David Jasper & Jeremy J Smith 
Reinventing Medieval Liturgy in Victorian England 
Thomas Frederick Simmons and the Lay Folks’ Mass Book

In 1879, Canon Thomas Frederick Simmons edited the late medieval poem now known as
The Lay Folks’ Mass Book creating what remains the standard edition of the text. This volume shows how Simmons’ interest in the text was related profoundly to contemporary debates about worship in the Church of England, and how he used his medievalist researches as the basis for the most important attempt at Prayer Book revision between the Reformation and the twentieth century.

Table of Content

Preface


Introduction: Imagining the Past


1.Thomas Frederick Simmons and the
Lay Folks’ Mass Book

2.Re-imagining Medieval Devotion: Nineteenth-Century Conceptions of the English Church

3.Simmons and the Early English Text Society

4.Simmons as Editor: The Philologist

5. Simmons as Editor: The Liturgist

6. Simmons as Parish Priest, and Liturgical Reform in the Victorian Church of England

7.The Afterlives of the
Lay Folks’ Mass Book


Conclusion: Liturgical Moments in Time


Plates

Appendix IThe
Lay Folks’ Mass Book: Text and Translation

Appendix IIThe
Lay Folks’ Mass Book and the Sarum Rite


Bibliography

Index

About the author

Jeremy Smith was professor of English philology at Glasgow, where he remains a senior research fellow and emeritus professor, and an honorary professor at St Andrews. His specialisms include English historical linguistics, medieval studies, and book history, combined recently in Transforming Early English (2020).