As with the remainder of the book, the purpose of this chapter is not to offer a detailed history of the individual prayers that make up the Jewish liturgy of today but to offer a general survey of liturgical developments that takes account of changing circumstances and outlooks, as well as of ongoing tensions, and thereby facilitates the process of understanding, more than has hitherto been possible, what is likely to have emerged when, and why. In order to be accurate and reliable, however, general surveys have to be based on particular details, however briefly presented, and it is with this in mind that the initial section of the current chapter offers some remarks about the specific accretions to the prayer-book that had occurred between the late geonic period and the first century of printing, without becoming involved in their intricate evolution. By examining such accretions and attempting to explain the overall theory behind the devotional practice, these remarks should clarify the nature of the starting-point from which the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century siddurim set out on their typographical odyssey and should thus set the tone for subsequent sections of the chapter in which demography, printing and mysticism dominate the description and analysis of developments before the Jewish emancipation and enlightenment.