Now and Then Sequencing The Sacred in Two Protestant Calendars Alison A. Chapman

Now and Then:

Sequencing the Sacred in Two
Protestant Calendars
Alison A. Chapman
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Birmingham, Alabama
Two of the master texts of the English Reformation—John Foxe’s Acts and
Monuments (also known as his Book of Martyrs ) and Archbishop Thomas
Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (also known as the Prayer Book)—share
a common denominator essentially overlooked by modern scholars: they are
both prefaced with a calendar. It is not surprising that each text contains a
calendar, for both the Book of Martyrs and the Prayer Book are fundamen-
tally about time; each one foregrounds its ability to alter radically how time
is lived and understood. John Foxe intends to change the reader’s under-
standing of the past by chronicling the rise of Protestantism and recording
the lives and deaths of the Protestant martyrs. In contrast to this backwards-
looking orientation, Cranmer’s text leans into the future by ordering the
liturgical year: the Book of Common Prayer as a whole told the sixteenth-
century English Protestant in advance what would be said at his or her wed-
ding, what holy days would be celebrated in the coming month, and what
Bible verses would be read on the next Sunday. In general, any calendar
serves as a temporal conduct book, instructing the reader as to how days,
months, and years are to be experienced, and both Foxe’s and Cranmer’s cal-
endars epitomize the two texts’ larger visions of how temporality is to be
experienced.
While Foxe’s calendar is filled with the names of Protestant con-
fessors and martyrs, Cranmer’s calendar primarily lists the Bible readings
assigned for each day.1 Despite their apparent differences, however, both cal-
endars share an unexpected but significant similarity: both calendars arrange
their contents into loosely sequential order, and this sequentiality differen-
tiates both texts from other early modern calendars. The Acts and Monu-
ments’ calendar puts the Reformation saints’ names into chronological order,
so that each month begins by commemorating an earlier exemplar of Protes-
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33:1, Winter 2003.

Copyright © by Duke University Press / 2003 / $2.00.
tant or proto-Protestant faith and ends with a later one. This arrangement
is often achieved only by detaching a martyr from his or her actual death
date. Similarly, Cranmer’s calendar constructs a roughly sequential read-
through of the Bible, whereby the Old Testament, the Gospels, and the
Epistles were read much as we might today read a novel—beginning to end.
Both the Acts and Monuments and the Book of Common Prayer present cal-
endars in which traditionally nonlinear material is carefully arranged into
sequential order.
The few scholarly treatments of Foxe’s and Cranmer’s calendars
have focused exclusively on their Protestant contents and ignored their
shared sequentiality.2 Both calendars substitute new Protestant history and
ritual for traditional observances. Foxe’s calendar omits the names of the
Catholic saints that had traditionally filled the ecclesiastical calendar and
replaces them with Reformation confessors and martyrs. In contrast, Cran-
mer’s calendar in the Book of Common Prayer has two kinds of contents.
First, it specifies which days are holy days and which saints the conforming
English churchgoer was allowed to commemorate (not many), and sec-
ondly, it lists the prescribed Bible lections (Bible verses to be read aloud in
church) for each day’s morning and afternoon services. The only scholarly
study of Foxe’s calendar, a fine article by historian Damian Nussbaum,
explores the implications of replacing the Catholic contents of the saints’
calendar with new, Reformation material.3 Nussbaum has shown how the
content of Foxe’s calendar was a deliberate reaction against the Prayer Book’s
calendar, since Foxe, like other more radical Protestants, thought Cranmer’s
choice of holy days was too indebted to Roman Catholic liturgical practice
and to its spurious and superstitious hagiography.4 Although the principal
content of the Prayer Book’s calendar is its lections, scholarly treatments of
Cranmer’s calendar have focused on the first type of content — Cranmer’s
revision of the liturgical year — and have generally ignored the listings of
appointed Bible verses, even though prior ecclesiastical calendars had not
included the lections and even though, visually, the five columns of pre-
scribed lections dominate each page of the calendar.
To different degrees, these two sequential calendars mark a shift
away from a predominantly Catholic emphasis on the reiterable experience
of the liturgical year and signal a new Protestant investment in linear his-
tory. Foxe’s calendar is clearly the more radical of the two, for it completely
replaces the traditional liturgical ordering of the year with a sequential list-
ing of martyrs and confessors. Cranmer’s calendar, in contrast, presents a
sometimes awkward merging of both liturgical and sequential arrangements.
92 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 33.1 / 2003

The mingled elements in Cranmer’s calendar support Christopher Haigh’s
contention that far from emerging in complete, instantaneous wholeness,
the English Reformation developed unevenly, retaining some traditional
elements while repudiating others.5 Indeed, Foxe’s thorough rejection of
traditional forms of calendrical observance may have been a reaction against
Cranmer’s more conservative attempt to reconcile liturgical time and
sequential time. Despite their differences, however, both calendars ulti-
mately make the sacred deeply subject to time in a way that prior calendars
did not, a move that not only reflects the pervasive Protestant interest in his-
tory but also hints at a changing Protestant understanding of the sacred.
Foxe and Cranmer implicitly arrange their calendars so that the sacred sub-
jects therein — Protestant martyrs and the Bible — can be more readily
recovered by and reproduced in the present. In this sense, both calendars
epitomize a larger Reformation desire to shape the present along the imag-
ined lines of the sacred apostolic past. Yet the very act of sequencing the
sacred undercuts this recuperative movement, for chronological sequence
has the unintended effect of distancing the past instead of making it more
accessible. Foxe’s and Cranmer’s sequential calendars—despite their authors’
own tacit intentions — make room for secular history in a way that no pre-
vious calendars had.
Foxe’s linear time
James K. Bracken remarks that Foxe’s Acts and Monuments “has long been
regarded as one of the most effective works of propaganda in history.”6 The
revisionary Protestant saints’ calendar prefixed to the first edition of 1563
represents a crystallized or condensed version of the whole text’s massive
propagandistic drive. In fact, Foxe’s twelve-page calendar seemingly gener-
ated as much opposition as the rest of his entire Protestant history.7 This
open hostility is not surprising given any early modern calendar’s inherently
controversial nature. Whereas we moderns tend to regard the annual calen-
dar as “fiscal, academic, or simply chronological,” for sixteenth-century
Catholics and Protestants, the calendar “was the Church calendar,” and as
such it was a frequent site of Protestant opposition to Catholic ritual prac-
tices.8 As Helen White notes, the saints’ calendar “was one of the earliest
and most persistent targets of the Protestant reformers.”9 The calendar’s
ability to generate controversy derived in part from its tacit function as a
conduct book. In the Acts and Monuments’ explanatory preface, “The Util-
ity of this history,” Foxe argues for the “common utilitie” of his text on the
Chapman / Sequencing the Sacred 93

grounds that through it readers may “imitate [the martyrs’] death (as muche
as we maye) with like constancy, or their liues at the least with like inno-
cencye.”10 If Christians are to pattern their behavior after the saints, then
the calendar, by listing these saints and linking their names and examples to
the daily experience of time, becomes the governing canon after which
action should be modeled. Robert Parsons, an English Catholic exile and a
vocal opponent of Foxe, similarly saw the saints’ calendar as providing holy
models for imitation, and it is because the calendar thereby bore so crucially
on everyday experience that Parsons excoriated Foxe’s calendar of “new
hereticall false Martyrs.”11 Through the agency of the calendar, Foxe’s Acts
and Monuments effectively claims to be more than just a history, more than
a mere narration of past events. Reading a historical account of the past
may or may not change the reader’s experience of the present and future.
When, however, that historical narrative is accompanied by a calendar—par-
ticularly one that incorporates the text’s essential figures into its timetable—
then the history makes a far more pressing claim on the experience of time.
While the narrative itself shows the unspooling events of times past, the cal-
endar provides a framework for times to come and makes clear the text’s
intent to shape the future.
Revising the liturgical calendar was central in another way to Foxe’s
project of creating a new yet authoritative pantheon of Protestant heroes.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first definition of the verb to can-
onize as “to place in the canon or calendar of the saints,” and one of the
highest orders of sanctity that the Catholic Church could bestow was to
insert a saint’s name into the calendar.12 By putting his Protestant heroes
into the ecclesiastical calendar, Foxe symbolically confers upon them canon-
ical status, and he creates a new canon, a new standard of religious authority
against which all forms of devotion should be measured. He is quite care-
ful, however, to distinguish between his calendar’s listing of confessors and
martyrs and the traditional Catholic calendar’s catalogue of saints. In his
1583 apology for the calendar, he writes, “I did regulate out a Callendare
not for any Canon to constitute Saintes, but onely for a table” of those who
suffered for their Protestant beliefs (AM, 1583, 1:583). He rejects here the
idea that his calendar names are saints in the traditional Catholic sense, and
he thereby tacitly claims that his calendar does not simply preserve tradi-
tional Catholic ritual practices in new Protestant form.
Foxe is similarly careful to assert that just as his “saints” are not
really saints, his calendar is not really a calendar. In the 1563 prefatory “Let-
ter to the Reader” (Ad Lectorem), he insists that his calendar is not meant to

regulate festal observance since it does not establish any new feast days (AM,
1563, B2v). No one should actually observe this calendar in any real litur-
gical sense. As he writes in the 1583 edition, he did not intend to “appoint
out holy dayes and working daies . . . to be observed” (AM, 1583, 1:582).
Politically, this was probably a wise assertion, for while Foxe could reform
the Catholic calendar with relative impunity, the English Church would
have been less tolerant of direct challenges to its official timetable. The 1559
edition of the Book of Common Prayer opens with the “Act of Uniformity”
spelling out the punishments—including forfeiture of all property and life
imprisonment — for failing to conform to the Prayer Book’s (or its calen-
dar’s) “order and form.”13 Foxe succeeds ultimately in differentiating his
work from both the Catholic and the official English Church calendars by
claiming that his calendar is not, in fact, a calendar at all. He writes, “this
calendar has not been instituted by me other than as an index, indeed,
merely designating the month and year of each martyr to serve the private
use of the reader” (Foxe’s emphasis).14 Foxe’s strategy is twofold. He uses the
authority and antiquity of the calendar to help legitimate his Protestant
heroes of the faith, yet by calling it an index he both disavows any direct
challenge to the English Church’s liturgical calendar and distances his text
from the Catholic calendar’s body of ritual practices.
As an actual index, however, Foxe’s calendar is hopeless. In early
modern usage, an index could mean a table of contents prefixed to a book
or “a brief list or summary of the matters treated in it,” in addition to the
more familiar meaning of a list placed at the end of a book.15 In this sense,
the saints’ calendars prefixed to traditional Catholic hagiographical texts,
such as the Golden Legend, are perfect indices. These texts arranged their leg-
ends in calendrical order, so the calendar serves as the de facto table of con-
tents. Readers, however, who expected Foxe’s calendar to provide a similar
navigational aid for the text itself would have been disappointed. As Nuss-
baum points out, the calendar cannot serve as an index since it is “lacking
page numbers and any other means of locating individual martyrs in the
main text.”16 The failings of Foxe’s 1563 calendar as a functional index are
highlighted by comparison with the 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments
where Foxe removes the calendar altogether and replaces it with “an alpha-
betical list of martyrs, and the page numbers where they could be found.”17
Having been told that the calendar is not really a calendar but an index, the
reader discovers that it is not much of an index either.
Foxe reinstated the calendar in the 1583 edition of Acts and Monu-
ments and, evidently responding to the controversy it had previously gener-

ated, wrote a defense of it. He suggests that what matters most about his cal-
endar is not the label assigned to it (“calendar,” “index,” or even “table”) but
the precision with which it locates the Protestant martyrs in time. He writes
that the calendar was to serve as a “table” showing “the yere and moneth of
euery Martyr, what time he suffered” and, similarly, “I make here no Calen-
dare purposely of any Saintes, but a Table of good and godly men that
suffered for the truth, to show the day and moneth of their suffering.” This
preoccupation with time appears again when Foxe repeats his desire to
“demonstrate . . . the time and day of their Martyrdome” (AM, 1583,
1:581). For each month, Foxe notes the year of death beside each figure and,
whenever possible, the exact day, and the result is a listing of days and years
down the right side of the calendar. By temporally locating each martyr and
confessor in this manner, Foxe participates in a new Protestant emphasis on
time over space as the defining context of the saint. Michel de Certeau writes
that medieval hagiography associates a “figure with a place,” and it is charac-
terized more by precise places than by precise times.18 Medieval pilgrimage
was premised on the idea that one had to journey to a specific place in order
to encounter fully the sacred aura that emanated from the saint’s relics. In her
study of Calvinist martyrologies, Catherine Randall Coats remarks that in
contrast to the Catholic emphasis on place, “time . . . is the predominant
trait” of Reformation hagiography. Coats here refers to time as “the phe-
nomenon of verbal and intellectual memory” instead of to an actual time-
table or dating system.19 Her remarks, however, can be aptly extended to
Foxe’s calendar, for it presents a quite literal timing of the saints. To modern
eyes, it might seem perfectly obvious that a calendar—which is, after all, a
timetable—would convey such information as the date of the martyrs. But
the traditional saints’ calendar was, in a sense, timeless. The Catholic saints’
calendar regularly transcended and disrupted merely human notions of his-
tory and temporal succession. Foxe’s calendar, in contrast, foregrounds the
very type of time—a relentlessly sequential unfolding of historical time—
that the medieval liturgical calendar so often contravened.
This emphasis on historical time can be seen in Foxe’s chronologi-
cal arrangement of the confessors and martyrs. Not only does the calendar
specify the day, month, and year of each martyr, but each month’s names are
arranged so that the years of martyrdom run in chronological order from
the top of the page to the bottom.20 The calendar’s chronological arrange-
ment of the years of death is achieved at the expense of many of the mar-
tyrs’ and confessors’ proper death dates, and as White remarks, many of
Foxe’s calendar names are not coupled with their rightful day and month.21

For instance, the Protestant martyr, Thomas Hitton, was burned at the stake
on or about 20 February 1530. To have included Hitton near the bottom of
February’s listing of saints, however, would have disrupted the orderly
advance of years down February’s right margin, since the figures at the bot-
tom of the page all died in the 1550s. Consequently, Foxe’s calendar moves
Hitton’s day of commemoration to 9 March where his year of martyrdom,
1530, fits seamlessly between Patrike Hamelton, martyred in 1528, and
Thomas Bilney, burned in 1531.
In the traditional Catholic liturgical calendar, the saints celebrated
on successive calendar days typically date from different centuries. For instance,
Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend commemorates a second-century saint
on 1 February; on 2 February, one reads about the Purification of the Virgin
Mary, and on 3 February the readings are for the fourth-century Saint
Blaise.22 This jumbled juxtaposition of saints flies in the face of orderly
chronology. Foxe’s calendar, in contrast, subverts the very ritualistic obser-
vances that had traditionally been the calendar’s primary purpose by imply-
ing that the ritual celebration of the “correct” saints’ day has less importance
than the uninterrupted chronological listing of years. The unprecedented
nature of this calendrical reorganization can best be appreciated by a hypo-
thetical modern analogy: imagine rearranging our contemporary secular cal-
endar so that the civic holidays are ordered not by their traditional calendar
days but by their historical sequence. By this logic, Thanksgiving, historically
the earliest of our official American holidays, would be celebrated in January
while Martin Luther King, the most recent addition to the calendar, would
be commemorated near the end of December.
The indifference to chronological order in the medieval Catholic
saints’ calendar seems fitting given the way in which the saints themselves
were experienced and invoked. Peter Brown writes that the celebration of
the saint’s passio, or story of suffering, “abolished time” and “breached . . .
the paper-thin wall between the past and the present.”23 The Catholic saint
was traditionally a point of contact between the atemporal world of heaven
and the temporality of earth. The ritualistic celebration of a saint’s day,
while it might have prompted some meditation on the saint’s original his-
torical context, primarily made the saint immanent in the believer’s time.
Joan of Arc claimed that Saint Katherine spoke to her directly, and her expe-
rience of the saint dissolved the time elapsed between Katherine’s past
moment and Joan’s own present. Brown writes of the conviction of early
hagiographers that “they were describing present, true facts” since “the
seemingly extinct past . . . had pressed into the present.”24 Richard Glasser

notes that in medieval France, “it was believed also that the same calendar
days of different years were in some manner bound up with one another.
Indeed, their relationship might almost be described as one of identity.”25
By identifying a contemporary celebration of a saint with a day centuries
earlier, the traditional saints’ calendar collapsed the intervening years.
Although Foxe’s calendar effects a drastic revision simply by replac-
ing the Catholic saints with Protestant ones, this straightforward act of
substitution is, in fact, less revolutionary than the calendar’s chronological
arrangement of those Protestant names. By carefully positioning the calen-
dar saints in the historical past (“designating the month and year of each
martyr”), Foxe’s calendar fundamentally reconfigures the role of the ecclesi-
astical calendar in the life of faith, and it thereby participates in contempo-
rary critiques of the Catholic cult of the saints. In his study of Reformation
perceptions of sainthood, Robert Kolb has demonstrated that reformers
inveighed against the invocation of saints precisely because invocation
superseded chronological time and thereby resulted in a “dehistoricizing of
the holy.”26 Reformers argued that the saints in heaven had no ability to
intervene miraculously on earth and retained only the power to inspire men
and women through their felicitous example. William Perkins, in A reformed
catholike (1597), objects to kneeling at the invocation of saints since the
saints are “absent from us.” He reasons that since the saints have departed
this earth, the only lawful means of honoring them is by “keeping a mem-
orie of them in holy manner.”27 Edmund Spenser echoes this doctrine in the
“Julye” eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender (1579), where the shepherd
Thomalin describes the saints as “dead of yore”: “And nowe they bene to
heaven forewent, / theyr good is with them goe: / Theyr sample onely to us
lent, / that als we mought doe soe.”28 Foxe’s calendar similarly rejects invo-
cation in favor of commemoration. The dates of martyrdom carefully noted
down the calendar’s right margin stress the specific historicity of each saint.
By listing the year of each martyr or confessor’s demise, Foxe’s calendar
emphasizes that these calendar figures are indeed dead, and this insistence
on their absence disables the traditional calendar practice that invoked the
saints’ numinous presence. His calendar accordingly serves a new Protestant
construction of sainthood as those who are “historically noteworthy,” rather
than those whose lives are marked by miraculous occurrences — or those
who can miraculously impinge upon the present moment.29
By arranging the martyrs and confessors in sequential order, Foxe’s
calendar forges a new awareness of the temporal lapse between the sacred
past and the present experience of the believer, and it thereby makes the

