Stephen Platten states in his Preface that as Chair of the Church of England's Liturgical Commission he was determined that the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer should be marked by proper scholarly observance – and this book certainly fulfils the task. It is a treat, with nine stimulating chapters tracing the creation and developing history of the reformed English liturgy (six of the nine originally given as papers at a British Academy symposium in 2012). The book is one both for non-specialists as well as specialists in liturgical history, who will delight inter alia in the fascinating insights offered by Peter McCullough into the influence of Lancelot Andrewes on Prayer Book revision in 1662. However, the book is also of great value for anyone concerned with the identity of Anglican liturgy today, or indeed simply the history of Anglicanism. William Jacobs’ essay on ‘Common Prayer in the Eighteenth Century’ is a master-class in how the study of liturgical controversy in that (or any) period is a way into study of wider theological and cultural development.

In a generally celebratory work, Bryan Spinks offers some memorable examples of why we should beware of appeals to some Cranmerian golden age before liturgical revision: baptisms in spittle, surplices used as (dirty) handkerchiefs during public worship, and the liturgy treated as an occasion for speed-reading (p. 105). Jacobs tells us that even in the early eighteenth century there were complaints about the archaic language of the liturgy, its length and repetitive nature (p. 91). Yet the collection is generally unsympathetic to such critique, focusing on the theological merits of the 1662 Book, the unparalleled place it has gained in the nation's cultural and spiritual inheritance, and – crucially – its role in unifying a very diverse church and nation through common liturgical experience and discipline. All that is now, as Paul Bradshaw observes, changed: ‘an Anglican service need have hardly anything in that resembles the traditional forms of worship in the Church of England, or even what is used in other congregations in the Church’ (p. 130).

I would like to have seen a tenth essay in this book – one from a writer enthusiastically involved in the Fresh Expressions movement and committed to innovative, contemporary forms of worship. I suspect such a writer might challenge robustly the implication of the collection taken as a whole: that the Prayer Book remains a vital element of what constitutes Anglicanism – and that not merely as a statement of historical fact, but as a statement of what should be, or perhaps even is, the case. This is a book written, largely, by the persuaded. Christopher Woods affirms ‘when something has influenced the language of a culture so deeply, it is inconceivable that it should disappear from use’ (p. 154). I'm not sure he's right – or even that Anglicans should really want him to be.