Praying in the Margins across the Reformation

Religious uniformity of the kind aspired to in the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571, subsequently reinforced by the “reading in” ceremony for all Church of England clergymen discussed by Austen Saunders in this volume, was not immediately forthcoming in the wake of Henry VIII’s Statement of Supremacy in 1534. ¹ As this study of marginalia in early Tudor prayer books argues, although the English laity may have been remarkably compliant in eliminating references to Thomas Becket and to all papal indulgences, as mandated in the Henrician proclamations of 1535 and 1538, that compliance was also remarkably nuanced. ² As Eamon Duffy and others have argued, superficial conformity on the level of prayer book usage during the years of reform often masked, and at times very lightly, more wide-ranging religious beliefs and practices. ³ This essay examines marginalia and associated evidence of personal piety in two categories of prayer books: first, unreformed Latin Books of Hours or Horae produced on the continent for the English market until 1538, as exemplified here by those produced in the Paris workshops of Simon Vostre and François Regnault; secondly, reformed English primers, specifically the first state-sanctioned prayer books published in England by William Marshall, beginning in 1534.