Protestant heroes of the faith subject to the constraints of historical time. In
the traditional Catholic calendar, the past is never really lost since the saints—
hovering outside of time in a kind of eternal present — are always equally
available to the believer. Saint Lawrence, for example, was no less “present”
to a fifteenth-century Christian than to one of his own era.30 Foxe, however,
uses the timetable of the calendar precisely to foreground the onward rolling
of a linear, unrecoverable time. Time in this calendar is steadily, inexorably
seeping away. This is not to argue that pre-Reformation Christians were
unaware of the passage of historical time.31 Instead, the sacred was defined,
in part, by its ability to transcend mere temporal “location.” Medieval saints,
for example, were identified by the miracles that they or their relics worked
long after the end of the saint’s mortal lifetime. Foxe’s calendar, in contrast,
carefully inserts its holy figures into history, and the Protestant confessors
and martyrs are both defined by and profoundly subject to the strictures of
a sequential chronology. Perhaps it was because his calendar disabled the
believer’s immediate, mystical experience of the saint that Foxe provided
such exhaustive narration of each martyr’s history in the body of his text.
Believers yearned for contact with the holy men and women of the Church,
and the Catholic calendar — like the saints’ relics — had provided a vehicle
for direct encounter with them. Foxe, however, substitutes the copious his-
torical text as the only means of access to the saint, and he makes reading
itself the primary vehicle for experiencing the sacred. With his calendar,
Foxe proffers a fundamental reconception of calendrical time, for his text’s
foregrounding of chronological historical time changes the way in which
the liturgical calendar mediates between the “secular present” and the “sacred
past.”
By making the sacred figures of Protestantism so deeply subject to
temporality, Foxe’s calendar participates in what Anthony Kemp calls the
Reformation’s “estrangement of the past.” Medieval Christianity, Kemp
argues, faced a crippling dilemma: the center of faith and authority—Christ
and his apostles—every year receded further and further into the past. “The
only way to palliate this recession of the focus of faith is to deny psycholog-
ically, and subsequently ideologically, the mutability of time and, as muta-
bility is the essence of our experience of time, consequently to deny time
itself.”32 Whereas the medieval church’s epistemology “committed it to
asserting the continuity of present belief with past belief, Luther’s rejection
of current Church doctrine commits him to an assertion of its discontinu-
ity with original truth, and this requires a violently dynamic history, a pre-
cipitous fall into unknowing.”33 Similarly, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments

is “shocking” when compared to earlier medieval histories in that it “posits
a [Catholic] past and a [Protestant] present that have absolutely nothing to
do with one another.”34 In contrast to the medieval Catholic move “to deny
time itself,” Foxe’s calendar, like the massive historical narrative that follows
it, forcefully asserts its sequential passage. In the medieval calendar, the steady
advance of historical time matters less than the cycling of liturgical time. In
Foxe’s calendar, however, the emphasis is reversed, for the chronological
arrangement of the Protestant martyrs and confessors stresses the relentless
linearity of history over the reiterable feasts of the liturgical cycle. Thus, in a
fine irony, the framework of the liturgical calendar—the exemplar of “time-
less” cyclical return — becomes the device for introducing a new under-
standing of calendrical time as, precisely, historical time.
This commitment to history, even within the confines of the eccle-
siastical calendar, is not surprising given the broader Protestant investment
in historiography as a means to legitimate the Reformation. During the
sixteenth century, writers such as Luther, Melanchthon, and Foxe forged a
new understanding of history whereby one could look at the contemporary
events of Reformation Europe to chart the working out of God’s master
plan of salvation. Protestant calendars on the Continent reflect a similar
interest in bringing Reformation history into the calendar’s timetable. Nuss-
baum has shown that Acts and Monuments is contemporaneous with the rise
of Lutheran “historical calendars” such as Paul Eber’s Historical Calendar
(1550), Kaspar Goltwurm’s New, Attractive Historical Calendar (1553), and
Michael Beuther’s Historical Calendar, Diary (1557).35 Like Foxe’s calendar,
these Protestant historical calendars substitute Protestant or proto-Protes-
tant figures for most of the traditional Catholic saints, but they also include
commemorations of important historical events. Nussbaum notes that Foxe
was probably familiar with these historical calendars, and they may have
influenced his own.36 Foxe’s calendar itself might have been the model for
another category of English calendars, for beginning around the publication
of Acts and Monuments in 1563, the calendars prefaced to English bibles
increasingly include references to Reformation history. For example, the cal-
endar prefixed to the 1583 English Geneva Bible offers historical commen-
tary about both scriptural and nonscriptural events such as the burning of
John Hus in 1415.37 Whether or not Foxe’s calendar actually inspired these
subsequent historical calendars, his text is unquestionably part of a move to
merge the cyclical timetable of the liturgical calendar with a particularly
Protestant interest in linear history. Foxe’s calendar, however, is the only one
which both imports Protestant contents into the calendar — such as com-

memorations of key historical events and figures of the Reformation—and
also demonstrates its investment in sequential history in the very way it
arranges those contents. That is, Foxe’s calendar not only overtly celebrates
Reformation history but simultaneously encourages — through its chrono-
logical sequences—an awareness that that past is perpetually being estranged
as history rolls forward into a dynamically changing future.
Sequential reading in the Book of Common Prayer
At first glance, the calendar prefixed to Archbishop Cranmer’s Book of Com-

mon Prayer — including column after column of prescribed Scripture read-
ings—seems to bear little resemblance to Foxe’s listing of Protestant heroes.
Both calendars, however, are similar in their sequential arrangement of those
contents, and furthermore, the sequentiality of the Prayer Book’s calendar
raises the same questions as Foxe’s about the temporal relationship between
the Protestant believer and the sacred past. Whereas the relentless sequen-
tiality of Foxe’s calendar contrasts sharply with the calendar of Catholic
saints — creating the illusion of a clean division between traditional Cath-
olic liturgical calendars and a novel Protestant emphasis on historical
sequence—Cranmer’s calendar itself contains both modes of arrangement:
liturgical and sequential. The liturgical mode dominates on holy days when
Cranmer’s calendar stipulates readings thematically appropriate to that day’s
liturgical character. For example, it requires that Isaiah 9:8 (“For to us a
child is born”) and Luke 2:7 (“And she gave birth to her first-born son and
wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger”) be read on
Christmas day. One result of such a liturgical ordering is to press Bible lec-
tions and daily religious observance into revelatory alignment. On most
other days in Cranmer’s calendar, however, the Bible is read roughly sequen-
tially without any attempt to match up verses and liturgical celebration. On
these days, the biblical narrative and the experience of daily life are more
detached from one another, each unspooling in separate, linear fashion. This
combination of a traditional liturgical mode of reading with a new, Protes-
tant emphasis on sequence signals, in part, the mixed nature of the English
Church with its mingling of radical and traditional elements. And yet,
however partial and interrupted, the sequentiality of Cranmer’s calendar-
lectionary — like Foxe’s calendar — fosters a new awareness of an ever-
changing temporal sequence and helps thrust believers into a dynamic and
forward-rolling history.
It would be difficult to overstate the pervasive influence of Cran-

mer’s Book of Common Prayer on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English
religious practice, yet as one recent historian comments, “astoundingly, [the
Book of Common Prayer ] has been almost unstudied by Tudor scholars.”38
First printed in 1549 under Edward VI and modified in 1552, it was
proscribed during Mary’s reign and then reissued in 1559 under Elizabeth,
newly prefaced with “An Act of Uniformity” detailing the exact penalties for
failing to conform to the text’s shaping of religious observance. In print con-
tinuously since then and revised regularly, the Book of Common Prayer has
ordered the practice of the Church of England over the past five centuries.
As its complete 1549 title —The booke of the common prayer and adminis-
tracion of the sacraments, and other rites and ceremonies of the Churche: after
the vse of the Churche of England —indicates, the text set forth the calendri-
cal holidays, laid out the pattern and structure of daily and Sunday services,
detailed the exact prayers and litanies to be used at different parts of that
service, and provided the wording of the various sacraments. In short, it reg-
ulated every aspect of public English Protestant devotion. John Wall argues
cogently that “the theology of the English Reformers is, in the most pro-
found sense, the Book of Common Prayer. For the new book did not merely
intend to replace the old; it sought to be a book that realized its true mean-
ing in use, through which a nation united in worship could be transformed
into the true Christian commonwealth. . . . Cranmer made clear that the
experience of corporate worship was to be at the center of English Chris-
tianity.”39 By laying out a common order of collective reading, the calendar
furthered the overall text’s project of constructing a “common prayer” for
the nation. At the end of his preface, Cranmer imagines the national cohe-
sion that will result from such a system of nationally synchronized Bible
readings and a shared liturgy: “And where heretofore, there hath been great
diuersitie in saiyng and singyng in Churches within this realme, some
folowyng Salsbury use, some Herford use, some the use of Bangor, some of
Yorke, and some of Lincolne, now from henceforth, al the whole realme
shall have but one use.”40 He reveals here a keen awareness that English
Protestantism could not cohere without a unified framework for prayer and
reading. That framework was in large measure the calendar, which not only
patterned the Sundays and holidays but also determined which Bible verses
would be read publicly each day.
Cranmer’s preface suggests the centrality of the calendar to the Book
of Common Prayer.41 Although the calendar itself occupies only twelve
pages—one page per month—out of the entire book, Cranmer spends
almost half of his preface discussing and explaining it. He opens with a com-

plaint about the ubiquity of corruption and decay in human affairs, as “maie
plainly appere by the common praiers in the churche, commonly called
diuine service” (sig. ❧2r). Although this opening gambit may seem unsur-
prising (reformers frequently exposed preexisting Catholic “errors” only then
to provide the much-needed reform), the specific corruption that Cranmer
sees in the Church’s divine service is altogether more startling. Instead of
lambasting any one of several aspects of Roman Catholic practice which the
English Reformation anathemized—neglect of the Bible as the sole determi-
nant of faith, the proliferation of ceremonies, the Catholic over-reliance on
rituals and icons, the nature of the Eucharist—Cranmer’s concerns lie in
another quarter: he is most concerned that the Bible is not being read in the
proper order. He explains first the practice of the early church fathers who
“so ordered the matter, that all the whole Bible (or the greatest parte thereof,
should be read ouer once in the yere” for the edification of both the clergy
and the people (sig. ❧2r). In his 1555 Second Defense of the Faith concerning
the Sacraments in answer to Joachim Westphal, John Calvin similarly argues
that “in regard to the division of the Gospels and Epistles, it is evident from
all the Homilies of Ancient Writers that the Books of Scripture were expounded
to the people in one uninterrupted series.” This seamless Bible reading, how-
ever, was broken by the custom that “gradually prevailed of extracting from
the Gospels and Epistles passages suitable to the season.” Lest we miss
Calvin’s disdain for such a fractured reading order, he points out that these
passages were chosen “ineptly and without any judgment,” and he derides
those who think that the Gospel must be “cut into pieces.”42
Cranmer, like Calvin, feels that the current lectionary contrasts
poorly with the exemplary apostolic practice of seamless reading:
But these many yeres passed, this godly and decent ordre of the
auncient fathers, hath been altered, broken, and neglected, by
plantyng in uncertain stories, legendes, respondes, verses, vain
repeticions, commemoracions, and Sinodalles, that commonly
when any boke of the Bible was begon, before iii. or iiii. Chapiters
wer redde out, all the rest wer unred. And in this sort, the boke of
Esaie was begon in Advent, and the boke of Genesis in Septuages-
ima: but thei wer onely begon, and never redde through. After a
like sort wer other bokes of holy scripture used. (sig. ❧2r)
Over the preceding centuries, more and more nonscriptural material had
been worked into the divine office such that pure Bible reading was either

displaced altogether or relegated primarily to the service of vigils. Although
Cranmer’s complaint might appear a typical Protestant jab at the nonscrip-
tural accretions of medieval Catholicism, he actually seems less incensed by
the nature of the intruding material than by the fact that its presence breaks
the seamless reading of the Bible.43 His objection is twofold: not only is
nonbiblical material disrupting the reading of Scripture, but the current
Scripture lections themselves are comprised of liturgically appropriate Bible
excerpts (called “pericopes”) rather than the linear reading of whole books.
Cranmer’s argument against a fragmented order of reading is similar to that
adopted by the Scottish Reformation, for the Scottish governing liturgical
text, the 1560 Book of Discipline, explains, “We think it most expedient that
the Scripturis be red in ordour. . . . For this skipping and divagatioun frome
place to place of the Scripture . . . we judge not so proffitabill to edifie the
Churche, as the continewall following of ane text.”44
Having outlined the problem, Cranmer then proposes his solution:
These inconueniences therfore considered: here is set furth suche
an ordre, whereby the same shalbe redressed. And for a readines in
this matter, here is drawen out a kalendar for that purpose, whiche
is plain and easy to bee understanded, wherein (so muche as maie
be) the readyng of holy scripture is so set further, that all thynges
shalbe doen in ordre, without breakyng one pece thereof from
another. For this cause be cut of Anthemes, Respondes, Inuitato-
ries, and suche like thynges, as did breake the continuall course of
the readyng of the Scripture. (sig. ❧2r–v)
In short, he uses the calendar to map out each day’s lectionary texts, lections
that are themselves drawn solely from Scripture. Cranmer’s use of a calendar
to set forth the daily readings can seem so obviously logical to modern eyes
that it is easy to overlook its novelty. No previous English service books,
however, had used the calendar to order the annual lections.45 Calendars fre-
quently accompanied devotional texts like primers, breviaries, and books
of hours, but these earlier calendars simply listed saints’ days, liturgical cel-
ebrations, and other major festivals without also stipulating what was to be
read when.46 The problem with using a printed calendar to pattern the lec-
tions is that the western calendar is an unstable, shifting compromise
between the solar and lunar year. Whereas some holidays (like Christmas)
are fixed, others (like Easter) move around, and figuring out what was to be
read when required a complex calendrical calculus. If the lections are to be

liturgically appropriate selections of Scripture, then any calendar that orders
those lections becomes obsolete after a single year. One of Cranmer’s inno-
vations was to list the fixed feasts (like 1 January, Circumcision) and their
appropriate readings in the calendar but to include the lections for Sundays
and the moveable feasts in a preceding section entitled “Proper Lessons.”
Although Cranmer’s lectionary scheme makes copious use of litur-
gically appropriate pericopes on Sundays and key holidays, in general it
emphasizes a sequential reading of Scripture. In an earlier manuscript draft
of the Prayer Book, Cranmer defined his goal in arranging the lections:
“The thread and order of holy Scripture shall be continued entire and
unbroken.”47 The Book of Common Prayer’s investment in linear reading first
appears in the “ for the ordre of the Psalmes, to be saied at Mattins
and Euensong” (sig. ❧3v). This table arranges the Psalms so that over the
course of the month the celebrant reads straight through the entire book.
The calendar, like the table of the Psalms, manifests a similar concern with
sequential reading, and G. J. Cuming writes that the “orderly reading of
Holy Scriptures” is the chief feature of Cranmer’s reformed office.48 In the
calendar, the lections are carefully arranged to create a progressive reading of
the Bible, one which if not perfectly sequential or uninterrupted was still far
more linear than previous lectionary formats. After a thin column setting
forth the selection of Psalms for the day, the reader sees the lections for the
first and second lessons of both morning and evening prayer. 1 January is
the Feast of Circumcision, and for this feast Cranmer’s calendar provides
liturgically appropriate pericopes for the day’s lections. For instance, the first
lesson in the morning is Genesis 17, in which God tells Abraham that he
shall found a nation whose males will be marked by the circumcision of
their foreskins, and the first lesson in the evening is Deuteronomy 10, which
enjoins the reader, “circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart” (verse
16). The readings here are specifically selected to conform to the liturgical
character of the day. After 1 January, however, the readings assume a less
thematic, more sequential character. For the first reading in the morning,
the calendar specifies Genesis 1; the first lesson in the afternoon is Genesis 2;
the next morning’s Old Testament lection is Genesis 3. And so on. The sec-
ond lesson in the morning begins a straight-through reading of the Gospels,
starting with Matthew 1. Similarly, the second lesson in the afternoon
presents a sequential reading of the New Testament Epistles, beginning
with Romans. These simultaneous, linearized readings of Old Testament,
Gospels, and Epistles continue in perfect sequence until 6 January, the feast
of Epiphany. Here, pericopes recur in the account of the miracle at Cana

( John 3), the baptism of Jesus (Luke 2), and the proclamation of God’s
chosen Redeemer (Isaiah 49 and 60)— all traditionally apt for Epiphany’s
manifestation of Christ’s power and Sonship. Epiphany over, however, the
lessons revert to the orderly sequence of readings, picking up where 5 Janu-
ary left off.49
Admittedly, Cranmer’s timetable of Bible reading is not truly
sequential. A perfectly linear reading of the Bible would begin with Genesis
on 1 January and continue through to the end of the Book of Revelation on
31 December. Instead, the Book of Common Prayer presents different threads
of narrativized Scripture — Old Testament, New Testament Gospels, New
Testament Epistles. Nor are the individual sequences truly comprehensive.
In a short prefatory explanation of the calendar lections, Cranmer writes,
“The olde Testament shalbe redde through euery yere once, except certain
bookes and Chapiters, whiche bee least edifying, and might best bee spared,
and therefore are left unred” (sig. ❧4r). The Old Testament sequence, for
instance, omits parts of Leviticus and Numbers, and the New Testament
readings leave out most of Revelation. Finally, the sequential reading is
liable at any time to be interrupted by the pericopes proper to the moveable
feasts. For example, a reader preparing to read the next installment of Scrip-
ture for the morning lesson on 25 January might realize that the day cele-
brated the Conversion of Paul, whereby the “Proper Lessons” table would
instruct him or her to read instead the liturgically appropriate story of Paul’s
conversion in Acts 22. During any given month, a sixteenth-century church-
goer would scarcely have settled into a steady pattern of linear reading
before pericopes disrupted the sequential flow of text. However, despite the
frequent interruptions, Cranmer constructed his lectionary calendar so as to
linearize the Scripture reading whenever feasible.50
The sequentiality of Cranmer’s lectionary becomes all the more
striking when we compare the Prayer Book with earlier models. Cyrille
Vogel writes that while the earliest church communities probably read the
Scriptures straight through week after week, much as Jewish congregations
do today, “certainly from the second century on, the annual recurrence of
special feasts and seasons suggested the use of proper readings in harmony
with the meaning of the feast or season in question.”51 By the early medieval
period, argues S. J. P. van Dijk, the Roman Church’s arrangement of the
Gospel readings “shows no trace of continuous readings,” and instead, peri-
copes dominate.52 For example, on Thursday in the third week of Lent, the
customary reading recounted the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law (Luke
4:38 – 44), a story well suited to that day’s hagiographical celebration of

Saints Damian and Cosmos, both physicians. Similarly, Luke 10:38 – 42
was read on 15 August, the Assumption of the Virgin, simply because of the
last sentence: “Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken
away from her.”53 Continuous reading of a certain kind does appear in the
medieval monastic tradition. The sixth-century Ordo XIV of the monks of
St. Peter includes in its title “The whole Scripture of the holy canon is read
(or sung ) from the beginning to the end of the year,” and lectio continua has
remained an important part of monastic observance.54 While this reading
practice, however, is continuous in the sense that the Bible is always being
read, it is not consecutive, for it does not consistently follow the sequential
order of books in the biblical codex.
Even the sixteenth-century lectionary in the official Roman Bre-
viary, compiled by the reform-minded Cardinal Quignones, bears little
resemblance to Cranmer’s lectionary, and this difference is all the more strik-
ing given Cranmer’s close reliance on Quignones’s text in other parts of the
Book of Common Prayer.55 Produced at the behest of Pope Clement VII
in 1535, Quignones’s breviary emphasizes reading the Old and New Testa-
ments and excises much of the nonscriptural material that had over centuries
become increasingly part of the divine office. In opposition to the prior
custom of using just a few Psalms repetitively during the office, Quignones
incorporates all of them. Unlike Cranmer, however, whose table of Psalms
arranges them sequentially, Quignones divides out the Psalms in what litur-
gical historian Josef Jungman calls “a more or less arbitrary fashion, not even
according their Biblical sequence.”56 Although Quignones, unlike Cranmer,
does not use the calendar to set forth the lections (his calendar provides
instead only a listing of the feast days and saints days), his ordering of the lec-
tions in large measure recalls the Book of Common Prayer ’s investment in
sequential reading, for Jungman notes that the whole New Testament, except
for Revelation, was read straight through. In distributing the Old Testament
readings, however, Quignones abandoned the sequential method and instead
“stuck fairly closely to tradition: in Advent, the Prophets; from Septuagesima
on, Genesis, interrupted on Passion Sunday and continued after Easter; in
autumn, the Books of Kings.”57 Quignones’s breviary was highly popular for
three decades (the first edition of 1535 saw eleven reprints in just the first
year), but its very popularity provoked attack. According to John of Arze,
Quignones’s chief Catholic adversary, its liturgical innovations looked too
much like those of “our adversaries,” and it was finally proscribed by Pius V
in 1568.58 In short, Quignones’s breviary, with its rearrangment of the lec-
tions to allow for a sequential reading of whole books, was simply too Pro-

