Today the church remembers Thomas Cranmer

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Comments

  • GalilitGalilit Shipmate
    Brillaint analogy!!

  • BF - may I borrow your "liturgically rather prolix please? Although I adore the cadences of Cranmer I know a BCP-or-nothing fanatic who needs to be stunned :grin:

    Indeed you may, free of charge!
    :wink:

  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host
    Jengie Jon wrote: »
    The thing is that Cramner, along with his deathless prose, also gave you the tin-eared liturgists that you complain about. Cramner spent forty years writing his liturgy. To get a good sense of liturgy and what works you need to be writing and using it continually for a good while.
    &
    The tragedy was that Cramner, with his deathless prose, stopped anyone else from carrying out the necessary practice to be a good liturgical writer.
    Although, to be fair to Thomas Cranmer it was not so much the deathless quality of his liturgical writing as the extreme delicacy of the Elizabethan settlement that set the liturgy in stone. And ‘yes’ to how long ‘good’ liturgy takes. The liturgy of the 1662 BCP which so many treasure was mostly first published in 1549.
    It is not knowing the theory that makes a good liturgist but practising that theory. If you look around liturgical texts that are not authorised the dominance of those writing are Methodist, URC and Baptists. Why? Well because they have been writing this stuff for years.

    Historically the vast majority of URC liturgy ended up in the fire after Sunday lunch and that is where most of it deserved to be. Today I guess in the rubbish bin on a clerical computer. The few bits that survived, survive because the minister was recognised as doing liturgically interesting things and therefore managed to get a selection published. The thing is that come the Monday after the Sunday, the minister would be back at his desk with next Sunday's worship to prepare including all the liturgy. Yes, you do not write from scratch, Cramner did not write from scratch, However, the discipline of writing week after week develops good liturgical writers, admittedly along with an awful lot of crap ones.
    It is true, generally speaking that English Anglicans, at least, were not writing liturgy until the twentieth century, and not in great quantities until mid-century. Like contemporary hymn writing, some is good and will last. Some is not.
    The result is when someone gets to write official liturgy, they have no practical experience, at best they are liturgical scholars who know the theory and theology behind what they are trying to do.
    I think a big issue with official Church of England liturgy is a combination of the theological range it is supposed to be inoffensive to, and the process of authorisation which it has to go through in General Synod which that great modern Anglican liturgist, Michael Vasey, likened to trying to do embroidery in a rugby scrum. One way round this has been the publication of liturgy which has not been formally authorised, but instead is commended by the House of Bishops.
  • Bishops FingerBishops Finger Shipmate
    edited March 2019
    On a slightly pedantic point, the 1662 BCP Communion service is mostly 1552, rather than 1549, isn't it?

    Good point re liturgies commended - covers a multitude of wotsits! - and means that Our Place can freely use the various treasures of the Franciscan Office Book for a number of different occasions, without falling foul of Canon Law, Archdeacons etc.

    (BTW, Michael Vasey was my tutor whilst I was training as a Reader. A Good Chap, sorely missed).
  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host
    And mine when I was training for ordination. And yes, I agree.
  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host
    The only online place I have found for comparing C of E prayer books and the 1637 prayer book proposed for the Church of Scotland is this Google Books ‘print’ of William Keeling’s 1842 Liturgiae Britannicae The whole thing can also be downloaded as a 531 pp PDF.
  • RossweisseRossweisse Hell Host, 8th Day Host
    Thank you, @BroJames. (I found my many-times great-uncle +John Cosen cited early on...) I have a friend who's researching +Thomas Ken, and have forwarded him a link in case it might prove useful.

  • EirenistEirenist Shipmate
    I've come a bit late to the party but Eamonn Duffy points out in his biography of Cranmer that it was the good Archbishop who was the first cleric to suggest, in the service for Holy Matrimony, that marriage might be rather fun.
  • Rossweisse wrote: »
    You can always tell when a lector hasn't practiced the reading in church, too.

    Hmm. I'm not convinced of that. I've never been in the habit of practicing before reading in church, possibly because I first started doing it in last-minute situations where the designated reader was unavailable. Given that I'm reasonably regularly approached after services to commend my reading I have no reason to suppose that not engaging in this practice has a negative impact. I will do a quick scan of the text for any names that are hard to pronounce, and keep an eye on the sentence structure to enable me to read for meaning, but that's about it. On the other hand having largely inherited my father's voice, and listened to 18 years' worth of Gospel readings and sermons while growing up I may have developed a sense of how things sound.
  • RossweisseRossweisse Hell Host, 8th Day Host
    Yes, I've done my fair share of last-minute readings, too. But if one has the opportunity to do so, reading it out loud is generally helpful.
  • Bishops FingerBishops Finger Shipmate
    edited May 2019
    Eirenist wrote: »
    I've come a bit late to the party but Eamonn Duffy points out in his biography of Cranmer that it was the good Archbishop who was the first cleric to suggest, in the service for Holy Matrimony, that marriage might be rather fun.

    Huh. He (Cranmer, not Duffy) was wrong there. Huh.
    :grimace:

    Who was it who suggested that years of misery might be avoided by simply finding a woman who doesn't like you, and buying her a house?
    :grimace:

    I'll get me morning-suit coat, and Top At.....

  • EirenistEirenist Shipmate
    'Might' means might, not 'will'.
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