Anglican Foundations: A Handbook to the Source Documents of the English Reformation

Anglicans across the globe place a great deal of importance on the Reformation texts that were prepared for their churches as England broke free from Roman Catholic control in the sixteenth century. The most well known of these texts are the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles, both of which are still used extensively throughout the Anglican Communion. However, these were only two of the documents that served the wide, and carefully integrated, program of religious reform in the Reformation years. Alongside them were other equally authoritative texts prepared to form children in the basics of the faith, guide ongoing patterns of private devotion, model healthy biblical interpretation, expound core doctrines, and much more. This handbook offers an introduction to the full suite of doctrinally determinative documents of the English Reformation. It supplies an orientation to each family of documents, as well as to the individual texts that were sanctioned by the church, state and crown. In addition to descriptions of the texts, there is also a brief history of each type of formulary, discussions of their varied purposes, and lists of key references for further reading. The Anglican Church can only benefit from a fuller understanding of its own documentary heritage. Anglican Foundations is an unparalleled resource that offers students, ordinands, and all committed Anglicans the ideal orientation to the doctrinal texts of the English Reformation.