Abstract
With the exception of his first chapter, which discusses Andrewes and George Herbert, Gay's focus is on the period following 1645 when the prayer book was officially abolished and replaced with the very loose (and, as he notes, aesthetically uncompelling) Directory for Public Worship, as well as with the decades following its reinstatement in 1662. In one of the most striking moments in the book, Gay argues that Milton used the Lord's Prayer as the subtext for Satan's soliloquy in book 4 of Paradise Lost, where each part of the prayer is invoked, parodied, or inverted. [...]Gifts and Graces leaves the reader less with a celebratory sense of poetry than with a strong reminder of how essential debates over prayer were to the identity and unity of the kingdom, and how profoundly these debates penetrated the literary imagination.