John Maiden, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy 1927–1928 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), pp. 210, ISBN 978-1-84383-521-9 (hbk).

摘要

The Prayer Book crisis of 1927–28 saw one of the great set-piece debates in twentieth-century parliamentary history. Parliament's refusal – twice – to let the established Church change its liturgy was also the last battle in a much longer turf-war between Church and State in England. And yet it is likely that if one asked a class of history undergraduates about the Prayer Book crisis today, not one of them would have heard of it. They would not get much help if they looked it up in a textbook. A.J.P. Taylor's English History 1914–1945 (1965) dismissed the episode as ‘the echo of dead themes’, while more recent histories of twentieth-century Britain have ignored it altogether. So did Callum Brown's Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (2006). While the crisis has spawned a handful of articles and chapters, it has not – until now – been the subject of a dedicated monograph.