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.

Every Sunday around the world, Christians offer money and in-kind gifts to the church, traditionally known as alms. This act produces questions about what it means to offer God a gift when God has offered humanity the greatest gift in Jesus Christ, or the balance of favour or gratitude in the giving of these gifts. These very questions, and more, have had a significant influence on the liturgical theology, particularly in the offertory, within Anglicanism. In Of Thine Own Have We Given, Shawn O. Strout provides a comprehensive analysis of the offertory rites, including in his analysis other churches within the Anglican Communion, beyond the Church of England. Ordered historically, the book encompasses the sixteenth century through to current times, scrutinising the offertory and oblationary changes throughout their religious and historical contexts. Strout argues that the development of oblation in the offertory was neither arbitrary nor episodic, but rather the result of sustained theological tension. Using liturgical theology's tools of historical, textual, and contextual analyses, the book examines why these developments occurred and their importance for the church today.