The Expurgation of Traditional Prayer Books (c. 1535-1600)

This essay concerns the expurgation of traditional prayer books during the sixteenth century. This phenomenon, whereby controversial material (mainly relating to the Pope and Thomas Becket) has been deleted, is apparent in a large proportion of surviving prayer books and was the result of legislation issued under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Previous approaches to this topic have tended to consider such censorship primarily in terms of the evident unwillingness of traditionally minded owners to censor their books. This study, by contrast, looks for evidence of other attitudes and behaviour, especially that of evangelicals, who seem purposefully to have gone beyond the minimum requirements of the legislation. The essay then considers similar deletions in other types of publication and concludes by suggesting that the original censorship legislation helped to engender a broader culture of censorship—one in which militant readers would expunge religiously objectionable material on an almost systematic basis.