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Austern et al, eds., Psalms in the Early Modern World
by Debora Shuger

Psalms in the Early Modern World.  Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David Orvis, eds.  Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. xxii + 385 pp. $114 cloth. 

 

The collection opens with the story of how, sometime around 1640, less than decade after arriving in New England, a puritan minister named John Eliot “gathered a group of native converts … all skilled linguists who could read and write English—to translate a selection of psalms and other scriptural passages into Algonquin.”  A note on the first page adds that “the same group later translated the entire Bible into Algonquin,” the New Testament coming out in 1661, the Old in 1663—the first Bible printed in America.  Thus told, this story represents a striking revision of standard account, which credits Eliot alone with the work of translation.  It also exemplifies the great strength of this collection’s essays, whose tracking of the psalms’ movement along paths that crisscross national and confessional boundaries reveals unexpected vistas and uncharted territories.

The same revelation of human connectedness and the historical complexity marks some of the volume’s finest essays, including, primus inter pares, Anne Prescott’s “Sibling Harps,” which compares the late sixteenth-century Sidney-Pembroke psalter with a 1694 French metrical psalter by the Roman Catholic poet Elisabeth Sophie Chéron, illustrated by her Protestant brother Louis.  Reading Prescott is like watching dominos fall, as one example after another topples one’s ideological predictions.  It is Sir Philip Sidney’s version of psalm 8 that stresses “the world’s fertility and its creatures’ sensuality,” including “sucking babies and mating animals,” whereas Mme. Chéron, eschewing both maternal and erotic resonance, “contents herself with unspecified big and little creatures apparently uninspired to make animal love” (239).  Nor do the translations reveal the expected denominational coloring:  the Catholic Chéron’s translation of psalm 136 (Super flumina) stresses the tyranny of Babel; in Pembroke’s version, by contrast, the “homesick voice” of the psalmist “is largely that of an individual wishing to go home” (247).  If nothing else, the essay makes a strong case that more is to be learned from the close reading of poems than from slotting them into pigeonholes.

John Schwaller’s translations from Bernadino de Sahagún’s mid-sixteenth century Psalmodia christiana alone are worth the price of the book.  Sahagún, a Franciscan scholar of Nahuatl culture, had been in New Spain since 1529; his Psalmodia is not a psalter but a collection of Nahuatl hymns that celebrate the saints and feasts of the Christian calendar in the style of native poetic tradition with its magnificent flower imagery.  The following is one of Sahagún’s Easter hymns:

 

You divine talauma, popcorn flower,

magnolia, red solandra flower, you

daughter of the holy Church, you woman:

be happy, be joyous.

You divine orioles, you grosbeaks, you

mockingbirds, you humming birds, all

you sons of God, you angels; come,

circle around the courtyard of our church.

(330)

 

Like Schwaller’s, Richard Freedman’s essay on Huguenot psalmody describes a “striking … collapse and reconfiguration of geographical, confessional, cultural, and linguistic distances” (23).  The essay focuses on Simon Goulart’s 1597 Cinquante pseaumes de David avec la musique à cinq parties d’Orlande de Lasso; like much of Goulart’s work, this is a volume of contrefacta: sacred texts set to the music of leading secular composers—a practice that in Geneva goes back to the 1562 metrical psalter used in public worship, many of whose tunes draw on medieval plainchant and popular song. Given the instinctive Calvinist distrust of all things Catholic and dim view of religious art, one would not expect either such syncretism or such sophistication in Genevan psalm settings.  However, as Freedman shows, Calvin valued music highly, but, unlike the ancients, located its moral and spiritual operation in the text rather than the tune:  hymnody spiritualized music’s “incredible power to move our hearts” to holy purposes by reforming the words.  While the Genevan Church used monophonic hymns for public worship, these being more suitable for congregational singing, there were no restrictions on polyphony for private devotion. 

If the opening microhistory of the Algonquin psalter exemplifies the volume’s strengths, it also illustrates its central weakness:  for within two pages of crediting skilled native linguists with the translation, the Introduction reverts, without explanation, to the standard account in which Eliot translates Scripture for the “psalm-singing Algonquins” (3). There may be a way to harmonize these two versions, but it’s not clear that the authors (who are also the volume’s editors) even noticed the inconsistency.  For all the volume’s stress on concrete particularity, this initial haziness about who translated the Algonquin psalter is symptomatic of a more pervasive failure to look steadily at the object.

