SOURCE: Devereux, James A. “The Collects of the First Book of Common Prayer as Works of Translation.” Studies in Philology 66, no. 5 (October 1969): 719-38.

In the following essay, Devereux analyzes Cranmer's translations of sixty-six Latin orationes.

Whatever their views on “Henry the Eighth and All That,” students of the English Reformation have always acknowledged the literary supremacy of the Book of Common Prayer.¹ And within the covers of the Prayer Book one group of texts is regularly singled out for praise: the short but solemn prayers called collects. From the literary point of view the collects are at the heart of the Prayer Book, epitomizing its virtues of style—in the words of one early admirer, “the most passionate, proper, and most elegant expressions that any language ever afforded.”² What the casual reader is likely to forget is that most of the collects are not original compositions but translations...