Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512803310

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Prophetic Song

University of Pennsylvania Press M I D D L E AGES SERIES Edited by Edward Peters Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History University of Pennsylvania

A listing of the available books in the series appears at the back of this volume

Prophetic Song The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England Michael P. Kuczynski

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Cover stamp: "King David," ca. 1470-1472. Anonymous (Netherlandish,fifteenthcentuiy). Woodcut (detail) from a blockbook facsimile of the Speculum humanae salvatimi!, fol. 33. Photo by Charlotte Phil. By permission of the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University.

Copyright © 199$ by the University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kuczynski, Michael P. Prophetic song / the Psalms as moral discourse in late Medieval England / Michael P. Kuczynski. p. cm. — (Middle Ages series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8122-3271-2 (acid-free paper) ι. Bible. O.T. Psalms — Criticism, interpretation, etc. — History— Middle Ages, 500-1500. 2. Christian literature, Latin (Medieval and modern ) — England—History and criticism. 3. Christian literature, English (Middle) — History and criticism. 4. Ethics, Medieval, in literature. I. Title. II. Series. BS1430.2.K84 1995 223' .206'09420902 — dc20 94-4465I CIP

For Chnstina Albers

Cantabiles mihi erant justificationes tuae, in loco peregrinationis meae. — Psalm 118.54

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Preface: "'Beatus vitres techyng" A Note on Psalm Texts and Middle English Quotations Acknowledgments

xi xiii xv xxvi xxviii

Part I. Interpreting the Psalms Chapter ι. David the "Maker" Chapter 2. Imitating David

3 51

Part II. Psalm Discourse Chapter 3. David as a Model of Compunction Chapter 4. The Psalms as Models for Middle English Poetry

81 120

Part III. Psalm Ideology Chapter 5. Two Versions of Captivity: Lydgate, the Lollards, and Psalm Complaint

151

Chapter 6. William Langland, Radical Psalmist

189

Afterword

216

χ

Contents

Appendixes Appendix A. 'The Direccioun of a Mannys Lyfe"

225

Appendix B. 'The Remnant of My Thoughts"

235

Notes

243

Bibliography

273

Index

285

Illustrations

Plate ι David portrait, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian Α. ι, fol. 30v, eighth century. Plate 2 Psalm 26 (Dominus illuminatio mea), Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge MS 300, fol. 26r, thirteenth century. Plate 3 Wycliffite Psalter (later version), Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Bodley 554, fol. 6çr, mid-fifteenth century. Plate 4 Richard Rolle, English Psalter, with Wycliffite interpolations, Houghton Library, Harvard University MS Richardson 36, fol. ioi v , mid-fifteenth century.

2

4 72

186

Abbreviations

CCSL DNB EETS e.s. MED OED o.s. PG PL

Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina Dictionary of National Biography Early English Text Society extra series Middle English Dictionary Oxford English Dictionary, ad ed. original series Patrologia Graeca (Migne) Patrologia Latina (Migne)

Preface: .. Beatus vivres techynß"

The Psalms, to borrow one of Petrarch's images, are a vast ocean. Their currents ran deep in the subconscious of the Middle Ages, influencing every aspect of medieval culture: music, painting, theology and philosophy, politics, and, of course, literature. Anyone who has tried to trace this influence will quickly identify with Petrarch's frustration in meditating on the Psalter itself. David's poetry is sublime, but it can also be overwhelming. The powerful emotional and didactic undertow of psalm discourse is at once alluring and threatening. This book is a study of one particular aspect of the Psalter's prominence in the Middle Ages, its influence on the shape of moral discourse in late medieval England. By moral discourse I mean, simply, the language of ethical instruction in its various forms: for instance, prescription and proscription, injunction, command, censure, and reproof. I would extend the term, however, to include as well the language of exegesis (biblical commentary) and meditation, when these modes of writing involve—as they do in such texts as Richard Rolle's English Psalter, Thomas Brampton's paraphrase of the seven penitential psalms, and Wycliffite psalm writings — a clear homiletic or polemical bias. Our vocabulary of literary types is inadequate to describe many kinds of late antique and medieval writing. Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos, for instance, began as individual sermons on particular psalms. In this sense the Enarrationes might be called a collection of homilies. Once assembled, however, these homilies took on life as a continuous and monumental work of biblical exegesis. Rolle's English Psalter, which is indebted not only to Peter Lombard's twelfth-century schoolroom catena on the Psalter but, perhaps more directly, to Augustine's Enarrationes, shares this textual complexity. Throughout, it reads both like preaching and academic glossing; it is a hybrid literary genre.1 So just as a series of homilies on the Psalter might gradually become a biblical commentary, a work of exegesis might come over time to have a pronounced preacherly aspect. In fact, by the end of the Middle Ages, with regard to psalm commentary, this is a likely development. Twelfth-century psalm exegesis was marked by Peter Lombard's efforts to turn monastic commentaries on

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the Psalter, which display a strong affective component, into a scholarly text for professional theologians.2 The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, witnessed a vigorous return to an affective and homiletic approach to the Psalms, defined often by an effort to recover the comprehensive sense of Augustine's Enarrationes, which are represented only piecemeal in the Lombard's catena. There is, in other words, much of late antiquity in those late medieval approaches to the Psalms as moral discourse that I discuss in this book. In analyzing the Psalms, I use largely ethical rather than aesthetic terms; when I do speak of the artfulness of the Psalter, I am referring to its rhetorical strategems.3 The beauties of the Psalter's music and meter cannot be denied; Augustine was certainly seduced by them. In a famous passage from the Confessions he describes how in listening to psalmody he was "firmly entangled and subdued" by the "delights of the ear," so entranced by the "whole melody of sweet music" that David had framed that he lost touch of its sense or doctrinal meaning: that mode seems to me safer, which I remember to have been often told me of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who made the reader of the psalm utter it with so slight inflection of voice, that it was nearer speaking than singing.... When it befalls me to be more moved with the voice than the words sung, I confess to have sinned penally, and then had rather not hear music.4

These remarks seem overly fastidious to the modern reader, for whom a poet's style is as valuable as his or her verbal content. For Augustine, however, the distinction between the accidents and substance of David's verse is central to the Psalter's moral import. If one becomes too captivated by the song, one can miss the sense. Deliberately neglecting the song, conversely, can concentrate one's attentions on the Psalmist's patterns of ethical thought and argument, as represented in Jerome's Latin versions by deceptively simple parallelisms and rhetorical inversions. Judson Allen remarks on how a sense of "rhetorical effectiveness" ought to dominate discussions of medieval poetry, as a means of relating the "expressive power" of medieval poetic language to its ethical import.5 This is how such commentators as Augustine, Cassiodorus, and Richard Rolle write about the expressive power of David's poetry, and how in this book I endeavor to analyze that expressive power. Psalm language attracted special notice in the Middle Ages for a number of nonaesthetic reasons. First of all, from Augustine on, the Book of Psalms was regarded as a digest of the wisdom of the entire Bible. Hence, its

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language repaid—indeed, demanded—careful study and exegesis. Moreover, the Psalms are highly repetitive and self-referential. Over the course of his 150 poems,6 David works variations on a limited repertoire of poetic commonplaces or topoi: for instance, the figure of sin as different forms of bondage or defilement, and the trope of life as a journey, or pilgrimage. The Psalmist expresses these topoi, repeatedly, by way of rhetorical parallelism and inversion, stylistic features of the Greek and Hebrew texts that Jerome consciously preserved in his translations. The Psalms are a poetry of cliché, not in the pejorative modern sense, but because they are a storehouse of ready-made and memorable expressions of profound human sentiment. The preponderance of Latin psalm quotation in Middle English religious texts, with accompanying vernacular translations, guaranteed that the surrounding discourse would become permeated with psalm tropes and figures. My thesis is that many Middle English moralists learned a language of ethics direcdy from David, whom the later Middle Ages regarded as an authoritative moral teacher. As Chaucer asserts in the Manciple's Tale, at the end of a passage against sins of the tongue: "Reed David in his psalmes; reed Senekke."7 The texts I discuss fall roughly into two groups: devotional ones, written for the instruction of solitary readers, and ideological ones, designed to make a polemical point or to promote a specific social agenda. For Middle English writers, the Psalms lead a double life; their significance is both private and public. They are at the same time David's personal lyric poems and an encyclopedia of sententiae that speak to contemporary problems and concerns. This doubleness makes them especially compelling rhetorical models. Imitating the Psalms could mean crafting affective paraphrases of David's penitential poems, as a means of inciting readers to deeply felt sorrow for their sins, or writing psalm exegesis designed to reflect how David's text argues for conservative or liberal attitudes toward Church reform. Moreover, for writers such as John Lydgate and William Langland, imitating David could mean bringing together the private and public significances of psalm discourse, as a means of asserting the essential relationship between the renewal of the individual soul and the reform of society itself. This last point is crucial. In several texts I write about here, the line between the devotional and the ideological is very thin. It is possible, for instance, to read Lydgate's psalm imitations as simple exercises in personal piety, intended at best for the edification of a small coterie readership. In two of his more expansive psalmic poems, however, Lydgate struggles with

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the relationship, or perhaps conflict, between his private and public roles as a Davidic poet—between his attempt to maintain his poems as prayers and his inclination to use them as platforms for ideological statement. And in his Defence ofHoly Church, written just after the serious Lollard uprisings of the early fifteenth century, he uses psalm language and allusion in aggressively political ways. To take another example: from one critical perspective, many Wycliffite interpolations to Rolle's English Psalter look like deliberate corruptions to their original, efforts to cloak heretical matter under the guise of orthodoxy. Read more closely, however, the interpolations display a heavy devotional and homiletic content, orthodox religious matter that suggests that many of them were written, in good faith, as amplifications of Rolle's own interpretive methods. To be sure, much Middle English psalmic writing is simply devout, such as the three anonymous prose texts I examine in Part II of this study. The proximity of devotional and ideological tonalities in many of the texts I discuss, however, is undeniable.8 Moreover, this proximity has its foundation in the Psalter itself. In one of the most important psalms, Psalm 50 (Miserere mei), David draws an explicit connection between his private, personal repentance and his public, social responsibility as a moral prophet. He asks God to create a clean heart in him ("Cor mundum crea in me, Deus"; 12), so that he might, in turn, teach others God's ways ("Docebo iniquos vias tuas"; 15). Throughout the Psalter, David not only asserts the general benefits of his particular penance, but also translates his introspective, emotional discourse into the hortative voice of moral instruction. David's status as prophetic teacher, achieved by his penance for the notorious crimes of adultery and homicide reported in 2 Samuel 12, becomes a key theme in Latin and Middle English psalm commentary. In the same commentaries, and in the Middle English prose and verse texts that draw on them, others are actively encouraged to imitate David's example, to change their lives and thereby to become moral prophets who teach, in Cassiodorus's terms, "vel exemplo et vel verbo," by their actions and by their words. Like David's own penitential behavior and poetry, acts of Davidic imitation always have a social as well as individual character. Converting sinners to God's ways might not fit a modern definition of political activism, but for writers like Langland, who believe that true political change can only begin with the renewal of the individual human soul, it is a powerful and necessary form of social action. My use of the term "imitation" in the foregoing remarks deserves some comment. In medieval schools, imitatio was a formal written exercise used to instruct beginners in rhetoric by having them model their productions

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on those of the "dictatores illustres," whose works are a superior and regulated standard against which the relative merits of lesser ones may be measured.9 Virgil, Ovid, and Statius teach others how to write by manipulating a storehouse of tropes and figures in a variety of exemplary ways. The medieval student would abstract from works like the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses., or the Thebaid passages employing a particular trope or figure, and then attempt to match the artfulness of these by using the same figure of speech to treat of a different subject, or by adapting the classical author's figure and subject to a modern context. Grammarians plundered the ductores for especially striking instances of the figures of speech, and assembled these into textbooks used by medieval students in their exercises. The expectation was that, through imitatio, these tropes and figures would become part of a student's literary imagination, to be used both with instinct and with skill in his more original productions. Imitation would lead to invention (inventio ) — the discovery of new ways to use old texts.10 In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, these same habits of imitation were applied to Scripture, and to the Psalms especially. Bede, in De Schematibus et Tropis, explains that all the figures of language and thought that one finds in great classical writing may be found, better exemplified, in the Bible. 11 And Cassiodorus, in his Expositio Psalmorum, identifies and explains more than 120 rhetorical colors from the Psalms alone. Some evidence survives suggesting that collections of psalms and psalm verses were used as rhetorical textbooks in the Middle Ages. For instance, in Bodleian MS Douce 103, in a work entitled Dictiones psalterii, difficult words from the Psalms are given grammatical and explanatory glosses to aid the reader's understanding (the glosses begin in Psalm 44.2). This text is followed by another in which especially difficult passages from Psalms 1 - 1 4 8 (the marginal numbers are postmedieval), the biblical Canticles, and the Athanasian Creed are rearranged for the reader in simple prose order. A third text in the Douce manuscript, Expositiones Hymnorum, is a grammatical treatise based on various Latin hymns, many of which themselves are based in the Psalms. All three works testify to a technical grammatical and rhetorical interest in the Psalms and psalm-like poems. 12 As Leroquais long ago observed, in the Middle Ages, "Livre de prière, les psautier était aussi un livre pédagogique." 13 The fifteenth-century English primers, the closest thing we have to medieval elementary school texts, usually contain at least the seven penitential psalms and the fifteen gradual psalms in Latin and English, along with other prayers and hymns. 14 Throughout the Middle Ages, being able to construe parts of the Latin Psalter marked one as literatas.15 By extension,

XX Preface accomplished writers might be expected to know the Psalter intimately, and to be able to work subtle variations on the words of its model poet. In the Middle Ages, imitating the Psalms was never a merely rhetorical activity. Rather, the Psalms were analyzed and used rhetorically because there was already a strong devotional predisposition toward them.16 As the Jewish temple prayerbook and the liber hymnorum of the Christian Church, the Psalter was esteemed as the common property of all the faithful. Debates raged over whether or not David wrote all of the Psalms: Jerome, the Psalter's great translator, argued no; Augustine, its masterful interpreter, said yes.17 But even for those who maintained the Psalter's single authorship, the cultic nature of psalm discourse was manifest: the Psalmist speaks to God on everyone's behalf. The speaking voice of the Psalms is always both singular and plural, the utterances of an individual poetic voice and the sentiments of a community {synagoga or ecclesia, an assembly of people). There was, therefore, no prohibition against translating the Psalms in the later Middle Ages, as there was against vernacular versions of the rest of the Bible.18 In the exquisite poetry of the Psalms, David articulates the sinful and righteous sentiments of all. Thus it behooves the faithful to study and understand his poems, and to learn to speak the language of the Psalmist. The Psalter's didacticism — its existence not just as poetry but as moral teaching—is caught up inextricably with the biography of David. Despite the scholarly problems involved in matching each psalm with an event in the chronology of David's life (psalm tituli describe no orderly chronology) , medieval writers insist that the Psalter only makes coherent literal and allegorical sense when grounded in the facts of Davidic history. Imitating the Psalms necessarily involves imitating David, recovering and reduplicating his experiences in one's own personal and communal life. Few Old Testament figures captured the medieval imagination to the degree that David did. The humble shepherd who became king of Israel, ancestor and type of Christ, was a man beloved of Yahweh as well as Yahweh's most inspired poet. The events from David's life that dominate psalm exegesis and late medieval writings based in the Psalter, however, are the king's sins of homicide and adultery, as recorded in 2 Samuel. These, and David's penance after the prophet Nathan confronts him with his crimes, are ur-moments for medieval writers who explain and are influenced by the Psalms. They complicate David's significance by establishing the deep contradictions in his character; he is both just king and murderer, Beatus vir and adulterer. It was in this tense space between David's ideal traits and his remarkably human failings that the Latin commentators located the Psalmist's poetic energy and authority.

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In his influential book, Medieval Theory of Authorship, A. J. Minnis remarks that it was only the later Middle Ages that became obsessed with David's humanity, and specifically his sins, as a key to the meaning of his poems. According to Minnis, the early commentators, such as Augustine, were concerned mainly with David's Christological significance.19 While this may be generally true, Augustine and Cassiodorus — on the penitential psalms in particular—betray an eerie fascination with David's crimes, one that matches anything in late medieval writing. These are the events of David's life that Augustine would most like to ignore, but to which, in his enarratio on the Miserere, he persistendy returns. For Augustine, David's crimes are lamentable, but they allow the Psalmist to emerge as an archetype of penance itself, and a powerful moral prophet. For Cassiodorus, the less than perfect king becomes the perfect moral teacher, in that he instructs both by his example and by his words. In Richard Rolle's fourteenthcentury English Psalter and commentary, the Psalmist's moral authority ultimately subsumes even his temporal status as king. His progress from sin to renewal through divine grace becomes a paradigm for others, low- and high-born alike. Those later commentators who draw heavily on Augustine and Cassiodorus, such as Peter Lombard and Nicholas of Lyra, likewise interpret David's exemplary significance, and lay the foundation for a tradition of Davidic imitation carried on in Middle English religious verse and prose. We would do well to remember that, in responding to David, medieval writers would not have assumed our easy critical distinctions between fact and figure, past events and their present implications. As Erich Auerbach notes of the Davidic tradition, it "shatters the framework of historical composition and completely overruns it with prophecy . . . [it] ranges through all three domains: legend, historical reporting, and interpretive historical theology."20 At the same time, the exegetical translation of David's literal experiences into the morally exemplary narrative favored by the commentators involved some sacrifice. Such modern scholars as Jan Wojcik and Charles Huttar observe that the medieval Christian commentators, like the Talmudic ones who preceded them, deliberately mask certain elements of David's tragedy in order to transform him into a model of moral reform.21 While it is true that writers as deft as Augustine are able to hold together the literal facts of David's tragedy and his exemplary significance, their presentation of David as an ideal moral prophet is often effected by sheer force of interpretive will. For the later Middle Ages, then, David is much more than just another exemplum of rectitude. He is God's supreme prophet. Isidore of Seville and, much later, Peter Lombard, define Davidic prophecy primarily in visionary

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terms. For them, the mark of the true prophet is his ability to foresee or predict future events, and David is the chief Old Testament prophet because the Psalms contain the most direct Old Testament prophecies of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ.22 This notion of prophecy was current in late medieval England. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, in particular, asserts a connection between visionary prophecy and Langland's great dreamvision poem, Piers Plowman.23 At the same time, however, she acknowledges that, according to Thomas Aquinas and others, one of the prophet's key functions is not to have visions of the future, but to teach common people by means of similitudes or figures — an essentially educative or didactic role.24 This is the sense in which David is esteemed as prophet by many late antique and medieval psalm commentators and later medieval poets and prose writers: as the author of a body of normative ethical teachings, or what Langland terms, in a splendid personification of the Psalmist himself via the opening words of the Psalter, "Beatus virrcs techyng."25 This is not to deny David's prophetic role as a precursor to Christ, but to augment it by underscoring the ethical dimension of the Psalms, their application to contemporary moral problems. I have already remarked that psalm exegesis in late medieval England was marked by a return to certain affective elements in the earlier monastic tradition, as a corrective to the overly intellective emphasis of Peter Lombard's commentary. This does not mean, of course, that late medieval psalm readers, lay or religious, would have felt the same kind of immersion in psalm discourse typical of monastic experience. In the monastic tradition, the Psalms were learned by osmosis. According to the sixth-century Benedictine rule, all 150 psalms were to be read through by each monk, each week.26 This kind of repetition made quoting and alluding to the Psalms virtually instinctive in monastic writing, what John Alford has called a "language of impulse."27 The authors of Middle English texts for religious novices or "lewed" ("unlettered") folk, however, use the Psalms more deliberately and selfconsciously. Most of the texts I discuss in this book were written by clerics. As that psalter-clerk William Langland laments in Piers Plowman, however, one could not assume that late medieval priests had meditated hard upon the Psalms. The breviary was arranged so that all the psalms (with additional lections) would be read through by every cleric, each week. Outside the regulations of the cloister, though, this could hardly be guaranteed. For late medieval readers, some themselves clerics, imitating the Psalms in private prayer and public ethical discourse necessarily involved sustained di-

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rection by better-informed spiritual advisers. The verbal mechanisms of Middle English psalmic prose and verse, like the rhetoric of Latin psalm exegesis, are heavily directive and derived from the aggressive, didactic tone of much of the Psalter itself. In my discussions of particular Middle English texts, I concentrate on how these mechanisms are adapted by writers to the needs of different "interpretive communities," who sought access to the Psalter's wisdom for a variety of reasons.28 Rolle composing his English psalm commentary for the recluse, Margaret Kirkeby, makes different rhetorical choices than his later Wycliffite interpolators, who in some cases are expanding Rolle's commentary as a comfort to those suffering religious persecution. Lydgate, working variations on psalm texts to induce Henry V to put down the Lollard rebels, makes different rhetorical choices than does Langland, who seems concerned with effecting social change from the bottom up, by urging the laboring classes to regard their physical work as a form of spiritual pilgrimage. Between such uses of the Psalms, there are continuities. I hope, however, that my argument also takes into account the immense variety of response to the Psalter as an ethical text in late medieval England. My study is in three parts. Part I, "Interpreting the Psalms," surveys the tradition of psalm commentary as it develops from Augustine, through the later Latin exegetes, and then into the Middle English period—notably, in Rolle's English Psalter, the most important vernacular psalter written before the Reformation. I emphasize two related tendencies in the commentaries: discussions of the significance of David's crimes and repentance as a foundation for his moral authority; and the relationship, in David's poetry, between the emotional and the didactic, the personal or self-expressive poetic voice and the language of moral instruction. The commentators approach psalm language from a perspective that we might describe, dismissively, as formalist or structuralist. That is to say, they concentrate on the rhetorical strategems that David uses to craft his feelings into suasive discourse. This does not mean that they treat the Psalms, as the New Critics sometimes explained Romantic lyrics, as independent from the historical circumstances that produced them. Quite to the contrary, in their explanations of how the Psalms teach, the commentators feel themselves to be presenting the past again in powerful exemplary ways. For them, unraveling David's deceptively simple art means uncovering anew the Psalmist's perennial literal significance for the Christian community. In discussing Latin and Middle English psalm interpretation, I have tried to be sensitive to what James O'Donnell, in his fine study of Cas-

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siodorus, calls the neglected "rhetoric of exegesis": the techniques the commentators themselves use to convey the import of their often emotional readings of the Psalms to others.29 We tend to forget, unless we read Peter Brown, that writers like Augustine were real people, who saw David's poetry as an artful record of actual past events with powerful contemporary implications. "In the Psalms," George Steiner remarks, "the formulaic, literalist texture of the Hebrew idiom is frequently distorted to baroque magnificence."30 This magnificence touched the pens of the best commentators who took up David's book, and inspired their own writings. There is not much verbal excitement to be found in the lecture-hall tonalities of Peter Lombard's catena on the Psalter. In Augustine, Cassiodorus, and Rolle, however, the language of interpretation becomes a living extension of David's own discourse, the first stage in a process of Davidic imitation that the exegetes hope will conclude in the translation of psalm language into everyday ethical speech and behavior. Part II, "Psalm Discourse," takes up Middle English prose and verse texts that actively encourage their readers to imitate David by identifying with and amplifying the sentiments and teachings contained in his poetry. Because the Psalms are ubiquitous in Middle English religious literature, I have had to be selective in my examples, striking a balance between works by well-known authors, such as Lydgate's psalm imitations, and those that remain anonymous: for instance, various forms of confession and meditative treatises for female religious that are copied in devotional miscellanies. Much could be said about the place of the Psalms in that monument of thirteenth-century prose style, the Ancrene Wisse, or their influence on the Prick of Conscience, not to mention their subtextual prominence in such late medieval morality plays as Mankind and the Castle ofPerseverance. Because I have not had the space to discuss these texts, I try in my readings of a number of representative ones to be as detailed as possible, and to posit some generalizations that might be tested against additional examples from the surviving Middle English corpus. Two of these generalizations are especially important. First, I make the point that the Psalms are frequently deployed in Middle English devotional writing for individuals in order to provoke an intense, interior feeling of contrition, or what Middle English writers call "compunction." This feeling, while it will have ultimate social results, is in the first instance personal. It has to do with the reform of the single human soul—which ought then, in the tradition of David's own contrition, to result in the conversion of others. Second, I maintain that the juxtaposition on the manuscript page of quotations from the Latin Psalter

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and English translations of these is intended, by some Middle English writers, as a textual model of the process of Davidic imitation they set out to encourage. Despite the fact that the Latin Psalter is itself a translation, Middle English religious writers assume that Jerome's versions of David's words have an originary authority for their readers. The emotions, imagery, and rhetorical patterns of the Latin Psalter exert a gravitational pull on Middle English versions, grounding their psalm discourse in the verbal utterances of the Psalmist himself and encouraging others to align their own discourse and behavior with the Psalmist's. Part III, "Psalm Ideology," analyzes a range of Middle English prose and verse texts that use the Psalter for political purposes: as a prophetic anticipation of and commentary on late medieval events, and as a source for tropes of social complaint.31 Two very different, even contradictory, political ideologies are derived from David's poems in connection with the serious Lollard uprisings of 1413-1414, which threatened the power base of the English Church and were violently suppressed by the crown. Lydgate's royalist polemic in his Defence and the propaganda behind many Lollard interpolations to Rolle's English Psalter both draw their authority from the Psalmist's feelings and words, and suggest the inherent ambiguity of the Psalter as an ideological instrument. Cicero said of Euripides that his every verse was a precept; medieval moralists and propagandists believed the same of David's poetry. Late medieval efforts to extract straightforward political sententiae from the Psalms, however, were doomed to failure. By aggressively translating David's ethical purposes into the thin language of polemic, Lydgate and the Lollards both miss the point about the Psalms that Langland exploits to advantage in Piers Plowman·, social reform is attainable only by means of collective, individual moral progress. The individual soul's inward journey, "ad interiora," is paradoxically the surest and most direct form of social action. Langland is the most radical of medieval psalmic writers, because his poem finally circumvents psalm exegesis and polemic to capture and reassert the primitive literal significance of David's text, the essential force of its prophetic penitential language. The message of this language applies to all the social classes, equally—to peasants, clerics, knights, and kings. But the fact that its best embodiment is a humble plowman, given fictive life by a clerk in minor orders who meditated hard on the teachings of Beatus vir, suggests the positively disruptive nature of psalm discourse when addressed to a corrupt age. Langland shows us that, like Christ's beatitudes, the Psalms are in essence anarchic, a poetic case for a standard of value according to which justice is synonymous with mercy, and

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true power with humility. Moreover, by associating his own prophetic poem with the Psalter, Langland points the way to a psalm-based aesthetic that might justify vernacular "making" as an adjunct to or amplification of Scripture. Like David's psalms, which the medieval commentators properly regarded as one long poem, Langland's passüs mark out the right path, the "via vera," for his readers. They translate, in the tradition of the Psalmist's work, God's laws into songs, crafted to instruct and delight the soul on its earthly pilgrimage.

A Note on Psalm Texts and Middle English Quotations The Psalms were an unstable text throughout the Middle Ages. They circulated in at least four versions: the vetus latina text that Augustine commented on, which was translated from the unsatisfactory Septuagint, and three versions attributed to St. Jerome: the Romanum, introduced to the South of England by Augustine of Canterbury; the Gallicanum, used by the church in Gaul and introduced to the North of England by Irish missionaries; and the Hebraicum, a Latin version corrected by Jerome against the Hebrew text, studied by medieval biblical scholars but not used in church services.32 The differences between these versions are more than slight, and can bear on matters of interpretation. For instance, Psalm 6.7 in the Gallicanum reads as follows: Laboravi in gemitu meo; Lavabo per singulas noctes lectum meum In lacrimis meis stratum meum rigabo. In the Hebraicum, however, it appears thus: Laboravi in gemitu meo natare faciam tota nocte lectulum meum; Lacrimis meis stratum meum rigabo. The parallelisms and inversions in the Gallicanum associate the Latin verbs for labor, wash, and water (irrigate or wet through) more deliberately than do the looser structures of the Hebraicum, confirming thereby both the intensity of the Psalmist's grief and his ability to progress from uncontrollable weeping to the deliberate act of complete inner purgation that incites God to forgiveness. Textually speaking, the Hebraicum may be more accu-

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rate. Poetically, it is often much less powerful than the Romanum or the Gallicanum. Matters are further complicated by the fact that many medieval commentators, writers, and readers did not use pure texts at all. Although Cassiodorus's Expositio Psalmorum draws heavily on Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos, its psalm texts often differ from the vetus latina in key readings.33 And the base text for Rolle's English Psalter, as Dorothy Everett has shown, was of the Gallican type, but conflated with readings from an old Latin version still in circulation.34 Because the Hebraicum was never in general use, and because after the mid-tenth century the Romanum was replaced in English use by the Gallicanum,35 when I quote the Latin Psalter in this book, I do so from the Gallican version, as edited by Bonifatius Fischer, et al. (Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, rev. by Robert Weber [Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983] ). 36 Other Latin biblical quotations are likewise from this edition. Translations, with slight adaptations, are from the Douai-Rheims version. Whenever a Latin psalm variant is relevant to a point of interpretation, I quote and discuss it. Normally, however, this is unnecessary for the quotations on which my argument depends. Unless otherwise indicated, I provide translations from Augustine, Jerome, Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, Aquinas, and Dante from standard versions, and cite these in the notes. All other translations in the text are my own. When quoting Middle English texts from critical editions, I do not reproduce brackets or other symbols used to indicate emendations, or the italics commonly used to mark expansions of abbreviations in the manuscripts. When quoting from manuscripts, I silently emend texts where they are obviously corrupt and expand abbreviations without notice. The punctuation in all manuscript quotations is my own. For especially difficult words and phrases in Middle English quotations, I provide glosses in square brackets.

Acknowledgments

This book draws heavily on unedited manuscript sources. I would like to express my gratitude to the following for permission to examine and quote from manuscripts in their collections: in Cambridge, England, the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, and the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum; in London, the British Library Board and Lambeth Palace Library; in Oxford, the Bodleian Library, the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, the Warden and Fellows of Merton College, and the Master and Fellows of University College; and in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland. I am likewise grateful to the following libraries in the United States: the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; and the Newberry Library, Chicago. Wherever I went, librarians and their staff associates were unfailingly helpful. They have my deep appreciation. The British Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Bodleian Library, and the Houghton Library have also allowed me to publish in this book photos of manuscripts in their care. For these permissions, they have my special thanks. The picture of David in penance on the cover, from a fifteenth-century blockbook edition of the Speculum humane salvationis, is reproduced by kind permission of the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University. For permission to quote from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets I am grateful to Harcourt, Brace & Company, Orlando, Florida. I could not have traveled to manuscript collections without generous financial support from my own university and from independent agencies. The Tulane Committee on Research funded three months of attention to MS Bodley 554, a glossed Wycliffite Psalter that figures prominently in the argument of this book. My provost, James F. Kilroy, and the Dean of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, William Cooper, have provided ad hoc financial support when I have had to make unexpected transatlantic trips tofinishmy research. And a separate grant from Dean Cooper helped to underwrite the book's production costs. To paraphrase the Psalmist, "Beatus vir"—Happy

Acknowledgments

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the man who delights in the counsel of such administrators! At the earliest research stages, this project was supported by a summer stipend from the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. For this grant, I am especially grateful. In 1992,1 received a visiting fellowship from the Houghton Library at Harvard University, which allowed me to spend an intense February exploring their de luxe Lollard copy of Rolle's English Psalter (MS Richardson 36). Houghton's librarian, Richard Wendorf, his assistant, Dennis Marnon, its curator of manuscripts, Rodney Dennis, and the entire reading room staff made me feel very welcome indeed. They have my affectionate gratitude. This book began as a dissertation on stylistic parallels between Middle English verse and prose, directed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, by George Kane. At the time, neither of us suspected that the Psalms loomed so large as a cultural backdrop to these materials and their correspondences. For encouraging me to pursue my interests, George Kane deserves my thanks. Patrick O'Neill and Joseph Wittig, the other readers of the thesis, encouraged me as well. The late Harold I. Shapiro taught me to respect poems and pictures on their own terms. He would have been delighted with Plate 2, which is reproducedfroma French manuscript owned by Ruskin. Ifirstlearned to read religious versefromRobert Voide, and to appreciate the intimacy between morals and aestheticsfromhis book, SamuelJohnson the Moralist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961 ). For both of these opportunities, he has my very affectionate thanks. For comments on the manuscript, I am grateful to the following colleagues: at Tulane, Caecelia Davis-Weyr, Department of Art; Charles T. Davis and Kenneth Harl, Department of History; and Geoffrey Harpham and Gerald Snare, Department of English. Mac Frazer, emeritus of the Tulane Department of Classics, deserves special notice and thanks. He read the entire manuscript through, and made several helpful suggestions concerning the Latin. In England I am especially indebted to: Helen Cooper, University College, Oxford; Bruce Mitchell, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford; Malcolm B. Parkes, Keble College, Oxford; and David McKitterick, librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge. As I neared completion of an early draft, C. David Benson invited me to give a paper based on Part III to his medieval studies colloquium at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. The response was highly instructive. David Benson and R. A. Shoaf both read the typescript for the press, and made many helpful suggestions for revision. For these they have my par-

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Acknowledgments

ocular thanks. I also received helpful questions from a symposium on the Psalms and the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages, organized in February 1991 by Nancy van Deusen, at California State University, Northridge. Anyone who sets to work on the Psalms swiftly becomes aware of the interdisciplinary nature of medieval studies. My colleagues at Tulane and elsewhere have allowed me to draw freely on their respective types of expertise. Any errors that remain in the text, of course, are my own. Jerome Singerman has been the best of editors. He has my sincere thanks. In its production stages, this book was very much improved by the fine editorial work of Ridley Hammer and Mindy Brown. I thank them both. My children, Sarah Anne and Henry Edward, helped by being their usual happy selves. They embody the Psalmist's words about wisdom from the mouths of babes, and Langland's observation that charity is "a childissh t>yng." Finally, it is a great pleasure to recognize in print the constant support of my wife, Christina Albers. As the Psalmist asks in a different but analogous context, "Quid enim mihi est in caelo? et a te quid volui super terram?"

Parti Interpreting the Psalms

Plate ι. David portrait. The Vespasian Psalter. British Library MS Cotton Vespasian A.i, fol. 30v, eighth century. By permission of the British Library Board.