testant, and the official breviary that replaced it, the 1568 Breviarium
Romanum, gave monthly lessons that were a traditional mix of Scripture
excerpts, hagiographical legends, and sermons of the church fathers, all selected
for their liturgical appropriateness instead of their place in a linear sequence.59
By the middle of the eighteenth century, a fragmented reading practice could
be associated specifically with Catholicism. A blacksmith in Inverary com-
plained to his church elders that instead of a “regular plan of reading the
scriptures,” the congregation hears only “detached places, chosen at the plea-
sure of the preacher,” and he concludes that this skipping about in the Scrip-
tures is too akin to “the popish system.”60
Why did Cranmer arrange the lections in sequential fashion? Four
immediate answers present themselves. First, Cranmer was simultaneously
reacting against Catholic practice and attempting to reform English worship
along what he saw as early church lines. This rejection of Catholicism and
cleaving to an apostolic model are both evident in the preface when Cran-
mer writes of recovering “this godly and decent ordre of the auncient
fathers” which has been neglected “these many yeres passed.” The second
reason is closely related to the first, for Cranmer’s calendar makes room for
sequential reading precisely through rejecting the Catholic abundance of
feast days. In 1532, Convocation requested that the number of holy days be
curtailed, and Cranmer’s calendar reflects this striking abridgment of the
festal calendar. Given the sudden, unprecedented emptiness of the liturgi-
cal calendar, a linear read-through of the Bible seems a logical device to fill
up the calendar’s space. Third, Cranmer’s lectionary shares in a wider Protes-
tant move toward a more sequential mode of reading the Bible. Hans Frei
demonstrates that during the Reformation a “literal and historical” approach
to Scripture became “the regnant mode of biblical reading.” If the Bible is
to be seen as historically true, then “the several biblical stories narrating
sequential segments in time must fit together into one narrative,” and linear
reading is one way to encourage a view of the Bible as a single, coherent
story.61 Indeed, sequential reading had been practiced on the Continent for
some time.62 In England also a linear read-through of the Bible was increas-
ingly common. The Puritan Middleburgh Liturgy of 1586 directs the Bible
reading “to bee in order as the bookes and Chapters follow.”63 Historian
Patrick Collinson has shown the increased English Protestant emphasis on
“the coherence of the text,” a coherence grasped, in part, by reading the
Bible beginning to end.64
Finally, a sequential ordering of the Bible also has a certain practical
appeal. Liturgical historian William D. Maxwell has pointed out the utili-

tarian value of such a lectionary, for it insures that nothing is left out: “the
consecutive method of reading is the chosen method because it is the only
method by which the whole of the Gospels are covered so that nothing is
withheld from the people.”65 Maxwell’s comment, however, fallaciously assumes
that discontinous reading is, necessarily, incomplete reading. Richard Hooker,
in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, alludes similarly to the practical side of
the lectionary, for like the Book of Discipline’s explanation that the “con-
tinewall following of ane text” is more “proffitabill to edifie the Churche,”
Hooker writes of the benefits accruing to the congregation when “the whole
booke of God is by readinge everie yeere published.”66 However, neither
Hooker nor the anonymous author of the Book of Discipline explain why a
specifically “continewall” reading edifies any more than a discontinous one.
To our modern sensibilities—profoundly informed by the rise of the prose
novel and thus habituated to linear reading — such a sequential ordering of
the Scriptures can seem like pure common sense. But our modern common
sense is not the same as a prior era’s common sense.
The sequential arrangement of the lections, when presented in the
timetable of a calendar, resulted in a new positioning of the believer’s tem-
poral experience in relation to the sacred events narrated in the Scriptures.67
In liturgical use before the Reformation, the Old Testament was read “pre-
dominantly for its prophetic and typological value. Hence it illustrates the
subsequent lesson from the New Testament, the mystery of the day, ecclesi-
astical discipline, the significance of the stational church — where the ser-
vice took place—or the life of its patron saint.”68 Although on holy days the
Book of Common Prayer ’s lections are similarly “prophetic” and “typologi-
cal,” on most days the Old Testament excerpts are not selected for their
typological appropriateness to the New Testament reading. In the sequential
sections of Cranmer’s lectionary, Old and New Testament readings do not
pair up into type and antitype, prophecy and fulfillment. They have no syn-
chronic relationship to each other, but only a diachronic one to the preced-
ing day’s lessons. Like strangers standing together in the same elevator, the
different Bible verses have little in common except being in the same “place”
at the same “time.” In this sense, Cranmer’s Bible lections are like Foxe’s cal-
endar names, each assigned a day in the calendar not out of liturgical appro-
priateness but in order to maintain an unbroken sequence.
In a lectionary comprised of pericopes, the Old Testament and
New Testament readings have a specific relevance to the present moment in
which the present is defined less by its place in a historical sequence than by
its liturgical character. For example, let us take two successive days from

Cranmer’s calendar: first, the feast of John the Baptist on 24 June and then
the liturgically “empty” 25 June. On John the Baptist’s day, the Old Testa-
ment lessons are Malachi 3 and 4, a section which begins, “Behold, I send
my messenger to prepare the way before me” (traditionally read as a refer-
ence to John the Baptist) and which ends with a warning about enmity
between children and fathers, a prophetic passage that the angel later quotes
verbatim to the pregnant Elizabeth, John the Baptist’s mother. The New
Testament lessons are from Matthew 3 (“In those days came John the Bap-
tist”) and Matthew 14 in which Herod gets John’s head on a platter. The rel-
evance of these Old and New Testament readings is obvious. And—here is
the crucial point — the relevance of both to the believer’s present is equally
obvious, since one reads these passages on the celebration of John the Bap-
tist’s holy day. Ostensibly, it does not matter if the believer lives in the sixth
century or the sixteenth since the specific historical moment matters less
than the liturgical moment. What counts is not the date (say, 24 June 1567)
but the feast ( John the Baptist’s holy day).
Whereas the pericope readings on 24 June mute any sense of linear
time, the sequential readings on the next day suggest that the believer inhab-
its an ever-changing historical process. On 25 June, Cranmer’s calendar
enjoins the reader to read Job 21 and 22, containing Job and Eliphaz’s
rebuttal and counterrebuttal about why human beings suffer; Luke’s narra-
tion of Christ’s ministry in chapter 8 (including the parable of the sowers,
the demons cast out into a herd of swine, and the resurrection of a dead
child); and Ephesians 2 in which Paul tells the church at Ephesus that those
who were once “Gentiles in the flesh” are now “fellow citizens with the
saints” under Christ’s new dispensation. These three passages have no par-
ticular, necessary relationship to each other. Nor do they have any specified
relevance to the believer’s experience of the day, 25 June, since Cranmer’s
calendar does not specify a feast on this day. Of course, to the sixteenth-cen-
tury English Protestant, the Bible would always have been relevant to the
present, but my point is that this relevance is not stipulated by the align-
ment of pericopes and liturgical celebration. The present relevance supplied
the previous day by the feast of John the Baptist would on 25 June have
been supplied by the particular historical moment of the believer’s “here
and now.” On 24 June, the triangulation of Old Testament, New Testament,
and liturgical present ( John the Baptist’s day) remains constant from year to
year. On 25 June, while the Old and New Testament verses for the day are
fixed, the third corner of the triangle — the present — always changes. So
that even though a sixteenth-century Protestant would have used the same

lectionary year after year, with each successive year the believer inhabits a
different historical moment, and so the lessons are made relevant in ever
new ways. Whereas pericopes produce a sense that time repeats itself (is, in
effect, timeless), sequential reading encourages a sense that one year is not
the same “time” as previous ones.
The experience of reading typologically and liturgically apt peri-
copes on holy days and sequentially arranged lections on all other days
results in two different senses of time: kairos, the paradoxical “time” which
transcends or even contravenes traditional human notions of temporality,
and chronos, the historical and sequential time in which human experience
unfolds. In kairos, the sacred past comes close to—indeed virtually impinges
—the spiritual character of the present, while chronos foregrounds the elapsed
time or temporal “distance” between past and present. As John Booty points
out, if conceived of spatially, kairos is vertical whereas chronos is horizon-
tal.69 Kairos typifies the experience of the medieval saints’ calendar, for on
his or her special holy day, the saint inhabited the present in a particularly
immediate way, one that annihilated the intervening years (or centuries)
between the saint’s historical life and the present celebration of the believer:
the day “was” Saint Lucy’s day. Foxe’s calendar, in contrast, exemplifies chronos
with its careful dating of the saints’ deaths and consequent relegating of
them to the historical past. Cranmer’s calendar, unlike Foxe’s, mingles the
two understandings of time. His use of pericopes on holy days can be regarded
as a concession to kairos, for pericopes — verses taken out of their biblical
narrative context—are, by their very nature, nonchronological. A lectionary
comprised entirely of pericopes collapses the distance between the “now”
and the “then,” since the biblical events which form the sacred past are used
to shape the secular present (and, in part, to help make the present itself
sacred). Instead of each day’s lections depicting an unfolding scriptural
story—such as the steady development of Isaiah’s ministry or the increasing
sufferings of Job — the readings are pulled from all over the Bible for their
relevance to the liturgical character of the present. Time itself seems to con-
catenate as the perceived gap between past and present narrows.
In contrast, the Book of Common Prayer’s sequential reading epito-
mizes chronos, for by refusing to accommodate the lessons to the liturgical
concerns of the present, it highlights the temporal distance between the
biblical events and the present lived time of the believer. Whereas, as
Stephen Prickett explains, for the medieval Catholic “the biblical world was
not really a past at all” and Christ’s crucifixion “was an ever-present reality
[belonging] . . . to a continuous timeless present that intersected with his

