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Nuptial Blessing: a study of Christian marriage rites . By Kenneth Stevenson. (Alcuin Club Collections, 64.) Pp. ix + 258. Alcuin Club/S.P.C.K., 1982. £10.50.

Nuptial Blessing: a study of Christian marriage rites. By Kenneth Stevenson. (Alcuin Club Collections, 64.) Pp. ix + 258. Alcuin Club/S.P.C.K., 1982. £10.50. Liturgical studies are the ultimate expression of ecclesiastical self-consciousness. As evidences for the understanding of theological, social, legal or cultural traditions their interest extends to other disciplines. Pursued in isolation they recall the Meccano sets, or their plastic equivalents, played with long ago: a re-building of the same bits and pieces into different shapes, with the processes of distortion and attrition spars bent, screw threads worn evident in the use. From this survey of marriage rites, extending from the Jewish antecedents of Christianity to its most recent liturgical expressions, Dr Stevenson relegates matters of canon law and social history to 'second place'. Theology though inherent in liturgical symbolism very nearly goes out with them in certain critical periods. It is not enlightening to throw in the words 'sacrament' and 'sacramental', particularly in relation to Reformation theologies, without recognising the diversity of meanings which those words carried; reflection on a paragraph in the Elizabethan homily on oaths and swearing will make the point clear. The book, then, is one for Iiturgiologists: readers with a wider interest in marriage will be less captivated except in the Epilogue, pp. 203-14, where the author reflects on what his liturgies mean. The study begins with the festive and domestic ceremonies alluded to in the Old and New Testaments. The Fathers are searched for signs of a specifically Christian rite and for the beginnings of episcopal or presbyteral intervention. As Eastern and Western traditions divide, literary evidences emerge of marriage customs, with or without priestly participation, at home or in church: of betrothal, joining of hands, veils, crowns, going to bed. Liturgical texts, sacramentaries, missals, manuals, witness to a bizarre range of liturgical readings, and of themes embodied in ceremonies, benedictions and prayers. Some lay emphasis on 'joining', increasingly by the priest; some, under canonical influence, on consent. These, with the mass, become the staple ingredients of late medieval forms. Out of these sources, mostly native, came the English rite for the Book of Common Prayer, 'beautifully fashioned by Cranmer, and gently adapted by succeeding generations': how unbeautifully adapted in this generation, in the Alternative Services Book of 1980, is exemplified in the appendix, A Procession of Nuptial Blessings and Prayers. Other Reformed and Protestant Churches launched new traditions upon their way. The Tridentine reforms, meanwhile, left the Roman Catholic Church with two entrenched essentials, consent and the conjoining ministry of the priest, with a wide tolerance of local diversity. It remained for Vatican II to abolish ego coniungo vos in favour of a role for the priest more consistent with the Council's rediscovered covenant theology of marriage. The book is a work of liturgical scholarship, well indexed and documented. It is marred by the frequent intrusion of jaunty asides in a strain persistent in an