Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Introduction: The Seven Penitential Psalms

1 Introduction The Seven Penitential Psalms This book charts the rich and, at times, tumultuous history of the seven Penitential Psalms in England in the late medieval and early modern era. During this period, the Penitential Psalms inspired an enormous amount of creative and intellectual work: in addition to being copied and illustrated in Books of Hours and other prayer books, they were­ expounded in commentaries, imitated in vernacular translations and paraphrases, rendered into lyric poetry, and even modified for singing. It is the task of Miserere Mei to explore these various material and generic transformations. Combining the resources of close literary analysis with those of the history of the material text, this study reveals not only that the Penitential Psalms lay at the heart of Reformation-age debates over the nature of repentance but also, and more significantly, that they constituted a site of theological, political, artistic, and poetic engagement across the many polarities that supposedly separate late medieval from early modern culture. The Penitential Psalms are the seven psalms numbered 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, and 142 in the Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate­ Bibles; and 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143 in the Hebrew Masoretic 2 MISE RE RE M EI Text (as well as in the majority of Protestant Bibles).The convention of according these psalms heightened significance as a subset of the Book of Psalms and associating them with repentance belongs entirely to what Harry P. Nasuti has termed “the interpretive community of western Christianity.”1 This tradition did not originate in ancient Judaism, nor has it ever been embraced by the Eastern Orthodox Church.2 Yet within Western Christendom it boasts an impressively long life, emerging in patristic times and enduring among theologians to this day.3 Miserere Mei examines the fate of this resilient tradition in England , in an era when the seven psalms held great sway over the religious and the lay alike—roughly from the end of the fourteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century. In terms of vernacular literature, then, this study stretches broadly from the Middle English metrical paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms by Richard Maidstone (composed in the late 1380s or early 1390s) to the early modern English “odes,” or songs, based on those same psalms by Richard Verstegan (first published in 1601). Yet this book also focuses more narrowly on the fortunes of the Penitential Psalms in the mid- to late sixteenth century, when the sequence became caught up in Reformation controversy.The objective of this endeavor (that is, of the simultaneous adumbration of both a longer and a shorter history of the Penitential Psalms) is not to insist upon the much-invoked opposition between late medieval and early modern modes of expression. Rather, it is to highlight how certain Reformation and post-Reformation habits of reading and writing­ derive directly from (and may depend crucially on) important pre-­ Reformation antecedents. To put it plainly, the Penitential Psalms are of significance precisely because they survived—because they made it through the turbulent years of the mid-sixteenth century as a unit, and continued to bear meaning in a range of contexts (not just religious but also social and political , artistic and poetic), even after undergoing intense reevaluation. Prior to the Reformation,these psalms served both as important prayers of repentance and as valuable petitions for the souls of the dead. Deeply embedded in liturgical and devotional practice, and virtually indispensable to the Latin Church’s economy of salvation, they could easily have been jettisoned from post-Reformation culture. Yet in the decades following the upheaval of the Reformation the Penitential Psalms were Introduction 3 not cast away but instead adopted, adapted, and appropriated—in some cases radically so. Indeed, the literary, cultural, and material history of England in the period of the Reformation bears witness to a remarkable eruption of activity around the Penitential Psalms, as the series was translated, paraphrased, contested, fragmented, set to music, copied, printed, marketed, smuggled across the Channel, and so on. The list of English individuals who engaged explicitly with the Penitential Psalms between the first years of the Reformation and the end of the sixteenth century includes, but is not limited to, figures as­ diverse as John Croke, Sir Thomas Wyatt, John Day, John Stubbs, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, William Byrd, and William Hunnis. (There is also some evidence that Edmund Spenser produced a rendition of the seven psalms, though, unfortunately, this particular adaptation appears to...