Public and Private Piety

Thanks to Jayson Grieser for sending along notes and quotations from Ramie Targoff’s 2001 Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England . Targoff points out that, contrary to what we might think, Protestants were more interested than Catholics in communal worship. “For sixteenth-century Catholics,” she writes, “the challenge of public devotion was not to promote a shared and collective liturgical language, but instead to encourage the worshippers to perform their own private devotions during the priest’s service.”

Protestants, on the other hand, saw common prayer as a public and communal means for forging practices of devotion: “What emerges from the texts and instructions of the BCP is not the triumphant celebration of religious interiority that we so often associate with the Reformation—as I have already briefly observed, this commitment to individualize worship would more accurately characterize the Catholic Church, not the Protestant. Instead, behind the introduction of a liturgy emphasizing the worshipper’s active participation and consent lies the establishment’s overarching desire to shape personal faith through public and standardized forms.”