I. David the "Maker"

Fecitque ut lacrimae suae, dum et per posteriorum ora decurrunt, nulla temporis prolixitate siccentur. (4s 3) [David has so crafted the Psalms that his tears, streaming down posterity's cheeks, shall never be dried by any lapse of time. ] Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalnwrum1 In the Vespasian Psalter, an eighth-century Latin servicebook with Old English gloss, there is a foil page illustration of David in imperial garb, haloed and enthroned, playing on his harp (Plate 1 ). At his feet, musicians accompany him on horns, and dancers clap their hands in time. Two scribes flank the Psalmist: one takes down his words on a scroll, the other records the notes of his song on wax tablets. This image, which draws on conventional early medieval iconography, represents David as God's inspired poet, in the act of poetic composition—or to use one Middle English writer's translation of Latin psalmista, David the "psalm maker."2 The picture may originally have had special status in the manuscript, as its frontispiece (it now appears at the beginning of Psalm 26). There it would have functioned like the Evangelist portraits common during this period, usually prefaced to each of the gospels: to ascribe authorship, but also to emphasize the activity of literary composition itself. Medieval viewers would have understood that the source of David's power to compose Scripture was God, the true author of the Bible. Nevertheless, like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Psalmist came to be presented in such images as an auctor in his own right, a literary authority whose writings were seen as a standard against which the value of other authorial productions had to be measured. David is God's preeminent poet, and thus a standard and model for all other poets. If, as some scholars have suggested, the harp David plays in the Vespasian Psalter is deliberately Anglo-Saxon (it resembles, for example, the harp discovered in the Sutton Hoo ship burial), then we might argue that the artist has gone a step further toward pointing up David's role as model poet, by placing in his hands the kind of

Plate 2. Imitating David. Psalm 26 (Dominus illuminatio mea), Psalter of Isabel of France. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge MS 300, fol. 2.6', thirteenth century. By permission of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

David the "Maker"

5

instrument a contemporary poet might have used in composing and performing verse.3 To the later Middle Ages, however, the Vespasian David, sober-faced and aulic, would have seemed remote—his poetic authority curiously divorced from his humanity. As A. J. Minnis notes in his book,Medieval Theory of Authorship, scholars and readers in the later Middle Ages were fascinated by the human traits of their ductores—the details of their biographies — as clues to the interpretation of their works. In David's case this meant, primarily, his infamous sins of adultery and homicide, as described in 2 Samuel 11 .* We might set against the Vespasian David, then, a later image of the Psalmist, in the thirteenth-century Psalter of Isabel of France (Plate 2). Here David is not dressed as a Roman emperor, but as a medieval king, and he kneels humbly in prayer before Christ. In this illustration to Psalm 26 (Dominus illuminatio mea), David does not hold his harp as an icon of his poetic authority, because he does not have to. The authority of his words, which run along the right-hand side of the image, is based in the potency of his actions: his self-effacing gestures of contrition and prayer, and the prior sins these recall. In the bottom half of the picture, representatives of the Christian community, male and female religious, imitate exactly David's penance. Because of his humanity, David is a powerful model not simply for poets, but for everyone. The traditions behind these two images are not as discontinuous as they might at first seem. By associating David's poetic authority with his personal moral history, scholars and readers in the later Middle Ages were expanding the very idea of prophecy, a notion which is behind early medieval views of David as divinely inspired. They were investing God's prophetic poet (who had always been interpreted as a precursor to Christ) with an additional power of moral prophecy derived, not from divine inspiration, but from his own sinful behavior and penance, the story of which God tells in the Scriptures as a way of leading others to grace. One result of this revised view of David was that the concept of "psalmody"—which in the early Middle Ages was almost exclusively textual and musical — became amplified.5 This new view recovered Augustine's late antique one, developed in his enarratUmes or homiletic expositions of the Psalms: that psalm-making means not only composing or reciting words of praise to God, but living the virtuous life: Omnes gentes plaudite manibus, peruenisse ad uos gratiam Dei. Plaudite manibus. Quid est: plaudite* Gaudete. Sed quare manibus? Quia boniis

6

Interpreting the Psalms operibus. Ne gaudeatis ore, et cessetis manibus. Si gaudetis, plaudite manibus. (531) ["O clap your hands, all you nations" (Ps 46.2), because the grace of God has come down to you. "O clap your hands." What is "O clap"? Rejoice. But why with the hands? Because with good works. Do not rejoice with the mouth while idle with the hands. If you rejoice, "clap your hands."] ( 161 ) 6

David's ten-stringed lyre becomes an allegory for the tenfingersthemselves, with which virtuous deeds are performed, and sometimes for the ten commandments, that body of moral precepts designed to encourage virtuous action by discouraging vice.7 Poetic "making" or craftsmanship becomes a trope for moral action. David and the Psalms are useful models only inasmuch as they can be transformed into the morally prophetic, ethical behavior and discourse of the entire Christian community. Not surprisingly, given the Psalter's poetic richness and disputes about the exact components of a virtuous life, different readers abstracted divergent and even conflicting ideologies from the Psalms: Richard Rolle, for instance, interprets them as validating the vita contemplativa, the life of the recluse, while the Lollards read the Psalter as a defense of the vita activa of the early Church reformers. Both views, however, in finding contemporary concerns implicated directly in the text of David's poems, draw on aspects of the same exegetical tradition, begun by Augustine, which stressed the links between David's Old Testament past and the medieval present. Rolle, the Lollards, and other late medieval Psalm readers were alike in regarding the Psalter as a speculum for their own individual and social concerns. While still recognizing David's special poetic gift, this interpretive tradition denied the hieratic aloofness of the early medieval David, and sought to translate the high poetry of the Psalms themselves into a broaderbased, cultural poetic. To understand this shift in attitudes, however, we must first examine the concept of Davidic prophecy as it developed in the long and complex tradition of medieval psalm interpretation, and as it came to be connected, in the later medieval period, with the Psalmist's penitential character.

The Poet as Prophet In the long commentary tradition that influenced David iconography, the Psalmist's role as model poet depends on his preeminence as prophet. Propheta is the most common Latin epithet applied to David; and when the

David the "Maker"

7

phrase "the prophet" appears in Middle English not followed by a proper name, it is understood to denote David, in the same way "the apostle" is understood to denote St. Paul. Applied to David,propheta means in the first instance "inspired poet," and identifies the Psalmist as chief among God's spokesmen, the greatest of the Old Testament authors.8 This tradition, as Minnis explains, culminates in the prologue to Peter Lombard's catena on the Psalms, which brought together the insights of such earlier commentators as Jerome, Augustine, Cassiodorus, and pseudoRemi of Auxerre, and came to supersede the famous Glossa Ordinaria of Anselm of Laon.9 The Lombard opens his prologue with a bold claim for David's uniqueness: Cum omnes prophetas Spiritus sancti revelatione constet esse locutos, David prophetarum eximius quodam digniori atque excellentiori modo, velut tuba Spiritus sancti, quam alii prophetavit. Alii namque prophetae per quasdam rerum imagines atque verborum integumenta, scilicet per somnia ac visiones, facta ac dicta prophetarunt. David autem solius Spiritus sancti instinctu sine omni exteriori adminiculo, suam edidit propheticam. ( 55 ) [It is generally accepted that, while all the prophets spoke by the revelation of the Holy Spirit, David stands out from the others in that he prophesied on a more exalted and distinguished level than they did, acting, so to speak, as the trumpet of the Holy Spirit. For other prophets gave their prophecies through the medium of images and words with a veiled meaning, but David uttered his prophecies by the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit, without any external aid.]

The exact distinction the Lombard is drawing between David's language and that of the other Old Testament prophets is not immediately clear. All the commentators insist that the Psalms are replete with tropes orfiguresof speech, locutions that might be described as verborum integumenta in that they do not make their points directly, but, for instance, by way of exaggeration or comparison or wordplay. In fact Bede, in De Schematibus et Tropis, explains that all thefigureswe find in the pagan grammarians and poets are used more exquisitely and persuasively in the Psalms.10 Also, if the language of the Psalms were entirely clear or not-veiled—free of images andfiguresof speech—much of the commentators' work would be redundant, since the basic aim of exegesis is to set forth in more obvious ways the latent meanings of Scripture. The Lombard clarifies his point about David's uniqueness later in the prologue, where he distinguishes four different ways in which prophecy occurs: through events, words, dreams, and visions. For instance, Noah's ark signifies the Church—thus an event might prophesy. Words prophesy

8

Interpreting the Psalms

when they predict the future, as the angel's words to Abraham do when they predict that his offspring shall inhabit all the nations of the earth. Finally, prophetic visions and dreams prophesy by presenting enigmatic or cryptic images that, properly interpreted, yield knowledge of the future, such as Moses's vision of the burning bush and Pharoah's dream of the seven oxen and seven ears of corn. Unlike these prophecies, however, David's are "direct": they do not merely anticipate or foreshadow the future, they present it as already happening. A good example is Psalm 21 (Deus, Deus meus, respice me, quare me dereliquistii). These words, many of the commentators explain, anticipate Christ's from the cross, in Mark 15.34: "God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" In the psalm they testify to David's prophetic role as a precursor to Christ, who speaks through the Psalmist's text as if he has already suffered. David's ability to speak of the future as if it were already present derives from the special quality of the revelation he receives, the directness of the Holy Spirit's inspiration. Because David's access to divine truth is direct, then, by corollary, so is his presentation of this truth in language. As I have already implied, David's materia, that subject matter of which he speaks most direcdy, is the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. Augustine explains that each of the 150 psalms is about Christ, and some—like Psalm 21 — ought to be understood as spoken by him, or rather by David in Christ's persona. Even those psalms that seem to express the sentiments of sinful mankind are about Christ, too, for as the Lombard explains (following Augustine), the materia of the Psalms is "the whole Christ": Ecce de quo agunt Soliloquia, de Christo toto, id est de capite et corpore. Materia itaque hujus libri est totus Christus, scilicet sponsus et sponsa. Intentio, humines, in Adam deformatos, Christo novo homini conformare. Modus tractandi talis est. Quandoque agit de Christo secundum caput, aliquando secundum corpus, aliquando secundum utrumque. (59) [Note that the soliloquies deal with the whole Christ, that is, both the head and the body. So, the subject-matter of this book is the whole Christ, that is, the betrothed and His spouse. Its intention is to remake men, whose image had become distorted in the person of Adam, in the image of Christ, the new man. The mode of treating the subject is as follows. Sometimes he treats Christ in terms of the head, sometimes in terms of the body, and sometimes concerning both.]

The curious language of this last observation invokes the Pauline doctrine of the Mystical Body, according to which the whole or corporate Christ

David the "Maker"

9

equals Christ himself, the head, plus ecclesia, the Church, or the body's members. Thus even when the Psalms seem to be about human sinfulness, as for instance the seven penitential psalms are, they are still about the corporate Christ, for all men are part of Christ's body, the Church. Augustine speaks to this point in his commentary on Psalm 50 (Miserere mei ), the chief penitential psalm, when he exhorts his congregation to understand David as a type not only of Christ, but thereby of the Church: "Videte quis iste sit; unus uidebatur deprecari Dauid, uidete hie imaginem nostram et typum ecclesiae" ("See who this is [speaking in the psalm] : David as one man was seeming to implore; see here however our own image, and the type of the Church" ) (615). The Psalmist's double persona, as both Christ and ecclesia, implies a double role for him as prophet. He is both a visionary poet and a moral reformer or teacher, whose poetry can repair the damage done by original sin, thus making whole again Christ's corporate self. This second aspect of David's double role is based in his humanity, his great personal sins, which made him spiritually vulnerable and dependent on divine grace. This same sin and grace made possible his status as preeminent moral prophet, who can refigure in poetry his own condition and sentiments as a moral exemplum for others. Thus, as Cassiodorus explains in his Expositio Psalmorum, David is the ideal moral teacher, in that Psalm discourse brings together the two basic types of teaching: instruction by example and by words. 11 These ideas are not just exegetical curiosities; the commentators derive them from David's own poetry, from the Latin Psalms themselves. For instance, in Psalm 50 David asks that G o d have mercy on him for his sins, so that in turn he can teach others God's ways: Cor mundum crea in me, Deus, Et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis. Docebo iniquos vias tuas, Et impii ad te convertentur. ( 12; 15 ) [Create a clean heart in me, O God: and renew a right spirit within my bowels. I will teach the unjust your ways: and the wicked shall be converted to you. ]

ιo

Interpreting the Psalms

David's acts of contrition are never simply personal; they always have social implications. The poetic language he uses to represent them are not merely self-expressive, but always potentially communal: a source of moral direction for those seeking to imitate his penance. The words of the Psalms, which David after all learned from God himself, are at once songs and laws, prayers of remorse and praise and moral statutes. Or as David puts it in Psalm 118.54: Cantabiles mihi erant justificationes tuae, in loco peregrinationis meae. [Your justifications (O God) were the subject of my song, in the place of my pilgrimage. ] The "syngabil" quality of God's laws, to use Richard Rolle's translation of the Gallicanum's "cantabiles" in his Middle English Psalter, suggests that God initially established them as a form of spiritual comfort for the faithful, who feel the pain of separation from him while on earth. In Rolle's words again, God's "justificationes" are "delitabil [pleasing] til me as gastly [spiritual] song, relesand my trauayls and my noy [distress] in this wrechid life,"12 which David throughout the Psalter represents himself as meditating on constantly. In the revised Hebraicum version of this same psalm verse, Jerome makes the relationship between God's laws and songs even more pointed. Now, God's justifications do not simply have song-like qualities, they are not merely tuneful; they are in fact songs. That is, Jerome implicitly identifies David's inspired poetic text as a compendium of God's statutes, Yahweh's book of laws: Carmina facta sunt mihi statuta tua, In loco peregrinationis meae. The parallel between "carmina" and "statuta" in the Latin is to the point: songs as laws, laws as songs. David's self-expressive poetry is also a form of moral discourse, and the moral discourse of the Psalms, as it appears in late medieval devotional texts, is a repository of profound emotions, waiting to be released in powerful ways, in new literary contexts. The fact that David is doing two things at once in his poetry, expressing himself subjectively and using himself as an objective moral example for others, accounts for some of the remarkable shifts in tone one encounters in

David the "Maker"

ιι

the Psalms. For instance, in Psalm 31 ("Beati quorum remissae sunt iniqui tates" ["Blessed are they whose sins are forgiven"] ), David begins in the first two verses by expressing his personal, heartfelt joy in God's forgiveness. Immediately after this, however, he recalls his great sins, and more particularly the wasting sickness caused by his having kept them secret: Quoniam tacui, inveteraverunt ossa mea, Dum clam arem tota die. Quoniam die ac nocte gravata est super me manus tua, Conversus sum in aerumna mea, dum configitur mihi spina. ( 3-4) [Because I was silent, my bones grew old, while I cried out all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me: I am turned in my anguish, while the thorn is fastened in me.] The poetry's double emphasis on the duration of David's suffering ("tota die . . . die ac nocte") underscores the pathos of the Psalmist's condition, while the parallel initial repetition of "quoniam" stresses the strict causal relation between David's efforts to hide his sin and his guilty sense of God's knowledge of them, and imminent divine judgment. The closing image in this passage, of the constant pricking of the thorn of conscience, nicely particularizes the reader's awareness of David's nagging sense of wrongdoing and his impulse to confess, as the verses move from the past into the present tense. Verse 5 begins a major shift in the poem's tone, as David remembers acknowledging his sin before God, and God's forgiveness: "tu remisisti impietatem peccati mei." Now the Psalmist sounds more confident. But it is only when this confidence compels him to generalize from his own condition that self-expression gets translated into moral didacticism. All good people ("omnis sanctus"; 6) must pray to God when surrounded by temptation or beleaguered by a deep sense of guilt—to use David's figure, when a great flood of waters surrounds them. And then most strikingly, in verses 8 through 10, the Psalmist turns away from recalling his own condition altogether, and directly addresses the reader, explaining that he intends to instruct him in God's way: Intellectum tibi dabo, et instruam te in via hac qua gradieris; Firmabo super te oculos meos.

12

Interpreting the Psalms Nolite fieri sicut equus et mulus, Quibus non est intellectus. Multa flagella peccatoris; Sperantem autem in Domino misericordia circumdabit. [I will give you understanding, and will instruct you in this way which you must go: I will fix my eyes upon you. D o not become like the horse and mule, who do not have understanding. The scourges of a sinner are many, but mercy will encompass the one who hopes in the Lord.]

Augustine and the commentators who follow him interpret this part of the psalm as being spoken by God, in response to the sinful David's earlier lament. They still note, however, that God is speaking here through David: that is, that these words are not—like all the Psalms — only parts of a colloquy between David and God, but parts of a moral dialogue between the reformed David and the rest of the Christian community. The Psalter's private character, as a record of David's personal conversation with God; and its public character, as David's ethical discourse to the entire Christian community, are complementary. The poetic language of the Psalms is, simultaneously, the language of self-expression and moral teaching. These ideas about David's moral exemplarism and the Psalms as moral instruction passed directly into the Middle English tradition, in texts like the prologue to Rolle's Middle English Psalter with commentary, and the prologues to the Wycliffite translation of the Psalms. Rolle's prologue, which survives in multiple manuscript copies, combines excerpts from Augustine, Cassiodorus, Peter Lombard, and Gilbert of Porree with original matter. It begins by noting the special virtue of saying or singing the Psalms, and how such devotion can elevate one to the contemplative or mystical life: Grete haboundance of gastly comfort and ioy in god comes in the hertes of thaim at says or synges deuotly the psalmes in louynge of ihesu crist. Thai drope swetnes in mannys saule and hellis [drop] delite in thaire thoghtis and kyndils thaire willes with the fyre of luf, makand thaim hate and brennand withinen, and faire and lufly in cristis eghen. And thaim that lastes [those who

David the "Maker"

13

persevere] in thaire deuocioun, thair rays thaim in til contemplatyf lyf, & oft sith [frequently] in til soun & myrth of heuen. ( 3 )

The Psalms for Rolle are a honey-like liquid or treacle, a "verbal medicine" capable of healing the sick soul: In thaim is so mykill fayrhed of vndirstandynge, & medicyne of wordes, that this boke is cald garthen closed, wel enseled [an enclosed, well-protected garden], paradyse ful of all appils: now with halesome lare drouyd [contrived of healthy teachings] & stormy saules it bryngis in til clere & pesful lyf, now amonestand to for do [do away] sins with teris. ( 3 )

The mixed metaphors are typical of Rolle's sometimes hysterical style. The key and stabilizing figure in this passage, however, is that of the Psalms as medicinal, a fragrant garden of apples, contrived to restore the morally sick soul to spiritual well-being. This figure Rolle adapts from the Psalms themselves, where David not only represents his soul as sick or diseased, but calls on God as a patient might appeal to a physician: "Sana me, Domine, quoniam conturbata sunt ossa mea" ("Heal me, O Lord, because my bones are troubled") (Ps 6.3). Once restored to moral health himself, David aids God the physician in his healing work; he becomes God's locum, ministering through the Psalms to other sick souls. Rolle's phrase "halesome lare drouyd [contrived]" (my emphasis) is especially significant, given the emotive language of the rest of this passage. The sense of moral calm and mystic fervor the Psalms can engender, for Rolle, is based in the rhetorical constructs of the Psalms' teachings—that is, in the tropes and figures whereby David performs his healing work. David's making, his poetic craft, and his moral prophesying are the same. Rolle goes on to explain that the unique value of the Psalter derives also from its comprehensive nature. The Psalms are the most perfect book of Scripture, for they contain in compressed form all that the rest of the Bible sets forth at great length: This boke of all haly writ is mast oysed [used] in halykyrke seruys, forthi that [because] in it is perfeccioun of dyuyne pagyne [the sacred page], for it contenys all that other bokes draghes langly [set forth at length], that is, the lare [teachings] of the aid testament & of the new. (4)

Rolle does not specifically call David a prophet in his prologue, as he does throughout the verse-by-verse commentary. But in this passage he clearly recognizes David's preeminence among the biblical authors; and towards

14

Interpreting the Psalms

the close of his prologue he discusses the materia ("subject-matter"), intenti*) ("purpose"), and modus tractandi ("method of proceeding") of the work, describing exactly the twofold prophetic function the Latin commentators attributed to David: The matere of this boke is crist & his spouse, that is, haly kyrke, or ilk ryghtwise mannys saule; the entent is, to confourme men that ere filyd [defiled] in adam til crist in newnes of lyf; the maner of lare [teaching] is swilke vmstunt [such that sometimes] he spekis of crist in his godhed, vnstunt in his manhed, vnstunt in that he oises [uses] the voice of his seruauntes. Alswa he spekis of haly kyrke in thre maners: vmwhile [sometimes] in the person of perfite men, somtyme of vnperfite men, som tyme of ill [evil] men, whilk er in halikyrke by body noght by thoght, by name noght by ded, in noumbire noght in merit. (4)

Rolle first takes up, following Peter Lombard, the Psalms' matter, intention, and mode of teaching, and then proposes, following Gilbert of Porrée, a threefold division of David's matter, his treatment of ecclesia or the Church. Rolle's intention is to make the reader conscious of his own method of proceeding, his exegetical modus tractandi, since as we will see, he views this interpretive method as an extension of David's own teaching. The overall sense of the passage, however, is basically that of the Lombard's prologue: the subject-matter of the Psalms is the whole or corporate Christ, Christ the head and the Church his members. Thus, sometimes, Christ himself is the subject and even speaker of the Psalms, and in other instances the Church members speak, sometimes its repentant ("perfite") members, giving praise to God, sometimes its sinful ("vnperfite") members, asking his mercy. When Christ himself speaks in the Psalms, David, like the other Old Testament prophets, anticipates the New Testament—although unlike them he enacts his prophecies in his verse, as if the future (the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ) were happening in his present. When the Church speaks in the Psalms, however, David prophesies in another sense: he teaches by ethical example and precept. His sins become an example to shun, his repentance one to imitate. Moreover, his words—the stuff of his poetry — become a pattern for the moral language of others. It is significant that Rolle, unlike Peter Lombard, emphasizes David's function as morally prophetic teacher over his role as inspired poet. Rolle's translation of modus tractandi as "maner of lare [teaching]" rather than, literally, "method of treatment," underscores this emphasis. Modus tractandi is a schoolroom phrase, a form of medieval academic jargon. While Rolle's English Psalter has certain elementary educational aims, the essential char-

David the "Maker"

15

acter of his text is, like the sermons that make up Augustine's Enarmtiones in Psalmos, homiletic; its didacticism is always practical. Rolle's use of the term "lare" in the phrase "maner of lare" echoes his double use of it earlier in his prologue, in the phrases "halesome lare drouyd" and "the lare of the aid testament & of the new." The Scriptures, in Rolle's view, are essentially a body of moral and mystical teachings, and the Psalms are the Bible's preeminent book of teachings because of their unique method and style—the directness of their prophecies and the richness of their language. At the very end of his prologue, Rolle seeks to identify David's role as moral teacher with his own role as Psalm translator and commentator. He explains that his purpose in translating and expounding the Psalms in English is "swa that thai that knawes noght latyn, by the ynglis may com til mony latyn wordis" (4) ("so that those who do not know any Latin, may by the English version acquire many Latin words"; my translation). This statement of intent is less modest than it seems. To be sure, it implies that the English Psalter is merely a handmaid to the Latin original, a means toward understanding the Latin Psalms, which (although themselves a translation) are presumably closer than Rolle's version to the aims and design of David's original. In Rolle's commentary itself, however, this idea serves another, more subde purpose. By deferring persistently to the authority of the Latin Psalter, Rolle acquires a special authorial status of his own, as humble servant to David's text. Nicholas Watson has demonstrated that Rolle tended to think of literary authority in terms of Latin, not English culture.13 In working the Psalms into the vernacular he often proceeds awkwardly, paying a slavish respect to the syntax of his Latin original, and having therefore in his expositions to retranslate many Psalm verses into more colloquial English. The exact psychology behind these working methods is not recoverable. But it is as if, having identified on a deep, emotional level with the poetry of the Latin Psalms, Rolle must resist the impulse to absorb the Latin completely and imperceptibly into the English idiom. He in turn represents his resistance as a form of deference to David, his literary and moral master. By taking pains to avoid what he calls "straunge ynglis" or neologisms in his translation, Rolle ensures that his version of the Psalms will reflect David's original teaching aims more accurately than other translations might. Such gestures of authorial anxiety confer on Rolle, by way of David's prophetic and literary preeminence, a more impressive literary and moral authority than he could have claimed by being freer with the Latin. He self-consciously portrays himself as allowing David's morally prophetic voice to

16

Interpreting the Psalms

speak through him, in as unobstructed a way possible, so that like David he becomes an agent of God's redemptive work. 14 A unique metrical preface to one manuscript copy of the English Psalter and commentary, Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Laud Misc. 286, picks up on and extends Rolle's sense of himself as a moral teacher in the tradition of David. The preface explains that the translation was done for Margaret Kirkeby, a recluse who was close to Rolle, and for whom he also wrote such devotional treatises as the Form ofLiving. That is, the English Psalter originated in a desire to educate. But to educate in what sense? The preface explains that the meaning of the Psalms is so "derke" or obscure that the sort of verse-by-verse exposition Rolle offers is necessary to their proper understanding: Bot for the psalmes bene ful derke, in many a place whos wol take hede, And the sentence is ful merke [obscure], euery row [person] who so wol rede, Hit nedeth exposicyon, written wel with monnes honde, To stirre to more deuocyowne, & hit the bettur vndurstonde. ( 1 ) "To stirre to more deuocyowne" means "to incite to deeper acts of devotion" — in the dual sense of producing a more profound penance as well as the kind of higher mystical adventures to which the purgative stage of the vita contemplativa may lead. For these purposes of the Psalms to be realized, however, their literal sense ("sentence" or "meaning") must be carefully understood. Thus Rolle as exegete is a kind of surrogate teacher, whose expositions aid David's text in doing its holy work. There is a continuum between David's poetry, the expository work of commentators on it, and the passionate apprehension and imitation of the Psalms by devout Christians. Psalm interpretation—even on the elementary level of construing the Latin text for those who cannot — is inherently an ethical process, an act of mediation between David's morally prophetic text and the moral history of all the faithful. The mediation is most direct in Rolle's exposition of Psalm 50.15, where David resolves to teach other sinners God's ways, once God has forgiven him: Docebo iniques vias tuas: & impii ad te conuertentur. I sali lere [teach] the wickid thi wayes, and synful sail be turnyd til the. He that gret is [wept]

David the "Maker"

17

before, now is he doctur, as whasay, conferme me, and confermed i sail not be vnkynde, bot i sali lere with goed ensaumpile and worde wickid men thi wayes, that is, mercy & sothfastnes. And swa synful men sail be turnyd til the. ( 1 8 6 )

Rolle's word "vnkynde" translates, somewhat colorlessly, Peter Lombard's "ingratus": having been strengthened by God, David accepts the care of others as a sign of his gratitude. Or to put the matter another way, David takes on his role as moral teacher out of a sense of ethical responsiblity. Furthermore, he will teach (according to Rolle and the Lombard, following Cassiodorus) in two ways: by personal example and by words. 15 Rolle's chiasmus, "gret is before, now is he doctur," stresses that David's weeping and making are different but complementary forms of teaching, both of them embodied in the text of the Psalms. The symbiosis between David's subjective experience and his literary objectification of it generates the suasive energy behind psalm discourse. Insofar as Rolle's own text clarifies the rhetorical processes and figures whereby David's emotions came to be expressed in language, it is propelled by this energy, teaching both by example and by words. Despite certain heterodox positions that crept into their other psalm scholarship, the three prologues to the Wyclifitte Psalter are as orthodox as Rolle's. 16 Unburdened by Rolle's personal agenda — to turn the Psalms into a treatise on the priority of the contemplative over the active life—the Wycliffites translated their prologues quite closely from the best orthodox authorities: for prologues 1 and 2, Peter Lombard; for prologue 3, Jerome. Prologue 3, since it considers the purely academic question of Psalm authorship, can be dealt with first. In this prologue, the author raises the point that David probably did not author all the Psalms. Some were most likely composed by others, including four psalmists officially appointed by David: Asaf, Eman, Ethan, and Iditym. This workshop of David approach never troubles Middle English moralists, who persist in attributing to David psalms that such formidable authorities as Jerome say he could never have written. But the authors of the Wycliffite Bible were academics, for whom such questions are endlessly fascinating. Thus they feel the need to translate Jerome's prologue on the multiple authorship question, and to preface this to their translation of the Psalter itself. The third prologue goes on to distinguish between which psalms may be assigned to David and which may not, and finally to confront the problem of psalm tituli. Anyone who has read the explanatory Latin tides to the Psalms through must admit that they describe no coherent chronology.

18

Interpreting the Psalms

Instead of forcing them into one, many commentators pursued a tropological approach, arguing that the 150 psalms describe a three-part moral chronology, the triple progress of David and every human soul through the stages of penance (Pss 1-50, ending in the Miserere), justification (Pss 5 1 100 ), and endless praise of God (Pssioi-150). The allegorical chronology of the Psalms, according to this view, is more important than the vexed question of their literal, historical one. As the translator of Wycliffite prologue 3 explains, the disorder of psalm tituli does not upset the morally prophetic order of the Psalter. Wycliffite prologues 1 and 2 are more obviously based in the commentary traditions we have been discussing, of David as a moral prophet or teacher. Both are translated straight out of Peter Lombard. Prologue 1 makes two basic points, thefirstconcerning the Psalms as a direct prophecy of Christ ("of his birthe, and of his power and teching; of his passioun and his rising ajen fro deeth, and of his ascencioun and of his comynge ajen in the laste doom"; 736), the second about the two reasons why the Psalms are most often read in church: in praise of God, and as a request for divine mercy. These two reasons, for the commentators, are really the same. Confession is an act of praise before God, since it acknowledges the soul's abject condition and dependence on divine mercy. And praise of God is conducive to shrift, since a humble attitude is its precondition. Prologue 2, however, is closest to our concerns in this chapter. Here, following Peter Lombard, the translator begins by discussing David's uniqueness among the prophets, and proceeds to allegorize David's harp just as the Lombard had, following Augustine: . . . as that instrument is of ten cordis, so this boc techeth the al about keping of the ten hestis [commandments] ; and as that instrument jiueth soun fro the ouere part bi the touch of hondis, so this boc techeth wel to werche, not for ertheli thingis, but for heuenli thingus, that ben aboue. ( 7 3 6 )

In its original context in Peter Lombard's Latin prologue, this allegory sounds innocuous, just one more clever academic point in a series of schoolroom analyses. For the Wycliffites however, whose entire religious program is based in a powerful reformist rhetoric, such an allegory becomes more urgent: potentially at least, it is a call to social action. The translator of prologue 3 does not himself pursue this possibility; evidently he felt his job here was to follow the Lombard's sense verbo pro verbo. As we shall see in Part III, however, when the Wycliffites came to write their own psalm commentaries, by expanding Richard Rolle's, they were well aware of the

David the "Maker"

19

radical ideological potential of psalm allegories like this one. Indeed, their commentary work is as politically charged as it is scholarly. After the allegory of David's harp, prologue 3 continues with some belabored numerological points about the Psalms, the most important of these being the previously mentioned threefold division of the Psalter according to the three "statis of cristene religioun": penance, justification, and endless praise of God. All of this is straight out of Peter Lombard. Then, again following the Lombard, the translator of prologue 3 explains that the Psalter is that book of the Bible most used in church because it is a digest of all the Scriptures, and perhaps most important, because it teaches contrition: . . . heer also is tajt what synne doth awei, what penaunce restoreth, what the gilti of synne othenkende [repenting] seye, that is, "Lord, in thi wodnesse vndernyme thou not me," and in an other place, "Haue mercy of me, God, aftir thy mychile mercy"; and what bi penaunce be purchasid [obtained], whan he vnderioyneth, "I shal teche wicke men thi weies, and vnpitous men to thee shul be conuertid." (737)

Nothing could be less heretical. The commonplace in Peter Lombard and the Latin commentators he drew on, that David was once a notorious sinner and is now the noblest of moral prophets, passes direcdy into the English tradition in the Wycliffite prologues, as in Rolle's English Psalter. What the Wycliffites would do with this commonplace in their contentious writings—how they would choose to imitate David's example in elaborating their own psalm ideology—is another matter. In the prologues to their translation of the Psalter, however, they attest in the simplest and most traditional of ways to David's stature as a moral prophet in the later Middle Ages.

The Poet as Penitent Although David's status as a moral prophet in the later Middle Ages was secure, it was hard-won. Reconciling the Psalmist's role as a type of Christ and his real history as a sinner caused the Latin commentators much interpretive anxiety. Peter Lombard's recourse to Pauline notions of the Mystical Body was simply one ingenious way around the problem. Another more abstruse route was taken by Gregory, in his highly influenti al Afora/i« in lob. There David's adulterous love for Bathsheba is interpreted as the unifica-

20

Interpreting the Psalms

tion of the spiritual and carnal senses of the Law, in Christ. Uriah, whose death David ordered, is dismissed as a type of the Jewish people and the old law of the Jewish temple. He has to die so that the New Law can live, and Gregory deals with him as expeditiously as David did, in sending him to the front lines.17 Much earlier in the Psalms' interpretive history, when Jerome recalls how he learned humility from David's example, the epithets he applies to the Psalmist are almost comically contradictory: David, sancti et mansuetissimi viri, homicidium pariter et adulterium Septem dierum emenda vit fames. Iacebat in terra, volutabatur in ciñere et oblitus regiae potestatis lumen quaerebat in tenebris illumque tantum respiciens, quem offenderai, lacrimabili voce dicebat: "Tibi soli peccavi et malum coram te feci," et "Redde mihi laetitiam salutane tui et spiritu principali confirma me." Atque ita factum est, ut, qui me prius docuerat virtutibus suis, quomodo stans non caderem, doceret per paenitentiam, quomodo cadens resurgerem. [David, that saindy and mildest of men, committed both murder and adultery; but he atoned for it by fasting seven days. H e lay on the ground, rolled about in ashes, forgot his royal power, looked for light in the darkness. H e turned his eyes only to Him whom he had offended, and cried in a lamentable voice, "Against you alone have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight," and "Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with your free spirit." And so it happened that he who taught me, by his virtues, first how I might stand and not fall, by his penance taught me how, if I fell, I might rise again. ] 1 8

A brief but telling pause separates Jerome's praise for David as that most saintly and mildest of men, and his necessary recognition of David's crimes of adultery and homicide. This juxtaposition of extravagant praise and blame makes two points: it conveys Jerome's unease in recalling the historical record of David's crimes; more important, however, it implies that David's authority as archetypal penitent is inextricably bound up with the magnitude, the notoriousness, of his sins. In contrast to 2 Samuel 12, which reports simply that David fasted and lay on the ground all night, this slighdy theatrical account of David's penance, heightened by Jerome's use of parallelism ("He threw himself on the ground, rolled about in ashes, and forgot his royal power") emphasizes the extent to which, in penance, David left behind one limited authoritative role and took on another, greater one. In forgetting—indeed, actively effacing — that royal power which he abused in the first place, David acquires the paradoxical authority of humility. Only in Augustine's Enarrationes, one of the earliest and most important Latin psalm commentaries (ca. 392-420), 19 do we find a reading of

David the "Maker"

21

David's sins honest enough to confer on him the penitential authority he has in later medieval texts. It would be impossible to overstate the importance of the Enarmtiones throughout the Middle Ages. Gneuss, for instance, lists eight copies written or owned in England up to the year 1100, each of them one-third of the entire text (because of their length, the Enarmtiones tended to circulate and be copied in parts, Pss 1-50, 51-100, and 101-150 separately).20 After 1100, the number of copies increased markedly: Ker mentions the Enarmtiones as one of the most popular texts in the century after the Norman Conquest, when sounder copies of patristic works were being produced. 21 Augustine's text seems to have been especially well-used and influential in fifteenth-century England. The Enarrationes are one of the key sources for extensive Middle English glosses in a very important Wycliffite Psalter (MS Bodley 554; ca. 1450). A large twelfth-century folio containing Part I of the Enarrationes, now in the Newberry Library, Chicago (MS 13), has extensive marginal notes (most of these précis of the the text) in late Anglicana script.22 In M S Bodley 423, a late fifteenth-century devotional miscellany, references to the Enarrationes appear throughout the margins of a copy of Fervor Amoris. For instance, Be thou neuer so ful of vertues, but thou conforme thy wille to goddis wille in alle maner thinges bodily and gosdy, thy wille is not rightful. To this purpos seynt Austyn spekith and seith thus, ' T h e rightwesnes of god is, that thou be hool of thy body somtyme and somtym syke."

