Kate Thomas's Late Anglo-Saxon Prayer in Practice is a highly technical study of early medieval English prayer collections that has wider implications for understanding the evolution of medieval Christian religious practices. The primary audiences are specialists in eleventh-century English manuscripts and liturgy able to follow the detailed analyses of these texts in their linguistic and cultural contexts. A broader audience of those interested in the long history of Christian prayer and how to categorize its manifestations will benefit from Thomas's framing arguments, signaled in the subtitle, “Before the Books of Hours.” Thomas argues that the emergence of this identifiable and standardized medieval prayer book has overshadowed the study of earlier collections of prayers used for similar purposes, collections that demonstrate continuity across the supposedly destructive line of the Norman Conquest (276). Most of the book is taken up with a close reading of the evidence for pre-Conquest prayer collections “in search of a deeper understanding of how early medieval people sought to communicate with God through ever more complex programs of prayers, psalms, and other devotions” (3). Thomas thus remains firmly focused on treating early medieval English prayer practices as worthy of study in their own right.

In terms of methodology, Thomas engages in a close reading of eleventh-century prayers in their manuscript contexts to reveal a “web of interconnected texts” that should not be read in isolation (6). Her main contention is that eleventh-century England was a site of liturgical innovation in which the religious, primarily monks and nuns, took inherited liturgical prayers and recombined them in new contexts, “creating sequences and programs for private devotion” (4)—contexts that include the vernacular and the laity and that point to a “more intimate focus” in the relationship between God and the one praying (23). By emphasizing usage over origins, she highlights the symbiotic relationship between public and private prayer (15), asserting that “every copy of a prayer or prayer collection, however much it was re-copied and altered, was an authentic version in the form in which the copyist found it or adapted it” (26). For manuscript specialists, the main sources are Ælfwine's Prayerbook, the Portiforium of St. Wulstan, and the Galba Prayerbook, a range of Psalters, the Leechbooks and Lacnunga, as well as Tiberius A.III, the Durham Ritual, and Carolingian influences (Alcuin). For the liturgists, Thomas offers a functional set of categories dividing prayer collections into “series, sequence, program, and office” (34–39).

The structure of the book reflects this agenda of defining types of prayer collections evident in these manuscripts. Each chapter tackles a genre of prayer, carefully defined, followed by a close reading as well as tables elucidating the texts but not without a lot of cross-referencing between chapters, given their overlapping manuscript contexts. Chapter 1 looks at “Prayers to the Trinity and Saints” to illuminate the differences between loose sequences that are drawn from the liturgy (the six Orationes ad personas Trinitatis), a full program of prayer (Feast of the Trinity in Galba), and offices (in Ælfwine and the Crowland Psalter). These variations demonstrate the adaptability of prayer for different contexts and needs. Chapter 2, “Praying with the Hours and Psalms,” similarly demonstrates how private or individual prayer drew on the standard repertoire offered in the Daily Office and Psalter. Thomas begins from the Regularis Concordia to establish the kinds of individual devotions recommended by the rule, then explores how communal practices became devotional outside of the liturgy, using vernacular evidence from the Old English Benedictine Office and the Prayers ad horas sequence whose Latin antecedents she traces anew. This chapter highlights how, given a choice, some Psalms are more popular than others for those “who wished to pray for themselves” in their own language and for their own needs (128). Chapter 3's “Prayers to the Holy Cross” introduces a performative context, since this genre “unites words with images and the spiritual with the physical” (129). These prayers, feasts, and signs of the cross include sequences, programs, and offices that reveal liturgical “experimentation” (139). Much of the chapter explores the popular Veneration of the Cross as one of the most “thoughtfully reworked” programs (146). Chapter 4 addresses “Prayers of Protection and Healing,” physical and spiritual, in medical and liturgical manuscripts. Here, Thomas engages well the fraught issue of prayer versus charm, noting that the Old English terms gebed and gealdor “are a great deal more fluid than a modern reader might expect” (177, 205). She first examines protective prayers in prayer books and Psalters, then healing prayers in medical texts (Lacununga and Leechbooks), arguing that the latter “offer rare evidence of prayer by and for the laity” (192). What is particularly innovative and useful is identifying prayer programs within the medical collections (213ff.), including Se wifman se hire cild afedon ne mæg, the Holy Salve, a Leechbook III ælfadle remedy, and N. in audiutorium sit salvator, “an entirely verbal program of prayers for the health of a woman” (221) that Thomas characterizes as a “dialogue” (222). These examples show how the laity might pray in specific circumstances of daily life. Chapter 5's examination of “Prayers of Confession and Penitence” recalls the problem of defining public versus private. After a brief background on the history of public confession, she turns first to monastic confession in groups or pairs, then to sacerdotal confession requiring a priest, but ultimately Thomas spends the most time on “private confessional prayer” without benefit of clergy (249ff.). Undoubtedly, individuals confessing directly to God relied upon what they learned from sacerdotal confession, but Thomas's close reading of the evidence suggests a level of intimacy in vernacular prayer that may be startling to those who dismiss rote prayer as lacking intentionality.

The greatest strength, then, of Thomas's detailed analyses of these prayer practices in manuscript context is this emphasis on innovation, individuality, and intimacy, characteristics not usually associated with pre-Conquest England or with liturgy until recently. The genius of this approach is in identifying programs and sequences within larger compilations while using a comparative method to demonstrate intentional variation and experimentation. The book adds to a growing body of new scholarship cutting across categories of liturgy and medicine, lay and religious, and Latin and vernacular that brings early medieval England to life in vivid ways.