own world,”70 a linear mode of reading makes the teachings and events of
the Bible more historical: they occurred “then” in contradistinction to the
believer’s “now.” The sacred past as represented in the Scriptures seemingly
exists at a greater temporal remove from the Church’s present, since the
unfolding story of the Scriptures does not bear intrinsically upon the eccle-
siastical shape of the present. Indeed, in sequential reading, the biblical past
as narrated in the lections and the Church’s present as experienced daily by
the body of believers have no fixed relevance to one another. In this way,
Cranmer’s lectionary seems prophetic of the respublica litterarum’s biblical
scholarship. As Debora Shuger demonstrates, this form of exegesis, which
arose in the 1580s, “presupposed the fundamental alteriority of the [bibli-
cal] past” and was based on “a new sensitivity to historical discontinuity.”71
Where these exegetes openly asserted the historical distance between the first
century and the sixteenth, Cranmer’s calendar-lectionary fosters this same
sense at the level of praxis, a knowledge built up imperceptibly over months
and years of simply reading the Bible in a particular order.
Since linear history allows the sacred events of the past to recede
inexorably down an ever-lengthening timeline, a ruthlessly sequential sense
of time can all too easily transform into a sense of purely secular time.72
Cranmer’s intent, however, in shaping the lectionary was decidedly not to
encourage a conception of secular history. Indeed, his preface explicitly
advances a continuous, unbroken order of Bible reading as a means of
reforming the current church along earlier apostolic lines. While sequential
reading over the course of the year might, by its very nature, have high-
lighted the temporal gap between “now” and “then,” it was also the same
tool that Cranmer imagines as restoring the English Church to an originary
sacred state. Referring to this Protestant desire to recover the apostolic past,
Jonathan Z. Smith writes, “I know of no non-Christian myth that expresses
the real possibility of the recovery of ‘pristine origins’ as strongly as does this
mythos represented by early Protestant historiography.”73 The increasingly
nuanced Protestant understanding of the biblical past as past did not pre-
clude a profound identification with it, one that in its conflation of past and
present, rivals the often-noted anachronisms of medieval art (such as depic-
tions of Christ dressed as a fourteenth-century nobleman).74 Similarly, in
framing a lectionary calendar that called for two different modes of Scrip-
ture reading ( pericopes and sequentiality), Cranmer was not trying to split
sacred and profane time. Certainly, for early modern English men and
women, some days would have seemed more spiritually rich than others.
Hooker writes, “the daies which are chosen out to serve as publique memo-

rials of . . . [God’s] mercies ought to be clothed with those outward robes of
holiness whereby theire difference from other dayes maie be made sensi-
ble.”75 On these days, pericope readings assisted the absorption of merely
quotidian time into the ritual experience of the sacred. Yet having observed
that the kairos of feast days would have seemed particularly holy, we cannot
accurately assert the opposite—that the chronos of all other days was merely
secular and mundane. To posit this would be to misrepresent the impor-
tance of chronicity to the Reformation. Cranmer himself would have been
appalled at the idea that his lectionary historicized the Bible in the sense of
reimagining it as “merely” a historical document without the ability to tran-
scend time and radically impinge upon and transform the present. As Patrick
Collinson reminds us, “The motive of protestant expositors and readers, at
whatever level, was professedly anti-historicist, making of ‘Scripture’ a text
which was not only harmonious but of timeless validity.”76
Instead of representing a split between sacred and profane time,
kairos and chronos, with their attendant reading modes of pericopes and
sequential lections, epitomize two different means of accessing the sacred.
For Protestants, “historicizing” the Scriptures was part of a uniquely Protes-
tant approach to typology, one that saw the contemporary events of the
Reformation as both part and culmination of God’s master plan for human-
ity. One encountered the sacred not just in the paradoxical, ahistorical tem-
porality of kairos but also through watching the steady unspooling of secu-
lar history and tracking the acts of God in the realm of chronos. In this
sense, preserving an awareness both of the temporal gap between one’s own
“now” and the biblical “then” was crucial to understanding how the Protes-
tant Reformation fulfills the past. Thus, although the sequential lections
seem antithetical to typology, these lections can be thought of as Cranmer’s
attempt to practice typology on a vast scale. The preface to the 1578 Geneva
Bible exhorts the reader to learn “the whole storie.” In light of this injunc-
tion, Cranmer’s sequential lectionary makes eminent sense, for except on
the days when pericopes are mandated, it steadily and methodically takes
the reader through the vast bulk of the canonical Scriptures, recounting
them so that the “whole storie” can be put in service of an overarching typo-
logical narrative, a larger “whole storie” that includes not only the biblical
narrative but also the subsequent events of human history.77 Prickett has
shown how, from Christianity’s very origins, the “stress on allegory was also,
paradoxically, to produce a new sense of the importance of narrative.”78 By
laying out the Bible in huge, months-long narrative sequences, Cranmer’s
lectionary represents an intensification of the allegorical and typological

approach to the Bible, one admittedly difficult to apprehend since the type
is nothing less than the entire Bible and the antitype that it fulfills is the
totality of human history. Cranmer’s calendar lectionary encourages and
augments this particularly Protestant melding of secular history and typol-
ogy since not only does the linear reading help to create a sense (however
erroneous) of the Bible as a single coherent story, but the very fact of includ-
ing the lections in a calendar creates a link between the day-by-day unspool-
ing of existence and the unfolding biblical story. Both are governed by the
same timetable, and for the sixteenth-century English Protestant, contem-
porary experience and scriptural history became part of a single temporal
continuum that would end in Apocalypse.
The calendar and the individual use of time
By imagining contemporary events as the fulfillment of time past, Foxe’s

and Cranmer’s sequential calendars stress that sixteenth-century history —
not just the major events and figures of the Reformation but also the
continuing experience of the body of believers — matters.79 This assertion,
however, about the collective entity called the body of believers begs the
question of the individual’s place within that body. If these sequential cal-
endars helped open up the possibility of secular history, to what degree
did they consequently encourage a sense of the individual’s unique place in
that onward-rolling time? As both John Wall and Ramie Targoff point out,
scholars have too readily embraced a view of late medieval Catholicism as a
primarily collective religion with the Reformation ushering in a new empha-
sis on individualism and personal spirituality. By “reading individualism
into all Anglican writing, scholars miss the communal intention” of the
Prayer Book, for “Cranmer made clear that the experience of corporate wor-
ship was to be at the center of English Christianity.”80 To argue that either
Foxe or Cranmer had an individualist project would crucially misrepresent
the intent of both their texts. Cranmer’s text is not titled the Book of Private
Prayer, and the Reformed early modern church was constituted only through
acts of common devotion.81 Cranmer’s calendar not only synchronizes reli-
gious observance for the entire nation but further specifies what texts the
whole congregation (indeed, the whole of churchgoing England) would
hear read aloud. This is not private reading.82 Similarly, the sheer size of
Foxe’s text — a massive folio — militates against the idea of widespread pri-
vate, devotional use, just as its very title emphasizes the collective “acts” and
the communal “monuments” of memory that the entire Church should

share. In his Laws, Hooker admonishes, “it doth not suffice that wee keepe a
secret kalender taking thereby our privat occasions as we list our selves.”
Foxe’s and Cranmer’s calendars conform to Hooker’s vision of the calendar,
for they present specifically “publique memorials” of piety and devotion.83
Although both Foxe and Cranmer undoubtedly intended their cal-
endars to contribute to a sense of collective Protestant identity, each calen-
dar simultaneously makes unprecedented room for individual approp-
riation. Despite the communal, ecclesiastical thrust of Foxe’s calendar,
individual believers would likely have consulted it not only for the times of
group remembrance but also for their own private and extraecclesiastical
reasons. Calendars, after all, were one of the most utilitarian of early mod-
ern texts. The seventeenth-century almanac writer Joseph Chamberlaine
attests to the calendar’s prosaic utility when he asks, “what man nowadays,
that hath any dealings in the worlds affairs but hath need of a Kalendar?”84
In the 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments, the calendar is followed by a
table “declaring the increasing and decreasing of the dayes by thapproching
[sic ] and declination of the Sunne.” The length of daylight has little real
impact on collective ecclesiastical observance and none on the kind of non-
liturgical commemoration that Foxe advocates, and readers would certainly
have used this table to structure their own private temporal experience. The
utilitarian table of daylight hours effectively underscores the purely private
usefulness of the preceding calendar. Even the sequentiality of Foxe’s calen-
dar encourages individual appropriation. The tacit understanding of Foxe’s
calendar (and of his whole text) is that Apocalypse is right around the
corner and that all time is about to end. Given this impending telos, the
chronological sequence of names on each calendar page encourages the
reader to see how the divine historical plan begun in Genesis is both con-
tinued and completed in the lives and deaths of these contemporary Protes-
tants. The problem, however, is that Apocalypse never arrives, and the cal-
endar’s sequence does not triumphantly end in the way that Foxe undoubtedly
imagined it would. Indeed, as the years rolled on, the calendar’s names
would have simply grown more and more past — and, potentially, less and
less pressingly relevant. The chronological listing of years on each page tac-
itly invites readers to continue its sequence, not with the revelatory end of
time and the apotheosis of the Protestant Church, but with the occasions of
their own private lives.
Similarly, despite the common aspects of the Book of Common
Prayer ’s calendar, the sequential reading of Cranmer’s lectionary enables
individual interpretation of the Bible, since the Old Testament and New

