Targoff 2001

Targoff, Ramie. Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Francis Bacon, the queen did not "make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts" -- this is "the dominant model for understanding the relationship between external practice and internal belief in the Elizabethan church" for most historians (2)

"There were not absolute divisions between sincerity and theatricality, inwardness and outwardness within the early modern English church. Although established churchmen recognized the potential for externally convincing but internally empty acts of devotion, they tended to minimize the threat that such dissembling posed either to the dissemblers themselves or to the congregation of eye-witnesses." (4)

"habitual practice" -- "helps explain how the religious establishment could simultaneously seem uninterested in private belief and yet demonstrate repeatedly its desire to subsume private devotion within the public liturgy of the church. Indeed, what appears to be a simple request for an untaxing and potentially unmeaningful participation in a weekly service turns out to be a strategy to transform the worshippers soul." (4)

"English emerges as a sacred tongue deemed worthy of communicating formal petitions to God. The particular properties of common prayer -- its emphasis upon premeditation rather than spontaneity; its insistence upon the interchangeability of first-person singular and plural pronouns; its preference for simultaneously eloquent and reiterable texts over complex and difficult models of language -- played an important role, I argue, in determining the poetic forms that seemed most effective for acts of personal as well as collective expression." (5-6)

"Faced with this notion of external devotion as at best an opaque, at worst a misdirected or fraudulent performance, English Protestants were challenged to construct a theological justification for the efficacy of public worship." (7)

Tyndale -- "insistence on the bodily pleasure of true prayer" (8)

Andrewes -- "words alone are insufficient in the service of God" (9); must involve the body in the act of prayer

"Andrewes's belief in the efficacy of external labor as a crucial tool for exercising our devotion represents a seventeenth-century High Church response to prevalent theological concerns of many Tudor Protestants." (9)