Book of Common Prayer (1559 Elizabethan edition)
Almighty God, unto whom all hartes be open, all desyres knowen, and from whom no secretes are hid...
Our renderingAlmighty God, to whom all hearts lie open, all desires are known, and from whom no secrets are hidden...
What it is
The Book of Common Prayer provided the complete liturgical and devotional framework for the English Protestant monarchy and aristocracy, combining Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, the Eucharist, the Psalter, and occasional offices into a single vernacular text. The 1559 Elizabethan revision drew primarily from Cranmer's 1552 edition and remained in use substantially unchanged through the Stuart period, making it the formative devotional text for every English royal and noble family for nearly a century. Its Collect for Purity, the General Confession, and the Comfortable Words represent some of the most durable penitential and eucharistic prose in the English language. The BCP was simultaneously a royal political instrument and a genuine instrument of mass devotional formation across all levels of English society.
Why it still matters
The Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer from the 1559 BCP — collects, psalmody, and scripture readings — is fully usable as private or household devotion today, and the Cranmerian collects reward slow, meditative reading even outside a liturgical context.
Kept alongside
Lady Margaret Beaufort's Book of Hours (MS N.24, St John's College Cambridge)
Horae ad usum Coutances
A French illuminated Book of Hours, use of Coutances (MS N.24), now in the Old Library of St John's College Cambridge, which Lady Margaret Beaufort owned and used for personal devotion throughout her life. Surviving portraits of Margaret depict her kneeling before this very manuscript open on a lectern. The illuminations are by the Fastolf Master, active c. 1415–1450, with gold-leaf borders interspersed with fruit and flowers; Margaret later inscribed the book to Lady Anne Shirley, and it is also known as the Shirley Book of Hours. As a surviving object of royal private devotion rather than a text for circulation, it bears witness to the daily prayer rhythms of the most powerful woman of early Tudor England.
De Imitatione Christi – Book IV translation by Lady Margaret Beaufort
De Imitatione Christi, Liber IV (Middle English translation)
Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, translated the fourth book of the Imitation of Christ from a French intermediary into English in 1504, making her the first named English translator of any part of the work. Published alongside William Atkinson's translation of Books I–III by Richard Pynson and then by Wynkyn de Worde, this was the first complete printed English edition of the Imitation. Book IV treats Eucharistic devotion — preparation for receiving the sacrament, the dispositions required, and the soul's union with Christ in the Mass — giving Margaret's contribution an immediate liturgical and pastoral urgency. Earlier anonymous English translations existed but had omitted Book IV entirely, leaving a gap that Margaret's commission directly filled.
Elizabethan Private Prayers (Primer 1559, Orarium 1560, Preces Privatae 1564)
These three interrelated official private prayer books — the Primer (1559), Orarium (1560), and Preces Privatae (1564) — were put forth by authority under Elizabeth I to supply Protestant alternatives to the abolished Catholic primers and books of hours, bridging the devotional gap left by the Henrician dissolution of traditional piety. They were designed for educated lay use and court chapel devotion, structuring private prayer around Reformed Protestant theology while retaining some Latin forms appropriate to learned readers. The collection represents the crown's deliberate attempt to standardize and supervise private devotional life at the household level. The Parker Society reprinted all three in 1851 as foundational sources for the history of English Protestant piety.