Testament verses have no clear thematic or typological association. An indi-
vidual believer could have found striking affinities between the day’s assigned
lections, but this private link is not one already scripted or encouraged by
the typological alignment of selected Bible verses. And since the lections do
not shape ecclesiastical observance, they could be made personally relevant
in an almost infinite number of ways. I am not claiming that pericopes did
not allow for individual interpretation, only that sequential reading — pre-
cisely by not matching up thematically similar Bible passages and by not
linking these paired verses to appropriate church festivals — more or less
insisted upon it. The blacksmith of Inverary who complained about the
“detached places” of Scripture being read in his church reasons that such a
fractured reading order “leaves our understandings too much in the power
of the clergy” and seems calculated to make “a property of the laity” and
keep “their judgments and consciences in the power of the parson.”85 His
argument suggests a perceived link between a “regular plan of reading the
Scriptures” (one that is not comprised of various “detached places”) and a
sense of the individual believer’s freedom of interpretation.
Further evidence that both Foxe’s and Cranmer’s calendars might
have been widely put to private, individual use comes from the changing
nature of the early modern calendar itself. Hooker’s admonition to follow
the public calendar and observe its “publique memorials” only betrays the
fact that English men and women did, in fact, keep private ones. The magus
John Dee, for example, was one of many Englishmen who used the calen-
dars found in almanacs to record his private affairs and the vicissitudes of
his health.86 Indeed, the growing influence of both Foxe’s Acts and Monu-
ments and Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer is exactly contemporaneous
with the proliferation of small English almanacs, each containing a calendar
and each tacitly suggesting that calendrical time is a private commodity
to be carried around in one’s pocket.87 Of course, Foxe’s text is scarcely
portable in the same sense, but the pervasiveness of English almanacs by the
end of the sixteenth century suggests a growing sense that calendrical time is
private time, regardless of whether that calendar is a tidy octavo or a two-
foot-long folio page. Indeed, by the beginning of the eighteenth century,
Cranmer’s sequential calendar is decisively linked to a private reading prac-
tice, for his lectionary calendar appears frequently in ladies’ almanacs.88
Whereas their counterparts, the gentlemen’s almanacs, instruct readers in
how to conduct, as one writer puts it, “Trade and Business”89 ( providing,
for example, descriptions of roads, tables of interest, and accounts of the
weather), the ladies’ almanacs are explicitly intended for private, domestic

reading. The fact that these ladies’ almanacs typically open with Cranmer’s
lectionary calendar suggests that this model of sequential Bible reading had
become associated with a specifically individual devotional practice. If Foxe
and Cranmer intended to nurture a collective Protestant identity destined
for Apocalyptic rapture, they also opened the door for male and female read-
ers to order their daily lives in terms of the sun, the days, and the things of
this world.
Notes
I am grateful to Rebecca Ann Bach for her generosity as a reader and her insightful,
cogent suggestions.
1 Although John Foxe was not actually the compiler of the calendar, in discussing this
text I follow historian Damian Nussbaum’s lead and refer to it throughout as “Foxe’s
calendar”: “Not only is this [terminology] convenient but also justifiable on the
grounds that although Foxe did not design the 1563 calendar himself, he did choose
to take responsibility for it thereafter, and to defend its implications against its detrac-
tors” (Nussbaum, “Reviling the Saints or Reforming the Calendar? John Foxe and His
‘Kalendar’ of Martyrs,” in Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to
Patrick Collinson from His Students, ed. Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger
[Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 1998], 114 n. 3).
2 Ironically, given my focus on the calendars’ sequential aspects, I have repeatedly
referred to the texts themselves in nonsequential order: Foxe’s calendar first appeared
in 1563 and Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer in 1549. My discussion begins with
the later Book of Martyrs since its sequential structure is essential to understanding
Cranmer’s earlier and more abstruse restructuring of liturgical reading.
3 Although Nussbaum does not discuss the sequential aspects of Foxe’s calendar, I am
deeply indebted to his insightful study. Unlike the paucity of references to Foxe’s cal-
endar, many studies of the Book of Common Prayer at least mention the calendar, and
a number of them discuss how its selection of feast days differs from other contempo-
rary calendars. Very few, however, discuss the lectionary texts contained in the calen-
dar, and none treat its sequential aspect.
4 See Nussbaum, “Reviling the Saints,” 121–25.
5 Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
6 James. K. Bracken, introduction to Come Ye Blessed, Go Ye Cursed: The World of John
Foxe’s “Acts and Monuments,” also Known as “The Book of Martyrs,” exhibition catalogue,
prepared and described by James K. Bracken (Columbus: Ohio State University
Libraries, 1999), 7.
7 For discussion of Catholic responses to Foxe’s calendar, see Nussbaum, “Reviling the
Saints,” 116–18.

8 Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 20.
9 Helen White, Tudor Books of Private Devotion (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1951), 76.
10 Foxe, Actes and monuments (London, 1563), sig. B6v. All subseqent references to
Foxe’s 1563 text will be given parenthetically in the text by publication year and signa-
ture numbers; the 1583 edition will be cited by publication year, volume number, and
page numbers.
11 Robert Parsons, A treatise of three conuersions of England from paganisme to Christian
religion, 3 vols. (Saint Omer, 1604), vol. 2, sig. C5v.
12 OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “calendar.”
13 The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John Booty
(Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), 6.
14 “Quanquam a me quidem non aliter Calendarium hoc institutum est, nisi vt pro
Indice duntaxat suum cuiusque martyris mensem & annum designante, ad priuatum
Lectoris seruivet vsum” (AM, 1563, B4r). I am grateful to Gregory Uchrin for his
translation of this passage.
15 OED, 2nd ed., s.v. “index.”
16 Nussbaum, “Reviling the Saints,” 118.
17 Ibid., 118; see also 134.
18 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988), 272, Certeau’s emphasis. See also Peter Brown, The Cult of
the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), 3.
19 Catherine Randall Coats, (Em)bodying the Word: Textual Representations in the Martyr-
ological Narratives of Foxe, Crespin de Beze, and D’Aubigny (New York: Peter Lang,
1992), 11.
20 There are a few exceptions to this chronological ordering. See Jan. 1; Feb. 11 and 18;
Dec. 2, 3, and 28 through 31.
21 White, Tudor Books, 136–37.
22 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, trans. and adapted from the Latin by Granger
Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (New York: Longmans, Green, 1941), xviii. The most
recent and otherwise authoritative translation of The Golden Legend by William
Granger Ryan errs crucially in omitting the calendar altogether (Voragine, The Golden
Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan., 2 vols. [Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1993]).
23 Brown, Cult of the Saints, 81.
24 Ibid.
25 Richard Glasser, Time in French Life and Thought, trans. C. G. Pearson (Manchester:
University of Manchester Press, 1972), 62. See also Stephen Wilson, introduction to
Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociolog y, Folklore, and History, ed. Stephen
Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 11.
26 Robert Kolb, For All the Saints: Changing Perceptions of Martyrdom and Sainthood in
the Lutheran Reformation (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1987), 3– 4.

27 William Perkins, A Reformed Catholike, or, a declaration shewing how neere we may
come to the present Church of Rome in sundrie points of religion (London, 1597), sigs.
Q4v, Q2r.
28 Edmund Spenser, Shepheardes Calendar, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of
Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1989), 125. For further discussion of Spenser’s text as a calendar, see Alison A.
Chapman, “The Politics of Time in Edmund Spenser’s English Calendar,” SEL: Stud-
ies in English Literature, 1500–1900 42 (2002): 1–24.
29 See Kolb, For All the Saints, 14–15.
30 This superseding of purely linear time was the same as that effected in the weekly
Mass, for transubstantiation brought the material flesh and blood of a Christ crucified
over 1500 years ago miraculously into the present.
31 Richard K. Fenn writes, “We can ignore the tendency of some . . . who continue to
insist that an earlier agrarian world, based on the rotation of the seasons, was giving
way to a more industrial—and hence linear—time line. We know that even in the
Middle Ages peasants had a quite realistic view of time as linear” (Fenn, Time Expo-
sure: The Personal Experience of Time in Secular Societies [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001], 7).
32 Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Histor-
ical Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 8.
33 Ibid., 79.
34 Ibid., 84.
35 For further discussion of these Lutheran calendars, see Kolb, For All the Saints, 29–37;
and Nussbaum, “Reviling the Saints,” 129–32.
36 Nussbaum, “Reviling the Saints,” 130.
37 The Bible [Geneva] (London, 1583), sig. C4r. Similarly, the calendar bound with the
1578 Geneva Bible includes historical notes at the bottom of the page such as
“The learned Clerke, Philip Melanthon, as upon this day, was borne. Anno. 1497”
(The Bible [Geneva] [London, 1578], sig. a4r).
38 Eric Josef Carlson, “Cassandra Banished? New Research on Religion in Tudor and
Early Stuart England,” in Religion and the English People, 1500–1640: New Voices,
New Perspectives, ed. Carlson, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 45 (Kirks-
ville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1998), 11. To date, the only recent
book-length studies of the Prayer Book are Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in
Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
and Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). I am generally indebted to
both these fine studies although neither one discusses Cranmer’s calendar.
39 John N. Wall, Jr., “The Reformation in England and the Typographical Revolution:
‘By this printing . . . the doctrine of the Gospel soundeth to all nations,’” in Print and
Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, ed. Gerald P.
Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim (Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press; Lon-
don: Associated University Presses, 1986), 214.
40 The booke of the common prayer and administracion of the sacramentes, and other rites

