In this very obscure piece of the history of the Book of Common Prayer Stefano Villani tells a tale which he openly admits is one of failure. It is a story which spanned three hundred years and is full of wishful thinking, total miscalculation of the bond between Roman Catholicism and Italian culture and society, and a highly inflated belief in the importance of the Anglican Church and its Book of Common Prayer. In many ways it shows the Church of England at its most ridiculous. The story begins with William Bedell, who hailed from the same Essex village as this reviewer, Black Notley. Bedell was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and later bishop of Kilmore. In 1607 he became chaplain to the English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton. A crisis between Venice and the papacy resulted in an interdict being imposed on Venice, and it seemed to some that Venice would repudiate the papacy and become an independent republic with an independent Church, which could be aligned with the Church of England, or at least assisted by the example of the Church of England. As part of this wishful thinking, Bedell undertook a translation of the 1604 Prayer Book into Italian, though no copies of his manuscript have survived. A complete translation of the Book of Common Prayer did not take place until 1685, being the work of Giovan Battista Cappello, a London resident and son of a religious exile, and promoted by Edward Brown. Villani observes of Brown that his entire intellectual output was a coherent part of a cultural project to restore a tradition of criticism of the Catholic Church. The date of publication reflects the growing alarm in England with James ii's accession, and the revoking of the Edict of Nantes. The unfulfilled hope then – renewed periodically through to the nineteenth century – was that Italian congregations in England might use it. Villani draws attention to the Italian congregation amongst the ‘stranger churches’ in the time of Edward vi. He correctly notes that they did not use the Anglican liturgy, though the blanket description of it following the ‘Calvinist discipline’ is slightly misleading. It was under the Superintendency of Jan Laski and, like the French and Dutch Churches in London, used an Italian translation of Laski's Forma ac ratio (a copy is in the British Library). Laski was certainly Reformed, but only ‘Calvinist’ in the very broad understanding of that term. This congregation lingered on but had no interest in using the Anglican liturgy. Successive attempts to found new Italian congregations in England all failed.
Villani raises the important question of whether the edition of 1685 or in fact any other edition was specifically intended for actual liturgical use? The edition published in 1708 and other eighteenth-century translations were closely related to the development of the Grand Tour in Italy, and probably served more as a means of learning some Italian than as a serious liturgical book for regular liturgical worship. In fact, that seems to be the underlying narrative of these translations – at best they served for teaching English people some Italian (Wesley learned German though using Moravian hymns), and also as some rather ineffectual propaganda; this, at least, seems to be the case of the reprints of 1733, 1796 and several times after 1820. A notable edition was published in 1831, the work of George Frederick Nott, a quintessential absentee incumbent. Nott did intend his translation for liturgical use, and Malta became a centre for the dissemination and use of an Italian edition, and a base for propaganda and ‘mission’. There were some flirtations with the Waldensians, but they too had no interest in either episcopacy or the Prayer Book. A key storm-centre in the 1841, Di Menna-Evans revision centred on how to translate the word ‘priest'. The 1841 revision used sacerdote, which later would be hotly debated. Villani notes how excitement arose with the Old Catholic split and the tension between the papacy and the newly unified Italy, and there were (again misplaced) hopes that an independent Church of Italy would emerge. There were also some translations by American Episcopalians of their Prayer Book, which at least in the eucharist, was ‘more catholic’ than the 1662 book, though again, there is no evidence of it having been in regular liturgical use. Villani documents the part played by the Anglo-Continental Society and the SPCK. The latter was highly involved in some of the translations and revisions with editions of 1662 appearing in 1863, 1870, 1880, 1882, 1888, 1915 and 1929. Villani's painstaking work has filled a gap in the history. The actual significance of the translations, though, is another matter. The Jesuit Giacomo Mazio best summed it up in 1847 when he said that the translations together with the Anglican mission were ‘something that might cause wonder at its eccentricity or laughter at its stupidity in the hearts and minds if Italians’. The reference to the diocese of Westminster on p. 104 must be a misprint for the diocese of Winchester.