Augustinus super psnlmum 3s•

(fol. 139")

The specificity of the marginal attributions, which are not in the text scribe's hand but one contemporary with it, suggests that the glossator was working from a copy of the Enarrationes, and perhaps also assuming that the reader for whom the glosses were made would have had access to a copy of Augustine's text. The glossator cites other standard patristic works as well, most notably Gregory the Great's Moralia in lob. The greatest number of citations, however, are to Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos.23 Poets also used the Enarrationes. Lydgate draws on them heavily in his psalm imitations and his psalmic complaint poem, A Defence of Holy Church; his abbey library, at Bury St. Edmunds, had at least two-thirds of the text, in two separate books, both apparently highly prized: each volume is marked on a fly-leaf for return to the library's locked book cabinet.24 Some lay poets read the Enarrationes, too. Petrarch, in a famous letter, thanks Boccaccio for a gift of the complete Enarrationes in a single volume.

22

Interpreting the Psalms

He describes how he reads it all night, and regards it as an essential guide to navigating the deep seas of David's poetry: You delighted me with your splendid and unusual gift; now I shall sail David's seas with greater assurance, avoiding the reefs, unafraid of his waves of words or collisions with mysterious meanings. I used to attempt the high seas under my own power, and at times plying both arms, at others supported by some chance object, I would so keep my exhausted mind afloat through the resisting waves that often, while beginning to sink, I would exclaim with Peter, "O Lord, save me!" . . . Amidst such storms you have sent me Augustine, a powerful and diligent skipper of divine intellect.25 Petrarch's letter records not only his personal devotion to the Psalter (he wrote a beautiful version of the seven penitential psalms, in Italian), but also his recognition that David's highly emotive poetry could not be comprehended—and was in some sense dangerously overwhelming—without Augustine's exegetical guidance. For the Psalms to be morally useful, they must be correctly interpreted. David's authority as a moral teacher requires the supportive, directive authority of psalm interpretation. Rarely in translating or paraphrasing the Psalter do medieval writers operate apart from the commentators; medieval congregations, readers, and poets seldom received David's text unmediated. It was almost always refracted through the prism of exegetical discourse, which separated out its levels and varieties of meaning so that each of them, distinctly, might illumine the soul. In his comment on Psalm 50, originally delivered as a sermon to the people of Carthage, Augustine presents himself as frankly obsessed with David's sins. He begins, as most commentators do, with the psalm's titulus. This mentions briefly that David recited the poem after being visited by the prophet Nathan, who made him aware of the true nature of his offenses in having Uriah killed and committing adultery with Uriah's wife, Bathsheba: "In finem psalmus David, cum venit ad eum Nathan propheta, quando intravit ad Bethsabee" ("A psalm by David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, when he went to Bathsheba"; 1 - 2 ) . However, Augustine goes beyond the other commentators in insisting on the historicity of David's sin, and in recording his personal sense of outrage at the offense: Bersabee erat mulier uxor aliena. Cum dolore quidem dicimus et tremore, sed tarnen Deus noluit taceri quod uoluit scribi. Dicam ergo non quod uolo, sed quod cogor, dicam non exhortans ad imitationem, sed instruens ad timorem. Huius mulieris uxoris alienae pulchritudine captus rex et propheta David, ex cuius semine secundum carnem Dominus uenturus erat, adulteravit earn. Hoc in isto psalmo non legitur, sed in título eius apparet; in libro autem Regnorum

David the "Maker"

23

plenius legitur. Utraque Scriptura canonica est, unique sine ulla dubitatìone a Christianis fides adhibenda est. Commissum atque conscriptum est. Huius etiam m aritum in bello occidendum curauit: homicidio auxit adulterium: et post hoc factum missus est ad eum Nathan propheta, missus a Domino, qui eum argueret de tanto commisso. (600) [Bersabee was a woman, the wife of another. With grief indeed we speak, and with trembling; yet God would not have hushed what he wanted to be written down. I will say, then, not what I want to, but what I am obliged to say; I will speak not as someone exhorting you to imitation, but as someone instructing you to fear. Captivated by this woman's beauty, the wife of another, the king and prophet David, from whose seed according to the flesh the Lord was to come, committed adultery with her. This thing is not read about in the psalm, but appears only in the title. But it may be read about more fully in the book of Kings (i.e., 2 Samuel). Both Scriptures are canonical, to both without a doubt Christians must give credit. The sin was committed, and was written down. Moreover, (David) caused her husband (Uriah) to be killed in battle; and after this happened, Nathan the prophet was sent to him by the Lord, to reprove him for such an outrage.] (189-190)

Augustine's impulse to suppress the story is sincere, not just a rhetorical flourish. He is repulsed by the fact that one specially set apart by God, like David, should commit such a heinous sin. It is significant, as a mark of Augustine's outrage, that in recalling the offense he refers to David by his proper titles of "king and prophet," and reminds his congregation that it was from David's seed ("ex cujus semine") that the Savior was destined to be born. In committing adultery and homicide, David has not sinned primarily against Bathsheba and Uriah, but against Christ himself; as David himself says in Psalm 50, "Tibi soli peccavi" ("Against you alone [Lord] have I sinned"; 6). Augustine's disgust suggests that, by his sexual sin, David has polluted the lineage of Christ. The greatness of the Psalmist's sin is so real to Augustine that it provokes a strong personal response, of rejection and of fear, a response Augustine hopes will serve as an example to his congregation. Counterbalancing this response, however, is Augustine's insistence on the fact that the sin is recorded, by God, in the canonical Scriptures—that it must never be forgotten. His restating the offense in his sermon is the result of a struggle: Augustine does not want to retell the story, but God's will, which is greater than his, compels it. Implied in Augustine's obedience is the realization that David's sin, like all events in human history, ultimately serves God's purposes. And because it does, God, as true author of the Scriptures, requires that the sin be recorded and retold. To see the matter

24

Interpreting the Psalms

another way, David's teaching by example is the result of God's design. The canonicity of David's sin, in turn, requires that all Christians acknowledge its historicity, and work to understand the significance of David's sin for them, as individuals and as a community. God expects the congregation not only to acknowledge his gracious purpose in demanding that David's sin be recorded, but actively to explore this purpose, as it is represented in the texts of 2 Samuel 12 and the Miserere, David's chief penitential poem. This purpose, as Augustine explains it, is twofold: to inspire fear and rejection of sin, and then the deep desire to imitate David's penance. The second of these aims I discuss in Chapter 2 ("Imitating David"). However, it depends for its meaning on the first; in Augustine's view, unless we first adequately fear David's example as a sinner, we cannot come to imitate his profound contrition. "Dicam non exhortans ad imitationem, sed instruens ad timorem": that is, at this point Augustine speaks not to encourage Davidic imitation, for it is only at the start of his sermon that Augustine seeks to instill fear by David's story; later, he does indeed advise the congregation to imitate David, but to imitate him properly, in rising not in falling. David's exemplarism has both a negative and a positive dimension: his sin is to be feared and avoided, his sorrow to be admired and imitated.26 The notoriety of David's sins, then, confers on him for Augustine a special authority as archetypal penitent. And his archetypal penitential role, subsequendy, confers on him his traditional preeminence as moral prophet. Augustine clarifies this point when, later in his sermon, he explains the meaning of David's admission in Psalm 50.7, "Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum" ("For behold, I was conceived in sins"). On the one hand, this admission associates David with all of mankind. Like us, David was born with the sin of Adam. However, Augustine does not leave his analysis of the psalm verse here: Suscepit personam generis humani David, et attendit omnium uincula, propaginem mortis considerauit, originem iniquitatis aduertit, et ait: Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum. Numquid David de adulterio natus erat, de Jesse uiro justo et coniuge ipsius? Quid est quod se dicit in iniquitate conceptum, nisi quia trahitur iniqui tas ex Adam? (606) [David has taken on himself the person of mankind, and has recognized the bonds of all people; he has considered the offspring of death, has looked towards the origin of sin, and he says, "For behold, I was conceived in iniquities." Was David born of adultery, being born of Jesse, a righteous man, and Jesse's own wife? Why is it that he says he was conceived in iniquity, except that iniquity which is drawn from Adam?] (192)

David the "Maker"

25

There is a fastidious quality to this passage, as if Augustine is struggling while he writes with his own ambivalence toward David's dual representative function, as a type both of Christ and of sinful humanity. The first statement echoes, however faintly, Isaiah 53.6, where the Suffering Servant (another Old Testament adumbration of Christ) is said to have had the iniquities of all laid upon him. Like Christ, David allows God's will to be done through him, albeit unwittingly: he takes on himself the collective sins of mankind by his own notorious crimes.27 The echo of Isaiah hints at Augustine's desire to redefine David's moral culpability as yet another aspect of his Christological typology, to cloud in effect the full, literal history of David's sins. The tone does not become any surer with the contrast Augustine draws between David and his ancestor, the righteous Jesse. Few in Augustine's congregation would be inclined to misinterpret the phrase "in iniquitatibus conceptus sum" as referring to an adulterous act on the part of Jesse, whose righteousness was a biblical commonplace. So Augustine's prolonged scrutiny of this psalm verse betrays, instead, his sustained preoccupation throughout his sermon with the magnitude of David's sexual sin. This preoccupation is confirmed later in the sermon, when Augustine feels he must point out that even those who remain faithful in marriage cannot escape the sin of Adam: Quomodo ergo sine uinculo peccati nascitur, quod concipitur et seminatur de corpore mortuo propter peccatum? Opus hoc castum in coniuge non habet culpam, sed origo peccati trahit secum debitam poenam. N o n enim maritus, quia maritus est, mortalis non est. (607) [ H o w then can that which is conceived and sown of a body dead because of sin be born without the bond of sin? This chaste operation in a married person is not itself sinful, but the origin of sin (with Adam) draws with it necessarily punishment. There is not husband, because he is a husband, who is not subject to death.] ( 1 9 3 )

This prolix exposition calls attention to itself and to the authorial attitudes behind it. The sex act itself, even in marriage, transmits the sin of Adam to other generations. The guilt associated with adultery, Augustine seems to be arguing, is obvious. What others must guard against is the belief that, simply because they are faithful in marriage, their sexual acts are somehow inherendy virtuous. In my analysis of Augustine's rhetorical style, I have been trying to chart what two other scholars, Jan Wojcik and Charles Huttar, view as

26

Interpreting the Psalms

the "embarrassment" of biblical commentators when confronted with the sometimes tawdry scriptural facts of David's life.28 The biblical narrative of David's career, Wojcik explains, is at times irrefutably tragic. Optimistic exegetical readings of David's character, both in the Talmudic and Christian traditions, must therefore mask certain elements of the literal truth about him. In particular, the common Christian view of David as a type of Christ, which Augustine puts forward most aggressively not in the Enarrationes but in the De Civitnte Dei, must virtually deny David's lechery. As Wojcik puts it, David's adultery becomes, for Augustine and those who amplify his views, "merely the necessary cause of the greater clear-sighted moral awareness which follows."29 Thus David can prophesy in two senses: as forerunner of the Messiah, and as an exemplum of penance. David's obsessive gaze as he looks on Bathsheba in her bath, just one psychological "fixation" of many exhibited by the king over the course of his biblical career, becomes translated into the "prophetic insight" of God's sweetest singer, David the Psalmist. Despite their general agreement, where Wojcik sees the allegorical impulse at work in early interpretations of David ("the disjuncture o f . . . literal and symbolic readings"30), Huttar sees the homiletic. He notes, for instance, the "subtlety" with which David's sins are defined by such commentators as Nicholas of Lyra (ca. 1265-1329), who concentrate not only on the sins of adultery and homicide themselves, but on the exact motives behind them. David sinned, according to Lyra, "per luxuriam, per neglegentiam, per superbiam," the repeated preposition signaling Lyra's desire to get behind the atrocious acts themselves, to what he believes must have caused them.31 This subdety enables the commentators to extend David's exemplary significance to its "broadest pastoral application."32 The local, tabloid elements of the David and Bathsheba story thus could be universalized; if David were, upon scrutiny, guilty of more than the crimes of adultery and murder, that many more sinful souls could learn from his example. Ultimately, Huttar explains, the particular sins of adultery and homicide were collapsed by Talmudic and Christian exegetes into the general sin of pride. And since pride, according to medieval hamartiology, is the root sin, David can therefore function as an instance of human sinfulness in its most general sense.33 For writers like Augustine, then, David's adultery reveals the essential moral precariousness of the entire human condition. It has a high if veiled moral use, in that it typifies the predicament of all who are "conceived in iniquity" — all men and women. Wojcik and Huttar do not, however, grant commentators like Augustine and Lyra their real achievement: maintaining the delicate but necessary balance between the lust of history and the lore of

David the "Maker"

27

exemplum.34 While it is true that both writers shrink at first from acknowledging David's humanity, theyfinallymake their resistance to the gross facts of David's actions another suasive element of their discourse. They are honest not only about the facts, but about their responses to these. This is especially true of Augustine on Psalm 50. Augustine implies a startling parallel between his resistance to the truth of David's story and David's own comfortable sense of himself (before the adultery and homicide) as someone privileged—one untouched, as king, by the base inclinations or motives of lesser men. Just as David was forced, by Nathan, to confront his own flawed humanity, Augustine is compelled, by the canonical Scriptures themselves, to acknowledge that even God's beloved was capable of sin, being as a man born to it. So too, faithful Christians must come to acknowledge that they are all, to a person, conceived in iniquity. In the enarratio on Psalm 50, Augustine the preacher is as much an exemplum as David the Psalmist. David's crimes havefirstto be acknowledged in the limited historical sense, and only then interpreted in a representative, transhistorical way. If David was capable of such acts, what can we expect of ourselves? De longe enim uidit David illam, in qua captus est. Mulier longe, libido propre. Alibi erat quod uideret, in ilio unde caderet. Attendenda est ergo haec infirmitas carnis, recordanda sunt uerba Apostoli, Non ergo regnet peccatum in uestro mortali corpore [Rom 6.12]. Non dixit, non sit; sed, non regnet. Inest peccatum, cum delectaris; regnai, si consenseris. Carnalis delectado, praesertim usque ad illicita et aliena progrediens, frenanda est, non relaxanda; imperio domanda, non in imperio collocanda. Attende securus, si non habes unde mouearis. Sed respondes: Fortiter teneo. Numquid tu fortior quam David? (601) [David saw her from afar, with whom he was captivated. Woman far off, lust near. What he saw was elsewhere, in himself that whereby he fell. The weakness of thefleshmust be kept in mind, and the words of St. Paul recalled, "Do not allow sin to reign in your mortal body." He has not said, do not let there be sin, but do not let it reign. When you take pleasure, there is sin in you; it reigns in you when you consent. Carnal pleasure, especially when it attaches to illicit and strange things, should be bridled, not let loose: tamed by government, not set up as government. Look and be secure, if you do not have anything whereby you may be moved. But you answer: I hold fast. Are you any stronger than David?] (190)

On a deep, psychological level, the historical David is a disappointment to Augustine, but a disappointment the exegete must confront. David might have restrained himself, acted wisely, made psalm interpretation more straightforward—an easy exposition of Christological typology. Augustine's repetition of "regnet" and "imperio" indicates that he sees David as

28

Interpreting the Psalms

having given over his kingly authority in committing the sin of adultery. Rather than ruling himself, he is ruled by sin: it reigns in his body; it governs him. This turnabout is ironic, for it was David's kingly authority which allowed him, according to the biblical story, to have Bathsheba and to have Uriah killed. But this authority for Augustine is illusory—temporal, not spiritual. Once David committed his sin, however, he took on another kind of authority—his authority as archetypal sinner. Because of his great favor in God's eyes, and his great sin, he is an example of how anyone might fall, an example against the proud man who might be moved to assert in the face of temptation, "Fortiter teneo": " I hold fast." "Valet ergo hoc exemplum ad id," Augustine summarizes, "ut timeamus felicitatem": "This example is useful in that it teaches us to fear felicity." That is, David's example is useful, in part, because it is unsettling. It is lamentable that David should have fallen in the first place, "Sed factum est" ("But it did happen"). In interpreting David the sinner as a morally useful exemplar, Augustine makes a virtue of necessity: against his own inclination otherwise, he struggles with the insistence of the divine text on David's humanity, and finds there a significance that would influence not only later psalm commentators, but the authors of medieval religious prose and verse. With the theme of David's penance, Augustine's sermon shifts from recounting Old Testament narrative to a more deliberate examination of Davidic imitation in connection with the language of Psalm 50, which Augustine and later commentators interpret as David's personal act of contrition. Augustine, of course, never direcdy discusses the words of Psalm 50 (or those of any other psalm) as literary models; he is interested in morals, not aesthetics. Like the commentators who follow him, he values David's poetry mainly as moral teaching; its beauties as verse, while they must be admitted, are functional, a means toward an end not an end in themselves. David is a model for all sinners, a group of whom poets are a minor subclass. Nevertheless, in concentrating on the language of David's poetry as an expression of the Psalmist's feelings, and as a pattern for the thoughts and feelings of others, Augustine and the other commentators imply a nascent poetic, a theory of the purpose and value of poetry and of the role of the poet based in the Psalms and the character of David himself.

L'umile salmista Turning from exegesis to poetry, we might explore how one prominent medieval poet, Dante, articulated more explicitly than Augustine could the

David the "Maker"

29

close relationship between David's humilitas and the issue of poetic authority—between biblical narrative and medieval aesthetics. Dante may be taken up as a typical rather than a special case in a book about the Psalms and Middle English literature, since many of the interpretive commonplaces he draws on are like, in some cases identical to, ones available to Middle English poets and prose writers. Quotations from and allusions to the Psalms run throughout the Commedia, the focus of my discussion here. But it is, more particularly, in his use of David as afigurefor the poet that Dante's aesthetic exploitation of the Psalms emerges. Dante most carefully associates David's poetic powers with his humility in Purgatorio X, where he calls David "l'umile salmista" and describes him dancing joyously before the ark of the covenant as it is returned to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6.16-23). 35 Dante's choice of the epithet "umile" is slightly odd here, since applied to David it would evoke in most medieval readers, almost as a reflex, an image of the penitential, self-effacing Psalmist. That is not, however, the pose David adopts before the ark: Li precedeva al benedetto vaso, trescando abrato, l'umile salmista; e più e men che re era in quel caso. Di contra, effigiata ad una vista d'un gran palazzo, Micol ammirava si come donna dispettosa e trista. (64-69) [There, preceding the blessed vessel, dancing girt up, was the humble Psalmist, and on that occasion he was both more and less than king. Opposite, figured at a window of a great palace, was Michal looking on, like a woman vexed and scornful. ] Dante relies on his audience's knowledge of the fuller biblical account of these events: overjoyed at the return of the ark, David, who has just been anointed King of Israel, takes off his regal garments and dances before it in his loincloth. Michal, Saul's daughter, witnesses the dance from a window and derides David for displaying himself foolishly before serving girls. David defends himself, however, by declaring that his performance —his prophetic frenzy—is for God and not them, and he goes on to assert that he would debase himself even further to give greater praise to heaven.36 Dante contrasts Michal's pride and David's humility in a more compressed way than the biblical account does: she looks down at the humble Psalmist from "un gran palazzo," an image for her haughtiness, her expres-

30

Interpreting the Psalms

sion one of despite ("dispettoza"). And in a wonderfully cryptic line, he summarizes the paradox implied in David's assertion that he serves God best by debasing himself. "In quel caso" may also carry the sense of "in that condition" — that is, upgirt and dancing before the ark. Although it may not appear that way, David's behavior is a form of pious self-humiliation, which makes him "both more and less a king" ("e più e men che re era"). To the unenlightened, like Michal, he seems to have abandoned his kingly authority, or become less a king on account of his behavior. But in his own eyes, and presumably God's, he is more kingly and more authoritative in humbling himself before and praising the King of kings. His folly in men's eyes is wisdom in the eyes of God, and his only apparently self-expressive behavior confers on him a measure of authority he could not have merely as a monarch, an authority derived from true self-knowledge and humility. It is this same authority that the Latin commentators see David as possessing in his battle against Goliath, that he is destined to lose in commiting the sins of homicide and adultery (both acts of prideful self-assertion), and that he regains by composing the penitential and prayerful poetry of the Psalms. Teodolinda Barolini sees in this episode from the Commedia Dante trying to assert that the paradoxical greatness of his poem lies in its low or vulgar style, its use of the vernacular, and in its lowly genre, comedy rather than tragedy.37 This may be the case, but more is at stake in this passage than aesthetic questions about the appropriateness of low styles and genre to lofty subjects. Dante seems to be struggling in the episode with his sense of himself as a poet, and more broadly with the idea of what exactly a religious poet is. Among other things, the Commedia is about Dante's struggle with the idea of the poet as penitent, and with the notion that poetic authority is grounded not in self-promotion, but in a humilitas derived from an awareness of the contingent nature of one's own fame and, indeed, of the entire poetic enterprise on divine approbation. No one who knows much about Dante's biography would think to call him humble. Yet that is how he represents himself in his alter ego at the start of the Commedia·,confused and threatened, lost in "una selva oscura" which represents, on the tropological level at least, moral crisis. It is while in this confusing place or state that Dante describes his meeting with his chief model from among the pagan poets, Virgil. The pilgrim Dante addresses Virgil abjectly: Quando vidi costui nel gran diserto, "Miserere di me" gridai a lui, "qual che tu sie, od ombra od uomo certo." (I.64-66)

David the "Maker"

31

[When I saw him in that vast desert, I cried to him, "Have pity on me whatever you are, shade or living man!"] The address, as Barolini points out, combines the Latin cue to Psalm 50, the chief penitential psalm, and Dante's vernacular.38 It is thefirstinvocation in the Commedia of David, "canto che per doglia / del fallo disse 'Miserere mei' " ("the singer who, through sorrow for his sin, cried 'Miserere mei' "; Paradiso XXXII, lines 1 1 - 1 2 ) . But the address does not simply anticipate later references to David in the poem. These are the pilgrim Dante's very first words in the poem, and they color the rest of his discourse. They mark, indelibly, the condition of his narrator as under moral threat and penitential: prey to error and moral confusion, at that point in his life when he is unable to help himself. Spoken to Virgil, the words are also a qualification of the Latin poet's literary authority, and by implication (since Virgil is chief among pagan poets ), the authority of all pagan verse. This is the first of Dante's several attempts in the Commedia to modify the authoritative idea of the poet as writer of epic, bequeathed to him by Virgil. Later in hisfirstencounter with Virgil in the Inferno, after Dante asks the pagan poet to identify himself, he goes on to praise Virgil as the source of his "bello stile," his "beautiful style," and then calls him his "maestro" ("master") and "autore" ("author," with the medieval sense "authority") : "Or sei tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte che spandi di parlar si largo fiume?" risposi io lui con vergognosa fronte. "O de gli altri poeti onore e lume, vogliami il lungo studio e il grande amore che m'ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume. 'Tu sei lo mio maestro e il mio autore; tu sei solo colui da cui io tolsi lo bello stile che in ha fatto onore." (I.79) ["Are you, then, that Virgil, that fount which pours forth so broad a stream of speech?" I answered him, my brow covered with shame. "O glory and light of all other poets, may the long study and the great love that have made me search your volume avail me! You are my master and my author. You alone are he from whom I took the fair style that has done me honor."] This praise is undercut, however, when Dante then asks Virgil to assist him in escaping from the wood; Virgil agrees to be his guide, but indicates that

32

Interpreting the Psalms

he can take Dante only so far in his spiritual and poetic journey, because he was a rebel against God, that is, because he is a pagan: . . . quello imperador che lassù regna perch'io fui ribellante a la sua legge, non vuol che in sua citta per me si venga. (Li 24-126 ) [the Emperor who reigns there above wills not that I come to His city, because I was rebellious to his law. ] Singleton glosses this remark as referring to the fact that Virgil died a pagan: "Only in this sense can Virgil mean that he rebelled against God's law."39 If, however, we understand this Virgil not just as an individual figure, but as one wha represents the vetus poetice that Dante's psalmic poetry must exceed, the comment may allude to the story of how Moses, himself a divinely inspired poet,40 cannot lead his people into the Promised Land because he prevaricated against God (Numbers 27.14). Moses can lead the Israelites to the border of the Promised Land, but cannot enter it himself; likewise, Virgil in the Commedia can lead the pilgrim Dante through hell, but not into heaven, because his poetry looks ahead only obscurely to Christ. To be sure, Virgil is a prophet: in the Middle Ages the fourth Eclogue was interpreted as a veiled prophecy of the birth of Christ. Virgil, however, is not a conscious, deliberate prophet; he does not realize that the Holy Spirit speaks through him, and as a result his prophecy is indirect. It is, in short, not as authoritative as the unique prophecy of the Psalmist, David. Dante's praise of Virgil in the Commedia is not insincere or ironic. As a Christian poet, in this his most sublime work, Dante must keep his artistic priorities in order. His alter ego, in moral crisis, praises Virgil; but the poet Dante, who has already overstepped his Virgilian epic model by rewriting it, qualifies the praise by aligning his poem with a Davidic standard rather than the Virgilian one. By first praising Virgil as the source of his beautiful style and then qualifying that praise, Dante implies an understanding of the value difference between style and substance in verse which is at the heart of medieval aesthetics and, more particularly, psalm poetics. Poetic style, eloquentia, is important in medieval aesthetic theory largely as a means of conveying ethical truth. "In verbis verum amare, non verba," Augustine writes in De Doctrina Christiana, "in words to love the truth, not the words."41 Dante has learned from the accidents of Virgil's

David the "Maker"

33

beautiful style, and has even patterned his career as aspiring epic poet on that of Virgil; but finding Virgil's substance limited, he must surpass him — in the allegory of the Commedia, he must leave him behind, for other theologically correct guides (Aquinas, Bernard of Clairvaux, Beatrice), and for other poetic models (the Psalms). In Canto I of the Inferno, the pilgrim Dante needs Virgil's guidance: his poetry casts a helpful moral light, however dim. It is not, however, as bright as the heavenly illumination David acknowledges at the start of Psalm 26: "Dominus illuminatio mea." In his opening allusion to Psalm 50, the poet Dante has his alter ego point to a more definitive poetic standard, and a more ethically sound (if humbler) role for the poet. Virgil needs Dante: to keep his fame alive by inscribing his name in the Commedia, and to fulfill the prophecy only dimly apparent in his own verse, by revealing as clearly as possible in the Commedia the penitential soul's progress toward heaven. Virgil's poetry could bring Dante only so far in realizing his aesthetic ideal. David in the Psalms, however, provides another kind of model, whereby a writer might increase the force of his poetry and elevate his discourse by self-consciously adopting a penitential attitude. It might seem an act of pride to aim at establishing such an art. However, as David's dance before the ark in 2 Samuel illustrates, what seems like pride to men can be profound humility in the sight of God. The continuities between Dante's psalm poetic and Middle English moral writing that uses the Psalms become evident if we compare Dante's use of the David-Michal encounter with some elementary exegesis of the same story in a little known, late fourteenth-century moral treatise, the Book to a Mother (MS Bodley 416). In this work, a child giving moral advice to his mother draws an extended comparison between David's harp and the human soul, a comparison based in the idea developed by Augustine that "psalmody" means not simply giving praise to God in words or song, but by behaving virtuously. (The conceit of the entire treatise, that a young child might be wiser than his parent, may itself be psalm-based: "Ex ore infantium et lactantium perfecisti laudem, propter inimicos tuos, / Ut destruas inimicum et ultorem"; "Out of the mouth of infants and of sucklings you have perfected praise, because of your enemies, so that you may destroy the enemy and the avenger" [ Ps 8.3 ]. ) The child explains that David used harp-song to cast seven devils out of himself and King Saul, just as the gospels record that Christ cast seven devils out of Mary Magdalene. From this scriptural base, the child develops his comparison:

34

Interpreting the Psalms But us bihouejj take good kepe J>at we legge not oure harpe moist for lesing of hure soun, J>at is j?at we leue not to holde godis hestis, for no moist & inordinate loue of wordli finges, but euere hyng oure harpe an he¡3 fro f>e er[>e, in [5e lyte sonne bernes of rijtwisnesse. And so shulle we holde out of us deuelis, & wij> Jse soun of oure good lyuinge, wif> J>e grace of god caste out deuelis of ojjere bisiden us. And fjis were a likinge song to god & to his angelis, murgure [merrier] ¡3an alle J)e murjje J>at euere was or mai be in {Ms world wijxmten {sis. (fol. i r )

Like the strings of a harp, our souls must be kept dry rather than moist, morally tuned rather than limp, if we are to be able to please God with "the sound of our virtuous living," our own moral psalmody. The closing hyperbole drives the message home: this sort of wordless and tuneless song is more pleasing to God than any other—Middle English "mur£>e" referring here not to joy or pleasure in general, but specifically to music-making. Moreover, the child explains, the "song" of a well-tempered soul will not only cast devils from the temperate person himself, but with the help of grace will "caste out deuelis of ojjere bisiden us." This observation brings the activity of the moral self closer to David's, when the Bible describes him casting devils out of Saul by his playing ( i Samuel 16.14-23), and establishes personal reform as a basis for the moral instruction of others, following David's depiction of his own reform and its consequences in Psalm 50. The writer of the Book to Λ Mother, then, is concerned not only with understanding David's harp as emblematic, but with articulating a view of the moral life as one in imitation of David. The idea of Davidic imitation is implied in the harp-soul analogy, but the writer only makes it explicit when he identifies the double function of our own psalmody or moral living: the good it does us, and the potential good it does others. Like the sinful David, who with the help of God's grace became the Bible's preeminent moral prophet, others through virtuous living can become authoritative moral teachers. As David's life was exemplary for them, their lives may serve as examples to others. In developing this idea, the child goes on to allude to the DavidMichal story, the same Old Testament episode Dante represents on one of the walls of Purgatory. H e begins with a moral injunction, and ends by paraphrasing part of the Vulgate: ]>erfore my leue dere modir, knowe Jses ten strenges & lerne to tempre f>in harpe, £>at f>e stringes be wel streynned whun crist wol sende his angelis & eke com him self aftur J31 soule, f>at J>ou mowe synge Jjanne in J>in harpe an hi3 song, lepinge upward wij) alle J>i uertues bifore Jdì lord, as kyng dauid dide wij)

David the "Maker"

35

alle his uertues, bifore Jx; arke of oure lord, |sat Jx: ten hestis weren inne. And {x)U3 wordliche folk Jjat knewe not f>is scorne £>e for for [ because ] Jxm letest so litel bi thi self as dide dauid J)es wise, neuere J>e latter, crie ]x>u nomore J>an dauid dide, & lerne his answere whanne he seide, "ForsoJ>e, god lyuejj, for i wol pleie bifore him, £>at ches me raj)ir Jsan |JÌ fadir or ony of f>i fadur hous, & comaundede f>at ich werre duk upon J>e folk of irael. I schal pleie, & i schal be maad more foul ¡san y haue be, and i schal be humble in myn owne eÍ3es." (fol. ir"v)

Just as David's extravagant praise of God appeared foolish to Michal, the life of one who imitates David will often seem foolish to those who remain unduly attached to the things of this world. The child's phrase, "for Jx>u setest so litel bi thi self," suggests a variety of reasons why the worldly scorn those who imitate David: because David's imitators have no regard for personal repute; because they have lost their sense of identity in a kind of spiritual ecstasy; but also, perhaps, because they have actively and deliberately effaced the self by the penitential practice of casting out their personal demons, the agents of their self-love. As we saw in our analysis of the Commedia, the David who danced joyously before the ark and who cried out piteously to God for mercy are the same; his prophetic frenzy and penitential attitude both signify his deep humility. The language of this passage from the Book to a Mother plays on a series of paradoxes: leaping up before the Lord is a form of bowing down to him, "pleie" is a type of moral earnestness, being "maad more foul" or degraded is spiritually uplifting, parading one's sense of inner, spiritual renewal is a type of humility. Or to revert to Dante's aesthetic understanding of David, a certain kind of poetic self-expression, the psalmic kind, is actually a form of self-effacement and praise of God. It should be noted, however, that the child in the Book to a Mother always cautions that the one who seeks to imitate David should "crie . . . nomore J>an dauid dide" and should "lerne" her answer to the world from David's own words. Imitating David involves self-restraint. The temperate moral life prescribes moderation in one's humility, resistance to a selfindulgent rather than self-effacing praise of God. The process of imitating David's humility requires persistent vigilance, a constant negotiation of the narrow space between profound humility and an insidious pride. David's example is easily misread. Thus medieval psalm interpretation, and Middle English texts that draw on this interpretive tradition, tend to emphasize two attitudes: receptivity to the moral provocativeness of the Psalms (their frankly emotive character ), and an appreciation of their rhetorical methods,

36

Interpreting the Psalms

the means whereby David's poetry helps to direct the spiritually favorable impulses it provokes. How, these texts ask their readers, does David's spontaneous, penitential weeping become a careful form of poetic and moral making? In what ways does David, in the Psalms, objectify his personal experience, in order to point up its exemplary significance?

