BISHOP, EDMUND

BISHOP, EDMUND. - English liturgist, b. at Totnes of an Anglican family on 17 May 1846, d. at Downside on 17 Feb. 1917. First secretary to T. Carlyle, then a member of the Educational Department in the Privy Council Office, he converted to Catholicism in 1867. His first work of great historical interest was a comparison of the official liturgical book of the Anglican Church with its Catholic sources: Edward the VI and the Book of Common Prayer (2nd ed., London 1891). A promoter of the renewal of liturgical studies, a profound investigator, and possessed of a rare bibliographical knowledge, he is regarded as a master in the field of historical liturgy, in which he carried out studies and researches of fundamental importance on the genius of the Roman rite, on the history of the altar, on the Gelasian Sacramentary, on the text of the primitive Canon of the Roman Mass, on the Kyrie eleison, etc., largely collected in Liturgica Historica (Oxford 1918).