Like the only partially obliterated images of saints and angels on the walls of old church buildings, the Book of Common Prayer, Articles of Religion, and other formularies by which the Church reformed during England’s long reformation contain traces of past conflicts. These remnants helped to preserve memory of defining moments, prompting narrative accounts of how things came to be the way they are. I focus on the Prayer Book in particular because it had by far the largest influence through its daily use and the public participation it required. Its continual, daily use throughout the whole kingdom meant that the entire populace encountered the traces of previous conflict preserved in its pages far more than those in the other formularies or the material ruins that remained in any particular church building or location. The signs of past conflict scattered throughout the Prayer Book fostered the development of an etiology myth among the liturgy’s users, which, in turn, supported acceptance of the identity the book assigns them.
It is not the case, I hasten to clarify, that conflict qua conflict was praised. The doctrine of the reformed Church of England was not a dualistic one, positing an eternal struggle of light and dark. In the postlapsarian world, conflict is unavoidable and can be redemptive, but it is always something undesirable to be overcome. Official public rhetoric concerning conflict during England’s long reformation was entirely negative. If we take that rhetoric seriously, then we must conclude that the controversies preserved and even promoted in the Prayer Book were understood by the religious authorities and presented to the people as significant enough to warrant the disruption to the public peace that they brought about.
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