Prayer was ubiquitous in the early modern period, and in recent years there has been a renewed interest in the study of prayer in the fields of literature and history. This particular volume aims to explore the performative aspect of prayer. As Joseph Sterrett notes in the introduction, a prayer “is always dependent on a performance,” whether real or imagined (2), and when it came to prayer in early modern England, performance was always “fraught with controversy” (5). The authors of the thirteen essays assembled here thus approach prayer not only as an activity directed toward God, but also as a social activity and process defined by, aimed at, and judged by a community of believers.

Several authors draw on Marcel Mauss's treatment of prayer as social phenomenon or on J. L. Austin's notion of performative utterances. This emphasis on performance is salutary and provides a compelling framework for thinking anew about familiar issues: the relations between inner thoughts and outer words; the value of set versus extemporaneous prayers; the relations between individual and corporate worship; the conflicts that swirled around the Book of Common Prayer; and the function of prayer in diaries, poems, and theatrical works. At least six essays examine prose prayer books or tracts. Brian Cummings, Graham Parry, and Sterrett explore questions concerning the body and bodily gestures in texts for public and private worship, with Cummings making the provocative argument that Protestants (like Luther, Bucer, Cranmer, and Calvin) were not so much focused on “disembodying prayer” but rather on reviving “its meaning by constructing a new theory of the passions in prayer” (36). Several essays address the function of prayer in creating or sustaining communities. Katrin Ettenhuber argues that Donne's Encoenia prayer and sermon served to affirm the corporate identity of the worshipers at a consecration ceremony. Robert Wilcher examines Charles I's failed attempt to promote national unity through prayer. Donald R. Dickson argues that Henry Vaughan's prose works were prayerful devotional aids as well as acts of political resistance.

Seven of the essays address plays, poems, musical anthems, and diaries, and in doing so examine the challenges and rewards of using human artifice in prayer and the multiple modes of performance that might be encoded in aesthetic works. Chloe Preedy, Alison Findlay, and Christopher Hodgkins offer close readings of the “doubly-performative” nature of prayers in plays by Peele, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Heywood. Findlay astutely analyzes the role of prayer in creating community, and Hodgkins offers a powerful reading of Claudius's failed prayer in Hamlet. Effie Botonaki draws attention to female and male diarists who became authors by setting down their prayers as cognitive and devotional aids. Helen Wilcox carefully analyzes a selection of devotional poems that foreground prayer as a “process” (167) and that involve the performance of the poet, the church, the reader, and God. Finally, Noam Reisner persuasively argues that Milton's four invocations in Paradise Lost are where we can truly observe the man “at prayer, and where the trope of private, inward-looking plea and meditation” lends authority to the “heaven-bound voice of public poetry” (207).

Surprisingly, there are no essays on Catholic theories of prayer or Catholic writers, a regrettable absence since Catholic prayers continued to circulate in recusant circles and across confessional lines, and because Catholic worship remained a focal point for Protestant self-understanding. It is disappointing to note that only two of the thirteen essays deal with female writers despite the fact that early modern women were very active in overseeing household devotion and in producing prayer books and devotional poems.

All in all, this is a valuable collection that prompts the reader to focus on the performative dimension of prayer, and in assembling essays on plays, poems, prose prayer books, sermons, and music, the volume will be valuable to historians and literary scholars.