Weeping and "Making," or How a Psalm Teaches And prayer is more Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding12 Medieval approaches to questions about how emotions become moral teaching in the Psalms are resolutely formalist. They tend to emphasize the rhetorical structures and patterns of David's poetry, and how these direct in very deliberate ways the powerful emotions provoked by David's sentiments and language. Augustine, after all, was trained as a rhetorician; Peter Lombard was a schoolman. Foremost among the early rhetorical interpreters of psalm teaching, however, was the late antique author, Cassiodorus (ca. 490-583). It is difficult to assess the impact of Cassiodorus's works on late Middle English culture. They were certainly less well known than Augustine's. Peter Lombard's psalm catena was one means of access, although here Cassiodorus's insights appear only in snatches, up against bits from Augustine, pseudoRemi of Auxerre, and others.43 There is no coherent sense, as one reads through the Lombard, of Cassiodorus's system of psalm interpretation — its almost architectonic quality. For example, Cassiodorus's discussion of each of the 150 psalms falls into four distina parts: an introduction to the psalm, based in an analysis of the psalm's titulus\ a broad structural division of the psalm into its major parts {divisto psalmi) ; an explanation of the parts, verse by verse (expositw psalmi)\ and a conclusion or summing up of the explanation (conclusio psalmi), which sometimes introduces new points. Cassiodorus aimed, in the Expositio Psalmorum, to translate the homiletics of Augustine's Enarrationes (most of them originally written as sermons) into a monastic textbook: a tool for classroom education. What he lost in rhetorical immediacy he gained in comprehensiveness: his discussions of individual psalms are full without, like the Lombard's, being bloated.

David the "Maker"

37

Nevertheless, his educational aims are behind why the Expositio Psalmorum has suffered unfair critical neglect. The work seems, on a superficial reading, too programmatic, an attempt to parse the language of the Psalter while neglecting its poetry.44 In fact, however, Cassiodorus's emotional response to the Psalms made a very deep imprint on the Expositio Psalmorum, so that in many cases his exegesis moves considerably beyond Augustine's in its personal, affective character. Throughout the Expositio Psalmorum, Cassiodorus examines the Psalter from a dual perspective. On the one hand he records, in sometimes exclamatory tones, his responses to the emotional character of David's poetry—its successful communication of David's own sentiments. On the other hand, he plunders the Psalms for examples of the most outrageous rhetorical tropes and figures, arguing on the quality of these that pagan grammarians and poets must have derived their knowledge of such materials from the ancient Scriptures themselves. To a modern reader, this approach may seem almost schizophrenic. In reading the Expositio Psalmorum, one shifts back and forth constantly between passages of imaginative, emotional prose and dry stretches of rhetorical analysis. To Cassiodorus, however, these two approaches to the Psalms converge. His explanations of their rhetorical structures clarify the basis of his emotional readings (many read as genuine efforts to work through first impressions), and indicate how such emotional responses might be turned to exegetical advantage. We might begin an analysis of the relationship between emotion and rhetoric in the Psalms by using Cassiodorus's discussion of Psalm 50, the Miserere, as a guide. Of all the psalms, the Miserere is the most important. It concludes and sums up thefirstthird of the Psalter, which treats of the soul's need for contrition, and is therefore one of David's most emotional poems. Its content is directly connected, by its titulus, to the most significant moment in David's personal history for the later Middle Ages: his passionate request for pity from God, for his sins of homicide and adultery. Middle English paraphrases of this psalm circulated independent of the rest of the Psalter, as separate, self-contained lyrics.45 Reading or reciting Psalm 50, in Latin or in English, was thought to confer special spiritual benefits on the soul. For instance, in A Reuelacyon schemed to ane holy woman now one late tyme, the author explains to her audience that reciting the Miserere immediately confers "trewe knaweyng o f . . . defautes" ("accurate knowledge of one's sins": a kind of instant examination of conscience) and protects the troubled soul against "wikkede sperites" that might threaten it with various temptations.46 This talismanic quality of Psalm 50, its efficacy as a charm

38

Interpreting the Psalms

against demons, is the flip side of another unique quality medieval writers ascribed to the Miserere — its special ability to assuage God's anger: Si vis delere tua crimina, die miserere; Per miserere mei flectitur Ira dei. [If you want to wipe away your sins, say the Miserere; throughMiserere mei God's anger is averted.] This Latin couplet appears immediately after a copy of Richard Maidstone's Middle English paraphrase of Psalm so in Advocate's Library M S 19.3.1 (fols. 97, 87-89 γ ) , in the hand of the same scribe who copied out the psalm. It is followed by a Latin indulgence from Pope Clement V (1305-14), in the same hand, explaining how the Miserere should be used as a meditation: first one ought, with a devout heart, to hear it read; then one ought to say the words to oneself, genuflect, and incline one's eyes to the ground. 47 In short, in using this paraphrase devotionally, readers should imitate David both in word and deed. As David's personal act of contrition and a model for all sinners, of all the Psalms the Miserere is most likely to reveal the true nature of the relationship between weeping and "making" in the Psalter. Cassiodorus explains, in his divisio, that Psalm 50 is appropriately fashioned in five sections, because "all sins are gathered under the five senses, [and thus] the evil incurred can be expiated by the same number of headings" (494) ("sicut quinario sensu peccatum omne colligitur, sic totidem partibus contracta iniquitas expietur" [454]). The reason Cassiodorus gives for his division is arbitrary. This is clear from the fact that he does not explain which of the five senses is connected with which psalm verse. But the division itself is based in clear shifts in emphasis and tone in the psalm's poetry: ι. "satisfactio perfectissimae humilitatis": "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your great mercy"; 2. "confidentia misericordiae Domini": "You shall sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed . . . "; 3. "petitur": 'Turn away your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities...";

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39

4. "subiungit omnes peccatores ad desiderium supplicationis": "I will teach the unjust your ways ..."; 5. "causa memorator Ecclesiae": "Deal favorably, O Lord, in your good will with Sion; that the walls of Jerusalem may be built up." (454) The names Cassiodorus gives to each of the five sections of the psalm are based on the content of these self-defined sections; Psalm 50 falls naturally into these parts. Moreover, although Cassiodorus himself does not make this point, it is clear from his division of the psalm that he regards its structure as symmetrical, organized around the central petition of verses 1 1 - 1 4 , to which Cassiodorus pays special attention in his verse-by-verse expositions: Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis, Et omnes iniquitates meas dele. Cor mundum crea in me, Deus, Et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis. Ne proicias me a facie tua, Et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me, Redde mihi laetitiam salutaris tui, Et spiri tu principali confirma me. [Turn away your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create a clean heart in me, O God: and renew a right spirit within my bowels. Cast me not away from your face; and take not your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and strengthen me with a perfect spirit. ] Commenting on section 5, Cassiodorus adds a remark that implies that the psalm contains an even broader structural division: between the "devout supplication" ("supplicatio deuota") of sections 1-4, and the concluding "announcement of the joys of salvation to come" ("uenturae salutis gaudia enuntiantur"), if everyone repents. That is, the argument of Psalm 50 begins with David's sober reflections on his own sinful condition, and concludes with the triumphant implications of his repentance for the entire Church.

40

Interpreting the Psalms

In discussing Psalm 50's first verse, "Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam" ("Have mercy on me, O God, according to your great mercy"), Cassiodorus reimagines in vivid detail the actual scene of David's penance: Rex ille potentissimus, et multarum gentium uictor egregius, cum se audisset a Nathan propheta redarguì, peccatum suum non erubuit publice confiteri, nec ad noxias excusationes cucurrit, ad quas maxime impudens festinat humanitas; sed repente salutari humilitate prostratus, ipsum se ofFerens Deo, purpuratus paenitens piis lacrimis supplicauit. Fidelis enim seruus non assumit callosas infidas, sed cito intellegit commissa delieta. Mirabile initium! Dicendo enim ludici: miserere mei, locum examini cognoscitur abstulisse. Vox ista non discutitur, sed sub tranquillitate semper auditur; solaque res est per quam possimus rei sine aliqua contrarietate defendi. Petebat quidem misericordiam, quam definire non poterat; sed tarnen peccatis suis eam grandiorem omnimodis sentiebat. (454) [When that most powerful king, an outstanding victor over many nations, heard himself rebuked by the prophet Nathan, he did not blush to confess his sins openly or have recourse to the harmful excuses to which men haste in their utter shamelessness. He at once prostrated himself with salutary humility, offered himself to God, and repentant in his prince's purple made entreaty with holy tears. The faithful servant does not cling to brash denials, but quickly realizes the faults which he has committed. What a marvelous beginning! By saying to the Judge: "Have mercy on me" he is seen to have removed the need for a trial. These words are not disputed, but always heard in an atmosphere of calm. This is the only means by which we can be defended when on trial without opposition. He sought the mercy of heart which he could not define, but which he felt in every way greater than his sins. ] ( 495 ) A marvelous beginning, indeed! The drama of Cassiodorus's prose makes it seem as if he is reading the psalm verse, and imagining the story behind it, for the first time. He not only touches on striking details of David's penance, using a sort of hyperalliteration to underscore the poignant disparity between David's abject humility and his "prince's purple," between his private anguish and his public standing ("purpuratus paenitens piis lacrimis supplicauit") — but ventures to explain the psychology behind David's poetic choices, as it relates to the tension at this moment between David and God's representative, Nathan. The immediacy of the phrase "Miserere mei" conveys both David's quick apprehension of his guilt, but also his desperate realization of the extent of God's anger. Words like "Miserere mei," Cassiodorus explains, are heard calmly by judges; their sincerity is not questioned. David's desperate request for mercy is at once both spontaneous

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41

and calculated, intended to express contrition in as heartfelt a way as possible, and designed to divert God's justifiable wrath. The rising tide of Cassiodorus's rhetoric carries one from his initial praise of David as "that most powerful king" to his crucial metaphor for the chastened Psalmist: "fidelis seruus," God's "faithful servant," tracing David's fall from the heights of temporal authority to his reclaiming moral authority, through penance. Cassiodorus sustains this sense of the drama of David's penance through his explanations of the subsequent psalm verses. For instance, in commenting on verse 5, "Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego agnosco / Et peccatum meum contra me est semper" ("For I recognize my iniquity, and my sin is always before me"), Cassiodorus describes the mental condition of someone haunted by his past: Perfecta enim paenitentia est futura cauere peccata, et lugere praeterita. Primo enim post ipsum fuit scelus, quando propheta interrogante respondit dignum esse morte qui alienam ouem pauperis concupiuit, tunc quando peccatum suum non credebat esse deflendum: modo autem eum paenitet, cum prostrarne suppliciter ingemiscit, contra se stare dicit delicta, quasi quamdam imaginem figuratam. Semper adiecit, hoc est quod iugiter aspicit et cum oculos claudit. (456) [Perfect repentance lies in avoiding future sins and lamenting those of the past. Initially after his sin, when the prophet questioned him, David replied that the man who coveted the poor man's ewe was worthy of death; at that time David did not believe that his sin should be lamented. But now as he prostrates himself and utters suppliant groans, he regrets that the sin stands before him like some shadow of a ghost. He added: "Always," because he continually sees the sin, even when he closes his eyes. ] (496-497)

The caesura at the middle of the Latin psalm verse ("agnosco / et peccatum meum") recovers for Cassiodorus the tense moment between the end of Nathan's parable and David's being told by Nathan that he is the man in the story, that shocking second in which Nathan sets before David his own iniquity. On another level, however, Cassiodorus sees in the pause that moment when David took over Nathan's role, became his own accuser, summoning up time and again, in his mind and in his poetry, the spectre of his crimes. There may even be, in the phrase "imaginem figuratam," cryptic praise for David's evocative poetic powers. The Psalmist's sins haunt his memory, but they also revisit him in the exquisite language and figures of the penitential psalms, where others, too, can read about and learn from them. Likewise, in his explanation of verse 12, "Cor mundum crea in me,

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Interpreting the Psalms

Deus, / Et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis" ("Create a clean heart in me, O God: and renew a right spirit within my entrails"), Cassiodorus stresses the connection between David's penitential emotions and the rhetorical structures he uses to record them. This verse, Cassiodorus explains, is to be especially scrutinized, so that its sense "can shine out more clearly for us" ("ut nobis sensus possit euidentius elucere"). David's use of the imperative "Crea," for example, Cassiodorus understands as conveying his particular eagerness and fervor as a penitent: Petit ergo propheta tale mundum cor sibi creati, quod iam peccatis impellentibus commoueri minime potuisset ad culpam; sed stabilitate defixum, bonum non possit mutare propositum. Hoc utique sanctis post resurrectionem dabitur. Sed paenitens iste bonorum auidus, uenturi praemii amore succensus, quod in futuro prouenire poterat, hoc sibi concedi praesenti tempore postulabat. (462) [The prophet asks that a clean heart be created in him, such as could not possibly have been stirred to repent its guilt when impelled by its sins, but which once established in constancy could not change its goodly plan of life. This will be the dispensation to holy men in particular after the resurrection. But this penitent who was eager for good things and fired with love for the future reward demanded that what could accrue in time to come should be granted him now.] (502-503) David pursues spiritual renewal, Cassiodorus implies, with the same gusto he brought to adultery. Indeed, in repentance he actually transforms his pernicious carnal avidity into a burning desire for God. That he does so at the start of a verse which concludes with a pointed reference to his adultery is a mark of the "liveliness" ("uiuacitate") of David's poetry: Addidit in uisceribus, unde nouerat adulterii detestabile crimen exiisse. Vtrisque enim partibus remedium petebat, quoniam de utroque peccauerat. Et intuere quanta uiuacitate se desideret expiari, ut intellegas eum nullum tale ulterius committere uoluisse delictum. (462) [He added: "Within my entrails," the place from which he knew the hateful sin of adultery emerged. He sought a remedy from both regions (his heart and his loins) since he had sinned in both. Observe the liveliness with which he longs to be forgiven, so that you may understand that he wished to commit no such sin any more.] (503) Cassiodorus's persistent use of introductory words like "Addidit" return the reader, imaginatively, to the moment of the psalm's composition. The purpose of exegesis, in the Expositio Psalmorum, is to make readers aware of the

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43

discrete artistic decisions David had to make in recording his moral history in the Psalms, and to explain those decisions in terms of their exact poetic effects. One would not want to give the impression that Cassiodorus is always as engaging in his analyses as he is in the passages we have been examining. Frequendy he takes time to explain one of David's especially exotic tropes, such as the enthymematicus syllogismus in Psalm 50.6: Tibi solipeccaui et malum coram tefeci: ut iustificeris in sermonibus tuis et uincas cum iudicaris. Hie iterum enthymematicus syllogismus apparet quern in uigesimo psalmo i am iam diximus. Cuius propositio est: Dominus iustificatur in sermonibus suis et uincit cum iudicatur. Huic subiungitur in conclusione praemissa sententia: tibi igitur soli peccaui et malum coram te feci. Hoc in redendis syllogismis sine culpa fieri, more ueterum constat esse permissum. Nunc ad exponenda uerba redeamus. (456-57) ["To thee only have I sinned, and have done evil before thee: that thou mayst be justified in thy words, and mayst overcome when thou art judged." Here a second example of a meditative syllogism appears; we have already mentioned this at Psalm 20. The proposition of it is: "The Lord is justified in His words, and he overcomes when He is judged." To this is joined as conclusion the statement earlier set down, 'To thee only have I sinned, and have done evil before thee." It is clear that the custom of the ancients allowed this practice without censure in the expression of syllogisms. Now let us return to the explanation of the words. ] ( 497 )

This is the language of the pedant, and Cassiodorus treats it almost as a digression in his psalm exposition. It is worth noting that such a trope occurs in Psalm 50.6, as evidence in Cassiodorus's argument against the priority of pagan rhetoric, but the point is hardly essential to an argument about the relationship between emotions and art in the Psalter. Cassiodorus's expositions are best when they do not sacrifice a direct, emotional apprehension of the Psalms to baroque rhetorical analyses, but stay close to David's most frequent and subtly used tropes: various types of repetition, parallelism, rhetorical inversion, and amplification, or what Robert Alter has termed the "forms of faith" in psalm poetry—"a finely tensile semantic weave that one would not expect from the seeming conventionality of the language."48 A literate medieval reader (that is, one who could read Latin) would not have had to consult Cassiodorus's Expositio Psaltnorum to appreciate the

carefully woven fabric of psalm verse. Everywhere one looks in Psalm 50, one confronts the imposition of a deceptively simple semantic order on David's chaotic and exuberant emotions — the very artfulness Cassiodorus writes about. For instance, the Miserere opens, following its titulus, with

44

Interpreting the Psalms

one of the most famous pleas for mercy in literature, the one Dante borrowed for his alter ego's first words in the Commedia. I have altered the normal line patterns to point up the verse's parallelisms: Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam, et secundum multitudinem miserationem tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam. The intensity of feeling in Psalm 50's opening verse is communicated both by repetition and parallelism: the imperative "Miserere" conveys initially David's sense of desperation, but this sense is reinforced and amplified by the imperative "dele," "blot out," which not only explains David's request (he wants mercy in the form of absolution), but anticipates the psalm's two key topoi: the sinful soul as dirty and unhealthy, and its antonym, the topos of moral cleanness or purity. Across the entire psalm, David uses imperatives parallel to "Miserere" and "dele" twenty times, in each case adding to the reader's sense of his abject condition and inability to help himself. Equally apparent in this opening verse, however, are parallelisms and inversions, which work at once both to aggravate and to alleviate the reader's sense of David's desperation. Unlike "Miserere" and "dele," "magnam misericordiam tuam" and "multitudinem miserationum tuarum" are virtually synonymous — an instance of simple repetition. But they are arranged with the imperatives in a chiastic structure, the first phrase following an imperative, the second preceding one. This chiasm brackets the thought; it conveys the emotional intensity of David's plea by repetition, but by formal rhetorical inversion suggests a controlled, artful expression of that intensity. David practices this rhetoric of containment throughout the penitential psalms, and in many of the other psalms as well. Here, in the Miserere, he uses it — with slight variation — in the very next verse: Amplius lava me

ab

iniquitate mea,

a

peccato meo

et m unda me.

David the "Maker"

45

The suspension of the imperative for three syllables, by "Amplius," serves two purposes. First, it stresses the magnitude of David's request. By asking for a thorough washing, David points up the extent of his sin. As Cassidorus remarks: Studiose debet diluì, qui criminum ueneno fuscatus est; quia incuriose non abluitur, qui tenebrosa infectione maculatur. (455) [The one who is stained with the poison of wicked deeds ought to be cleansed carefully. He who is spotted with the contamination of darkness should not be washed carelessly. ] ( 496 ) Cassiodorus's psalm text, however, read "usquequaque" (in every way, or everywhere) for the Vulgate's "amplius," so for him the first word of the verse simply suggests the greatness of David's guilt. By contrast, the Vulgate reading looks ahead to the thorough cleansing implied by "munda," thereby reinforcing rather than disrupting the verse's chiastic structure. Second, "amplius" suggests the greatness of God's mercy, which is able to cleanse David's soul so thoroughly, thereby recalling "magnam" and "multitudinem" in verse 1 and, like the entire Psalter, combining the two essential Davidic attitudes of remorse and praise. We should recall, at this point, Cassiodorus's remark concerning how David is an ideal teacher because he instructs in two ways: by his example and by words. Insofar as David's words represent, in striking ways, his sentiments, they enhance his force as a moral exemplar. Moreover, the kinds of repetitions, parallelisms, and topoi we have been discussing in the Psalms make David's words especially memorable. Anyone who has read the Psalms straight through will be struck by their self-reflexive quality: the Psalter insistendy quotes itself, as David works variations on a relatively limited repertoire of poetic formulae. These formulae, by the end of Psalm 150, make up a storehouse of moral clichés. One frequent psalm topos is the representation of sin as various forms of bondage. Throughout the Psalter, this topos occurs in two basic forms: in the figure of temptation or sin as a snare or trap, and in the figure of sin as captivity. To quote just three examples of the first type: Laqueum paraverunt pedibus meis, Et incurvaverunt an im am meam. (Ps 56.7) [They prepared a snare for my feet; and they bowed down my soul. ]

46

Interpreting the Psalms Subito sagittabunt eum, et non timebunt; Firmaverunt sibi sermonem nequam. Narraverunt ut absconderent laqueos; Dixerunt: Quis videbiteos? (PS63.6) [They will shoot on him on a sudden, and will not fear: they are resolute in their wickedness. They have talked of hiding snares; they have said: Who shall see them? ] . . . Deus meus, sperabo in eum. Quoniam ipse liberavit me de laqueo venantìum, Et a verbo aspero. (Ps 90.2-90.3) [ . . . M y God, in him will I trust. For he has delivered me from the snare of the hunters: and from the sharp word. ]

In each case, the poetic meaning turns on one word "laqueus," a noose, snare, or trap used to catch small birds and animals. But the commentators explain the word, in each of these contexts, figuratively: "laqueus" means deceits or subtleties, the sorts of deceptions that Satan and his agents use to entrap the bird-like soul. This general figurative sense is constant across the three psalm verses. Nevertheless, in each case the specific ethical valence of the topos is slighdy different. For example, in Psalm 56.7, the laqueus figure, which here has special prominence because of the initial position of the word, conveys the soul's sense of entrapment, and its consequent inclination toward despair. Like Psalm 50, this psalm begins "Miserere mei," with David crying out to God for help, and "laqueus" becomes a metonomy for moral danger, juxtaposed sharply with an earlier figure in the psalm—the protective embrace of God's wings ("Et in umbra alarum tuarum sperabo, / Donee transeat iniquitas"; "And in the shadow of your wings will I hope, until iniquity pass away"; 2). Furthermore, since the second half of the verse containing the laqueus figure emphasizes the futility of the efforts of those who threaten the soul ("Foderunt ante faciem meam foveam, / Et inciderunt in earn"; "They dug a pit before my face, and they are fallen into it"), the moral bondage topos in Psalm 56 has a double effect: it not only points up the soul's near despair, but almost comically depicts the ineptitude of its enemies, given God's protection. The role of the same topos, in Psalms 63 and 90, is quite

David the "Maker"

47

different. In each of these verses, it functions in a more dramatic context. In Psalm 63, for instance, the soul imagines the treacherous conversations of the hunters, as they plan to trap it; David's words, figuratively, evoke the idea of moral ambush, which is introduced first with shooting rather than entrapment imagery. Psalm 90 uses the laqueus figure in a similar way, associating the moral threat the snare represents with the sharp words of the hunters, which the commentators explain as the darts of temptation Satan aims at the soul. In fact, in both Psalm 63 and 90, the moral bondage topos is subdy conflated with another prominent psalm cliché, the topos of spiritual battle. In monastic culture, the Psalms' repeated verbal patterns and clichés became part of a community's literary subconscious. According to the Benedictine Rule, all 150 psalms were to be read through by each monk, each week. Inevitably, the Psalter would be committed to memory, and deep reflection (ruminatio) on a particular psalm verse might evoke several others, as the mind concorded the Psalter for other discrete uses of the same topos.49 The initial phrase of Psalm 1, "Beatus vir" ("Blessed [or happy] is the man") might summon up at least two other psalms, 31 and 40, in which similar phrases appear initially, the mind thereby assembling a brief catalogue of what constitutes "blessedness," as David defines this quality in the Psalms: not partaking of the counsel of wicked men (Ps 1 ) ; having one's iniquities forgiven (Ps 31); understanding the plight of the poor (Ps 40). More than likely, the mind would conflate some of these separate but allusive verses, unintentionally. This would account for the phenomenon of slight "misquotations" from the Psalms in monastic writings, in which some of the verba from related psalm verses have bled into the verse the writer thinks he is quoting exacdy, from memory. There must have been a sense in which, for a medieval monastic audience, the Psalms were not a series of separate lyric poems, but one long poem. Fourteenth-century lay audiences, of course, could not hope to have experienced this sort of total immersion in psalm poetry. The entire Book of Psalms was translated several times in late medieval England: by Rolle, in his Middle English Psalter with comment ( 13 3 7-1349 ) ; by the Wycliffites, in their two complete English versions of the Bible (1380-1395); and in two other versions — the so-called Surtees Psalter, a Northern version in rhymed couplets (1250-1300), exhibiting several similarities to Rolle's prose version; and the West Midlands prose Psalter (1325-1350), once ascribed to the poet William of Shoreham.50 Not many people, however, would have had access to complete psalm translations. More than likely,

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Interpreting the Psalms

layfolk would have read only parts of the Psalter: in primers, the seven penitential psalms and the fifteen gradual psalms; in prose treatises and individual religious lyrics, individual psalm verses and groups of verses worked into English in homiletic contexts; in abbreviated psalters and psalm catenae, verses on similar themes gathered from across the Psalter.51 Also, two metrical paraphrases of the seven penitential psalms survive, clearly done for private use by devout lay readers,52 along with separate paraphrases of individual psalms, most notably the Miserere. Even from this limited exposure, though, one would develop a sense of the central role of repeated verbal patterns and topoi in the Psalms (Augustine and Cassiodorus grouped the seven penitential psalms, presumably, because of their especially repetitious phrases, parallelisms, and clichés). More to the point, the mainly clerical authors of Middle English prose and verse, for whom the Psalms should have constituted a daily private and public devotion, 53 were in a position to exploit the verbal patterns and topoi of the Psalms in various ways, in their vernacular writings for devout lay people. They would have found, in the repetition with variation which characterizes psalm discourse itself, a powerful impulse to work their own variations on David's themes, to amplify his emotional teachings by their rhetorical skills. To this point, we have been considering ways in which particular psalm verses and topoi accurately but artfully represent Davidic emotion. According to the Latin commentators, however, there is another, related sense in which the Psalms teach: David's poetry articulates—joins together, verbally—the disparate moral sentiments of the entire Christian community, sentiments that individuals, steeped in their peculiar sins, find inexpressible. As God's preeminent poet, David takes on ecclesia''s persona because she is unable to express to God, using her members' language, her own needs and thanks. David's artful arrangements of psalm language are at once distillations of his own subjective emotions, and fictive objectifications of the Christian community's sinful plight. This function of the Psalms recalls the episode in 2 Samuel 12, where the prophet Nathan confronts David with his own sin in the form of a parable about a rich man who abuses his poor neighbor. When David, blinded by sin, judges against the rich man, Nathan tells him, "You are the man!", and provokes at that moment David's contrition. The story Nathan tells David is an analogy for the king's own experience—not an exact reproduction of it, but an exact enough representation. So at first David does not recognize himself implicated in the story, but later at Nathan's urging he

David the "Maker"

49

must. By means of a fictional construct, an apparently objective version of David's subjective, personal experience, the king is enlightened. Robert Alter calls Nathan's technique a "rhetoric of entrapment," and finds it characteristic of most Old Testament prophetic poetry—although he does not include the Psalms in this classification.54 The Latin commentators, however, clearly did. Gregory the Great, citing the Nathan-David encounter in his Regulae Pastoralis, explains exactly how such a rhetorical strategem works: Aliquando autem cum hujus saeculi potentes arguuntur, prius per quasdam similitudines velut de alieno negotio requirendi sunt; et cum rectam sententiam quasi in alteram protulerint, tunc modis congruentibus de proprio reatu feriendi sunt; ut mens temporali potentia tumida contra corripientem nequáquam se erigat, quae suo sibi judicio superbiae cervicem calcat; et in nulla sui defensione se exerceat, quam sententia proprii oris ligat. [Sometimes, in taking to task the powerful of this world, they are first to be dealt with by drawing diverse comparisons in a case ostensibly concerning someone else. Then, when they give a right judgment on what apparendy is another's case, they are to be taken to task regarding their own guilt by a suitable procedure. Thus a mind puffed up with temporal power cannot possibly lift itself up against the reprover, for by its own judgment it has trodden on the neck of pride; and it cannot argue to defend itself, as it stands convicted by the sentence out of its own mouth. ] 5 5

Gregory's special concern here is with advising those who have to confront superiors with their shortcomings, but a mind puffed up ("mens . . . tumida") with pride is an apt description, tropologically speaking, of any sinful soul. What was good enough for David, Augustine might intone, is good enough for us. Like Nathan's story, the Psalms function as a rhetorical strategem, designed by David (under divine inspiration) to lead others to moral enlightenment. As with Christ's parables, the Psalms succeed best with those who have a capacity for metaphor, for understanding their own experiences when represented parabolically. Those who are morally obtuse, like David himself in 2 Samuel 12 or the scribes and Pharisees in the gospels, will have to be pressed toward self-understanding. They convict themselves by their lack of imagination. Properly understood, however, the Psalms are an exquisite similitude for everyone's sinful condition. God inspires poems like the Miserere, Cassiodorus explains immediately after a reference to David's having been rebuked by Nathan, "to entice [others] by every means to the grace of a most conciliatory confession" ("ad gratiam blan-

50

Interpreting the Psalms

dissimae confessionis modis omnibus inuitaret" [470]). The Psalms' enticements consist in David's profound emotions represented in artful form. Thus wrought, they guarantee that David's tears will, as Cassiodorus puts it so eloquently, run down posterity's cheeks; that his moral exemplarity will continue its beneficent effects by drawing forth holy tears from others. The moral force of David's pathetic weeping inheres in, and is amplified by, his consummate artistry as a "maker."

2. Imitating David

Ad te Nathan propheta non est missus, ipse David ad te missus est. Audi eum clamantem, et simul dama; audi gementem, et congemisce; audiflentem,et lacrymas junge; audi correctum, et condelectare. (602) [To you Nathan the prophet is not sent, David himself is sent to you. Hear David crying, and cry with him, hear him groaning and groan with him; hear him weeping and mingle your tears with his; hear him amended, and with him rejoice. ] (191) Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos According to the Latin commentators, mankind does not have to imitate David consciously; it does so necessarily, in that like him all people are born into sin. Since one has no choice in this matter, however, it is imitation only in the most general and desultory sense. As Augustine points out in his commentary on the Miserere, the only proper and morally useful sort of Davidic imitation is conscious and deliberate imitation of David in penance.1 Augustine designs his sermon, therefore, not only to explain the significance of David as moral exemplar, but also to manage very carefully his audience's apprehension and imitation of David's penitential authority. Two themes dominate Augustine's enarratio on Psalm 50: proper meditation on David and the Psalms, which involves guidance by a spiritual authority (in this case, Augustine himself), and the communal benefits of psalm meditation, which involve the complex transmission of David's teachings to others by those who have imitated the Psalmist. These two processes, Augustine argues, are complementary aspects of the practice of Davidic imitation, the second developing out of the first. The first consists of sustained reflection by an individual on the Psalms, and the second of real moral action within a community—including ethical speech—based in that reflection.