Thus Penny Granger offers compelling evidence that late medieval England often portrayed the Virgin reading the psalter, but to conclude that such representations fostered Bible reading among the laity in general, and laywomen in particular, requires facing the issue of textual availability with something more than the single breezy comment that by the fifteenth century the psalms “were at least selectively available in the vernacular” (299).  Late medieval primers, the standard text of lay devotions, contain dozens of psalms, but never, to my knowledge, in English.  Perhaps the portrayals of a biblically-literate Virgin were meant to (tacitly) encourage reading of the so-called Wycliffite Bible, despite the ecclesiastical ban, or perhaps more lay folk read Latin than we realize.  Granger, that is to say, may be right, but her picture of medieval women reading has a dark rectangular blur where the book should be.

A similar vagueness regarding the concrete particulars of the text infiltrates Hannay’s piece on the reception of the Sidney-Pembroke psalms, which takes the manuscript evidence for their use in private, or possibly even public, worship as implying that “the Sidneys’ words” could and did function “as simply the Word of God” (229).  By “Word of God” Hannay apparently means Scripture (rather than the second Person of the Trinity); that is to say, she assumes that Anglican worship, private or public, used only biblical texts, only the “Word of God,” and not the words of Thomas Cranmer or St. Athanasius or the Sarum missal.  Instead of the Book of Common Prayer, with its collects, Gloria, Creeds, sursum corda, Te Deum, preces, Great Thanksgiving, epiclesis, and litany—none of which are sensu stricto the word of God—we are again presented with a dark rectangular blur.

Hannay’s essay—which, like all the essays in this volume, has much to commend it—could have benefited from Jamie Ferguson’s discussion in this same volume of how Coverdale’s 1534-35 translation of Johannes Campensis’ Latin psalm paraphrase complicates any clear-cut distinction between pure word of God and its human-authored glosses, translations, and renderings; for all their championship of sola Scriptura, Ferguson observes, the Reformers recognized that the former might often not be accessible except via the latter, the meaning of the original having been “obscured by the temporal and cultural distance” separating the Hebrew prophets from Protestant England (152).

Nor is this the only instance where one essay might have clarified and sharpened the argument of another. Van der Woude, for example, views lining-out (the congregation singing the hymn, line by line, after the song-leader) as a New England innovation (132); the Introduction, however, describes the practice as common to “many English parishes” (13).  I suspect the Introduction is correct, since van der Woude’s claim that English churchgoers sang from books presupposes an implausibly high degree of both literacy and book-ownership.  Yet whatever the truth of the matter, the inconsistency itself contributes to one’s sense of an ambient haziness.

A similar inconsistency briefly surfaces in Bray’s attempt to reconstruct the intended readership, and implicit message, of the psalm settings William Byrd published after his embrace of the Church of Rome ca. 1581.  As evidence that Byrd composed these for recusant use, Bray points to their musical complexity, which, he argues, made them ill-suited for “Protestant households with their taste for the drab S&H[1] metrical psalm” (70).  Yet the essays by Freedman and Austern which bracket Bray’s piece show in some detail that Protestants, however drab their public worship, freely allowed complex sacred music in other contexts.

Despite this small lapse, Bray’s is an admirable study, in part because it struggles to see its object clearly, even when that object turns out not to look as one had expected.  The piece is, in fact, one of several admirable essays that begin with a programmatic thesis and then, over the course of the article, work their way free.  For Bray clearly wants to find that Byrd wrote his metrical psalms, perhaps even his earlier anthems, for a Catholic readership—and hence that they may bear “a hidden recusant message” (70-71).  The evidence, however, will not sustain the argument: the anthem text copied into a recusant manuscript that Bray cites as a possibly containing such a message comes, as his own chart on page 62 indicates, from the Geneva Bible. In the end, all that can be said with any certainty is that Byrd’s compositions appear in several recusant music miscellanies, but since they also appeared in licensed publications dedicated to leading Protestant statesmen, in the end Bray wisely concludes that we do not know “for whom Byrd intended these printed metrical psalms” (74).

Similarly admirable is Austern’s essay on “women, psalms, and domestic music-making,” which begins by claiming that early modern English culture viewed the female voice as deceitful and seductive, and hence forbade women to sing in public or mixed company—although alone or in female company, “literate women … fashioned musical selves that were … not only unreproachable by worldly male authority, but entirely beyond” male authority (93).  Yet among the traces of female psalmody Austern discovers is a 1599 harmonized psalter, dedicated to the Countess of Warwick and with the melody in the treble, whose four parts include a bass line, as also a manuscript compiled for a female singer/lutenist that includes duets for high and low voices. Heeding the angel’s injunction to be “lowly wise,” Austern ends her piece with a call for further investigation into whether or not, outside the church, women—and if women, then also men—sang to the Lord only in single-sex groupings (114).

