The First Protestant Hymnal, Five Centuries of Descendants

The Moravian Church's claim to the first Protestant hymnal ever printed sits at the start of a publishing lineage most denominations cannot trace anywhere near as far back. At the opening of the sixteenth century, the Unitas Fratrum, the Bohemian Brethren who are the direct ancestors of today's Moravian Church, produced a hymnal of their own even as the wider Protestant Reformation was still taking shape around them. The Czech reformer and educator Jan Amos Comenius later edited what would be the Brethren's last Czech language hymnal, in 1659, before persecution scattered the community and very nearly ended it.

That community's eighteenth century revival at Herrnhut did not start a new hymn tradition so much as reactivate an old one, and the editorial thread runs continuously from there to the present: Christian Gregor's 1784 Choralbuch established the musical style still recognizable in Moravian hymn singing today, and each subsequent hymnal, through to the 1995 Moravian Book of Worship now in current use, has been produced as an extension of that same unbroken project rather than a fresh start. Few worship books in active use anywhere can point to a documented publishing lineage stretching back roughly five hundred years.