Wednesday, October 12, 2016

An Anglo-Catholic Prayer Card of the Angelus



This beautiful card with the Angelus on one side, and the Regina caeli on the other, was made in the 1910s or ’20s by the Society of Ss Peter and Paul, an Anglo-Catholic publishing company (now-defunct), which also produced the original Anglican Missal. The decorative border is obviously made from the same stamp on both sides, but the illustration accompanying the two prayers is different, the Annunciation with the Angelus, the appearance of Christ to the women at the tomb with Regina caeli. (Many thanks to Mr Richard Hawker for sharing this with us.)

It is really a pity that decorative elements of this sort have essentially disappeared from liturgical books; many medieval Missals and Breviaries have them on almost every page, a tradition which carried over into the early printed editions of the 15th century, and the first editions of the Tridentine period. Here, for example, is the first page of liturgical text in a Premonstratensian Missal printed in 1578, which has at least one such decoration, very often two or three, on almost every page.

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