Reformation
Church of England
The body whose settlement removed an exorcism rite and put nothing in its place — a real position, and one the corpus cannot yet source.
In its own terms
What this body is doing
Carried without positions, deliberately. The Book of Common Prayer contains no exorcism, and the deliberate absence of a rite is itself an answer to every question this section asks — but the corpus holds no primary text for it, and inferring six answers from one silence would be the confident summary this site exists against.
What would fill it: the 1559 settlement, Canon 72 of 1604 — which required episcopal licence before any attempt at dispossession, and is a restraint clause in all but name — and the twentieth-century diocesan guidelines that followed. All are reachable. None is in the corpus yet.
Where it stands in the tree
Descent
Separated from
The Latin West · 1534Royal supremacy first and doctrine after. The Elizabethan settlement of 1559 is what suppressed the Sarum use and replaced its books with the Book of Common Prayer.
Bodies that separated from it
- Pentecostal and charismatic1906
Not a schism from one body but a revival across many, conventionally dated to Azusa Street. Its Methodist and holiness roots run back through the English evangelical revival, which is why the corpus files it on that branch rather than as a root of its own.
The same questions asked of every body
What it holds
Are the gifts still given?
Not established here. Not an exorcism question, and the one that decides the rest. A body holding the gifts ceased with the apostles has no room for a deliverance ministry; a body holding they continue has no reason to license one.
Who may act?
Not established here. The first thing a rite settles, usually in its opening rubric, and the sharpest divide between an office and a gift.
What counts as evidence?
Not established here. Where a tradition decides it is dealing with a spirit rather than an illness, a grief, or nothing at all.
Where is the spirit?
Not established here. All four inherit gospel scenes in which spirits are in people. What each adds beyond that is the largest difference between them.
Whom do the words address?
Not established here. A formal difference a reader can check by counting clauses rather than by weighing tone.
What restraint is written in?
Not established here. Every one of these traditions knows the practice can harm. What each does about that is what popular accounts leave out.
What closes the matter?
Not established here. Whether the encounter ends, and who declares it, separates a rite from an ongoing practice.
This page records what a body holds and where that is written down. It takes no position on whether any of it is true, and nothing here is instruction — the rites are described by what they contain, never as something to follow.