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Interpreting the Psalms

Meditating on the Psalms Augustine's first suggestion that proper meditation on David and the Psalms involves careful direction from a spiritual adviser occurs in his emphasis on biblical stories about David. Whenever Augustine discusses the Psalter, he takes pains to demonstrate that his conclusions concerning the significance of its author are rooted in David's own history, not in the logic of homiletic expediency. In De Civitate Dei, for instance, he insists that proper understanding of this or that psalm verse depends on a full understanding of the entire poem in which it appears; that is, he argues for a broadly contextual analysis of psalm verses, as an antidote to overly flexible quotation and exegesis out of context.2 Likewise, in the enarratio on Psalm 50 we find him stressing how a deep and accurate appreciation of the Miserere as a whole depends on an exact understanding of the historical facts of David's kingly and moral career. Throughout his exegetical works, Augustine displays a keen awareness of the importance of context, literary and historical, for understanding psalm language. For him, the meaning of David's poetry, whether in this psalm verse or that entire psalm, must always connect with the fullness of Davidic statement and experience, as these appear throughout the entire Psalter and in the full narrative of David's career. Augustine recalls David's biography three times in his sermon on Psalm 50: first David's quarrel with King Saul; next Nathan's encounter with David, concerning David's sins of adultery and homicide; and finally Absalom's war against David, his father. The stories do not appear together in the sermon. Rather, Augustine distributes them strategically across the discourse, using them at key moments to call himself and his audience back from minute exegetical analysis to the broad historical basis for his argument, and to provide a meditative focus for his congregation in David's history. As a group, the stories have a cumulative force. Just as the DavidGoliath, David-Michal, and David penitens stories collectively describe for Dante David's attitude of humility, for Augustine his three stories are connected by their common emphasis on the moral struggle between pride and humilitas as it figures in David's biography. In his quarrel with Saul, David traditionally represents humility, but in his encounter with Nathan the figuration is reversed: David, like Saul earlier, is now the proud tyrant, his sins being abuses of his kingly authority as well as instances of personal moral corruption. Finally, in the story of Absalom, David once again represents humility; it is his son who is prideful, in his foolish civil war. The moral and

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allegorical tension between pride and humility not only unites these three biblical episodes in Augustine's sermon, but provides much of the ethical energy that propels the sermon rhetoric. Those who are profoundly humble one moment might be supremely prideful at another. If David's career was marked by such moral vagaries, others might be too. "Aicyou somehow stronger than David?" Augustine asks his congregation sarcastically. Any sin is an abuse of power, an example of bad self-government, and thus an instance of improper Davidic imitation. And any act of penance confirms the soul's ability to rule itself well, and may be understood—potentially at least—as an instance of proper Davidic imitation. To the extent that Augustine can make this process of good Davidic imitation highly selfconscious for his congregation, their individual and collective ability to rule themselves well becomes surer. Augustine's carefully positioned references to David's biography have a parallel in some of Nathan's words to David, once David admits his sin in 2 Samuel 12. Nathan seeks to intensify David's guilt by reminding him of his successful history as a monarch, itself an allegory of the exaltation of the humble: Haec dicit dominus Deus Israel: Ego unxi te in regem super Israel, et ego erui te de manu Saul, et dedi tibi domum domini tui, et uxores domini tui in sinu tuo, dedique tibi domum Israel et luda: et si parva sunt ista, adiiciam tibi multo maiora. Quare ergo contempsisti verbum Domini, ut faceres malum in conspectu meo? ( 7 - 9 ) [Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul, and gave you your master's house and your master's wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and luda: and if these things be litde, I shall add far greater things unto you. Why therefore have you despised the word of the Lord, to do evil in my sight? ]

Nathan recalls the victories Yahweh has granted David in order to increase David's sense of his own ingratitude, the gap between God's ample goodness and the extent of human badness that figures so prominently throughout the Psalms. Augustine's references to David's biography, likewise, increase his congregation's awareness of the distance between the greatness of David's anointed kingship and the depth of his sinful human choices, thus forcing the issue of the instability of anyone's moral condition, everyone's essential ingratitude before God, and their corresponding need to imitate David in penance. The Psalms frustrate our postmodern sense of the autonomy of lyric

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because their meaning depends on and repeatedly evokes a sweeping biblical narrative, the history of a dynasty. Commentators like Augustine and Cassiodorus insist on historicizing the Psalms because they understand that the Psalms are always historicizing themselves. Beyond the obvious function of psalm tituli to ground the individual poems in the narrative of David's life, the emotions recorded in the verses themselves trace the trajectory of David's political and moral fortunes, as a paradigm for the moral lives of individuals and the collective moral life of the Christian community. The imperative verbs requesting pity, mercy, and moral cleansing in Psalm 50 ask for these things as if David has not already, at the time of the psalm's composition, received them. Psalm 50, however, is in fact retrospective, composed after David's requests have been answered. 2 Samuel 12.13 reports that David's words after his confrontation with Nathan are not poetic, but a simple declarative statement of his guilt: "Peccavi Domino" ("I have sinned against the Lord"). Later presumably (despite the psalm titulus), David composes the Miserere as a way of giving artful shape to his feelings, recollecting them in penitential tranquility and crafting them into a model for the sorrowful expressions of others. The words of Psalm 50 do not record a spontaneous oral effusion; they are resolutely textual, and draw attention to their textuality by their complicated rhetorical patterns of repetition, parallelism, and inversion. Moreover, the commentators are aware that the Latin version of the original of Psalm 50 is at a considerable remove from the oral moment of the psalm's composition, if there ever was one. By its very nature as a translation, the Latin Miserere assures the medieval reader's sense of the psalm as both retrospective and prospective. This poem, like all the psalms, looks backward at David's history and forward to the moral condition of those who read or hear it. The verses of Psalm 50 imply a narrative line extending from David's past offenses, through his contrition as expressed in the present of the poem, to the moral history (present and future) of all Christians. The poem implies two linked narrative schemes, one historical and temporal, the other anagogical and moral, one describing David's history as a sinner and penitent, the other the moral status of those who read or hear his poetry. The Latin commentators also used David's personal, moral history as a way of ordering the Psalms, which they had to admit are arranged in an arbitrary sequence: that is, the psalm tituli do not describe the events of David's life in a strict chronological order. In doing so, the commentators felt they were exposing an order implicit in the Psalter itself, one intended by the book's ultimate author, God, for moral advantage. Like Augustine in

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his sermon on Psalm 50, the commentators go out of their way to guarantee that readers respond in the proper way to David's exemplarism. The anagogical order they describe across the entire Psalter parallels the double narrative implied by Psalm 50, and is part of the morally directive function of the Psalms themselves. So Part I (Psalms 1-50), ending in the Miserere, directs the soul in contrition; Part II (Psalms 51-100) guides it in its state of justification, through grace; and Part III (Psalms 101-150) compels its imitation of David's joyous psalmody, in giving endless praise to God. This pattern traces David's own progress from sin through moral reform as it is reflected in the sentiments of his poems, and the potential progress of every Christian individual, reading or listening to the Psalms. Mankind's history and David's are most proximate, however, when individuals meditate devoudy on particular psalms or psalm verses, and in doing so actively identify their sentiments with the Psalmist's. According to Augustine, two necessary practices promote this identification: carefully reading or listening to David's words, so that one understands fully the sentiments behind them, and repeating those words with depth of feeling. Just as Nathan confronted David with his sins in the form of a parable, a fictional analogue to his own sinful condition, David confronts others with theirs by way of his poetry, which is at once personal or self-expressive, and a literary analogue or paradigm for others to follow: Ad te Nathan propheta non est missus, ipse David ad te missus est. Audi eum clamantem, et simul clama; audi gementem, et congemisce; audi flentem, et lacrymas junge; audi correctum, et condelectare. (602) [To you Nathan the prophet is not sent, David himself is sent to you. Hear (David) crying and cry with him; hear him groaning, and groan with him; hear him weeping, and mingle your tears with his; hear him amended, and with him rejoice.] ( 1 9 1 )

Augustine's hortative repetition of the command audi stresses the need to attend closely to psalm language. The heavy alliterative progression from "clama" to "congemisce" to "lacrymas junge" to "condelectare" traces, like the entire Psalter, David's and the listener's mutual narrative of reform from the first cries for mercy, to the groans of the sick soul, to the tears of the contrite and justified heart, to the joy of amended life. As in Cassiodorus's splendid conceit of David's tears running perpetually down the cheeks of posterity, here Augustine implies that David's poetry, properly apprehended, makes his sentiments of grief and joy so palpable, so real, that our tears can mingle with his. David's sins revisit not only him in his poetry;

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they haunt others as well. It would be a mistake to interpret such images from Cassiodorus and Augustine asfyurae. The authors mean them literally. To be sure, the historical David is dead. His exemplary experiences and sentiments, however, live on in the Psalms. They have moral force not because they have somehow detached themselves from David's history, been generalized to the point of interpretive vagueness, but because they actually summon up the shade of David, whom others then must confront. In this sense, according to the commentators, the Psalms must always be regarded as both individual and representative. When the Psalms are heard or read, we identify with David, who in these moments is powerfully present before us. To reinforce his argument, Augustine mimics in his prose the sorts of parallelism and medial pauses his audience would be familiar with from the Latin Psalms. He realizes in his own exegetical text the harmonious patterns of moral instruction David constructs in his moral lyrics. Beginning with a striking chiasmus, he emphasizes how David has taken over for others Nathan's role as moral teacher: "Ad te Nathan propheta . . . ipse David ad te" ('To you Nathan the prophet . . . instead David to you"). And his repeated parallel injunctions to listen attentively to David's words edge toward a persistent rhetorical balance that is virtually poetic: Audi eum audi audi audi

clamántem geméntem fléntem corréctum

et et et et

simul lacrymas

cláma congemísce júnge condelectáre.

Augustine's disruption of his roughly balanced pattern of stresses in the third parallel injunction concentrates verbal emphasis on the holy tears the Psalms are designed to provoke, and the realization in one's own actions as well as words of David's penance. The heavy alliterative patterns in this passage, which bridge the strong caesura before each use of the conjunction "et," insist on the compelling inevitability of deep emotional response, once a reader or listener truly attends to the powerful poetic language of the Psalms. We might compare Augustine's rhetoric here in the Enarrationes with the less artful, but no less directive, language of John Mirk's Middle English sermon for Quinquagesima Sunday, the Sunday nearest the fiftieth day before Easter, where Mirk discusses the significance of the Miserere. Mirk uses the name of the feast as the starting point for his analysis of the moral

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import of Psalm 50. He explains, echoing Augustine, that this psalm is most recited in church at the start of Lent in order to lead others to contrition: Wherfor to draw men to contricion namely [especially] these fyfty dayes, J>e fyft psalm of {3e sauter, ¡sat ys: "Miserere mei, Deus!" ys more rehersyd J>es dayes f)en any ojjer tyme of {>e ^ere. I>e wheche ys JJUS to say yn Engiysche: " G o d , aftyr jay gret mercy haue mercy on me; and aftyr J>y multytude of Jsy mercyus do awey my wickednesse!" and soo forth. Thus when a man is sory of hys synnys and sayth [ses wordys wyth a full hert, G o d heryth his prayer and for3euyth hym hys trespas, so f>at [as long as ] he be yn full wyll to amende hym yn tyme comyng, and also full of charyte wythout faynyng. 3

Mirk's comment on the position of Psalm 50 in the liturgical calendar is revealing. The Church arranges for this psalm to be repeated most often this time of year because people will already be feeling penitential: that is, there will be an affinity between the attitude the psalm encourages and the attitude those reciting it may already be feeling and enacting. Also important is the connection Mirk draws between the liturgical practice of psalm-singing or recitation ("rehersyd" is ambiguous; it means either "to recite" or "to repeat aloud in a formal manner" [OED] ) and the meditative practice of reading the psalm, perhaps silently, as a personal act of contrition or prayer ("when a man is sory of hys synnys and sayth j^es wordys . . . " ) . For Mirk, like Augustine, communal and individual psalmody are complementary. The priest or assembled congregation singing or reading Psalm 50 themselves become models or examples "to draw men to contricion." This theme is strengthened by the liturgical fact that in Lent the Miserere gets "rehersyd" or repeated frequently within a short time. Liturgical repetition of the psalm increases its authority as a form of morally prophetic utterance, because its affective power is thereby enhanced, and more likely to provoke a powerful sense of identification in others. Mirk's primary concern in this passage, however, is with the sincerity of an individual's identification with the Psalmist's words. A penitent indicates true sorrow for his sins, real identification with David, by repeating the Miserere's words "wyth a full hert"—not mechanically or half-heartedly, but devoutly and passionately. David's words actually become "his prayer" (my emphasis), for the original sentiments behind the words match his own sorrowful feelings. Psalm 50's affective force is so strong that Mirk, at the end of this passage from his sermon, cautiously situates successful Davidic imitation within a doctrinal paradigm of penance: he insists that imitating David is just the start of an institutionalized, sacramental process

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of obtaining divine forgiveness and grace. True sacramental penance has three distinct stages, described as follows in Chaucer's Parson's Tale: N o w shaltow [you must] understande what is bihovely [useful] and necessarie to verray perfit Penitence. And this stant on [depends on] three thynges: Contricioun of herte, Confessioun of Mouth, and Satisfaccioun. For which seith Seint John Crisostom: "Penitence destreyneth [constrains] a man to accept benygnely every peyne that hym is enjoyned, with contricioun of herte, and shrift of mouth, with satisfaccioun; and in werkynge of alle mauere humylitee." (X.I.106-108)

In Mirk's sermon, contrition of heart is the recitation of David's words "wyth a full hert"; confession of mouth is the penitent's "full wyll to amende hym yn tyme comyng" by actually going and confessing to a priest; and satisfaction is the equivalent of persisting in charity—loving God and neighbor and expressing that love in prayer and good works, "full of charyte wythout fayning" ("wythout fayning" echoing and reinforcing Mirk's earlier remark about how true penitents will recite David's words sincerely, "wyth a full hert"). Imitating David, publicly during the liturgy or privately during individual meditation, marks the beginning of this process. It is not "verray perfit Penitence" itself, but a valuable prelude to it, a display of selfawareness and of the soul's admission that it requires God's grace as bestowed in the sacrament.4 Mirk does not, like Augustine in his enarratio, constrain his audience to sustained reflection on David's history and his pathetic sinful condition. An analogue to this meditative practice occurs in a short affective treatise on the seven penitential psalms once attributed to Gregory the Great, but now ascribed to Eribert of Reggio (d. 1085).5 In the proem to his discussion of Psalm 50, Eribert recalls the history of David's crimes as recorded in 2 Samuel 11 and in the psalm's titulus. He passes on from this point fairly quickly, however, to note that these events are nowhere mentioned in the psalm itself ("In psalmo tamen nulla sit de historia mentio" [581 ] ), which instead directs the emotions of its reader to the great sadness of mind ("animi dolentis" [581 ] ) it records. In other words, the psalm is rooted in David's personal history, but its language refashions and objectifies David's experience so that others can more readily identify with it. Here Eribert is not, as Gregory himself is in his interpretation of the Bathsheba episode in the Moralia in lob, trying to mask the true nature of David's crimes. Rather, he reenvisions David's history in such a way as to reveal how the Psalmist's own experiences are a mirror of true penance ("poenitentium speculum" [ 581 ] ), in which others may see their own moral lives reflected.

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This method becomes clearer once Eribert moves on to the psalm's first verse. Before quoting the psalm text, he encourages his readers to set before their mind's eye the image of someone near death, sighing on account of his grievous wounds ("Ponamus ante mentis oculos aliquem graviter vulneratimi, et vix jam últimos hujus Vitalis aurae trahentem anhelitus" [ 582] ). The mental picture is highly specific and vivid, but not immediately identified with the Psalmist, although the proem on the history of David's sins would seem to suggest the identification. In elaborating the image, Eribert quotes a passage from Isaiah 1.6 traditionally explained as referring to Christ's passion: "Vulnus, et livor, et plaga tumens, non est circumligata, nec curata medicamine, nec fota oleo" ("Wounds, and bruises, and open sores, none is dressed, nor treated with medicines, nor soothed with oil"). Those readers familiar with the Christological dimension of Davidic typology might immediately think of the Suffering Servant, thereby shifting their attentions for a moment from the pathos of David's state. Other particulars in the construction of the image, however, work against this impulse—for instance, Eriberfs reference to how the wounded figure being described, like Job, lies naked on a dunghill ("nudus in sterquilinio jaceat" [582]). At the start of Book II of the Moralia, Gregory himself associates Job and David as exempta of the effects of tempation. Whereas Job is an example of how others might be exalted in virtue by resisting temptation, and thus should be hopeful, David is an instance of how others might be morally ruined by succumbing to temptation, and thus should be morally vigilant: Ecce enim Job describitur tentatione auctus, sed David tentatione prostratus.6 Later, in Book III, Gregory directly associates Job's dunghill with the hearts of penitent sinners, as a figure for the recollection before the mind's eye of one's moral faults.7 So Eribert seems to be drawing on a number of scriptural texts and Gregorian exegesis to compose an image of David's penitential suffering that is consistent with the sentiments of the Miserere, but for the purposes of this text not to be identified strictly with events in David's biography. It is a hybrid image, a conflation of biblical figures of profound human suffering (the Psalmist, the Suffering Servant, Job), intended in the first instance to appeal emotionally and not to be deconstructed. The events of David's biography, acknowledged in the proem, are necessary to Psalm 50's meaning, but not sufficient to explain its exemplary, meditative function for other sinners. Thus Eribert suspends his next refer-

6o

Interpreting the Psalms

enee to David himself until the mental picture he has composed has presumably had its emotional effect: Agnosce interius, vulnerate, medicum tuum, et ei peccatorum tuorum vulnera detege. Audiat cordis tui gemitum, cui omne patet cogitationis arcanum. M o veant ilium lacrymae tuae, et quadam ilium importunitate quaerendi, semper ad eum alta de profundo cordis suspiria educito: perveniat ad eum dolor tuus, ut dicatur etiam tibi: "Transtulit Dominus peccatum tuum" (2 Sam 1 2 . 1 3 ) . Clama cum David; vide quid ipse dixerit: "Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam" ( P s s o . 3 ) . (582) [Acknowledge within, wounded, your physician, and lay bare to him the wounds of your sins. Let him hear the groaning of your heart, to whom every secret thought is laid open. Let your tears move him, and with a certain importunity of seeking him, always draw out deep sighs from the depths of your heart: Let your sadness come before him, so that it may be said even to you: "The Lord forgives your sin." Cry out with David, look at what he himself said: "Have pity on me, God, according to your great mercy." (my translation) ]

The image of this anonymous, wounded soul should provoke admissions of personal guilt on the part of readers, whom the author now identifies implicitly with the wounded figure. Only once the soul makes such admissions, does Eribert connect his meditative image direcdy with David's cries in the first verse of Psalm 50. Having first schooled his readers in the facts of David's history, Eribert then moves them emotionally by a powerful meditative image based in those facts, but generalized from them, and finally confronts them with a specific textual moment at the start of the most important of the Psalms with which he now expects them to identify. This movement from the specifics of David's history, to the more general figure of the pathetically wounded soul, to the author's implication of his reader in the literal sense of the psalm text, underscores the double significance of the Psalmist. David is to be viewed always both as an individual and as a archetype of sin and penance. The rhetorical shifts also testify to the heavy directive component in the meditation, which is designed to ensure the reader's affective identification with the Psalmist. A similar rhetorical movement occurs in an Old English verse meditation on Psalm 50, in British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.6 (fols. 70 r 73 v ) .8 The meditation is in three parts. It begins with a proem emphasizing David's distinctiveness as a historical figure: he was the bravest of kings ("cyninga cynost"), and most beloved of Christ ("Criste liofost"), as well as the most excellent and truest or most virtuous of musicians ("hearpera masrost... / Sangere he w£es soöfestest"). He is also a man set apart by the

Imitating David

6ι

notoriety of his sins, which are recalled briefly, followed by a reference to David's subsequent encounter with a wise man ("witgan") sent by God— that is, Nathan. The proem craftily balances praise and blame, at one moment extolling David's cunning in battle (he was "casere creaftig"), at another criticizing the slack or undisciplined thoughts ("lene geöohtas") that led to his crimes. The point, in short, is to state the scriptural record, with an admixture of moral critique, without provoking any sense of identification on the reader's part with David. The author's aims and tone shift noticeably, however, with the psalm paraphrase itself. Often in the Old English, the sense moves beyond a literal version of David's own sentiments to a prolonged conflation of David's feelings and those of his translator. This is clearest when the Old English paraphrase suddenly involves a generalized request for forgiveness: Ecce enim iniquitatibus. Ic on unrihtum geeacnod waes. maehtig dryhten, in scarne and in sceldum; J>aet ic fram Ipxm synnum Jja |je mine aeldran and ic selfa eac

eac öan in synnum J)u öaet ana wast, hu me modor gebaer forgef me, sceppend min, selfa gecerre, ser geworhtan sioj^an beeode. (60-66)

[I was, indeed, conceived in unrighteousness and sin. Mighty Lord, you who alone know how my mother bore me, shamefully and sinfully: grant, my Creator, that I might be able to turn myself away from those sins which my elders committed in the past, and which I myself committed after that. ] Only thefirstline matches anything in the Latin text. The rest is a prayer for mercy designed to echo the first line and desperate keynote of the psalm: "Miserere mei deus." This prayer takes David's specific, literal statement of guilt and turns it into a plea for moral fortitude, which involves praise of God's omniscience and an implicit declaration of responsiblity for the crimes of one's forefathers. There may be some confused influence from the commentary tradition on this expansion: for instance, Augustine's analysis of how this verse refers to the taint of original sin, not to any indiscretion of David's ancestor, the virtuous Jesse. The main point, however, is that the paraphrase generalizes from David's record of his experience in order to

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associate the Psalmist's sentiments with those of the writer and reader, and that in doing so it moves the meditation beyond the relatively specific statements about David's historical career in the proem. In the third andfinalpart of the meditation, David's condition and that of the writer and reader are even more proximate. The author explains that, in the psalm just paraphrased, David interceded ingode") on behalf of his kingdom, asking that it might be considered worthy ("weor]?ne munde") to receive the consolation of Christ—that is, the gift of divine grace. It was for this reason, speaking as a representative of all, that David revealed the secrets of his sin-hoard ("balanij^a hord"). Consequently, the meditation ends with the writer himself imitating David on behalf of the community, requesting that all might be granted the grace to defeat sin and to obtain everlasting joy:

J>aet we synna hord and us geearnian an lifigendra

Forgef us, god maeahtig, simle oferwinnan 2Ece dreamas landes wene. Amen. (154-157)

[Grant that we, Almighty God, might always defeat the sin-hoard and gain for ourselves eternal joys, and happiness in the land of the living. Amen.] What began as a summary of Davidic history has been refashioned into an archetype for all, and applied finally to the general condition of the writer and his readers. The sense of poetic continuity across the three parts of the Old English meditation is strong. Nevertheless, the poem has been constructed to manage the reader's meditative experience in stages, as a way of reinforcing the work's overall theme: that David's Old Testament experience is linked direcdy to the writer's and reader's moral present. Medieval readers who could afford them sometimes commissioned actual portraits of David to aid and direct their meditations on the Psalms. Thomas Berkeley, famous for his patronage of John of Trevisa, commissioned an image of a sober-faced David, harp in hand, for the start of Psalm ι (Beatus vir) in his lavish folio copy of Rolle's English Psalter (MS Bodley 953).9 This subject, and its placement, were common: a similar picture, of David as an introspective old king, appears at the beginning of an important interpolated copy of Rolle's Psalter, now at Harvard (MS Richardson 36). Confronted with such a picture as he began his Psalter, a medieval

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reader might self-assuredly imagine himself leaving the "cathedra pestilentiae" of the wicked to sit beside David, the sage and philosophic survivor of the kinds of sins the Psalms encourage people to avoid. Even in the delicate execution of these images, there is a self-conscious delight in the law of the Lord, as it is represented iconically in David himself, and textually in David's poems. These isolated David images, however, are not nearly as directive as the complex David pictures in the thirteenth-century Psalter of Isabel of France (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge MS 300). Both individually and as a series, these pictures aim to guide the mind of the psalm reader in a deliberate way, encouraging her to approximate as closely as possible, in her own sentiments and pious expressions, David's penitential character. The best of these pictures, which I referred to at the start of Chapter 1, appears at the opening of Psalm 26 (Dominus ittuminatio mea), David's quintessential expression of trust in God (Plate 2). Psalm 26 begins on a very hopeful note, emphasizing David's confidence in God's protection against his enemies—figuratively, the temptations that threaten each Christian soul. David asks, rhetorically, "whom shall I fear?... of whom shall I be afraid?," insinuating that his moral condition is stable, now that God watches over him. The Fitzwilliam illustrator, however, was a very subde reader of psalms. He detects some hesitancy in these questions, as if David might be less than confidently reassuring himself. This sense he could have gotten from the later verses of the psalm, where David feels he must deflect God's anger, despite his opening show of confidence: Ne averías faciem tuam a me; Ne declines in ira a servo tuo. Adiutor meus esto; ne derelinquas me, Ñeque dispicias me, Deus salvator meus. (9) [Turn not away your face from me; decline not in your wrath from your servant. Be my helper, forsake me not; do not despise me, O God my savior. ] In his picture, the artist anticipates these later verses, reading the psalm in its entirety rather than simply depicting the confident David of the early verses. He captures David's uncertainty touchingly, in the Psalmist's posture and facial expression. In contrast with the male and female religious

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imitating him in the lower half of the painting, David slouches at the shoulders, perhaps cowering, and he holds his hands folded in prayer and directly in front of his face, as if to block the censorious gaze of Christ. David's mouth is downturned, his cheeks sunken, his eyebrows raised in anticipation. Unlike the monk in the bottom right hand corner of the picture, who prays to the lamps of God's guidance, he cannot smile. David confronts Christ himself, and even in a psalm which begins confidendy, he wears a penitential mood. These details of David's portrait evoke a fuller sense of the complete trajectory of David's moral history than do the confident opening verses of Psalm 26. They imply David's entire moral chronology, beginning with his sins of homicide and adultery and extending forward to this pictorial moment, of his address to God at the start of Psalm 26. The miniature also extends this moral chronology forward into the viewer's present in the bottom half of the image, in the picture of the praying religious and in the psalm cue, in liquid gold letters, that runs down the right hand side of the painting. The words are painted so as to be easily read, in alternating red and blue squares. Their keyword, "illuminatio," bridges the gap between David's past and the viewer's present, marked in the letter "D" by the angular interlace pattern in the bow. And the closing word of the cue, "mea," at the extreme lower end of the picture, emphasizes the strict contemporaneity of the psalm text: David's words are the words of his imitators, the praying religious in the lower half of the picture and the reader of the book herself. The carefully designed structure of the image breaks down and controls the moment in which one first takes in the entire picture. It converts simple affective apprehension into a managed process of meditation. While a picture like this one may be interpreted in isolation from others in the book, its directive character becomes more evident when it is seen in the context of the two David series of which it is a part. There are in all eight images of David running throughout the psalter text in this book, each of them consisting (in the top half of an initial letter) of David engaged in some sort of activity and (in the lower half of each letter) other figures engaged in activity that parallels or comments on David's. Only in the final instance, the illustration to Psalm 109 {DixitDominus), does the artist squarely emphasize David's Christological typology to the neglect of his sinful humanity. All of the other pictures concentrate on the analogy between David's sins and the sins of others: for example, in the illustration to Psalm 68 (Salvum me fac), where David kneels in the top half of the

Imitating David

65

initial "S," and in the bottom half a naked man, his arms raised in desperation, kneels in a deep flood of water.10 In terms of predisposing a reader to understand David's moral chronology as a model for others, the illustration to Psalm 1 (Beatus vir) is the most important. In the top half of the initial "B," David looks on Bathsheba in her bath, while in the bottom half of the letter a penitential David prayerfully looks up to Christ. The artist has worked to set Davidframedin his doorway looking down at Bathsheba, and Christ in his mandorla looking down at David in direct iconographie opposition. Counter to Gregory's evasive allegorizing in the Moralin in lob, the artist implies by the visual logic of his picture that in loving Bathsheba David has not fulfilled but abdicated his role as precursor to Christ. He has abused not only his kingly power, but his own typological significance; to paraphrase Augustine, he has polluted the lineage of Christ. Thus he must ask, abjectly, for forgiveness, and thereby become a penitential model for others. Having lost both his kingly and typological authority, he must earn another by way of or rather through his sinful humanity. At the beginning of the Psalter of Isabel of France (fols. i v -vi r ), there are also six full-page images of events from the life of David, starting with David's dance before the ark, proceeding through the death of Absalom and the birth and coronation of Solomon, and ending with David's burial. These pictures are separated from the Psalter and its pictures by the book's kalendarium, and are executed by a different artist. Given the expense and care that has gone into them, however, it is difficult to regard their significance as entirely independent from that of the psalter images. They are a splendid, self-contained gallery of pictures of important events from David's career. They may also be read, however, as a historical proem to or even a foundation for the psalter pictures, a preparation for psalm reading and the kind of mimesis this reading encourages. These full-page images imply that the meaning of the Psalter as a text, as a book of words, is inextricably bound up with David's personal history. The size and placement of these opening pictures would seem to argue that understanding David's life and words as a moral paradigm for others is only possible within the context of his history, the significance of his dynasty. In the last of these full-page pictures, David is buried as Solomon looks on. This is the point in Davidic history when David's temporal authority is transferred, as the surviving son from his marriage to Bathsheba begins his reign of wisdom. According to the commentators, however, it is Christ himself who ultimately receives David's authority at his death, having conferred it in thefirstplace, and who

66

Interpreting the Psalms

passes it on not just to Solomon, but tropologically to all the sons and daughters of his kingdom. In this sense, David's history as rex andpenitens is not simply parallel to the moral lives of all Christians, but identifiable with them. We are all sons and daughters of David, inheriting his inclination to fall in sin and his capacity to rise again in penance. All people play out, in their individual and collective conditions, the vagaries of David's failures and successes as a monarch—morally speaking, his lapses and reforms.

Acting on the Psalms These examples of psalm meditation differ from Augustine's enarratio in one important respect: they all seem to have been designed for private reading, their focus almost exclusively the interior mental state of the individual seeking to imitate David. Augustine, however, insists in his sermon that his congregation recite the words of Psalm 50 not only for themselves, but for all those who are absent—that is, for the entire Christian community.11 The individual or private significance of David's example and psalm meditation, for him, must always be connected with their communal or public aspea. Experiencing the moral benefits of Davidic imitation entails the responsibility of actively distributing these fruits to others, in the form of psalm-based language and actions. This is not to say that personal psalm meditation, as a practice, is not itself an important way of acting on the Psalms. The kind of meditation Eribert encourages involves highly particular activities (retreating to a silent place, kneeling, casting one's eyes to the ground) and provokes strong personal contrite behavior—most notably, spontaneous penitential weeping.12 While all of these behaviors have mainly a private significance for the person meditating, they contribute by way of the reform of the individual soul to the collective reform of Christ's corporate self. Augustine, however, wants to make the connection between meditating and acting on the Psalms stronger and more explicit than this. For him, private Davidic imitation is useless if it does not generate new forms of social behavior: patterns of ethical speech and activity based in David's example and the language of the Psalms. The distinction (and complementarity) between private psalm meditation and social psalmic practices goes back to Ephesians 5.12, where Paul enjoins his listeners to speak "amongst yourselves" not in seductive and empty words ("inanibus verbis"), but in the morally provocative language of David:

Imitating David

67

implemini Spiritu sancto, loquentes vobismetipsis in psalmis, et hymnis, et canticis spiritualibus, cantantes, et psallentes in cordibus vestris Domino. [be filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking amongst yourselves in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and psalming to God in your heart. ] In commenting on this text, Thomas Aquinas explains that "there are two ways of speaking to yourselves. O n e is external, of a man talking to other men; another is interior, of a man speaking to himself' ("Est autem duplex locutio. Una exterior, hominis ad homines; alia interior, hominis ad seipsum"; lectio V I I . 3 1 1 ) . 1 3 Aquinas identifies the latter with meditative prayer, which should lead to private acts of penance, and the former with the performance of g o o d works, explaining that singing and psalming to G o d in the heart is a means of stirring the will to virtue:

Meditemur ergo de recta operatione quid faciendum, de divina laudatione quid imitandum, de caelesti iucundatione quid et quomodo serviendum. Sic ergo effectus Spiritus Sancti primus est sacra meditatio, secundus spiritualis exultatio, quia ex frequenti meditatione ignis charitatis in corde accenditur. Ps 38.4: Concalvit cor meum intra me, et in meditatione mea exardescet ignis, etc. Et hinc generatur laetitia spiritualis in corde. Et ideo dicit cantantes et psallentes, id est ut afFectus nostri afficiantur gaudio spirituali ad operanda bona, (lectio VII.312-13) [Hence let us meditate on honest actions and what we should do; on the divine praise and what we should imitate; and on the joy of heaven and what we should render homage to, and how. The first effect of the Holy Spirit is a holy meditation, and the second is a spiritual exultation; from frequent meditation the fire of charity is enkindled in the heart. "My heart grew hot within me: and in my meditation a fire shall flame out" (Ps 38.4). And from this a spiritual joy is born within the heart; thus he mentions singing and making melody so that our will would be stirred by spiritual joy to undertake good works. ] There is, Aquinas asserts against "those heretics" ("haereticorum") w h o maintain that Paul argues for purely private prayer, a double element to psalmody: it stimulates the mind of the person meditating "to an interior devotion" ("incitetur ad devotionem interiorem"), but it also teaches the illiterate, by active example, h o w to be more devout. That is, psalmody is a private practice with a profoundly public significance and effect. It is a form of personal prayer and social action. Augustine raises this issue at the very start of his enarmtio

on Psalm 50

to the people of Carthage, when he refers to those w h o have not gathered to

68

Interpreting the Psalms

recite the psalm, but instead are off indulging in the vanities of the world. He encourages his congregation not to feel contempt for these people, but to resolve to speak for and to them: Credendum est Caritatem uestram non ob aliud hodierno die copiosius conuenisse, nisi ut oretis pro eis quos absentes facit alienus et peruersus affectus. . . . Loquamur et cum absentibus: erit ad eos uox nostra memoria uestra. N e saucios et lánguidos neglegatis, sed ut facilius saneüs, sani permanere debetis. Corrigite arguendo, consolamini alloquendo, exemplum praebete bene uiuendo, aderit eis qui adfuit et vobis. (599-600) [It has to be believed that your love has assembled in greater numbers today, for no other reason than to pray for those who are kept away by a strange and perverse inclination. . . . Let us speak also with the absent: your memory will serve as our voice to them. D o not neglect the wounded and the feeble, but remain whole, so that you may more easily make whole. Correct by reproofs, comfort by addresses, set an example by living well, so that he who has been with you will be with them. ] ( 189 )

Augustine's congregation, as it recites the Miserere, must understand that it speaks for the entire Church, just as David does throughout the Psalter. Furthermore, just as David set forth moral precepts in the Psalms, which also record his penitential experience, Augustine's congregation must turn their acts and words of private penance into moral exempta and the language of ethical correction for the absent. By enacting their own experience of Davidic imitation before others, they will speak the Psalms again. Their translation of the Psalter's private effects into the public Psalm discourse of moral example and ethical statement ("Corrigite arguendo, consolamini alloquendo, exemplum praebete bene uiuendo") repeats and extends David's ideal teaching, by example and by words, and works by way of the Psalms to make whole again the Mystical Body of Christ. Just as David imitated Nathan, others imitate David. A twelfth-century copy of Part I of the Enarrationes (Pss 1 - 5 0 ) , now Newberry Library MS 13, gives us a sense of how at least two medieval readers traced this theme of the social aspect of Davidic imitation through Augustine's sermon. In Newberry MS 13, the enarratio on Psalm 50 is heavily noted throughout by two hands, one in pencil (perhaps fourteenthcentury), the other in ink (fifteenth-century). The pencil notes consist of pointing hands and nota abbreviations, often both together, the ink notes of keywords, phrases, and précis drawn from the Latin text itself. The author of the ink notes has followed the pencil notes closely, sometimes taking his keyword or phrase from a passage previously noted in pencil. For instance,

Imitating David

nota ( pencil )

Erat in infirmitate tribulationis suae tanto in Deum intentìor, quanto miserior videbatur. Utile quiddam est tribulatio; utile mediciferramentum, quam diaboli tentamentum. (fol. i56 vb )

69

"Utile" ( ink)

More interestingly, however, the second notator expands and clarifies the first one's sense of the directive structure of Augustine's discourse. This is most obvious in the notes at the start of the sermon. For instance, the first notator cites two important passages: Augustine's remark that he tells the story of David's fall to encourage others in moral vigilance, and his comment that David's story should encourage others not to fall in sin, but to rise in penance. These two comments, in effect, summarize the negative and positive aspects of David's exemplary significance. In the following transcript, I print the two additional passages cited by the second notator, in italics: Dicam ergo non quo volo, sed quod coger; dicam non exhortans ad imitationem, sed instruens ad timorem... . Multi enim cadere volunt cum David, et nolunt surgere cum David. Non ergo cadendi exemplum propositum est, sed si cecideris, resurgendi. Non sit delectatio mirwrum lapsus majorum, sed sit casus majorum tremor minorum. . . . (fol. i 5 6 r b ) . . . tu tibi tanquamsanctumproponis utpecces; non imitaris ejus sanctitatem, sed imitaris ruinam. . . . preparas te ad peccandum, disponis peccare: librum Dei ut pecces inspicis; Scripturas Dei ad hoc audis, ut facias quod displicet Deo. (fol. 156™)

The second notator follows the first one's basic reading of the directive structure of Augustine's sermon, but specifies this by emphasizing additional passages in this section of the enarratio that heighten one's anxiety about the potential for bad Davidic imitation. By pointing to these warnings, the second notator connects the logic of Augustine's discourse with the actual behavior of others. "Multi" he writes in the margin, next to Augustine's observation that many fall with David who do not choose to rise with him again, implying for those who might read his analysis of Augustine's argument that questions of Davidic exemplarism have real social import. The tone of the passages the second notator cites add a forceful urgency to the two declarative statements cited by the first notator, an urgency based in Augustine's essentially pessimistic view of the human will. The vast majority of passages noted by either hand use heavy parallelism to press their points. Thus, for instance, the first notator draws a pointing hand plus nota next to Augustine's observation that David takes over, in the Psalms, Nathan's role as God's moral prophet: "Ad te Nathan propheta

70

Interpreting the Psalms

non est missus; ipse David ad te missus est" (fol. i56 vb ). Any reader's attentions would naturally be drawn to these passages, since their rhythmic verbal patterns are designed to be especially striking and memorable. These two notators, however, may have had another purpose in marking such passages. They might have been plundering Augustine's text for homiletic or didactic materials of their own. The provenance of Newberry MS 13 is fairly clear. Its earliest provenance is monastic; it has been connected, perhaps erroneously, with St. Albans. In the fourteenth century, according to Ker, fol. 160 was written at the Cistercian monastery of Ford, to provide for a lacuna in the text (the page was written to look like its twelfth-century counterparts in the book). In the fifteenth century, when the second set of notes was made, the book was in lay hands. It seems, then, that the book's first set of notes were done by a religious and the second set by a pious layman, building on the insights of the earlier clerical reader. If this were indeed the case, they preserve an instance of how one late medieval layperson understood the social implications of a clerical reading of Augustine's enarratio on Psalm 50. As actual extracts from the Latin text, the ink notes are a collection of powerful sententiae on the individual and social importance of Davidic imitation as Augustine interprets it, and as it applies not just to the individual monastic reader of such a text, but to the many ("multi") outside the cloister touched by Augustine's anxieties over the human propensity to fall in sin rather than to rise in penance. Augustine speaks even more directly about the connection between individual Davidic imitation and the lives of communities at the end of his sermon, after commenting on the last verse of Psalm 50, David's prayer for the rebuilding of the city of Sion. (The prayer is interpreted by the Latin commentators as referring to the rebuilding of ecclesia, the Church.) After reminding his congregation that no one can escape sin, since all are born to it in Adam, Augustine exhorts his congregation to be severe in disciplining their households: Verumtamen, carissimi, in tanta morum diversitate et tam detestabili corruptela, regite domos uestras, regite filios uestros, regite familias uestras. Quomodo ad nos pertinet in ecclesia loqui uobis, sic ad uos pertinet in domibus uestris agere, ut bonam rationem reddatis de his qui uobis sunt subditi. Amat Deus disciplinarti. Peruersa autem et falsa innocentia est, habenas laxare peccatis. Ualde inutiliter, ualde perniciose sentit filius patris lenitatem, ut postea Dei sentiat severitatem. ( 6 1 5 - 6 1 6 )

The following is a Middle English translation of this Latin passage, in a gloss to an important fifteenth-century Wycliffite Psalter, MS Bodley 554:

Imitating David D e r e w o r J j e s t brij>eren, reule 3e 3 0 u r e housis, 3 0 u r e sones &

71

30ure meynees.

i t p e r t e y n e j j t o u s t o s p e k e t o 3 0 U i n Jse c h i r c h e , s o i t p e r t e y n e j s t o 3 0 U t o d o 3 0 u r e h o u s i s , { j a t 3 e 3 e l d e g o o d r e s o u n o f h e m £>at b e n s o g e t t o 3 0 U . G o d chastisyng.

