In 1879, the late medieval poem now known as The Lay Folks' Mass Book - a guide to the Mass -- was edited for the Early English Text Society by Canon Thomas Frederick Simmons. It remains the standard edition of what, to modern tastes, can seem a simple work of conventional Middle English devotion. Yet, as this book shows, the poem had a remarkable afterlife. The authors demonstrate how Simmons' interest in and presentation of the text was related profoundly to contemporary concerns and heated debates about worship in the Church of England, at a time when Anglian clergymen could be imprisoned for their ritual practices. Simmons, educated at Oxford during the height of the Oxford Movement, was recognised by contemporaries as a leading authority on liturgy, a topic that troubled prime ministers as well as archbishops, and the authors bring out the ways in which Simmons himself used his medievalist researches as the basis for what was to be the most important attempt at Prayer Book revision between the Reformation and the twentieth century.

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

David Jasper is a theologian with a particular interest in the nineteenth century. He is emeritus professor at the University of Glasgow, where he was formerly professor of literature and theology. Recent publications include The Language of Liturgy (2018). He has been an Anglican priest for forty-six years and is canon theologian of St. Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow.