The Flower of Godly Prayers
Introduction
Para1Thomas Becon (c. 1511–1567) was an early Protestant reformer
and homily writer. Arrested and forced to recant during Henry VIII’s reign, upon the
accession of Edward VI he became chaplain to the Lord Protector Edward Seymour and
later to the household of his patron Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. His
1550 Flower of Godly Prayers, reprinted in 1551, 1561, and
1570, was an influential and widely used devotional text. The language of the
confessional prayer to the Holy Spirit here excerpted is traditional, and draws
heavily from that of the earliest English bibles, but it is of interest since it may
be the source, rather than the Bible itself, for the Archbishop’s language about
Henry’s reformation (A1 Sc1 Sp9).
This modernization is based on the Bodleian Library copy (Becon fols. 11v-13v) of the 1550 text (STC 1719.5),
accessed through Early English Books Online.
A Confession of Our Sins unto the Holy Ghost
Para2O most blessed and Holy Spirit, equal God with God the
Father and God the Son, I, miserable sinner, confounded in my conscience and
almost fallen through the multitude of my sins into the hell-like pit of
desperation, am come at this present before thy divine majesty most humbly to
confess and from the bottom of my heart to lament all those my sins and
wickednesses which from my youth hitherto I have unjustly committed in word, deed,
or thought against thy goodness: most entirely beseeching thee mercifully to
forgive me all those mine offences and abominations, and to make in me a clean
heart, endowed with a new and right spirit, which may from henceforth through thy
godly governance so direct me in all my doings that I may only attempt such
enterprises as be agreeable to thy blessed will, profitable to my neighbor, and
pleasant to my soul.
Para3O Lord my God, where thou art, there is liberty. But I,
through the crafts of Satan, the lusts of the flesh, and the pleasures of the
world, am in most miserable captivity, slavery, bondage and thralldom, whereby I
evidently perceive that thou dwellest not in me, neither that I am thy temple, nor
yet have that ghostly freedom wherewith all be endowed that have thee dwelling in
them.
Para4O Lord, have mercy on me, and take away from me that heavy
bondage of the flesh wherewith I am most grievously enclosed, and give me that
sweet and free liberty of the spirit which by thee is wrought within the hearts of
the faithful, that I, being delivered from the power of mine enemies, may serve
thee in holiness and righteousness all the days of my life; again that thou making
me a new creature by mortifying old Adam in me, and by giving me a good spirit,
mayst delight in me as a father in his son, and continually dwell in me as in thy
holy temple. O blessed spirit, forgive me my sins; purify my mind with thy holy
inspiration; comfort my weak heart with thy joyful presence; make merry my
troubled conscience with true and spiritual mirth; lead me, which have so long
erred, into all godly truth; give me the knowledge of all heavenly and spiritual
things, even so much as is necessary for my salvation; put on me the shield of
faith that I may be able to quench the fiery darts of the devil; kindle my heart
with the fire of Christian love; make me a fruitful olive tree in the congregation
of thee, my Lord God; give me patience in tribulation; take away from me vainglory
in prosperity; engraft in my heart continual humility; make me bold to confess the
truth of thy gospel before the tyrants of this world, and give me grace to
persevere in the same unto the end. Replenish my breast with thy heavenly gifts
and spiritual treasures that the devil, the world, and the flesh, with all their
works, pomps, and vanities from me utterly secluded and put apart, thou mayst
continually dwell in me by thy godly inspirations, and I in the thorough, true,
and undoubted faith doing that alway that is good and pleasant in thy sight unto
the glory of thy blessed name, which livest and reignest with God the Father and
God the Son in one majesty, power, and glory, very God, worlds without end.
Amen.
Prosopography
Challen Wright
Chris Horne
Donald Bailey
Eric Rasmussen
Eric Rasmussen is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at
the University of Nevada. He is co-editor with Sir Jonathan Bate of the RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works and general editor, with Paul Werstine, of the New Variorum Shakespeare. He has received the Falstaff Award from PlayShakespeare.com for Best Shakespearean Book of the Year in 2007, 2012, and 2013.
James D. Mardock
James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate
General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake
Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto
and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance
literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonsonʼs representation of urban space as an element in
his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and
he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in
early modern English drama.
Janelle Jenstad
Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director
of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Jodi Litvin
Joey Takeda
Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020
after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.
Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media
Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities
projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the
Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020.
He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.
Michael Best
Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He is the Founding
Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, of which he was the Coordinating Editor
until 2017. In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and
huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on
Electronic Shakespeares,and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.
Navarra Houldin
Project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them)
completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During
their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs
Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and
sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.
Nicole Vatcher
Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.)
in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was womenʼs
writing in the modernist period.
Tracey El Hajj
Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD
from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched
Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on
Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life.Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.
William Shakespeare
Bibliography
Orgography
Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE1)
The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) was a major digital humanities project created
by Emeritus Professor Michael Best at the University of Victoria. The ISE server was retired in 2018 but a final staticized HTML version of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project is still hosted at UVic.
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
| Authority title | The Flower of Godly Prayers |
| Type of text | Primary Source |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
| Series | |
| Source |
This file has been converted from IML, the SGML markup language of the Internet
Shakespeare Editions platform. IML files do not indicate the copy or copytext
transcribed. LEMDO acknowledges that we are not the main source of transcription,
and
that we do not know the witness transcribed in this transcription. As time permits,
we will compare this transcription to an open-access digital surrogate and align the
transcription that surrogate. If you have worked on ISE and/or may have an idea as
to
the source of this file, please contact lemdopm@uvic.ca.
Born digital.
|
| Editorial declaration | |
| Edition | Released with LEMDO Editions for Peer Review 0.1.5 |
| Encoding description | Encoding description coming soon. |
| Document status | draft, peer-reviewed |
| License/availability |
Intellectual copyright in this edition is held by the editor, James Mardock. The critical paratexts are licensed
under a CC
BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that they are freely downloadable
without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the
editor, NISE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the
content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of
academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without
the knowledge and consent of NISE, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for
pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the classroom.
|