I t is a w e i w a r d

&

false i n n o c e n c e

to

3Íue f r e d o m

to

A s in

louejj

synnes.

F u l

p e r e l o u s l i t o d e j j f > e s o n e f e e l i j ) { κ s o f t n e s s e o f £>e f a d i r , { > a t h e f e e l e a f t i r w a r d { > e sharp p u n y s c h y n g o f god.

/Austyn inpe ende ofpefiftipesalm.

(fol.

25v)

This translation, like the many other Middle English glosses in this book, is quite close to the Latin, and the very specific attribution (not simply "Austyn here," as elsewhere in the text) implies that the glossator not only wants to invoke Augustine's authority on this point, but to provide accurate information to the reader, should he wish to check this translation against a copy of the Enarmtiones. The Middle English glossator does not duplicate Augustine's repetition of the imperative "regite," which in the Latin is clearly intended to recall Augustine's earlier repeated "audi," and thus to link rhetorically individual Davidic imitation and the public application of that process. He does, however, reproduce Augustine's important parallelism, "Quomodo ad nos . . . sic ad uos," which suggests a relationship between Augustine's exegetical discourse, the exposition of psalm meaning in this enarratio itself, and the moral discourse of the community, the application of psalm meaning in particular ethical circumstances. This same relationship between psalm language, exegesis, and moral discourse is reflected in the two types of glosses that appear throughout MS Bodley 554. On the one hand, there are glosses of the simple "J>at is" ("vel") variety, expositions of difficult or troublesome readings. Often these glosses clarify the sense of a translated passage against Jerome's Hebrew version; sometimes they offer simple explanations of particular words and phrases in a psalm verse: Iustus es domine.

L o r d f>u art i u s t , &

r Ì 3 t f u l n e s s e ]pi w i t n e s s y n g i s , &

¡>i d o o m

is r Ì 3 t f u l . T h o u

[DÌ t r e u j j e g r e t l i t o b e

j s a t is J>i l a w e , b i w h i c h J>e d o o m o f o £ > e r e m e n o w i J > be 30uun.

Pou hast comaundide ri-yfulnesse, J j a t

c o n t e y n y n g e r Ì 3 t f u l n e s s e . And

pi witnessingis:

c o m a u n d i d

to

i s ¡31

is s e t h e r e f o r £>at i s

i n i e r o m J > u s : JXDU h a s t c o m a u n d i d e J>e r Ì 3 t f u l n e s s e {31 w i t n e s s y n g i s .

hast

kept;

o f

/Lire here·, ri3tfùlness in tribulacioun &

n e d e , b e n jse

m a r t i r d o m e s o f g o d , j ? a t i s , w i t n e s s i n g i s f o r w h i c h e {3e martris be c o r o w n e d .

IAustin here.

(Ps 1 1 8 . 1 3 7 ; fol.

69')

On the manuscript page, these two glosses are not interlineated with the text. They appear in the right and left margins, respectively, and are keyed to lemmata in the psalm text with dumbell-like red markers, which repeat in

, > of tVatrig.-fajyt Ecptcn not- pi tóttie; i n f o i ò ce & ñ c f t r t tn o+tbofóle tvjtñú il Oli im comaiîW6 M~tt0tiiaecßtm freitpC 1 + gi-edt to be fegt- ( D i (enterte· lotte moot· -- tu«-tu be meine · « u s u r a ettcropee ftwat?' tit t»iKbi$ " O fa gntttt feraftf?.* 5 $ f e v u f t n r louyfcr t r ^ c ß m m É f i M p t ^ « " f f f ne fijsj ß ^ e r a o r j n β riffitkmEt i$ wítfitUitftìftpomen enfe-·% pt latee xt? treitpe t ^ ^ b u w i o j î t an$«HTHj ômîStt WM8tî>«eft»e a«XIEi2*~f· ^ vVmicOWi'ô ιβ CH W t e tfcpoittcn S f e t CJite-'Jinie-poit ¡wít^twftOMÓjwJ^· h» tnt-ri^ ^.birt-WwàïÂçr ' ' i S t f t u i m W ^ X ^  ô !

JfSJ^S'

? «uni h e O * 1 * 0 he«« pou Citai m«tíhrfumfne χ τ ήpiraitiAmWime ίΛ· » «afcc W« ttic C&frfÂι Λιη m e î e - ^ ί boyi «îboiieOhpi Vécete < 2 / " Wn bifi>ï«ni? ¿ S f U U » to pee f u l «t'U.*yftfrf'wMOf Irniente- pi b o f X ^ C p c r f t i e - — e t ^ w w H e X c w û > 1 ' « VÚ m>' void tn m m u m mei· π · · * flupfcenetwiime Ä K ? b. pt i w m Z W * y t i t m t v c m me u ^ i t e W&fitfti iBfo Wíc^iOttCífc-·· Wîibpc p«t ben ««Mb fe· ftv m laiVe-Xf^ozOho^i ftrr «toi alle ρ t VÎei «e t e n « V l í pe btg^wng·^ N e t * of -'û| 3 T ? pou « ρ me-

ffiffi1 tff&tótffte-i· wtr>e xxix salm [Exaltabo te Domine] to preise & Jjanke god of his merci & grace, for he forçai J>e synne of awoutrie & of mansleyng; for whiche he desseruyde to be slayn & dampned, outakun [except for] goddis merci. Gostli [spiritually], J)is salm mai be expowned of ech cristen man, Jjat knowij) bi goddis reuelacioun ejjer resonable euydence, (jat god haj> forçoue a greuouse synne to him. Wherfor he άοφ Jjankyngis to god; in preisynge J)e goodnesse of god, and in knoulechyng his freelte. /Lire here. (fol. 13 r )

Lyra's gloss does not distinguish the historical and moral significances of the psalm, but relates them. The implication behind "Wherfor he doij) Jjankyngis to god" is not simply that David speaks for ecclesia as well as himself in this psalm, but more important that the psalm is an apt model for others of how to thank God for his mercies in two ways: by praising his goodness and admitting one's own badness—"knoulechyng his freelte." In a gloss like this one, and there are many such in MS Bodley 554, the aims of historical psalm scholarship and psalm-based moral discourse converge. To learn about David's history is to learn about one's own. Reading the Psalms accurately means recovering both their literal and figurative sense; indeed, for Lyra thefigurativesense is just another aspect of their literal meaning— another dimension of the intentio of the author.15 Psalm scholarship, in glosses like this one, becomes potentially both a form of moral self-examination and ethical teaching. The segregation of these two types of glosses on the page suggests that the scribe might have been producing an exemplar for others to follow, and that the book was planned so that it could be used easily either for scholarship or meditation. Curiously, though, the segregation also works to point up how the aims of psalm scholarship and psalm meditation converge in MS Bodley 554. By (in most cases) allowing these two types of glosses autonomous status on the page, the scribe draws attention to those instances where he purposefully coordinates simple "J)at is" and more complex tropologica! glosses. In the following passage, for example, the glossa-

Imitating David

75

tor juxtaposes a scholarly gloss from Lyra and a moral one from Augustine; both go down the right margin: Ebreis seyn jsat moyses made f>is lxxxxj salm [Bonum est confiten] to be sungen in J>e dai of sabat, J>at was solempne anentis [among] iewis, for J>e mynde of benefice of makyng of f>e world. Firste Jjis salm indusijj men to do {sankingis for J>e benefice of creacioun; Jje secound tyme it shewija J)e punyschyng of vnkynde men; & [se [3 ridde tyme it shewijj f>e avaunsyng of kynde men, Jjat louen wel god. /Lire here·, God techij? vs noon oj^ere song no but of feij>, of hope, & of charité, J>at oure feijï be stidfast in hym, & Jsat we bileue in to hym whom we seen not, Jjat we haue ioie whanne we seen. Sclaundris ben plenteouse. No man feelij) {κ>, no but he {>at goth in J>e weie of god. It is seid to him in alle J>e bookis of god, f>at he suffre present fingís & hope jringis to comynge, & Jsat he loue god whom he seej> not, J)at he haue ioie whanne he shal se hym. /Austyn onpe title of lxxxxj salm. (fol. sor) The glossator exploits the contrast between Lyra's academic tone and Augustine's homiletic one because his aim is double: to present a sound text for scholars, but also to offer ethical instruction—to show how the Psalms and the history behind them might be applied to present concerns. Like Rolle in his English Psalter, the person who planned this book understood that psalm scholarship and meditation may be separable as textual practices, but in the experience of the Christian community are ultimately convergent. Augustine's homilies do not make sense apart from the historical context of the Psalms, and the history behind the Psalms is of merely antiquarian interest if not turned to exemplary advantage. Reading through a psalm in MS Bodley 554, beginning with its long tropologica! gloss and then moving verse to verse and gloss to gloss, one senses how proximate the concerns of scholarship, devotion, and ethics could be for certain late medieval readers. One appreciates how, in medieval approaches to the Psalms, the actual and the typological are finally indissociable.16 The Latin commentators and medieval readers did not distinguish sharply between fact and figure in reading the Psalms. Rather, they perceived in David's text two levels of the literal, two related types of reality. One of these is the record of David's own experience, thoughts, and feelings. The other is the result of one's projecting oneself and one's circumstances into David's text—finding present experience implicated in the recoverable pastness of the Psalms. In short, late medieval psalm commentators and readers assumed that these biblical poems were both about David and about them. What we refer to, for our own convenience, as their allegorical read-

76

Interpreting the Psalms

ings of psalm texts were, to their minds, readings ad litteram. By asserting the presentness of the Davidic past, these readings reliteralized it, linking its historical sense intimately to medieval persons and communities. When Augustine enjoins his congregation to discipline their households in the spirit of the Psalms, he secures the bond between David's history and his audience's present. He argues that the process of Davidic imitation, beginning with David's imitation of his own moral teacher, Nathan, continues beyond the walls of a church into the home, where the moral lessons others learn from David's poetry must be translated into the prosaic terms of everyday moral discourse and activity. Represented schematically, the process of Davidic imitation Augustine describes would look like this: Nathan

>

David

>

Augustine

>

his congregation

>

the community;

parable

>

poetry

>

exegesis

>

psalm recitation and understanding

>

ethical speech and behavior,

The moral guidance represented early in Augustine's sermon by Nathan's useful fiction is taken over by David's poetry, then by Augustine's interpretation and rhetoric, and finally by the congregation's language of moral reproof and self-regulation, which is based in its understanding of the Psalms. According to such a paradigm, the form moral discourse takes — prose, poetry, homiletics, ethical prescription and proscription —is less important than its function. The force of psalm language may be kept constant, or even heightened by careful authorial control, operating with an awareness of how the storehouse of repetitions, parallelisms, and topoi that make up the Psalms may be deployed in new and powerful ways in new aesthetic circumstances. The patterns of ethical speech and behavior learned from David's teachings may be reconstituted in pictures, sermons, glosses, prose, and poetry: the immense variety of texts and contexts generated in response to David's lyrics. Ideally, imitation of David as a penitential exemplar should culminate in a moment of deep, emotional self-indictment, what Gregory the Great calls "compunctio cordis." But this interior moment originates in a carefully guided process of meditation, and ought to result in the transformation of one's behavior and words into exempta for society. The entire process is one of translation: of David's sentiments and expressions into one's own, and of one's own Davidic sentiments and expressions into those of the wider Christian community.

Imitating David

77

For the later Middle Ages, then, the Psalms had a double life: they were a text with private significance for David, and public relevance for ecclesia. The particular Middle English writers and texts we will consider in Parts II and III might tend to emphasize one of these levels of significance over and against the other. For instance, Middle English penitential prose stresses David's role as a model of compunction, for the individual private reader, while Lollard psalm scholarship teases out of the Psalter text a language of social complaint directed at the entire Christian community, for the sake of common profit. As we will see, however, despite their peculiar concerns, all of these texts imply the double significance of the Psalms. Studying, meditating on, and writing psalm discourse is, for all of these writers and their readers, a powerful form of self-investigation and social action.

Partii Psalm Discourse

3. David as a Model of Compunction

N a m potest hic et illud fortassis intelligi; ideo eum in hoc psalmo dixisse, Doceam iniquos uias tuas, et impii ad te convertentur, quoniam praeuidebat sequentes populos per istum psalmum copiosissimae paenitentiae muñera petituros. (470) [Perhaps a further meaning is to be grasped here: that the psalmist said in this psalm: "Let me teach the unjust your ways, and the wicked shall be converted to you," because he foresaw that in the future people would by means of this psalm seek the gifts of most abundant repentance.] ( 5 1 2 ) Cassiodorus,

Expositio Psalmorum, from the conclusio to Psalm

The notoriety of David's sins and the excellencies of his verse ensured his place not only in medieval exegesis, but in Middle English religious literature as well. The deep broodings of the commentators about David's character and the moral content of his poetry had a direct influence on Middle English devotional writers, who are just as earnest in putting forward the penitent David as a model for others, and in showing how the personal voice of his lyrics speaks immediately and intensely to a general human condition. Like the Latin commentators, and like Richard Rolle in his English Psalter, these Middle English writers are moral teachers in the Davidic tradition, converting sinners by turning the moral prophecies of the Psalms into the rich variety of Middle English writing on the habits and advantages of the penitential life. The level of self-consciousness displayed by these writers about this role varies from text to text. The techniques of psalm translation each uses, however, suggest that they are all equally aware of the need to assert the contemporaneity of psalm discourse, by collapsing the distinctions between psalm language and their own discourse of moral instruction. References to David and the Psalms are ubiquitous in Middle English religious verse and prose, and psalm language shapes in a persistent way the discourse, or verbal expressions and arguments, of each. Given the proximity of the psalm and medieval lyric as forms — both are essentially rhythmic

50

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and formulaic expressions of powerful emotions, often possessing a strong didactic component—the Psalms' influence on Middle English religious poetry is stronger and more specific than their influence on devotional prose. Nevertheless, we must consider the prose first, since the prose writers tend to be more explicit and discursive than the poets in presenting their rationale for encouraging Davidic imitation, many of the poets taking for granted the fact that David is to be understood as an exemplar, and that his psalms are to be apprehended as models for the attitudes and language of others. While some Middle English religious poets refer to David by name and quote the Psalms directly, more invoke David's authority obliquely, by way of familiar psalm topoi or commonplaces. Nevertheless, all of the prose writers and poets considered in these two chapters, many of them anonymous, assume that writing psalm-based prose or verse is itself an act of Davidic imitation, in that their texts amplify the morally prophetic aims of David's poems by quoting, alluding to, and working variations on them. As they translate David's biblical discourse into new devotional contexts, these writers carry on the process begun by the Latin exegetes of opening up or exposing the sense of David's words for others. Sometimes, by juxtaposing texts from the Latin Psalms and their own interpretive paraphrases or amplifications, they literally speak alongside the Psalmist, encouraging their readers to identify with him. In other instances, by allowing their language to be shaped by the controlling topoi and rhetorical patterns of the Psalms, these writers illustrate textually the mimetic process whereby everyone has to become another David ("alter David"),1 a proud soul brought into humble dialogue with God through the operations of divine grace. Most of these texts, prose and poetry alike, belong to that class of vernacular writings produced in response to the twenty-first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which mandated annual confession and communion for all the faithful and thereby placed a vital new importance on lay education. By the late fourteenth century, devout layfolk were assuming increased responsibility for their own spiritual development; lectio, "spiritual reading," and oratio, "formal prayer," were no longer practices confined to the cloister. Sometimes under the supervision of a spiritual director, but often not, layfolk read texts that set out for them the basic principles of the devout life: the nature of sin, temptation, prayer, and divine grace, among others. These texts, some of them translations from Latin sources and others original works in the vernacular, circulated widely, often in anthologies combining prose and verse, such as the Wheatley man-

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uscript (British Library MS Add. 39574) . 2 In tone, many of these writings are impersonal and didactic. Alternately instructive and hortatory, the firm teaching voice of such texts becomes a substitute for the actual presence of a father-confessor. Often, however, they are written in the first-person, as dramatic models for the reader's own self-examination or meditation. These works of spiritual guidance draw heavily on the Scriptures and classics of Christian spirituality, such as Gregory the Great's Moralin in lob. Of all the Scriptures, they rely most deliberately on the Psalms—the centerpiece of monastic devotion after Benedict's reforms, and the liber hymnorum of the entire Church. In the monastic tradition, religious were expected to spend much of their day praying and reflecting on the Psalter; indeed, their prayer cycle was organized so as to be permeated by the language of the Psalms. Analogously, at the close of a pseudo-Augustinian treatise in MS AU Souls 24, the author gives the following advice to "a widowe of cristene religioun": Bifore alle fingís, witoute ceessynge Jsenke J>u {>e maundementis [commandments] of J>i lord. Bisily lyue £>u in praiers & spalmes, j>at if it be possible, no man fynde f>ee ony tyme no but eifjer redynge ojjere praiynge. (fol. 35')

A layman or woman, with for instance the concerns of a large aristocratic household, could not maintain the sort of obsessive attention to the Psalter advised here.3 They could, however, receive intensive introductions to the Psalms in didactic prose and verse, and they could be directed in these to attend to the biographical outline of David's career as a striking exemplum both to fear and to imitate. When psalm discourse was adapted from the monastic to lay context, it may have lost something in extent, but not necessarily in intensity. In the following chapter, I do not discuss the major canonical works of Middle English prose that use the Psalms, such as the Ancrene Wisse or Rolle's Form ofLiving, since in these the Psalms compete as authorities with many other scriptural, exegetical, and homiletic texts. Rather, I concentrate on three less well known examples of Middle English didactic and devotional prose, each of which uses the Psalms and the theme of Davidic imitation in a more pervasive way, and focuses on David's function as a model of compunction or penitential humility. I have arranged the examples so that my discussion moves from a text which uses the Psalms in a straightforwardly discursive way, the Middle English translation of the pseudo-Bernardine Liber de Modo Bene Vivendi ad Sororem, to two that have prose styles more heavily influenced by psalm language, 'The Direccioun of

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a Mannys Lyfe," a general treatise on the moral life, and "The Remnant of My Thoughts," a penitential meditation. In all three cases, I concentrate on techniques of psalm translation used by the respective authors, as evidence of how they conceived the relationship between psalm discourse and their own didactic and devotional rhetoric. Middle English authors introduce David most often as an exemplum of compunction or penitential humility, citing and commenting on the Psalms in order to induce a humble attitude in their readers. Even in a work like Piers Plowman, where David's kingship is certainly an important theme, the significance of David rex is discernible only in relation to David penitens, and Langland's energetic use of the Psalms in penitential contexts. For most Middle English writers, David must be understood as sinner and penitent, before he can be comprehended as monarch. As I noted above, many of these prose and verse texts achieved wide circulation. In the first instance, however, they are addressed to the individual reader: some, for instance, are written for certain individuals in religion, others for the general lay reader.4 They are all concerned with the Psalms in their private rather than public aspect, as models for personal devotion and the reform of the individual soul. As we saw in Part I, the commentators stress that this individual reform has immediate social import. Except in certain Lollard revisions to Thomas Brampton's paraphrase of the seven penitential psalms (see Chapter 4, below), this point is not made any more specific than the statement that the individual reformed soul, like David himself, should become a model or example for others to imitate. In these prose and verse texts, devotion rarely slips over into ideology. Although the doctrine of compunction gets developed and promoted most vigorously by Gregory the Great, in his writings on the role of the affectus in spirituality, it has biblical roots. 5 The one specific biblical reference to the term compunction appears in Acts 2.37, where those who hear Peter's account of Pentecost are collectively "pierced to the heart" ("compuncti sunt corde") and repent. The doctrine of compunction, as it developed in medieval spirituality, came to involve the sudden and often unexpected apprehension of one's sinfulness — a painful moment of self-accusation, followed by a deep sense of guilt and sometimes even self-hatred. These negative feelings, as the story from Acts makes clear, are not an end in themselves. They should direct the soul away from its own concerns and back toward God. Because of the real dangers of overscrupulousness, however, which in extreme cases can lead to despair, late medieval writers frequently explain compunction in positive terms as well, in connection with the soul's longing

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for God. "With most of us," William James explains in Varieties of Religious Experience, "the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at."6 Late medieval prose writers and poets anticipated this analysis, and following Gregory explain that the sorrowful groans of the penitent must be transformed into the expectant sighs of the soul as it actively moves toward God. David, accordingly, becomes a model of compunction in two senses: an exemplar of tearful sorrow for one's sins, and of fervent longing for the divine. Gregory draws a distinction between two kinds of compunct tears: the lower stream ("irriguum inferius") of repentance and the higher stream ("irriguum superáis") of desire for God.7 Examples of both, of course, are to be found in the Psalter, where David presents himself not only as weeping day and night on account of his sins, but sometimes as restlessly thirsting after the divine waters of grace (e.g., Ps 41.2), and as a pilgrim, wandering in distress until he reaches the heavenly city (e.g., Ps 118, passim). While the verb compungere does not appear in the Psalms, the doctrine of compunction is indeed psalm-based. In his words to the crowd in Acts 2, Peter explicitly recalls David's status as a prophet of Christ, quoting the Psalmist twice as an authority for the idea that God made Jesus "both Lord and Christ": Dixit Dominus Domino meo: sede a dextris meis, Donee ponam inimicos tuos scabillum pedum tuorum. (Ps 109.1 ) [The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand: Until I make your enemies your footstool.] Peter sets David's prophetic and self-effacing deference to the kingly authority of Christ against his audience's rejection and crucifixion of Jesus, in order to induce their sense of collective guilt. He uses the triumphal first verse of Psalm 109 to provoke his listeners to self-accusation and penance. In Acts 2, then, David is not just a model of humility, but an active agent of compunction, whose poetic text —via Peter's strategic quotation of it — stimulates the moral reform of the crowd. Compunction appears as an aspect of the Psalmist's own experience in

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the story of Nathan's confrontation with King David in 2 Samuel 12, and throughout the penitential psalms. David's touchingly simply statement in response to Nathan's parable, "I have sinned against the Lord," is the archetypal biblical moment of compunction. Sudden and heartfelt, this admission changes forever David's sense of himself, by implying that he finally understands his kingly authority (and the temporal powers it confers) as radically contingent on the supreme authority of God. With this statement, David reorients his own sense of ethical priorities once and for all, and takes on Nathan's mande of moral prophecy by his exemplary penance. He who was taught by parable will teach others through his poems. In the penitential psalms themselves, this exemplary moment from 2 Samuel 12 is elaborated in expansive, poetic language. For instance, in the second penitential psalm (Ps 31 ) David laments that, because he conceals his sin from God, he is stung continually by the "spina" or thorn of guilt: Quoniam die ac nocte gravata est super me manus tua, Conversus sum in aerumna mea, dum configitur mihi spina. (4) [For day and night your hand was heavy upon me: I am turned in my anguish, while the thorn is fastened in me. ] Peter Lombard explains that this "thorn" signifies the moment when the sinner's conscience feels pierced and humbled by its sense of guilt ("dum compuncta est conscientia") .8 Richard Rolle, translating David's verse and the Lombard's comment in his English Psalter, makes the connection between the psalm and the doctrine of compunction even more direct: For day and nyght heuyd is on me thi hand; turnyd .i. am in my wrichidnes whils the thorn is festid [fixed securely]. That is, lord, for thi vengaunce touchid me, for to make me meke, and that day and nyght, that is assiduely [constandy], turnyd .i. am til the in my wrichidnes, knawand [acknowledging] me a wreche, whils the thorn is festid, that is, whils compunccioun for my synn is festid in my hert. (112)

Clarifying the Lombard, Rolle closely associates compunction's initial moment, the soul's apprehension of guilt, with its necessary consequence, the sinner's acknowledgment of his essential wretchedness: in the first instance to himself, but presumably later in confession to a priest.9 Moreover, although Peter Lombard notes (following Cassiodorus and pseudo-Alcuin) that the main purpose of this psalm is to admonish others to confess ("In-

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tentio: monet ad poenitentiam"),10 Rolle's abbreviated but more pointed version of the Lombard's gloss actually dramatizes the psalm's effect. By eliding his psalm translation andfirst-personexposition, and his triple repetition of "festid," Rolle shows how a troubled soul might suddenly be touched by the image of itself it sees reflected in the Psalms. In a way Lombard the schoolmaster cannot, Rolle demonstrates how this penitential psalm demands to be read not only as a record of David's feeling of compunction, but as a sharp stimilus to one's own self-interrogation. In the first penitential psalm, David describes his sorrowful tears, which he hopes will assuage God's righteous anger at his sins. Just as in Psalm 31.3-31.4 David remarked on the continual nagging of his conscience ("all the day long... day and night"), here he describes the depth of his sorrow in terms of the intensity and duration of his weeping: Laboravi in gemitu meo; Lavabo per singulas noctes lectum meum; In lacrimis meis stratum meum rigabo. (7) [I have laboured in my groanings, every night I will wash my bed: I will water my couch with tears. ] The anaphora "Laboravi / Lavabo / Lacrymis" connects by heavy alliteration David's past cries of penance ("I have labored") with his resolve to continue his penitential weeping ("I will wash . . . I will water"). In the monastic tradition, according to Jean Leclercq, "tears of desire, born of the compunction of love, are a gift from Our Lord." 11 This gift, however, which is a reward for confession, the soul must actively use to its advantage— cultivating it by recurrent self-examination and penance. In Psalm 6, David presents himself as resolving to make his penance ongoing and complete, and actively doing so. As Peter Lombard remarks, commenting on David's progression from the verb "lavabo" to "rigabo" at the end of this verse, "rigabo" denotes a fuller washing, one that does not simply cleanse the outside or surfaces of something, but penetrates in Peter Lombard's terms "ad interiora," to the intimate places of the heart.12 David's status as a model of compunction may be grounded in that moment in 2 Samuel 12, when he first and simply confesses his sin before Nathan and God, but it is rendered archetypal only in the penitential psalms themselves, where the Psalmist uses his divinely inspired poetic skills—the deceptively simple artfulness of

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anaphora, alliteration, and repetition —to represent the anxieties of a sinful conscience, and the difficult, deliberative work of penance.

The Pseudo-Bernardinc Liber De Modo Bene Vivendi cui Sororem and Its Middle English Translation (Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 517, fols. i r -i75 r ) Most late medieval readers would not have learned about compunction in psalm commentaries, or directly from the penitential psalms themselves, but in the devotional writings influenced by these: Middle English prose of religious instruction and religious lyrics. A comprehensive guide to compunction and its role in the devout life appears in a Middle English translation of a Latin treatise on contemplation once attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, the Liber de Modo Bene Vivendi ad Sororem. The work is now ascribed to Thomas of Froidmont.13 Originally, the treatise was intended for a particular woman religious. In the vernacular, however, such texts were also read and adapted for those pursuing the devout life in the world, or what the Middle English mystic Walter Hilton (d. 1396) called the "mixed" ("medled") life.14 There is no clear evidence that MS Laud Misc. 5x7 was commissioned by a layperson, although at the end of the Middle Ages the book was in lay hands. Nevertheless, there is nothing about the devotional teachings and practices of the texts in the book (among these treatises on meekness and patience in illness)15 that would preclude lay readership, despite the Liber's concerns with the spiritual life of those in religion.16 The early chapters of the Liber concern general matters, such as the nature of faith ( Chapter 1, "De fide" ), the character of divine grace ( Chapter 3, "De gratia Dei"), and the importance of spiritual affection, or fervent love of God and neighbor (Chapter 5, "De charitate"). Some of these chapters take up the severer aspects of devotion, including the need to cultivate a real fear of God (Chapter 4, "De timore Dei") and hatred of the world (Chapter 8, "De contemptu mundi"). For the most part, however, Thomas's theology is benign —his rhetoric soothes and encourages rather than chastises. Likewise his Middle English translator, in abridging the Liber, tends to emphasize those parts of the treatise that would attract rather than put off readers from the contemplative life: for instance, the advantages of spiritual conversation and of prayer, and the emotional and spiritual rewards of fervent pursuit of Christ the bridegroom.

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Following his early chapters on general matters, Thomas takes up practical ones: the details of the everyday life of a woman religious. For instance, in his discussion of religious garb (Chapter 9, "De habitu"), Thomas draws heavily on St. Jerome's famous letter to Eustochium, and describes how religious should be moderate in dress, ornate clothing being a sign of pride. More important, however, are Thomas's remarks on daily prayer. The prayer life of a religious, Thomas explains, should center on the Psalms and other biblical canticles and hymns, since these are especially effective in provoking the affectus and redirecting it away from the allures of this world and toward God. 17 As if to prepare his reader subliminally for a full discussion of the importance of the Psalms later, in his fifty-second chapter, "De psalmis et hymnis," Thomas lards the earlier parts of his text with psalm references, deferring constantly to David's authority on matters as diverse as fornication, fasting, and lying. In doing so, he implies the standard medieval view of the Psalter as a doctrinal summa, a digest of the wisdom of all the Scriptures, and develops an image of himself as a Davidic teacher, who explicates for the neophyte the Psalmist's moral prophecies. Although Thomas uses the Psalter as a kind of ethical handbook, he regards it more highly as the focus of two aspects of monastic prayer: oratio, the act of praising God either verbally or silently (in the oratory of the heart); and lectio, sacred reading, which ought to be practiced as a preparation for prayer: "Lectio nos ad orationem instruit" (1272) ("Redynge techyth vs to praye"; fol. i20 v ) . 18 Indeed, Thomas explains, David himself stresses the importance of sacred reading in the first psalm, where he describes constant meditation on the delights of God's law as a chief activity of the happy or just man: "Beatus vir qui in lege Domini meditabitur die ac nocte" ("Blessid ys J?at persoun {>at ys occupyed ny3t & daye in the lawe of god") (Ps 1 . 1 - 1 . 2 ) . Sacred reading, and the prayer it can generate, are the soul's weapons against the devil ("arma quibus diabolus expugnatur" [1272]) and its means of acquiring the bliss of heaven ("instrumenta quibus aeterna beatitudo acquiritur" [1272] ) : Redynge & prayer be wepyns that the devyl ys ouerecomm wit. These be instrumentes that heuen ys comm by. (fol. I 2 0 v )

Thomas does not single out the Psalms for reading and meditation in his chapter "De lectione." It is, however, the only biblical book he cites as an authority in the chapter (most chapters quote from at least three), and he thereby concentrates his reader's attention on it during his discussion of

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lectio divina. Moreover, the priority of the Psalter as an authoritative text throughout the Liber, witnessed simply by the abundance of quotation from it on all topics, suggests that Thomas regards it as more important to the intellectual and prayer life of his reader than other Scriptures. It is hard to believe that he would disagree with Rolle in the following passage, where Rolle describes the Psalms as a "more certain standard" than others for those seeking moral guidance through prayer: rede apone thi sauter, for J>at is euer more a sekyr standarde Jjat will noghte faile, who so may cleue Jser-to he sail noghte erre.19

Reading, however, is not the only way the Psalms influence the devout life of the religious. Thomas also emphasizes how listening to the Psalms read aloud or sung can turn souls away from the world and sin to a love of holiness ("ad amorem pietatis convertuntur"). Also, by the smoothness and sweetness ("suavitate") of David's verses, many are moved to tears ("commovet . . . ad lacrymas") of compunction, which cause them to bewail their sins ("peccata sua lugent") : as soon as they here the swettnes of psalmodie deuoudy songe, they be conuerted to the loue of god. Ther be many f>at wit J>e swetnes of psalmodye, beenge compuncte, wayle theyr synnes.