and ceremonies of the Churche, after the vse of the Churche of England (London, 1549),
sig. ❧2v. All subsequent citations of the 1549 Prayer Book are from this edition and
are cited parenthetically in the text by signature numbers.
41 For the history of the preface, see John Booty, “Communion and Commonweal: The
Book of Common Prayer,” in The Godly Kingdom of Tudor England, ed. Booty, David
Siegenthaler, and John N. Wall, Jr. (Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1981),
163–64.
42 Calvin, Tracts and Treatises, trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
William B. Eerdmans, 1958), 2:323.
43 Cranmer reasons that the steady degeneration into a nonsequential Bible reading has
been further compounded by the Bible being read in Latin instead of the vernacular:
“wheras Saint Paule would haue suche language spoken to the people in the churche,
as thei might understande . . . the seruice in this churche of Englande (these many
yeres) hath been red in Latin to the people” (sig. ❧2r). While the vernacular Bible was
unquestionably a crucial facet of early modern Protestantism, it is worth noting that
in the logic of Cranmer’s preface, the problem of the Bible being read in Latin is sec-
ond to the problem of its not being read in the right order.
44 Cited in both William D. Maxwell, The Liturgical Portions of the Genevan Service
Book Used by John Knox while a Minister of the English Congregation of Marian Exiles
at Geneva, 1556–1559 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1931), 185; and A. Allan
McArthur, The Christian Year and Lectionary Reform (London: SCM Press, n.d.), 26.
45 The one exception is the 1539 Manual of Prayers or the Primer in English compiled by
John Hilsey, bishop of Rochester; see Edward Burton, ed., Three primers put forth in
the reign of Henry VIII (Oxford, 1848), 316.
46 For examples of the earlier calendars found in various English service books—ones
that Cranmer would likely have been familiar with and which do not list the lec-
tions—see William Maskell, Monumenta ritualia Ecclesiae anglicanae, 3 vols. (Lon-
don, 1846), 2:180–215; and Burton, Three primers, 11–22 and 444–55.
47 Quoted in G. J. Cuming, “The Office in the Church of England,” in Cheslyn Jones,
Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarnolds, eds., The Study of Liturg y (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978), 390. Cuming has modernized Cranmer’s spelling in
transcription.
48 Ibid., 392.
49 In his Description of England (1586), William Harrison sums up the annual result of
this lectionary: “There is nothing read in our churches but the canonical Scriptures,
whereby it cometh to pass that the Psalter is said over once in thirty days, the New
Testament four times, and the Old Testament once in the year” (Harrison, The Descrip-
tion of England, ed. Georges Edelen [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press for the
Folger Shakespeare Library, 1968], 33).
50 My understanding of the ways in which Cranmer’s lectionary advocates a sequential
reading of the Bible is, paradoxically, deeply indebted to Peter Stallybrass’s discussion
of how the Bible was read discontinuously in the early modern period (Stallybrass,
“Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern
England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer [Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002]), 42–79. Stallybrass’s field of inquiry is pri-

marily private Bible reading. My discussion, in contrast, attends to the collective read-
ing mandated by Cranmer’s very public lectionary. In other words, although early
modern English Protestants may well have (as Stallybrass argues) hopped around in
their private devotional Scripture reading, the collective reading required by the Prayer
Book tolerated less divergence.
51 Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturg y: An Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. William
G. Storey and Neils Krogh Rasmussen (Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1986), 300.
52 S. J. P. van Dijk, “The Bible in Liturgical Use,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible,
Volume 2: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 226.
53 See van Dijk, “Bible in Liturgical Use,” 226 nn. 2–3. This second pericope about
Mary is particularly odd since the Mary in question is not Jesus’s mother (the Virgin
being celebrated) but Martha’s sister.
54 Quoted in Pierre Salmon, The Breviary through the Centuries (Collegeville, Minn.: The
Liturgical Press, 1962), 63.
55 F. E. Brightman discusses Cranmer’s debt to Quignones in writing the preface (Bright-
man, The English Rite: Being a Synopsis of the Sources and Revisions of the Book of Com-
mon Prayer [London: Rivingtons, 1915], xxiv– xxix, lxxvi –lxxxiii).
56 Josef A. Jungmann, Pastoral Liturg y, (New York: Herder and Herder, 1962), 202.
57 Ibid., 202–3.
58 Quoted in Ibid., 190.
59 See the reprinted edition, Breviarium Romanum, Editio Princeps (1568), ed. Manlio
Sodi et al. Monumenta liturgia Concordii Tridentini, vol. 3 (Città del Vaticano: Libre-
ria Editrice Vaticana, 1999). In his discussion of Quignones’s lectionary, Pierre Salmon
notes that the sequential arrangement of the New Testament lections “offends the litur-
gical sense” and that dissociating the readings from the celebrations of the Church’s
mysteries “was contrary to the whole of tradition” (Breviary through the Centuries, 85).
60 John Whiterspoon et al., A Letter from a Blacksmith to the ministers and elders of the
Church of Scotland, 3rd ed. (New York, 1764), 4–5; qtd. in McArthur, Christian Year, 27.
61 Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-
Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 1–2.
62 For Continental Protestant lectionary practices, see McArthur, Christian Year, 26; and
Maxwell, Liturgical Portions, 180.
63 A Booke of the Forme of Common Prayers, repr. in Liturgies of the Western Church, ed.
Bard Thompson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 322. For another early modern
injunction to read the Bible sequentially, see Randall Sanderson, An explication of the
following direction for the reading of the Bible over in a yeare (Oxford, 1647).
64 Patrick Collinson, “‘The Coherence of the Text: How it Hangeth Together’; The
Bible in Reformation England,” in The Bible, the Reformation, and the Church: Essays
in Honor of James Atkinson, ed. W. P. Stephens, Journal for the Study of the New Testa-
ment, Supplement Series 105 (Sheffield, Eng.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 84–108.
65 Maxwell, Liturgical Portions, 182.
66 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book 5, in The Folger Library
Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, 4 vols. (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977–82), 2:89.

67 My discussion of the effects of sequential reading rests on the assumption that six-
teenth-century conforming churchgoers did, in fact, publicly hear the Bible in the
order prescribed by the calendar and with sufficient frequency for the sequentiality to
have some effect on the believer’s perception of the overall biblical text. Sharon
Arnoult argues that “[t]he service itself presumed a congregation, and anecdotal evi-
dence suggests lay attendance” (“‘Spiritual and Sacred Publique Actions’: The Book of
Common Prayer and the Understanding of Worship in the Elizabethan and Jacobean
Church of England,” in Carlson, Religion and the English People, 28).
68 Van Dijk, “Bible in Liturgical Use,” 221.
69 Booty shows how the Prayer Book structured and pervaded the chronological experi-
ence of life. He also, however, treats another form of time: “Thus far we have been
mindful of horizontal time, chronos, but the Prayer Book also concerns vertical time,
kairos. For in and through this book, . . . the holy community is forcefully made to
remember God’s mighty acts in history . . . and in remembering participate in that
which in terms of chronos is past” (“Communion and Commonweal,” 170–71).
Although I have borrowed Booty’s terms chronos and kairos, my use of these terms is
different from his. Principally, whereas Booty sees the Protestant act of remembering
as epitomizing the work of kairos, I would argue that memory is still deeply impli-
cated with chronological time.
70 Stephen Prickett, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75–76.
71 Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 23.
72 Albeit in another context, Elizabeth Mazzola also identifies this especially Protestant
problem of temporal recession, for “as Spenser proposes, the saint’s view of new Jeru-
salem gradually recedes” (Mazzola, The Patholog y of the English Renaissance: Sacred
Remains and Holy Ghosts [Boston: Brill, 1998], 3).
73 Jonathan Z. Smith, “A Slip in Time Saves Nine: Prestigious Origins Again,” in Chrono-
types: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 76.
74 See, for example, T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries (Grand Rapids,
Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1971), 91.
75 Hooker, Laws, 2:363.
76 Collinson, “‘Coherence of the Text,’” 96.
77 As Arnoult observes, the sheer volume of Bible lections during the Church of England’s
service “put emphasis on the entire sense of the Scriptures rather than on any specific
passage. . . . The consensus was that any one part of Scripture could and should only
be understood in the context of the whole” (“‘Spiritual and Sacred Publique Actions,’”
31).
78 Stephen Prickett, Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory, ed. Prickett
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 4.
79 In this sense, they participate in what Fenn calls a particularly early modern “serious-
ness about the present and future that was quite as punctilious as the prior preoccupa-
tion with the past” (Time Exposure, 7).
80 Wall, “Reformation in England,” 215, 214. See also Targoff, Common Prayer, 13–14.

81 There is some evidence for the increasing private use of the Book of Common Prayer.
For example, prayer books were frequently bound together with English bibles, and
Cranmer’s calendar implicitly serves as a guide for navigating the Scriptures. Maltby
also points out that the prayer books were frequently printed in small sizes, indicating
private use outside of the public service (Maltby, Prayer Book, 25).
82 The seventeenth-century writer Richard Allestree suggests that even following the
Prayer Book’s lectionary at home only cements collective church identity, for “if we
govern our privat reading by her [the Church’s] measures, it will well express our def-
erence to her judgment” (Allestree, The lively oracles given to us, or, The Christians
birth-right and duty, in the custody and use of the Holy Scripture [Oxford, 1678],
210–11).
83 Hooker, Laws, 2:363.
84 Joseph Chamberlaine, A new almanacke and prognostication (London, 1628), sig. B1v.
85 Letter from a Blacksmith, 4–5, qtd. in McArthur, Christian Year, 27.
86 See, for example, The private diary of Dr. John Dee, ed. J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps (Lon-
don, 1842), 5–10. I use the term Englishmen advisedly since we have no clear evi-
dence of early modern women who annotated their almanac calendars.
87 For discussion of the steady sixteenth-century rise in almanac sales and the use of
their calendars as private diaries, see Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500–1800:
Astrolog y and the Popular Press (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 23– 42
and 61–62.
88 See, for example, John Tipper, The ladies diary: or, the womens almanack, for the year of
our Lord, 1708 (London, 1708).
89 John Tipper, The ladies Diary, or, The womens almanack, (London, 1710), sig. C3r.

Now and Then Sequencing The Sacred in Two Protestant Calendars Alison A. Chapman

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Now and Then:

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33:1, Winter 2003.

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The calendar and the individual use of time

By imagining contemporary events as the fulfillment of time past, Foxe’s

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