Free Republic

In the early 1980s, three unrelated events converged to turn my attention decisively to the late Middle Ages and the Reformation. I was invited to give a lecture on the Book of Common Prayer Burial Service. I decided to tackle this task by comparing the elaborate medieval Latin burial service with the austerely Protestant rite Cranmer had quarried from it: the realisation that, in the medieval service at the moment of committal of the corpse, the priest addressed the dead person directly, whereas in the Prayer Book rite the minister turned instead to the living mourners round the grave...