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129 Chapter Four From Penance to Politics In his paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms, Sir Thomas Wyatt effects a certain fictionalization of the seven texts, translating and adapting a prologue sequence by Pietro Aretino that sets the psalms’ composition within the biblical story of David’s adultery with Bathsheba and the related murder of Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah.To be sure, the impetus to fictionalize the Penitential Psalms was not limited to Aretino and Wyatt. Indeed, the Horae in which most lay folk would have first encountered the Penitential Psalms in the late medieval period consistently gloss the seven texts with illustrations that interpret them as key elements in the tale of David’s fall and subsequent exemplary repentance . Yet while it had become customary by the sixteenth century to fictionalize the Penitential Psalms, it had also become common to read them in a ritual manner, as a series of prayers accessible to present-day sinners: the seven psalms were understood to belong—as scripts for penance (or repentance)—to all Christians as much as to the famous King David.1 Ritual readings of the seven Penitential Psalms were endorsed by numerous statements made by theologians (from the patristic era 130 MISE RE RE M EI through the Reformation) about the spiritual efficacy and contemporary relevance of the complete Psalter. The metaphor favored above all others in this context was that of a mirror. Thus Athanasius (as he is quoted in Archbishop Matthew Parker’s Psalter of 1567) declares that the psalms are a “glasse” wherein whoever sings them “maye beholde the whole affections of his soule”;2 and reformer Martin Luther exhorts his readers in the following manner: “If you would see the holy Christian church painted in living color and shape, comprehended in one little picture, then take up the Psalter. There you have a fine, bright, pure mirror that will show you what Christendom is. Indeed you will find in it also yourself and the true gnóthi seautón [know thyself], as well as God himself and all creatures” (LW 35:256–57).3 In a sermon on Psalm 30 (Vulgate), Augustine offers basically the same image. Proposing that “all that is here written, is a mirror for us,” he argues that individual Christians must imitate closely, must enter into, the actions and emotions of the psalmist: “and if the Psalm pray, do ye pray; and if it­ lament, do ye lament; and if it joy, do ye rejoice; and if it hope, do ye hope; and if it fear, do ye fear.”4 Advice such as this concerning the entire Psalter may well have been responsible for the fact that ritual approaches to the seven Penitential Psalms were often privileged over fictional approaches by church authorities. It was not uncommon for ministers or theologians to use the story of David’s great sin and even greater repentance primarily to promote the earnest repetition of the seven psalms by the laity, or to suggest that a fictional understanding of the seven psalms was valuable only insofar as it supported a ritual interpretation of the same texts. Thus in a series of sermons written in the first decade of the sixteenth century, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, moves from a Davidic to a universalized reading of the Penitential Psalms specifically to underscore the importance of reciting those psalms regularly (in concert with the tripartite sacrament of penance), while in Robert Redman’s bilingual primer of 1537 the editor introduces the Penitential Psalms by first recalling the story of David and Bathsheba and then insisting on the necessity of apprehending the psalms within a generalized penitential setting.5 When the historical narrative of David’s adultery was deployed in relation to the Penitential Psalms, therefore, it was brought up most frequently to frame the sequence as a crucial resource for spiritual conversion or renewal in the present. From Penance to Politics 131 This approach remained the case well into the sixteenth century. For although the early reformers rejected the sacrament of penance, they did not immediately challenge the kind of reading of the seven psalms that relied on what I have called penitential hermeneutics. Take Thomas Bentley, for example. When this ambitious Elizabethan church­warden compiled The monument of matrones (1582), a massive anthology of devotional materials for use chiefly by women,he included the Penitential Psalms (in English) in the work, with prefatory materials that not only linked those psalms to King David but also made them...

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