Reflection for August 2

It was inevitable that the Prayer Book would have a key role in deciding what was good English: it was destined to be one of the most frequently printed and often most heard texts in the language. Whatever its content it would have become decisive; as it was, the Prayer Book’s language was created by an individual with a natural ear for formal prose: for sound and sentence construction. For this reason Cranmer deserves the gratitude not merely of the Church of England, but of all English speakers throughout the world. Through his connoisseurship, his appreciative pilfering of other people’s words and his own adaptations, he created a prose which was self-consciously formal and highly crafted, intended for repeated use until it was polished as smooth as a pebble on the beach…. He stands prominently amid a select band of Tudor writers, from Tyndale to Shakespeare, who set English on its future course….

Twentieth-century scholarship has reminded us just how fundamental is the structure of language to the way in which we construct our lives and our culture. Cranmer’s language lies at the heart of our own English-speaking culture, which has now become so central to the destiny of the world (Thomas Cranmer, Diarmaid MacCullough).