The Art of Purifying: The Bay Psalm Book and Colonial Puritanism

While hybridity has been the focus of much recent investigation into colonial culture, for the seventeenth-century religious migrants to Massachusetts Bay, purity was the goal: purification of the religion they had inherited, by means of transplanting it further away from the episcopal authorities that were obstructing reforms. Though purification involved practical reforms, it was also an aesthetic ideal, and the literary embodiment of that ideal was the Bay Psalm Book of 1640. As a locus of negotiation between the New England leaders, the colonists they were overseeing, and the authorities and colleagues they had left behind in England, the Bay Psalm Book offers valuable insight into how colonial divines shaped the ideal of religious purity to fit the cultural, social, and religious circumstances of the new colony. Though often the butt of literary critical abuse, the Bay Psalm Book has been recognized as highly artful by the few scholars who have studied it closely.¹ Moreover, if (as has been argued) the New England church was held together less by doctrinal unity than by "common standards of behavioral orthodoxy" and spiritual aspirations for the colony, then the Bay Psalm Book provides a particularly vivid illustration of such dynamics in the aftermath of the Antinomian Controversy (M. Winship, "Glorious Church," 79–80).

Certainly, in one respect, the Bay Psalm Book's achievement was exceptional: it became widely accepted as the replacement for the old Sternhold-Hopkins metrical Psalter in most of New England's churches, something no Psalter achieved in England before Tate and Brady, published in 1696. The Bay Psalm Book's nearest equivalent in England, a Psalter by the puritan parliamentarian Francis Rous, completely failed in its bid, despite official backing, although the Scottish Kirk did adopt a revised version of it in 1650.² While the very different historical situations in England and New England largely account for the different fates of the two Psalters, their internal qualities also contributed. Comparison with Rous's Psalter highlights the distinctive literary construction of purity in the Bay Psalm Book, and shows how well the colonial text was adapted to the values, experiences, and needs of the settlers.

Building a colonial church with purified ordinances was central to the Bay colony's religious purpose: in his farewell sermon to Winthrop's party, John Cotton listed "the liberty of the ordinances" as one of the reasons that justified a godly migration; Thomas Tillam, in his 1638 poem "Upon the First Sight of New England," envisioned Christ telling his "little flocke" of refugees, "heare you shall Injoye / My sabbaths, sacraments, my minestrye / And ordinances in their puritye"; and an official promotional pamphlet from 1643 explained that "Our indeavour is to have all [God's] own Institutions, and no more then his own and all those in their native simplicity without any humane dressings."³ As John Cotton explained more fully in his 1647 treatise, one such "gospel ordinance" was psalm-singing, and the Bay Psalm Book's preface presented its text as the answer to the "corruptions in our common psalme books." This new metrical Psalter was designed to complement the plain style sermons and the unscripted prayers that replaced the Book of Common Prayer in New England churches, so that, in the words of the preface, "wee might inioye this ordinance also in its native purity" (Singing of Psalmes, Sig. **2 r–v).

The evocative language of purity of course encoded beliefs about specific church reforms, such as not kneeling for communion, and (in the context of the Psalter) a preference for literal translation. However, the language also aestheticized the religious goal. As the Antinomian or "Free Grace" controversy illustrated, New England puritans were far from unanimous on doctrinal issues—even psalm-singing, according to the Bay Psalm Book preface, had become a source of "discord . . . and crotchets of division" (Sig. *2^r).⁴ Yet the ideal of purifying the church united the religious migrants, and the Bay Psalm Book channeled this idealism in its own aesthetic self-presentation. Only 10 copies plus a few fragments survive of the Bay Psalm Book's 1640...