Owen Feltham Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ted-Larry Pebworth

Critical Essay by Ted-Larry Pebworth

SOURCE: Pebworth, Ted-Larry. “An Anglican Family Worship Service of the Interregnum: A Cancelled Early Text and a New Edition of Owen Felltham's ‘A Form of Prayer.’” English Literary Renaissance 16, no. 1 (winter 1986): 206-33.

In the following excerpt, Pebworth argues that Felltham's “A Form of Prayer” had been printed in at least some copies of the 1661 edition of the Resolves, leading to the conclusion that the author's liturgical challenge to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer was a product of the Interregnum and not the Restoration, as previously assumed.

For two hundred fifty years, scholars and critics of the essayist and poet Owen Felltham (1604?-1668) have considered his “Form of Prayer” to be a Restoration document. Ostensibly not included in the 1661 folio of Felltham's Resolves (which is, in effect, his collected works to that date) and apparently published for the first and only time in the twelfth...
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