A brief account of the history of the English liturgy is useful in understanding the historical and cultural role of the Book of Common Prayer. My aim here is not to produce a definitively new history of the Prayerbook; rather, while presenting an introductory sketch of its history, I intend this account to demonstrate narratively several important things about the liturgy, and through it, about the English Reformation itself. First, simply a sense of its historical importance: in a sense, it's not wholly inaccurate to say that English history from the mid-sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries centers on the BCP, in part because it articulates conflicts whose (ir)resolution was fundamental to the national project (the Civil War split between royalist/Anglicans and parliamentarian/Puritans, for example, which expressed itself so centrally in conflicts over the liturgy, was essentially a spectacular crystallization of always present tensions in the Prayerbook). Second, a sense of its significance for English national identity: by 1555, there were clear links between the Prayerbook, its language, and the idea of “Englishness,” and this association continues to the present day. Third, this account is a narrative counterpart to some of the major concerns of the larger project: the BCP's crucial cultural position as a textual synthesis of the nascent nation-state and the potentially contradictory discourses of Protestant theology (i.e. its simultaneous commitments to both hierarchical power and an individualized model of authority), and its establishment of the characteristically Anglican solution; its implicit reconstruction of the relations of Church and State, religion and politics, in England; its general project of streamlining and centralizing English religious discourse under state control; and its dependence and emphasis on vernacular, print, and interpretation.