Van der Woude’s study of the oft-reprinted 1640 Bay Psalm Book (BPB) likewise ends by opening windows into the unknown rather than wrapping up his argument into a tidy package. The study’s opening pages describe the BPB—the psalter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—as an “exemplary text of immigration: an instance of transatlantic self-fashioning, articulating a new, colonial identity,” one defined  “over and against” the “metropolitan paradigm” of the English Church’s Whole book of psalms (116, 124).  Supported by compelling and hilarious examples, van der Woulde shows that the BPB, which proclaimed its commitment to fidelity in translation rather than poetry, managed to forsake both—and often intelligibility as well—in its ardent pursuit of metrical monotony: its twenty-third psalm begins “The Lord to mee a shepheard is, / Want therefore shall not I” (128).  Van der Woude initially attempts to make a silk purse of this by redescribing the BPB translation as a “subversive” anti-aesthetic, whose endless lines of thumping common meter create “a new kind of collectivity,” “a new cultural consciousness” and “collectivizing aesthetic in early colonial America” (118).

Cotton Mather, however, knew a pig’s ear when he heard one, his diary recording a plaintive wish that the “singing the sacred psalms in the flock” might “have the beauties of holiness more upon it” (133).  The congregational psalmody of this brave New World could, apparently, drive the godliest of puritan ministers under the Laudian standard.  A subversive anti-aesthetic indeed!  Nor was Mather an isolated case; by the 1720s, van der Woude reports, “large-scale musical reform” had brought colonial psalmody back within “the traditions of the Anglican Church” (133).  The essay, however, never even attempts to place this re-formation within its post-colonial identity politics framework, graciously leaving this puzzle for future generations of scholars.[2]

Clare King’oo’s study of Wyatt’s penitential psalms has a more delimited scope than most of the pieces in this volume, but the tight focus allows her to lay out a strong case for the specific religious and political exigencies leading to their posthumous publication.

The three remaining essays have only a nominal relation to the psalms. James Melvin discusses nuptial spirituality in the Audi, filia of Juan de Avila; David Harradin explores the kabbalistic music theory laid out in Angelo Berardi’s 1689 Miscellanea musicale, tracing its sources through a wide range of Hebrew and Christian materials.  And last, but by no means least, Carol Kaske’s wonderful essay on sacral monarchy in Spenser overturns decades of critical orthodoxy on two fronts:  first, by devastating the claim that Spenser and his contemporaries portray Elizabeth as a surrogate Virgin Mary—allegedly “to fill the void left in the hearts of her formerly-Catholic subjects” (205-6); and second, by arguing that sixteenth-century readers would not have taken the Christic imagery with which Spenser invests the Queen as literal divinization, but rather, like Gabriel Harvey, would have understood such tributes as the “hyperbolicall amplifications” of epideixis, or, like the Junius-Tremellius gloss to Psalm 89:26-67, as affirming the divinity tenuiter (in a weak sense) that Scripture regularly applies to “sovereigns as types of him [Christ]” (203).

These are smart, scholarly essays that awaken, if not always satisfy, curiosity and wonder. It took me a long time to get through the volume, since every few pages some astonishing anecdote or allusion would send me down the by-ways of Google Search to find out how, for example, it came to pass that in early sixteenth-century Rome a community of Ethiopian monks, with its own church, resided in the shadow of St. Peter’s (4-5). The volume needed a stronger editorial hand to catch inconsistencies and evasions, but it makes a powerful case for the complexly interconnected trans-Atlantic and pan-European reach of the ancient Hebrew poems constituting the psalter.

 

Debora Shuger

University of California, Los Angeles

 



[1] I.e., Sternhold and Hopkins’s metrical psalter, or, more accurately, The whole book of psalms: the massively revised and expanded version of Sternhold and Hopkins, first published in 1562 and running through endless editions thereafter.

[2] One correction seems in order:  Isaac Watts was a dissenting minister, not an Anglican, so Mather would not have viewed the former’s Psalmes and hymns as an “endeavor by the Church of England to assert ownership of the book of Psalms” (119-20).

 

 

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43.2.37

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Debora Shuger, "Austern et al, eds., Psalms in the Early Modern World," Spenser Review 43.2.37 (Fall 2013). Accessed March 28th, 2024.
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