While reading one of my favorite books from last year, How to Use the Book of Common Prayer (review here), I was surprised to learn that the 1662 Book of Common Prayer's Ash Wednesday service does not include ashes. You can read Bray and Keane to get the full argument as to why that is. But it was striking to me to realize that if you were a 17th century Protestant Christian in the modern-day United Kingdom, your options with regard to Ash Wednesday were basically restrained to "churches that dispense with it altogether," or "churches that hold an Ash Wednesday service but do not do the imposition of ashes."
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