The Church of England in the 16th and 17th Centuries:Liturgy, Identity, Loyalty

The purpose of this article is to examine Tudor and early Stuart religious policy throughthe lens of liturgical reforms and to demonstrate the role of liturgy as an instrument ofconfessional identity and thus of political-religious allegiance in sixteenth- andseventeenth-century reformation England. The source base of the study comprises theliturgical texts from the 1549, 1552, and 1559 editions of the Book of Common Prayer,as well as theological and polemical treatises of the time. The author concludes that theliturgy was a central tool in the process of confessional identification, being at the sametime the clearest indicator of the content of the political-religious programme pursued bythe English monarchs during the period in question. He notes the characteristic tendencyof each programme to maintain a varying degree of continuity with the one thatpreceded it. The author demonstrates how by the time of the Interregnum a specific"Anglican" identity-loyalty was taking shape, where the three main elements wereloyalty to the Book of Common Prayer, the Crown and the Episcopal polity. The trials ofthe Cromwellian persecution era showed its resilience, which was an important elementin the Restoration process in 1662