Thomas's conflation of pleasant and distressing language here underscores the twofold nature of compunction: the fact that it causes the soul pain, but pain which has been provoked by what Rolle calls the sweet, honey-like medicine of the Psalms.20 The mellifluousness of the Psalms results in the soul's lamenting its wretched condition, a complaint that later transforms itself, with the help of divine grace, into love longing for God. In Thomas's description of the efficacy of hearing the Psalms, one senses that obsession with the affectus that came to characterize late medieval spirituality: the emphasis on feeling rather than thought in the devotional life.21 Lectio is important; one ought to read and meditate intellectually on one's Psalter. But it is limited and preliminary in its effects, and must be complemented by an openness of spirit to the sensual qualities of David's rhetoric, in liturgical song and public reading of the Psalms. Thomas's first reference to the doctrine of compunction, however, is not in this relatively late chapter "De psalmis et hymnis." Rather, he gives his detailed explanation of compunction much earlier in the Liber, immediately after his first chapter on practical matters, "De habitu." These later

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remarks on reading and listening to the Psalms he intends to be read in the context of his earlier, comprehensive treatment of compunction, in his chapter "De compunctione."22 Thomas associates his discussions of religious garb or habit and compunction because these are two aspects of the same, essential problem of the devout life: how properly to align the accidentals of physical appearance and behavior with one's inner spiritual condition or moral substance. A humble garment is an index to meekness of spirit; just so, the penitential weeping provoked by a sudden feeling of guilt is a "token" or sign of contrition. Thomas's Middle English translator, following his Latin text closely, uses the familiar psalm topoi of the healthy soul and the light of grace to explain how the tears of compunction are an outward sign of an inner visitation by the Holy Spirit: The compunccion of f>e hart ys the helth and J>e lyght of {>e soule. For then the soule ys ly3tned, when it ys compuncte to teerys and wepyng. Compunccyon with teerys obteyneth remission of synnes. For then synnes be forgeue, when they be called to remembraunce with wepyng teerys. Compunccyon bryngeth to a persone the holy goste. For whenn the holy goste ys presente in the harte, anone a man or a woman doeth wayle theyr synnes. (fol. 32™; my emphasis)

The translator's first two when/then conditionals anticipate his final causal relation between the visitation of the Holy Spirit and holy weeping. As soon as ("anone") the Holy Spirit enters the heart of the penitent, he bewails his sins: in an instant, the penitent's outer behavior matches his renewed inner condition. The translator extends this point by simplifying an unexplained distinction in Thomas's Latin text between "compunctio cordis" and "compunctio mentis." He collapses the sense of both of these Latin phrases into his single phrase, "the compunccioun of Jje hert," and thereby virtually identifies the sudden apprehension of guilt associated with compunction and the necessary sequel to it, painstaking moral self-examination. The soul's sense of being both illuminated and relieved ("ly3tned")23 at the moment of compunction must be followed by its deliberate recollection of its sins and continued weeping, like David's in Psalm 6; its "I have labored" must become a resolve not simply to wet but to drench its inner parts in sorrowful tears. The outer token of the soul's visitation by the Holy Spirit is not momentary, but an ongoing process. By rendering Thomas's word "lacrymas" with the phrase "wepyng teerys," and his verb "plorat" with the alliterating word "wayle," the translator links verbally the two outward

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signs of compunction — the penitent's tears themselves and his sorrowful sighing—and suggests that the intensity of the original moment of compunction must be preserved through the soul's active use of divine grace. And by heightening the emotional register of the Latin, the Middle English translator virtually dramatizes the soul's experience of compunction, providing his reader with a vivid image of what it is like to experience such a sudden apprehension of guilt. Much more so than the Latin original, the emotional tone of the translation exemplifies for the reader the heightened feelings of the compunct soul. The text itself becomes a model for the reader. Thomas first introduces David as a model of compunction alongside other Old and New Testament exemplars of this emotion, such as St. Peter, Anna the mother of Samuel, Tobias, and Mary Magdalene. The technique of proliferating examples of notorious sinners and exemplary penitents, in lists in which David usually appears, is common in Middle English religious writing. A parallel instance is Langland's triple reference to Mary Magdalene, David, and St. Paul in Piers Plowman B, Passus X: Than Marie Maudeleyne who my3te do werse? Or who dide worse J?an Dauid ¡3 at vries dee]? conspired, Or Poul |?e Apostle {jat no pite hadde Cristene kynde to kille to dej>e? And now ben swiche as Souereyns wij> Seintes in heuene, Tho J>at wrou3te wikkedlokest in world J)o |)ei were. (42S-433) 24 Langland seems to give each of these examples equal rhetorical weight. Thomas, by contrast, emphasizes David's preeminence among his examples of compunction by quoting the Psalms directly at the beginning of the list, and by amplifying the David exemplum, while leaving the others undeveloped. In MS Laud Misc. 517, this passage is marked with a pointing hand, drawn in ink: Euery synner knoweth hym then to be vystitte of god, when he ys compuncte vnto teres or wepyng. For seynte petyr then dyd wepe, sayeth J>e gospell, when cryst lokyd vpon hymm. And the psalmyst sayth, "God lokyd, and f>e erth was moved and tremeled" [Ps 17.8]. Then doeth the erthe tremyll, when a synner ys moved to teerys. I exhorte you fjerfor, my dere suster, ]aat in prayer ye call to remembraunce with teerys your synnes. For he ¡3at hath not compunccioun or contricioun of hert, hath not a clene and pure prayer. My loued suster in cryste, here ys exaumples of holy sayntes which by

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compunccion and terrys obteyned of god forgevenes of theyr synnes. Anna, J)e moder of Samuel, by compunccion and terrys deserued to haue a chyld, and more ouer she obteyned of god J)e gift of prophecie. Dauid by compunccion and wepyng obteyned forgeuenes of his murther and aduoutre. Thys he hard by jje prophete Nathan, "Thou shalt not dye, for almyjty god hath forgeven thethysynn." (fol. 3 i r v ) In the Latin, the psalm quotation with which this passage begins shares equal status with the gospel reference to Peter's weeping, since Thomas quotes in full the text of Matthew 26.75, where the episode is recorded. The Middle English translator omits the Gospel quotation, giving added prominence to the psalm text and thus to David's function as an authoritative example of compunction. The Middle English text also refers to Nathan by name, the Latin reading simply "prophetam," perhaps to recall in greater detail the Old Testament story of David's contrition —the historical and canonical basis of David's exemplary status. The Middle English translator further underscores David's preeminence as a model of compunction a bit later in this chapter, when he uses David's example and psalm quotations to explain the three reasons why people weep for their sins: on account of the wretchedness of this life, out of compassion for the sinful condition of their neighbors, and out of longing for the next life, and mankind's heavenly inheritance: Ye wold, parauenture, aske me, what be the causes of oure sorow or mornyng, {sat we shuld wepe for in this mortali lyfe. My loved suster, we doo wepe for oure synnes, for the wrechidnes of this world, for the compassion of our neyghbour, and for ]>e love and desyre of heuenly reward. For synn wepte kyng Dauid when he sayd, " I schall wasch euery ny3t my conscience in wepyng for my synn, and with teerys I shall weete my sensualyte" [Ps 6.7], f>at it may bryng furth jre good frute of vertue. The same personn wepte for the mysery of this world, when he sayde, "Woo ys me J)at my habitacioun here ys prolongyd. I have duellyd longe amonst wycked cumpany ! " . . . For the love of ]?e celestyall rewarde wepte f>e iuste persons Jjat J>e psalmyste spekyth of sayeng, "Overe the floddys of babylon we sate and wept, when we thoujt on the, syon" [Ps 136. ι ]. The flodes of babylon be the goodys of f>e world, which euery good and iuste seruaunte of god doeth passe ouere and sytteth above them, by lyftyng vp his mynde to heuen, and mornyth J>at he ys taryed from the ioyes of J>e celestyall syon, wher he shuld se Jje gloryous vision of god. (fols. 32 v -33 r ) In this instance, the translator has made extensive changes to the Latin. For example, Thomas does not, as his translator does, explain the tropologie parallel between the Babylonian captivity and the situation of the virtuous

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in this life, who must live among (and be tempted by) temporal goods, while longing for the "celestyall syon" and the beatific vision. It may be that Thomas intends to imply the parallel: it was a commonplace derived from Augustine's enarratio on Psalm 136 (Superflumina Babylonis). The translator's amplification, however, stands as another instance of his making the Latin text more explicit and emotional. By explaining the allegorical equivalences, the translator implicates his reader's situation, and the situation of all just people, in the literal sense of the psalm verse. Rather than elevating David's words to some abstruse symbolic level, he reliteralizes them by establishing an identity between what they say and how his readers actually have to live. For the translator, as for Augustine in the Enarrationes, the floods of Babylon do not merely represent this earthly life; they are this present life.25 The translator's changes to Thomas's quotation from the first penitential psalm (Ps 6.7) are more subtle, but make a similar point. He adds to Thomas's quotation of the Latin psalm verse information from the exegetical commentaries, and readjusts the chiastic pattern of the Latin to concentrate attention on the image of David's holy tears. Where, in the Latin verse, David refers quite literally to washing his couch ("lectum") with tears, and to watering his bed ("stratum") with his weeping, the translator has substituted the standard allegorical equivalences, as explained by Peter Lombard: "lectum" = conscience, and "stratum" = sensuality, or the soul's lower nature or appetitive part.26 The effect is twofold. On the one hand, the substitutions introduce a cryptic gloss on the Latin text itself, by alluding to the Davidic narrative behind this psalm verse: David's well-known concession to his sexual appetites, his having slept with Bathsheba. That is, one effect of the translator's adaptation is to historicize the psalm verse, to evoke the circumstances in David's life that led to the writing of this psalm. On the other hand, and almost paradoxically, the substitutions generalize David's personal statement; they point up its representative function. By identifying details of David's chamber with terms from medieval faculty psychology, the translator implies that David's personal history and sentiments are exemplary or paradigmatic: they describe a geography of the human soul. David's sins, as Augustine explains in his commentary on Psalm 50, are both a matter of historical record and a mode of rhetorical implication—his moral problem and a description of the dilemma of the human condition. They are fully comprehended only in this double sense. There is, however, another element to the translator's additions. They imply that, just as man's present condition is a Babylonian captivity, his

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"conscience" and "sensuality" are as real, as places, as David's bedchamber. Once again, the translator uses allegory to reliteralize his psalm text. This point may be clearer if we consider an allegorical tradition that grew out of exegesis of this psalm verse: detailed representations of the conscience as a physical place or chamber. The most elaborate example of this kind of allegory is a late fourteenth-century prose text called The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, which begins by comparing "a place J)at es called Conscyence" to a religious house.27 The comparison is prompted by the author's sense of his audience: those outside the cloister ("all tho jjat ne may noghte be bodyly in religyone"), who nevertheless seek to practice the devout life, and more particularly, to "be clensed clene of syne" through the grace bestowed by God's Holy Spirit. Much of the treatise describes the "xxix gostly ladyes" who inhabit the abbey, among them the cook ("kychynnere") Penance, £>at with grete besynes trayuells [labors] daye & nyghte for to plese alle, and ofte swetis with bitter tens for angyre of hir [their] synnes. Scho makes gud metis, J>at es many bitter sorowes alle for hir gyltes, and theys metis fedis J>e saule; bot scho sparis [denies] hir-selfe thorow abstynence and etys bot littül, ffor do scho neuer so mekill ne so mony-folde of gud werkes, ay semys scho hir-selfe vnworthy and synfull. (329)

Like the Middle English translator's changes to Thomas of Froidmont's Liber, this author is concerned with making his allegory seem as literal—as real—as possible. His hyperdetailed description of the abbey implies that man's conscience is not just figurally but actually a place, where the household staff seeks to maintain cleanliness and order. Most of the allegory's details are derived directly from the penitential psalms. Penance's toiling day and night and her preparation of tasty dishes for the soul from sorrow for sin are literalizations of two of David's penitential statements: that he labors in weeping all night long (Ps 6.7), and that his food is of ashes and tears (Ps 41.4). The implied paradox in this later statement—that what sustains the Psalmist are in fact his acts of physical self-denial—is caught in ùve Abbey allegory in the detail of Penance's fasting. Although she cooks an abundant and tasty meal for the soul, she herself refrains from food. Food is simultaneously figurative and literal in the allegory: the moral nourishment of sorrow, and the physical sustenance Penance denies herself. The Abbey author does not make the connection between his allegory and the Psalms explicit. By contrast, the author of a similar allegory in MS Douce 302, the unique copy of John Audela/s poems, refers directly to Psalm 6.7 as the basis for his imagery:

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Psalm Discourse Whan J)e chambur of J31 soule is clensid fro al syn, J)u schalte arayad do Jjerin on Jais wyse, in jse whiche lorde ihesu wol haue lykyng to ryst hym. Bot first {?u most make lytter [bed], J>at schal be made of mynde [remembrance] of al J>e synnys J>at euer comydidyst, 3ederyng togedir as in to a lytter of straw. I>en loke Jra schake out of J)is leter, wyche is in J>i mynde, al J>e dust of al syn and of foule Jx>3tis so \νφ J>e schakeforke of kyndnes, wyche schal haue ii grayue [prongs] : Jjat one is wil to amend ye, J>at oJ>er is to prey god of grace J)at hit mow so be. ]>e carines [sheet] nexte J>e straue most be an enterele sorow for Jn syn, wyche wyl make J)e to watyre jse lytter of J)i bed with terys of J)yn ene, as f>e prophet DauyJ) sayj) in jje sautere boke, Lacrimis mets stratum meusrigabo, Jjat is to say, ' Ύ haue watered my bydstre all wijs terris of myn ene." (fols. 32 v b -33 r a )

The distinction the allegorist draws between the straw beneath the sheet and the sheet itself is an effort to deal precisely with the Psalmist's double reference to his "lectum" or bed (OF "litiere," M E "lytter") and his "stratum," literally "a piece of bedding or coverlet" not a bed,28 which the allegorist translates instead as "bydstre" or bedding. Augustine points out, in his comment on this verse, that "lectum/stratum" is a simple repetition, and that we should take the two terms as synonymous, the Psalmist's emphasis instead being on the difference in intensity between simply "washing" and fully "watering" or drenching his bed with tears. The allegorist, however, is interested in how this distinction connects with the two objects in question, the exact physical circumstances of David's penitential behavior. His translation of "stratum" as "bydstre" is curious, but not inept. The second Wycliffite version of the Psalms ( 1388), for example, translates the verse "Y schal moiste my bedstrew with my teeris," and Rolle writes, following Peter Lombard, "I trauaild in my sorow, i sail waysch my bed ilke [each] nyght by nyght: with my teris my beddynge i sail wete."29 Confronted with the Psalmist's near synonym, his Middle English interpreters saw in "lectum" vs. "stratum" a distinction that pointed up the need for excessive introspection on the part of penitents. By his version, the Douce allegorist keeps the reader's attention on David's actual situation, while satisfying the emphasis Augustine detects on the intensity of David's weeping, since to drench completely ("watered... all") his bedstraw with tears, the Psalmist would have had to weep so bitterly that his tears could penetrate his sheet, to the inner portion of his bed —figuratively, the innermost recesses of the soul. The Douce allegorist goes on to describe the soul's chamber even more particularly, discussing the nature of its blankets, bolsters, and curtains, all in allegorical language that is at a considerable remove from the simplicity

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of David's statement in Psalm 6.7. At the start of his allegory, however, when he wants to establish its basis in the Psalms and in David's own condition, he dwells on the "lectum/stratum" distinction. The mattress in the soul's chamber, in his allegory, "schal be hote [fervent] medytacioune" (fol. 33ra). The intensity of his own allegorical distinction becomes a representative type of this kind of "hote" meditation, as it demonstrates just how much can be deduced about the significance of David's example from a single very important psalm verse. Like the Middle English translator's rendering of "lectum" as conscience and "stratum" as sensuality, then, the purpose of these allegories of the soul is twofold: they concentrate attention on the details of David's experience as he represents it in the Psalms, and at the same time link that Old Testament experience with the interior or subjective states of those who must pattern their contrition on the Psalmist's. The places they describe — the bed of conscience, the chamber of the soul — are just as literal as David's own room and the particulars of his moral experience. They are not abstractions from David's words, but reliteralizations of these in the context of the reader's actual experience. Medieval faculty psychology, we ought to remember, represented the mind as a series of chambers, the loci of various types of activity, and the memory as a vast storehouse of sense impressions that the imagination could recall and reconstitute. For the allegorista we have been considering, as for the anonymous Middle English translator of Thomas's Liber, the physicality of the soul made tropologie parallels between it and David's private chamber all the more plausible and suggestive, in literal notfigurativeterms. It is worth observing, in connection with these allegories, that the language of many of the penitential psalms, and of Psalm 50 especially, deliberately opposes the exterior and interior person—what David appears to be on the outside, and what within he actually is. In Psalm 37.6, for instance, David suggests that his sins fester because he has foolishly kept them secret ("Putruerunt et corruptae sunt cicatrices meae, / A facie insipientiae meae"), God knowing all the while the secrets of his heart. Thus, in the Miserere the Psalmist asks not only to be washed but to be cleansed fully, acknowledging that God desires the renewal of sinners deep from within ("in visceribus meis"; 12), and to that end opens up His own innermost secrets to those who are humble: Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti; Incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi. (8)

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Psalm Discourse [For behold you have loved truth: the uncertain and hidden things of your wisdom you have made manifest to me. ]

This opposition between the sinner, who guiltily hides his sordid deeds, and God, who opens up his innermost wisdom to the penitent, implies the sinner's responsibility to look within, and to reveal what is there, if he expects divine grace. More than that, it implies the sinner's need to search out his innermost being completely, so that he might understand the exact nature of his offenses and ask confidendy for their forgiveness. If, according to the penitential psalms, sinners must learn habits of inferiority—of intense reflection and self-examination—we might detect another rhetorical purpose in the allegorical glosses on Psalm 6.7 that we have been examining. These allegories compel the reader to look deeply within by comparing the soul's inward parts with a private place, the spirit's habitation, for which it alone is responsible. By describing this place in detail, these allegories create an interior counterworld, opposed to the world of the flesh, effectively reorienting the soul so that it is better able to undertake the hard work of penance. They describe the objects and principles of spiritual housekeeping as literally as they can, in an effort to displace the soul's sense of the temporal and its attractions as all that is truly real.30 One final point must be made concerning the place of the Psalms in the Liber. The examples we have been considering show Thomas and his Middle English translator emphasizing what Gregory called the "irriguum inferius," the lower stream of compunct tears of penance. This emphasis is counterbalanced in the Liber, however, by references to tears of spiritual longing or desire, the "irriguum superius," made in connection with the biblical Song of Songs, which the Middle Ages interpreted as the love song of Christ for the Church.31 In fact, at the end of his chapter on compunction, Thomas uses an extended rhetorical gloss on a verse from the Song of Songs to prepare his reader for his final exhortation to penance: O ye spouse of cryste, be ye lyk to J>e turtyll [turtle dove], and excepte Ihesu cryste your spouse, [>e which ys ascenditi to heuen, loke after noon of>ere lover. Scripture sayeth also in Jse voyce of cryste to his loued spouse, "Verey feyr be thy chekys, as of [je turtyl" [Cant 4.1]. In the chekys ys wonte to be shamfastnes seenn. Reuerent suster, ye haue Jje chekys of J>e turtyl, yf for shamfastnes of your spouse, Ihesu cryste, ye doo no J>ing agaynste his wyll; ye haue J>e chekys of Jse turtyl, yf with loue and reuerence of cryste, ye sette asyde tho thynges J>at shuld displese hymm; ye haue ¡je chekys of J>e turtyl, yf ye love no

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no£>er louer but cryste. Therfor, dere suster, wassh your synnes indefynently with teerys; daily wasche your negligences by compunccioun and wepyng; contynually dense f>e transgressions of your order with teerys. By teerys and compunccioun gete you remission of your synnes and euerlastyng ioye. That ye haue lewdlye [ignorandy] doonn vnlefully, purge it with wepyng. Good virgynn, yf ye doo not wepe for your synnes in {)is world, wher shall ye say with holy and penitent kyng dauid to god, "I>ou haste good lorde put my teerys before thy syght." And in ano£>er place he sayeth, "My teerys and wepyng was to me night and daye both mete and drynke" [Ps 6.7]. I counseyle you then, spouse of cryste, J>at in this mortali lyfe ye mourne and wayle your synnes, so J)at ye may deserue comfort and consolacioun in hauen. As the gospel sayth, "Blessed be thoo J)at mourne, for they shal be comforted" fMt 5.4]. Amen, (fols. 34 v -35 r )

The passage begins, strategically, with the language of praise, identifying the reader with the sponsa of the Song of Songs, and then enjoining her to make herself more like the turtle dove, an Old Testament figure for fidelity. Thomas then avoids imputing any moral shortcoming to his reader by using a series of conditional statements to encourage her self-examination: she may be compared with the turtle if she obeys Christ in everything, avoids that which displeases him, and takes no other lovers. The second and third of these conditions, of course, are simply different ways of stating the first. Thomas's parallel conditionals are meant to impress on the reader that she must be certain that her will is not disposed toward the things of this world, but those of Christ. The impression is made, however, through the language of love and indirection, rather than chastisement and command. After this point, Thomas turns to a parallel series of moral injunctions, based in the penitential psalm topos of moral cleanness. Now that his reader's gaze has been turned within, Thomas's tone can become more imperative. The Middle English translator reinforces these imperatives by arranging them in a double chiastic structure: wassh daily contynually purge

indefynently wasche clmse with wepyng (my emphasis)

The parallelisms and inversions insist that compunction is not a momentary experience, but an ongoing process of moral renewal: to be complete (a purgation), the washing away must be continuous. These parallelisms echo the parallel conditionals that explained to the reader how she might become

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Psalm Discourse

like the turtle, thereby connecting the trope of spiritual love longing and that of moral cleansing. The implication is that love of Christ and denial of the self are two aspects of the same condition, a complementary via positiva and via negativa. With this point made, Thomas again quotes the Psalms, and refers directly to David as a penitential exemplar. In calling David not only "penitent" but "holy," Thomas's translator summarizes the double nature of compunction, as it is represented in the Psalms. It involves, on the one hand, sorrow and remorse, but offers, ultimately, the joy of blessedness —"comfort and consolacioun" in heaven.32

"The Direccioun of a Mannys Lyfe" (Cambridge University Library M S Ff.6.33, fols. 98 ν -ιΐ4 Γ and Trinity College Cambridge M S 0.7.47, fols. 87 r -95 r ) The Psalms are central to the spiritual life as Thomas describes it in the Liber, and his Middle English translator underscores their centrality by his adaptations of Thomas's Latin text, especially his remarks on the virtues of compunction. It would be an overstatement, however, to represent the style of the Liber itself as heavily indebted to psalm discourse. Although, as we have seen, Thomas draws on the Psalms throughout his work, he tends to concentrate emphasis on them in his discussions of prayer and compunction. David is one of Thomas's main scriptural authorities, but he cites many others as well over the course of his seventy chapters. The Psalms are a weighty textual presence in the Liber, but they do not dominate or permeate Thomas's discourse. By contrast, another shorter Middle English treatise roughly contemporary with the English translation of the Liber, "The Direccioun of a Mannys Lyfe," suggests how pervasive the influence of the Psalms could be in a single prose text, and how the style of such a text might come under the influence of the author's repeated quotations and translations from the Psalms. ' T h e Direccioun of a Mannys Lyfe" is a late-fourteenth-century treatise on temptation and penance, which describes the various types and degrees of temptation and advises the reader on how to survive the devil's assaults. Unlike Thomas of Froidmont, its anonymous author wrote for a lay audience, conceived in the most general terms: in a rubric to one of two identified copies of the text, he explains that the seven chapters of his "litell short tretys" are "necessary to euery man to vndirstonde that will be the

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seruaunt of god," and in his opening sentence he addresses "every man and woman that by grace of god is in wille for to plese god and to be his seruaunt" (Cambridge University Library M S Ff.6.33, fol. 98 v ). The University Library manuscript was copied in the south of England; the Trinity copy, imperfect at the end, is in a northern dialect, thus suggesting how widely the text must have circulated. Both copies appear in books with other devotional texts, in the same scribal hands, such as the Middle English translation of Richard of St. Victor's Benjamin Minor (in the University Library manuscript) and an abridged version of Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection (in Trinity). Except for dialea differences, simple scribal transpositions, and some missing translations from the beginning of the University Library copy of "Direccioun," the Middle English translations of Latin biblical texts and other authorities in these copies are identical. They are also distinctive, clearly indebted to neither Wycliffite version of the Bible nor, in the case of Psalm translations, to Rolle or other Middle English prose or verse psalters. The amount of Bible translation in the treatise is remarkable. Out of about 5,000 words of text, approximately 2,200, or almost half, consist of quotations from the Vulgate and translations of these. Sometimes, especially in quoting the Psalms, the author piles quotation on quotation, with little intervening expository matter. This suggests that the writer has two aims: to make his arguments concerning temptation and penance using as much biblical authority as possible, but also simply to introduce his readers to as much of the Latin Bible as possible in a short space, translated into good Middle English. This second purpose should not be underrated. Wyclif once remarked that one of the aims of his English homilies was to work the entire text of the Pauline epistles into English. 33 Treatises like "Direccioun" functioned, in part, as compendia of substantial biblical quotations from the more important scriptural books, such as the Psalms. The quotations are unusually full; none of them ends in "etcetera," as is common with Latin biblical quotations translated in vernacular contexts. This suggests that the author does not presume any prior knowledge of Latin on the part of his audience (that is, no ability to complete the quotations on their own) and confirms the sense that one of his aims is to use his Middle English translations not as ends in themselves, but as a means of educating his audience in the Vulgate, much as Rolle says he does in his English Psalter with comment. Two general features of the text are significant in connection with this aim. First, in both manuscripts of "Direccioun" the Latin quotations are

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visually more prominent than the translations: in the University Library manuscript, they are done in bright red ink; in the Trinity manuscript, which is less lavish, they are consistently underlined in yellow ochre. The reader must give them his attention, not leap over them into the English renderings. One curious feature of the underlining in Trinity's copy deserves note: it is always done neatly, but more often than not extends beyond the end of the Latin quotation, to thefirsttwo or three letters of the English rendering, as if the scribe were using the underlining to imply a strict continguity of meaning between the Latin and English. Of the thirty-eight Vulgate quotations in "Direccioun," twenty-three are from the Psalter. This is not surprising, given the author's penitential theme. In many of the Psalms David asks God's help in overcoming his enemies, whom the commentators usually interpret as the deadly sins or temptation, an interpretation put forward several times in "Direccioun." More particularly, the author concentrates his attention on the seven penitential psalms, David's archetypal expressions of contrition for his sins of adultery and murder, and presents them as direct models for sinners. He quotes and translates from three of the seven penitential psalms, and from two of these twice. Also, within the first fifty psalms, regarded by such commentators as Augustine as a larger subgroup devoted to penance, he quotes and translates several instances of comparable topoi, where the Psalmist deliberately recalls and plays variations on his own patterns of thought and language. It seems, in other words, as if the author is not selecting his psalm quotations casually, but is deliberately concording the Psalms, especially those concerned with penitential themes, to imply for his reader an interrelatedness among the psalm verses he quotes. Whenever possible, the author of "Direccioun" avoids Latinate diction and syntax in translating, using what Rolle calls in the prologue to his English Psalter "lyghtest and comonest" English.34 For instance, early in the treatise, the author tries to induce a penitential attitude in his reader by quoting and translating a verse from the prophet Joel: forthynke [sat synne that thou hast doon, and than doo shryve the faste and 3erne, and do penauns with al thi hert bi discrecioun, and moorne and wepe for thy synne, and than may thou comme to good lyvyng and be turnyd to god, as he sayeth hymselfe, Conuertimini ad me in foto corde vestro, in iemnio etfletu- et planctu [J1 2.12], "Be 3e turnyd to me," seyeth god, "in all 30ure hert—in fastyng, wepyng, and moornyng for 30ure synne." (fol. ioi v )

Both Wycliffite versions use the cognate "convertid" to translate "Conuertimini." While this author's use of "turnyd" is hardly a stroke of genius, it is

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an attempt to do justice to the Latin while bringing the style of the translation into line with the author's own plain, colloquial turns of phrase in the expository matter: "commme to good lyvyng and be turnyd to god." On other occasions in the treatise when he has to translate the same Latin verb, the author also uses "turnyd," and then recalls his translation in the expository matter following by using the same word to discuss the reader's hoped for conversion. The less Latinate word does not depend on a reader's etymological skills to get across the central metaphor of "Direccioun" —the soul's need to demonstrate that it has shifted its concerns from the carnal to the spiritual by actively turning away from the world and toward God. In some cases the gap between the choices of the Wycliffite translator and this author are greater, and more clearly due to this author's decision to avoid awkward, overly literal translation. For example, in advising his reader not to despair, the author appeals to David as an example: if thou by freylte fall ofte in synne, doo as I haue sayde and kepe the bettyr another tyme. And pray god than as dauid dyd, whan he sayde thus, Usquequo domine cxaltabitur inimicus meus super me? Respice, et exaudí me, domine deus meus [Ps 1 2 . 3 - 1 2 . 4 ] . That is to sey, "Lorde, howe longe shall myn enemye haue maystrye ouere ouere me? Behold me lord god and here me." (fol. i04 v )

In trying to do justice to the Latin, the first Wycliffite version translates "exaltabitur . . . super" as "ben enhauncid vpon"; the second version improves on this somewhat with "be reisid on." However, this author's rendering, "haue maystrue ouere," is obviously superior: it captures the sense of the verb accurately enough, and improves on both Wycliffite versions in translating the preposition "super" as "over" rather than "upon" or "on." Although the "Direccioun" author always wants his reader to be aware of the priority of the Latin text of Scripture over his English versions, he does not shrink from interpretive paraphrase when this would bring his scriptural text more in line with his own rhetorical concerns. A good example occurs at the very end of the treatise, as the author seeks to assure his reader of God's mercy, by quoting and translating Psalm 31.10: Multa flagella peccatoris. Sperantem autem in domino misericordia circumdabit [Ps 31.10], "There are many chastysyngys of a synner, but mercy shall belappe hym that hopith in oure lorde." As it is sayde before, that mercy and that hope graunte vs he, whose mercy is to all men fre. Amen. (fol. 114 r )

The author's choice of "belappe" is poetic rather than literal: the Wycliffite alternatives, "enuyroune" and "cumpasse" recall Latin "circumdabit" more

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directly. However, they fail to suggest the writer's (and, he hopes, the reader's) emotional response to the awareness of God's care for sinful mankind. "Belappe," with its sense of wrapping up or enveloping rather than simply surrounding, attributes to God a protective motherly affection for sinners; the verb appears elsewhere in Middle English in Marian lyrics, where the Virgin is described as wrapping up the Christ child in swaddling clothes, or in her own protective embrace. In the "Direccioun" author's version of the psalm verse, this sort of affectionate and protective embrace stands in sharp contrast with the "chastysynges" or discipline mentioned earlier in the verse. Such a juxtaposition summarizes the seemingly contradictory, but in fact complementary, aspects of God's attitude toward sinners discussed throughout the treatise: on the one hand, his righteous anger and fatherly need to discipline the soul; on the other hand, his motherly impulse to protect it from assault by its enemies. It is, in fact, likely that the "Direccioun" author has other psalms in mind when he translates "circumdabit" as "belappe" in Psalm 31.10, most notably Psalm 56.2, where David expresses comfort in the fact that God will protect him "in the shadow of his wings." In fact, the author has just quoted and translated Psalm 56.2 before this verse and quotation: trust and holde the vndir cristys baner with mynde [mindful] of his woundis and passion, and ther shalt |x>u fynde reste. As dauid sayde, Et in vmbra alarum tuarum sperabo, dmec transeat iniquitas [Ps 56.2], "I shall hope," he sayde, "vndir the shadwe of his wynges tyl my wyckidnes be passid awey." For god ys well plesyd that a man trust in hym. (fol. 1 1 3 ' )

The author's use of the spiritual battle topos as an anticipatory reference to "vmbra alarum tuarum" is slightly awkward: going into battle under Christ's standard is not quite the same thing as taking refuge in Him, the first being an active response, denoting moral fortitude, the latter a passive one, indicating the soul's vulnerability.35 This point aside, however, one can see how, at the close of his treatise, the "Direccioun" author is not translating psalm verses individually, but in association with other psalm verses. That is, he is contextualizing each verse by concording it with similar ones in the Psalter, and sometimes representing in his Middle English translations conflated versions of more than one psalm verse. He allows individual psalm verses to function as glosses on others, and involves in the discourse of his treatise far more psalm verses than actually appear translated on the page. The dominance of psalm discourse in "Direccioun" is first suggested,

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however, by the author's powerful opening image—of the world as a threatening place, full of the devil's snares and traps. H e derives the image from Psalm 56: Every man and woman that by grace of god is in wille for to plese god and for to be his seruaunt behouyth, for nede, for to kepe hym from his thre gosdy enemyes — that is for to sey, Jje flesshe, the worlde, and the feend—the which are besy day and ny3te for to tempte vs and bryng vs in synne and in euyll lyvyng thurwe her manyfolde wyles, and panterys, and snarys that they ordeyn and leyn to cacche cristen soules. And dauid therof beryth wittnesse wher he sayth, Laqueum pamuerunt pedibus meis, et incuruauerunt animant meant [Ps 56.7], "jjei haue dight a snare to my fete & worked my sowie amys."36 These snaris are the sevyn dedeiy synnys, and for to breke the ten commaundementis of god, and misspende and mysvse oure .v. wittis [senses], and for to make vs mystrowe the articlis of the feyth and of oure beleve, and such other temptaciouns. (fol. 98") "Panterys" are, literally, snares for catching birds. Following the Psalmist, the "Direccioun" author represents "cristen soules," frustratingly, as both responsible for keeping themselves from the three classic deceivers (the world, the flesh, and the devil), and as being as vulnerable as sparrows. On the one hand, moral vigilance must be enjoined; on the other hand, the soul appears to be considerably outmatched. The author's main concern throughout his treatise is with allaying the deep anxieties generated by the soul's dilemma, largely by referring his readers back to comforting rather than frightful verses from the Psalms. 37 Unlike Thomas of Froidmont, the "Direccioun" author is not really concerned with discussing the Psalmist as an exemplar of holy tears. He presents David, instead, as a model of penitential hope and trust in God. Three times over the course of his treatise, the author explicitly calls David an "ensaumple" for others, and each time he charges his reader with repeating David's contrite expressions aloud, so that he will make David's words and sentiments his own. He arranges his seven chapters so that they proceed from more general advice to those who have sinned (e.g., in Chapter 2, " H o w a man shall doo [behave] J>at is in wykkid lyfe"), to the more serious problems of those who have already resisted sin, but continue to be troubled by the devil (e.g., in Chapter 5, "Of harde [severe] temptacionys, and howe they shall be ouere comme"), and concludes with chapters on how one should not complain about being tempted (Chapter 6, "That a man shall not grutche wyth temptacion") and a general chapter on taking refuge in G o d (Chapter 7, " H o w e a man in tyme of temptacioun shall hope

