Part of the ‘Studies in Worship and Liturgy’ series published by the SCM Press, The Collect in the Churches of the Reformation affords the academic and the interested lay person a look into this great treasure of the common heritage of Anglicanism. Edited by Bridget Nichols, the volume includes contributions by such luminaries in the field of liturgics as Donald Gray, Frank Senn and Karen Westerfield Tucker.

Nichols herself offers the opening chapter, discussing in considerable detail the 84 collects for Sundays and holy days that Cranmer translated from Latin into English. She concludes that Cranmer ‘has eliminated the idea of personal merit and of the invariable efficacy of prayerful acts’ in his translations (p. 21). Reminding us ‘not to impute contemporary notions of literacy and liturgical appreciation’ to worshippers in the sixteenth century (p. 27), Nichols concludes that Cranmer achieved invariable improvements in liturgical prose.

Donald Gray provides details of the collect in various Anglican churches, including examples of the ‘modernization’ of language effected in the first American prayer book of 1789, and the ‘new’ collects in the 1979 American book – compositions or translations by William Bright, Charles M. Guilbert, Massey Shepherd, William Reed Huntington and Howard E. Galley among them. He also details Australian appropriations from the English Alternative Service Book, the South African, Canadian and New Zealand prayer books, the ICEL collects from The Roman Missal, the Lutheran Book of Worship, the worship book of the Uniting Church in Australia, and Janet Morley's All Desires Known.

In a chapter on collects and lectionaries, David Kennedy first asserts that the relationship between the collect and the eucharistic readings on a given Sunday is often ‘somewhat ambiguous’ (p. 157). He then goes on to lay out various contemporary efforts to ameliorate this situation, including recent work in England (Common Worship) and among American Lutherans (Evangelical Lutheran Worship). This last effort is particularly notable in its various attempts to maintain a common framework, but adapting it to each year in the three-year lectionary. Consider, for example, the collect for the First Sunday in Advent from Evangelical Lutheran Worship:

Kennedy concludes that the exact relationship between the collect and the lectionary is likely to continue to be debated and disputed into the future.

The book also contains chapters on the use of the collect in Sweden, in the Methodist churches of Britain and the United States, in Lutheran liturgical books, in the Reformed tradition, and in British Baptist worship, as well as a detailed summary of the Roman Catholic process of translating collects into English in the twentieth century. The essays are written in an accessible style while at the same time demonstrating a high standard of academic rigor. Both a general index and an index of collects referenced in the book are provided. The volume offers a helpful single source of overall information regarding this integral facet of liturgical prayer, as well as interesting examples of its implementation in the English-language tradition.