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and truste in gode"). It is notable that the author concentrates his psalm quotations and references to David's example in these later chapters, presumably because it is to these severer questions that he feels the Psalms are most relevant. His most insistent quotations from the Psalms, for instance, comprise about the last fourth of his chapter on "harde temptacionys": "Nedefull it is," sayeth seynt Bernarde, "J)at temptacionys comme." "Neuertheless," he sayth, "there shall no man be crowyned but if he fy3te lawefally. And howe shulde he fy3te whan that fayleth that he shulde fyjte with?" Dauid was thuys dysesyd and sayde, Miserere mei, domine, quoniam infirmus sum. Sana me, domine, quoniam conturbata sunt omnia ossa mea. Et anima mea turbata est valde [Ps 6.3]. "Haue mercy on me lorde" he sayeth, "for I am seke of synne. Hele me lorde, for all my bonys are troublyd and my sowie ys gredy distrowblyd." But what seyth he more? He sayth, Laudans inuocabo dominum, et ab inimicis metssaluus ero [Ps 17.4]. That is to say, "I lovyng and praysyng my lorde god shall call hym, and I shall be save," he sayeth, "or all myn enemyes." This prouyth dauid sooth, to oure example, where he sayeth in the sawter thus, In tribulacione mea inuocaui dominum, et ad deum tneum clamaui; et exaudiuit de templo sancto suo vocem meam [Ps 17.7], "I cryed and callyd," he sayth, "in my tribulacioun to my lorde god, and he hath herde my voys from his holy temple." Do he thus that is tempted and dysesyd and he shall be safe, and god shall not forsake hym, but he shall loke to hym and helpe hym whan his wyll ys. And dauid also beryth wittnes thus, Nec auertitfaciem suam a me, et cum clamarem ad eum exaudiuit me [Ps 21.25]. "God hath not turnyd awey," he sayth, "his face fro me, but whan I cryede to hymm, he herde me." (fol. 1 io r v )

The tone the author adopts with his reader is remarkably indulgent, and at the same time firmly directive. He anticipates and states questions concerning the topics of each chapter, especially the anxieties of those who have successfully withstood temptations, yet continue to be assaulted. In this passage, having translated a rather unsympathetic remark by Bernard of Clairvaux about fighting the good fight, he immediately juxtaposes with this David's pathetic requests to God for help, in Psalm 6. By introducing these with the phrase "Dauid was thuys dysesyd," the author removes any onus the reader might feel to be attached to his own weakened moral energy: the Psalmist once felt this way, too! The word "dysesyd" is a careful choice. It looks ahead to the topos of the sick soul in the psalm verse that follows—that is, to David's unhealthy moral condition, which he represents in the psalm as a morbid affliction of both mind and body. The troubled reader's mental and physical powers likewise fail him. But "dysesyd" also denotes a more general malaise, what William James calls the "weariness of spirit."38 This vague feeling of spiritual distress and gloom can

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be a more pernicious threat to the soul that this or that particular temptation, since potentially it can lead to "wanhope" or despair. Thus the "Direccioun" author immediately follows his translation of David's "distrowblyd" statements with the confident "Laudans inuocabo" verse from Psalm 17. The brevity and directness of this psalm verse stand in sharp contrast with the malingering length of the previous one, and cancel out its demoralized tone. If David once was "dysesyd," he also overcame that condition, through his trust in God. The author's translations from the Psalter do not end here. Having implied his analogy between David's condition and the reader's, he moves on in the passage to establish David as an enlightened moral teacher. He who once wept, to paraphrase Rolle, now teaches. The Psalms are not simply a record of David's experience, useful as a speculum of our own, but a body of teachings—poems that prove ("prouyth") and testify ("beryth wittnes") to the truth of certain positions regarding God's faithfulness to those who ask for his aid. These more formal introductions to psalm verses coincide in the passage with the author's own shift to a more didactic style: "If he who is tempted and diseased does just as David did, he will be saved, and God will be certain not to forsake but to help him." The author knows that this kind of advice, declared in the face of his reader's uncontrollable distress, will have little effect. So he suspends giving it until he has managed the reader's fears by his earlier juxtaposition of David's own disturbed state, as expressed in Psalms 6 and 17. Once the reader has seen his own experience objectified in David's, he will be more receptive to straightforward moral advice, which the author also derives directly from the Psalms. At leastfifteentimes in the Psalter, David speaks of God as his refuge or source of hope,39 and portrays himself as hopelessly threatened without God's care. In counterpoint to David's Old Testament status as God's beloved, the greatest of kings and warriors, the Psalms develop an image of David as a man like all others: subject to sin, vulnerable in the face of his own inclinations. It is this David who is most authoritative for the later Middle Ages, and in whom the "Direccioun" author is most interested. In one passage from his treatise, he directly advises the threatened reader to follow David not in moral battle, but in retreating to God's care: For ofte tymes temptacionis and pryckynge of conscience are nedefull and medefull for clensyng and purgyng of oure synne, and tokenys of mykill grace afürwarde. Thyus dyd [realized] dauid, and fledde to god in his sowie, whan he sayd, Tu es refußium meum a tribulacione quae circumdedit me, et cetera [Ps 31.7], "Thou art my refute," sayd dauid, "in tribulación and disese." Doo thou

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Psalm Discourse thus that art temptyd and dysesyd or dredfull or aferde, and he shall not fayle the." (fol. ii3 r )

In the Middle English translation of Richard of St. Victor's Benjamin Minor, David is represented as developing "a strong felinge of hatrad ajen al synne" as a result of persistent temptation, and "J)is felinge taujt dauid vs to haue."40 The David of "Direccioun," by contrast, does not always have this sort of fortitude. Like the treatise's reader, he is weak. Thus he retreats to God in his soul. Confronted by persistent temptation, he finds the best defense to be withdrawal from the world, along with meditation on God's goodness. He is not an example of moral vigilance, but a model of interiority. Corollary to the "Direccioun" author's presentation of David as vulnerable is his portrait of God as indulgent toward the sinful soul. There are ample references throughout the Psalter to God's justifiable anger and threatening might. These do not fit, however, with this author's penitential theology. Rather, he represents God as being "courteous" toward sinners, and as offering "gladsum" and "comfortable" words, sometimes by way of the Psalms: seynt gregory seyth . . . Lacrimis nostris conscientiam baptiymus. "Baptise we," he sayth, "and make we clene oure conscience with terys and wepyng of oure yen." And se here also a comfortable [comforting] worde that dauid seyth for this wepyung and terys, where he sayth thuys, Posuisti lacrimas meas in conspectu tuo sicut et in promissione tua; tunc conuertentur inimici mei retrorsum [Ps 55.955.10]. "Lorde," seyd dauid, "thou hast put my terys and my wepynges in thy sy3te. And than thurwe thyn owne behest myn enemyes shall be turnyd a bak." And 3ite oure merciful lorde sayth to vs a gladsum worde for to clens oure synnes, and sayth thus, Date elemosinam et ecce omnia munda sunt vobis [Lc 11.41], "3euyth almes," seyth god almy3ty, "and loo all thynges are clene for3even 30we." (fol. 107') It is difficult to believe that the "Direccioun" author's own comforting and encouraging tone is not based, in part, in the reassuring tone he finds in some of the psalms, and in the Psalmist's occasional references to God as "benigne" —gracious and lovingly understanding toward the faults of his creatures: Benigne fac, Domine, in bona volúntate tua Sion, Et aedificentur muri Hierusalem. (Ps 50.20) [Deal favorably, O Lord, in your good will with Sion, and the walls of Jerusalem may be built up. ]

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The "Direccioun" author understands God as having spoken directly and soothingly to David, and David in turn as speaking in the same way to us. And just as Christ offers practical advice, in the Gospels, concerning works of charity that may effect forgiveness, David in the Psalms describes activities that are efficacious in combatting venial sin. For instance, in Chapter 4, concerning how to overcome temptation, the author distinguishes mortal from venial sins, and argues that the reader should not allow the devil to persuade him that these, even in abundance, are serious and damning. In fact, the author explains, there are many prayers and church rituals that are efficacious against venial sin: Than may thou say and thynke that ther are many thyngys that fordoon [ eliminate] venial sins —as heryng of messe [mass], the Pater noster, Aue, and the Credo, Confiteor, and blissyng of ych a bisshope, knockyng on the breest, and contricioun principally [chief among these, confession] ; holy brede and holy

watyr. As dauid sayeth, Asperges me domine ysope, et mundabor; lauabis me et super niuem dealvabor [Ps 50.9], "Lorde," he sayth, "thou shalt sprenkle me with thi holy watyr stycke, and I shall be made clene." (fol. io6v)

The rendering of "ysope" as "holy watyr stycke" can only be described as idiosyncratic. The commentators explain, following Augustine, that hyssop is a medicinal herb, and is thus, figuratively, an appropriate remedy for the sickness of sin; it "betokyns mekenes" according to Rolle, following Peter Lombard. 41 The "Direccioun" author, however, because he is discussing at this point rituals effective against venial sin, translates with reference to the ceremony popular from the tenth century on, of the priest sprinkling the congregation at mass with holy water. The sprinkling was called the asperges, after the keyword of one of the psalms, the Miserere, commonly recited during the ceremony.42 By enacting some of the words of Psalm 50, the ceremony induces feelings of penance in the congregation, in preparation for the celebration of the Mass. And by recommending the ritual to his reader, while translating the psalm verse in terms of this ritual reenactment of the Miserere, the "Direccioun" author both speaks the comforting words of David to his reader, and reinforces the sense of the contemporaneity of psalm sentiments as these are realized in the asperges ceremony. There is a tendency on the part of Middle English psalm translators to identify immediately with the Psalmist because of the affective power of his verse. Translation of the Psalms verbo pro verbo is made more difficult, rather than easier, by the extent of this authorial identification with David. It is hard to imagine someone identifying, for instance, with the author of Levit-

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icus or Deuteronomy, but not with the poet of the Psalms, who speaks directly to the contemporary spiritual concerns of individual readers and the collective self of ecclesia. Deep identification with the Psalmist caused that best-intentioned of translators, Richard Rolle, considerable grief. He may have set out to avoid "straunge ynglis" in his English Psalter, but some of his renderings are indeed bizarre, and we often find him, in the expository matter on certain verses, making amends, in effect retranslating, in less literal but (one could argue) more accurate ways. Some of the awkwardness of Rolle's initial translations are an act of compensation, an effort to use the literal to resist his affective impulse to work more subtle and more personal variations on David's poetry. The author of "Direccioun" solves this problem of identification by accepting a less rigorous standard of literalism in his psalm translations. He never violates the substance of David's originals, but when the context seems to require it he feels freer than some translators do toward their accidents. He regards translation as a form of metaphor, a way of asserting, by juxtaposition of his Middle English with his Latin originals, the relationship between David's discourse and his own, and between David's experience and that of his readers. Unlike the authors of the first Wycliffite Bible, who respect the syntax of its Latin original to the point of incomprehensibility, he does not try in translation to replace one thing with something else, but to mediate between his original and the vernacular of his readers. For him, rigorously faithful translations of the Psalms, verbo pro verbo, would have seemed a betrayal of David's morally prophetic intentions. He identifies the tone of his treatise with that of certain psalms, but concentrates equal attention on the parallels between what David writes about in the Psalter and what his readers experience, both in church and in the secret places of their souls.

'The Remnant of My Thoughts" (MS Bodley 423, fols. I 5 6 v - i 6 i r ) The expressive possibilities of speaking with the Psalmist can be realized only partly or potentially in the third-person discourse of Middle English didactic prose. Writers devise means of implicating their readers' experience in the texts of the psalms they are translating, but the internalization of David's sentiments depends essentially on willed reader-response. In firstperson psalmic prose, by contrast, the very act of reading itself, mechan-

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ically as it were, compels the reader to speak as the psalmist, inasmuch as the persona of the text does so. By following the text, the reader engages in mimetic behavior that can only be recommended by the various strategies of translation we have been considering in works like the Middle English Liber and 'The Direccioun of a Mannys Lyfe." A representative example of this sort of first-person psalmic prose is "The Remnant of My Thoughts," an extended meditation on Psalm 75.11 : "Quoniam cogitatio hominis confitebitur tibi, / Et reliquiae cogitationis diem festum agent tibi" ("For the thought of man shall give praise to you: and the remainders of the thought shall keep holiday to you"). The best surviving copy of the meditation appears in MS Bodley 423 (ca. 1430), a collection that has a pronounced devotional complexion.43 It includes mainly vernacular prose texts — some of them famous, such as parts of the Fervor Atnoris, five tracts of Pore Caitif, and a copy of Aelred of Rievaulx's "Reule of a Recluse"; others anonymous and less well known, such as "the mirrour and the mede of sorow and of tribulacyoun" and "thou sely soule betyn & disciplinyd of J>e lord WÌJD Jje louyng rod." As these titles suggest, two themes dominate the collection: the role of the affect or feelings in generating desire for God, and the value of spiritual discipline—both as evidence of God's love for the soul, and as a goad to moral progress. The volume also contains some poetry, as well as expository prose devoted to scriptural and hymnal poems. For instance, the "Remnant" meditation is immediately followed by a short treatise on tribulation that quotes substantially from Job, and explains the significance of Job in terms of medieval faculty psychology. This text is followed by an explanation of Te deum laudamus and the Athanasian Creed, both of these poems copied as canticles in many medieval psalters; these explanations are then followed by one of the most important hymns to the virgin, Salve Regina, in English (written out as poetry), followed by a short prayer in prose to the Virgin. This subsection of the manuscript, and indeed the contents of the entire collection, suggests that the book was compiled as a practical guide to the devotional life, and that particular texts such as the "Remnant" meditation were intended to be used as deliberate models for personal prayer. Moreover, the grouping of "Remnant" with prayer-poems is appropriate given the prose style of the meditation, which as we will see, at times comes close to the condition of poetry. The basic theme of the meditation is abstracted from the whole of Psalm 75: that God is awful in his power ('Tu terribilis es"; 8), and that therefore all people should pay him homage:

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Psalm Discourse Vovete et reddite Domino Deo vestro, Omnes qui in circuitu eius adferent muñera. (12) [Vow you, and pay to the Lord your God: all that are round about him bring gifts. ]

The need to bring "muñera" before God, however, only points up how little in the way of pious thoughts the soul has to offer. Thus the key phrase of the meditation, drawn from verse 1 1 of the psalm, and the speaker's persistently slavish language in addressing the deity: Why cometh my benigne lord J>us, to his proud thralle, my maker {JUS to his soget, my maister heuenly to his vnworthy disciples erthely? Why trauaileth thus my good lorde to se {je remenauntes of my thoughtes, sithen it owith to me on my bare knees & ννψ wepyng eyen to beseche, aske, & hertly to desire of him to haue J>e leste croume of his graciouse table, for myn owne profyt & myn owneauaile? (fol. 1 5 7 ' )

Like the author of "Direccioun," this writer refers to God as benign, gracious, and courteous — but not with the same tone. The "Direccioun" author put forward the adjectives confidently; this speaker does so hesitandy, obsequiously even, hoping that his praise will avert God's justifiable anger. Later in the meditation, he will attempt to be more suasive. Here, however, he feels he must be ingratiating, modeling his discourse on the postures of the penitential rather than the argumentative David. In terms of literary type, much of the "Remnant" meditation may be usefully compared to the Middle English forms of confession, first-person declarations of guilt and the desire to be contrite, which take the reader systematically through various subdivisions of sin (e.g., of thought, word, and deed; venial or mortal) and types of error, often arranged according to the standard hamartiological model of the seven capital vices (pride, avarice, lechery, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth) ,44 The first-person voice of these texts is a fiction, constructed to encourage identification by the reader, who may not be able to articulate for himself the specifics of his moral condition. For the most part, the forms of confession are devoid of any but the most formulaically expressed emotions. What they emphasize is coverage: ensuring that the reader is aware of the various manifestations of sin. When a particular audience is being addressed, these subdivisions and types of sin are keyed particularly to those readers. Here, for instance, is the start of "a maner of a confessioun for religious persons" in MS Trinity College Cambridge ο. 1.74:

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I knowlech to god and to 3011 my goosdy fadir, Jjat y greuously haue synned, not keping jje obseruaunce of relegyoun as y haue be tau3t, which y coude doo and my3t haue doo . . . specially in silence breking in qwere [choir] . . . and customably in al placis and tymes where and whanne y schuld haue kept my silence. Wilfully and 3enst my conscience I haue talkid with my sistren or with religyous men or wommen, or with secler men or wommen, honest persouns or dishonest, of honest mater or dishonest, in tyme of dyuyne servuce and after complyne, and in ojier vndewe tymes a3enst myn ordir, 3euyng euyl ensample to ojrer, whiche haue synnyd in f>e same poynt be mey procuryng or haue be J?e t)olden to falle jjerynne bycause of my disordynat lyuyng. (fols. 6 o v - 6 i v )

This may, of course, be a record of an individual's personal examination of conscience; we would certainly be right in assuming that the author could have identified himself in what he was writing. It is more likely, however, to be a guide for others to follow, a model confession crafted to highlight the ways in which a person in religion might fall. It is simply a more detailed version of the simplest of these forms, represented by the following text from Bodleian MS Tanner 201 : I, synful creature, knowleche me gilty and synful and shrue me, with all my herte and mouthe, to god and to my ladi seint mary and to all ]je holy cumpany of hevene, and to my gosdy fadir, of my synnes and trespasses, bothe dedly and venially... in thinking, in deliting and consentyng, in willyng, in spekyng, and in dede, etc. I, hyyg god, mercy and luue, seke hym cumfortely of forgifnes. (fol. i v )

The comprehensiveness of phrases like "dedly and venially" and "deliting and consentyng," as well as the "etc.," suggest that the reader ought to adapt this first-person statement, mentally, to his or her own condition, and ought to select from the detailed analysis of the seven deadly sins that follows whatever specifics pertain most closely to his or her case. That is, the reader ought to use this objectified version of a confession to guide his or her examination of conscience, and to arrive at a personalized, subjective statement of guilt and contrition. The "Remnant" author takes this basic idea of the text as "form" of confession and elaborates it through his greater use of emotional detail and rhetorical ornament. In the following passage, for instance, he combines an emphasis on comprehensiveness with heavy adverbial parallelism, which promotes the illusion of a speaker concentrating not only on his vices, but obsessed with the exact manner and intensity with which he committed them:

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Psalm Discourse For now I se in myself, that J>e moost parte of my thou3tes, sithen I coude eny discreción, han rather be corrupte & synful than dene and able for the. For ofte haue I dryue forthe [spent] my tyme, whan I neither thoughte on the, ne spake of j?e, ne wroughte for Jse, not withstondyng to sture my thoughtes toward the. Thou hast yeue me thy comaundementes that I haue leite recchelesly; thy benefetes ¡jat I haue resceiued vnreuermtly; ensample of seyntes f>at I haue not folewyd deuoutly; to thenke on my synnes, J>at I haue vsed wauntounly; the peynes of helle, that I haue desemed folely; and J>e blysse of heuene that I haue not desired louynßly. And so good lord alle Jjese considred hertly, I can not say but if I haue had eny gode Jxnrçtes, they mowe wel be cleped remenauntes in comparison of my bad thoughtes. (fol. IS7V; my emphasis)

By situating the parallel adverbs at the ends of successive, paratactic phrases (not joined by conjunctions), the writer underscores the drama of his speaker's deep sense of guilt: his frank recognition of the many opportunities for virtue God has offered him, and his persistent, willful rejection of them. Moreover, the cumulative force of these parallel adverbs allows for the sudden shift in tone at the end of this passage, with the final adverb, "herdy," which at once summarizes the earnestness of the speaker's selfexamination and looks ahead to the sincerity of the humble confession to follow. This confession is based on xht Miserere, with the addition of the poetic figures of Christ as the door and key of the soul, the clauis Dauid. Traditionally, the "key of David" (mentioned in Apocalypse 3.7) is interpreted as a symbol of Christ's messianic authority, his status as the fulfillment of the Davidic prophecy. The "Remnant" author, however, uses the figure to represent the power of divine grace to provoke the powerless soul to contrition. In effect, it becomes here a parallel trope to the more common "prick of conscience": Therfor lorde I knouleche wel j?at J>ou art of my soule bothe the dore and the keye, as thy gospel saith, Ego sum ostium. And holichirche clepith the £>e keye, saieng, O clauis dauid, "O thou Ihesu, the keye of dauid." And sithen, good lord, I am of vnpower & thou art £>e dore and fie keye, therfor my swete lord, now at this tyme I falle dowun to thy mageste, knowyng that I am not worthy to lifte vp myn eyen towarde the for the multitude of my synnes; but wit a meke wille I say, Domine labia mea aperies [Ps 50.17], "Lord thou shalt opene my lippes, with jse keye of thy mercy, and so come in and lete in thiself into myn herte, thy pryue chambre." I pray the lord, Cor mundum crea in me deus, et spiritum rectum innoua in visceribus mets [Ps 50.12], "Make in me a clene herte god, and renewe in myn inwardes the spirit of rightwesnesse." And so good lorde make parfyt in me that thou hast graffed [engrafted] in me, the verray loue of obedience, the clene kepyng of chastite, & spiritual pouerte for thy

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sake, that I may saie ννφ J>e profite, Perficeßressus, meos in semitis tuis [Ps "Lorde make my passages parfit in thy waies." (fol. iS7 v ) 4 5

16.5],

A Renaissance hand has identified, in the margins of the manuscript page, each psalm reference. The medieval reader would hardly have required such notes. Scriptural passages throughout the "Remnant" meditation are in red, and the writer has already cited "jje prophete dauid" as one of his chief scriptural authorities at the start of the treatise, when he first quoted the psalm verse that gives the meditation its tide. Moreover, even without the hint provided by the author's use of the "key of David" figure for Christ, a reader in religion might be expected to be able to identify psalm cues from the chief penitential psalm, especially David's request that God create in him a clean heart. By not citing David (or "Jx prophet") explicidy as an exemplar at this point, the author displays his interest in presenting a speaker who absorbs psalm discourse directly into his own, and in suggesting that anyone who uses this meditation as a model for prayer ought to identify his or her sentiments strictly with David's. The "labia mea" of Psalm 50 are now not David's alone, but the lips of anyone praying "wit a meke wille" the, words of the Psalter. There also seems to be an effort, in the meditation, to encourage physical gestures that would confirm in the reader his mental penitential disposition. The phrase "now at this tyme I falle dowun to thy mageste" may be meant to suggest that the reader actually kneel down while saying the subsequent words of the meditation. This kind of advice on the physical postures and circumstances required for successful meditation was quite common in Middle English religious writing, and often appears introductory to forms of confession (e.g., in British Library MS Harley 6041, the reader is instructed to "be in a preuey stede [private place]" [fol. 97'] before conducting his examination of conscience; in Bodleian MS Douce 322, at the start of a long meditation on the passion, the reader is advised in detail about how he or she must enter "a pryuy place fro all the noyse, withouten any lettyng" and should "Syt ther or knele as his ys most thyne ease than" before starting the meditation [fol. 97r] ). For the "Remnant" writer, the physical and mental attitudes of the reader using this psalmic form of confession are complementary. They are both aspects of the process of Davidic imitation. The "Remnant" author's translations of Latin psalm verses likewise testify to his interest in provoking the reader's passionate identification with David's sentiments and words. Like the authors of the Middle English

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translation of Thomas of Froidmont's Liber and of "Direccioun," this writer feels free to move beyond the strict literal sense of the Latin, to adapt it to the circumstances of his readers. He does not do so, however, by substituting allegories for literal images in the verses, or by adapting translations to liturgical contexts. Rather, he first gives a strict literal rendering of the Latin, but adds to it an expansive paraphrase that continues the Psalmist's thought. Thus "Lord thou shalt opene my lippes," which is a strict translation of "Domine labia mea aperies," is expanded by the explanation that this "opening" shall be effected with the key of Christ's mercy, the earlier clauis Dauid figure. The author plays on the idea that his lips have been opened, that is he has been able to speak penitentially, only as a result of the agency of David's poetry, which after all is divinely inspired. In other words, Christ offers the soul mercy by means of David's poetry, which enables it to overcome its powerlessness due to sin, and to express its feeling of compunction in prayer. That the theme of compunction is on the author's mind at this point is suggested by the last part of his expansive paraphrase of the psalm verse, where Christ is described not only as opening the locked door of the soul, but entering into its "pryue chambre." We saw in our discussion of compunction and Thomas of Froidmont's Liber that medieval spirituality often described the heart or conscience as a place, a locus for the visitation of God in the form of his Holy Spirit. Compunction involves, in short, not only a sorrowful attitude but the proximity of the divine, which prevents sorrow from slipping over into despair. The "Remnant" author expresses these notions by way of his expansive paraphrase of Psalm 50.7, whereby the soul is actually inhabited by God, who cleanses and justifies it from within. The particular nature of this cleansing and justification, in this text, is connected with the triple religious vow of obedience, chastity, and poverty. The "Remnant" author not only sees the Psalms as models for penitential prayer, but more particularly, as models for the contemplative life. Here the writer's metaphors become awkwardly mixed. He switches from the more conventional, psalm-based topos of the clean soul to the organic trope of a scion —the spiritual longing of the contemplative — grafted onto the soul. He does not abandon the Psalms altogether, however. Rather, he implies that David's request that his soul's passages ("gressus") be perfected in God's ways may be construed as a reference to the monastic vow of poverty, as might be David's reference to his impoverishment in Psalm 87.16: "Pauper sum eg0 et in laboribus a iuuentute mea, Ί am right pore & used in labours fro my yonge age' " (fol. i57 v ).

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The "Remnant" author is not mainly concerned with using the Psalms to assert the priority of the contemplative life. Rather, he seeks to identify in the psychology and behavior of the Psalmist a paradigm for all penitents, especially those who are in extremis—convinced that because of the depth of their sins they are beyond hope of salvation. This concern he shares with the author of "Direccioun" who, as we have seen, focused his attentions on David as a model of penitential hope, an exemplar of the person who, despite frequent assault by temptation, trusts in God and does not hesitate to take refuge in him. When the "Remnant" author has his speaker introduce this exemplum, the tone of the meditation shifts from the self-effacing to the argumentative: Thou art clepid a comfortour, and thyn office is to clepe ayen suche soules that han goo astraye from thyn hyest grace by dyuerse synnes, that thei shuld not falle in to the worst synne, the whiche is cleped desperacyoun. In the lord trusted muche dauid the kynge whan he had synned, that he not falle into the synne of desperacyon, seieng, Emundabor a delicto máximo [Ps 50.9], " I shall be clensed from the grettist synne." And there as ¡se grettest synne hath had maistrie, it were necessary that there shuld come the hyest remedye. And sich remedye is there noon, lord, but thiself (fol. is8 v )

The speaker presumes to explain to God that it is one of his duties, given his title "comforter," to protect sinners against despair, and then proceeds to remind him of how he acted in the case of David, who wrote Psalm 50 after having been assured of God's grace. The implication is that if God so behaved toward David, who was guilty of the greatest sin, he ought to be gracious as well to others who have gone astray "by dyuerse synnes." In the passage immediately following the psalm quotation, the speaker tries logically to argue for the necessity of divine grace for those in his extreme condition: the greatest sin requires the greatest remedy; since God is by nature the greatest of the soul's remedies, he must intervene on the soul's behalf, or else be responsible for its despair. Of course, one important way in which God has made his grace known and available to sinners is through the inspired poetry of the Psalter. This may be why 'The Remnant of My Thoughts," like other prose meditations on the Psalms, repeats at fairly regular intervals the psalm verse or keyword on which it is based.46 The verse or keyword functions like a mantra, literally in Sanskrit "an instrument of thought" (OED), designed to call the agitated mind back from its sometimes hyperemotional rhetoric to the succinct comforts of David's words:

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Psalm Discourse But {JUS my lord seeth £>at I am slowe, and feintly {senke on him, and perfore he cometh to me & askith the remenauntes of my thoughtes. Wei I wote his leste grace were to me sufficient, and alle my nedes gostly & bodily, and alle my thoughtes, \νψ alle her remenauntes, is to him right nought worth. Sauf jjus, lo, I bileue wel, £>at if eny of my thoughtes be to him plesinge, he by his gret power & gentilnesse may encrese it, & make {>erof to me a gret grace, and a sufficient to drawe me |>e more feruendy to his loue. And J>erfor my soule I can not se but J>at it is best, sithen {sy lord J>us graciously askith £>y remenauntes, jpat thou yeue him louyngly, not proudly, bothe jje hool Jxnrçtes and eke J>e remenauntes. (fol. 157 r )

The feverish, racing quality of the speaker's thoughts has a calming counterpoint in the word "remenauntes," which at once denotes the cause of the speaker's anxiety ( she does not have enough of a gift to offer God), and the solution to her problems. Although the Psalmist's language does not, quantitatively, dominate the discourse of this passage, its rhythmic repetition is what shapes the discourse. It operates like a refrain, as in the opening stanzas from the following psalmic lyric: Fadyr & sone & holy gost, Grete god in trinite, As J)u art lord of myjtes most, Saluutn mefac, domine. Fadyr of heuyne, mercy of my gost! Swete god, {?u rew one me! Vanite we ben, well JDU wost, Saluum mefac, domine. In vanite we lyve yne That men call ryalte, To j?e, lord god, hyt ys All synne — Saluum mefac, domine. ( 1 -12 )47 Like the speaker of "Remnant," this speaker is concerned with repeatedly praising God, especially in terms of his absolute power, and, conversely, with criticizing himself, and sinful humanity in general, as vain. What men call "ryalte," the speaker implies, is foolishness when set beside the "myjtis most" of the three-personed God. On one level, then, the argument of this poem is conducive, like the thoughts of the "Remnant" speaker, to despair.

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On another, however, the speaker's canceling out of the sinful self in the vernacular portions of the lyric allows for his rearticulation of that self in Davidic terms, in the poem's refrain, the cue to the first verse of Psalm 68: "Save me, O God: for the waters are come in even unto my soul." By using the language of David, the poet introduces a harmoniousness or balance into the lyric that becomes, by the end of its sixth stanza, a textual correlative to the moral stability the speaker asks of God: Graunt vs, lord, J>y blysse to wynne, The fendis temptynge euer to fle. In holy lyuynge, JJU stabyl me yn— Saluum mefac, domine. (13-16) God has offered the resdess soul of the sinner stability, in the words of David himself. The same poet who soothed the madness of King Saul restores, by way of his influence on later devotional prose and verse, the moral stability of Middle English writers and readers.

4. The Psalms as Models for Middle English Poetry

Composing verses was not, in the opinion of the Church Fathers, a morally defensible activity. "Daemonum cibus est carmina poetarum," Jerome writes in a famous letter to Pope Damasus, "Demons feed on the songs of poets." Although Jerome refers to the allures of pagan verse, the warning could apply to the writing of religious poetry as well.1 As George Kane has argued, verse making was suspect to some medieval thinkers because it encouraged delight in one's own accomplishments: that is, it was conducive to the sin of pride.2 Langland even registers anxieties about the kind of deeply devout poetry he writes in Piers Plowman, when he has Imaginatif (the dreamer's imageproducing faculty itself) upbraid Will for "messing about with poetry": . . . JJOU medlest J^e wij? makynges and mytest go seye J)i sauter, And bidde for hem |>at yuej} J?e breed, for f>er are bokes ynowe To telle men what dowel is, dobet and dobest boJ)e, And prechours to preuen what it is of many a peire freres. (B.XII. 16-19) Even poetry that addresses the urgent moral issues of the day is at best redundant, and at worst a distraction from Will's duties as a psalter-clerk, singing for the souls of the dead. Poetry turns the mind's eye within, and encourages self-love; prayer, ultimately, ought to turn one's attentions outward, encouraging the other-directed love of God and neighbor. In the face of such arguments and anxieties, it is not surprising that medieval religious writers turn to the Psalms in their efforts to justify the art of poetry. Boccaccio, in De Genealogia Deorum, points to the moving and edifying words of both David and Job as proof that all poets are not involved in the business of lying under the guise of pleasing language: Thou, heavenly harper, thou, O David, who art wont to quiet Saul's rage with thy sweet song, if ever thou didst utter a soft, melodious note, silence now thy song. And thou, O Job, who hast recorded thy labors and long suffering in heroic verse, if it should prove agreeable or fair, do thou likewise.3

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Boccaccio is not insulting David's verse in implying that it is not melodious. Rather, he is drawing a distinction between two kinds of melody: the frivolous, impugnable sort, that is superficial and appeals only to the sensual aspect of the soul, and the poetry of high moral seriousness, represented by such biblical texts as the Psalter and the Book of Job. The Psalms are indeed, as Boccaccio notes elsewhere in De Genealogia Deorum, musically pleasing—but with a noble purpose. It is the same point Dante makes, in a different way, in interpreting David's joyous dance before the ark of God as emblematic of a poetics based, despite its self-expressive appearances, in a deep humilitas. The accidents of poetry are justifiable only in terms of their substance. Unlike the Song of Songs, the Psalms do not require aggressive allegorizing to yield up their noble sense. They are, for medieval writers, the direct record of David's own thoughts and feelings, manifested repeatedly through the complementary postures of praise and penance. They are poems at once self-expressive and self-effacing, always directing the listener or reader away from the poet's self-consciousness toward the divine source of his inspiration, and his morally prophetic aim of converting sinners back to God. David's humilitas is an example not just for penitents, but for other religious poets; his sermo bumilis is an immediate model for theirs. The act of writing religious verses may be justified, finally, not as an activity different from prayer, but as a form of prayer itself. It is another, albeit more refined, way of "saying the Psalter" — a type of making of which even Langland's Imaginatif might approve. In the prose texts we have been considering, David exemplifies two important penitential attitudes: a deep sense of the soul's vulnerability and even helplessness before temptation, and a counterbalancing sense of hope, based in the expectation of God's help in the form of grace. In Middle English poetry influenced by the Psalms, these attitudes are elaborated into a subtle aesthetic of prayer, designed to move readers not only to holy tears, but beyond these into conversation with God. The practical rhetorical problem posed by the poetry of prayer is this: how to balance abject selfdenial and request, the language of humble supplication and the suasive rhetoric of the soul making its case for God's help. The Psalms provide Middle English religious poets with, among other things, a model of an ongoing address to God, often frank, which moves back and forth between attitudes of request, praise, and even criticism and cajoling. The Psalms implicitly validate the poetry of praise and request one finds in so many Middle English religious lyrics. Or, to put the matter another way: by modeling their own forms of prayerful poetic statement on David's divinely sanctioned ones, religious poets avoid the charge of spiritual presumption.

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The changes in David's persona throughout the Psalms provide Middle English religious poets with another kind of model—of a representative, ethopoetic voice expressed in the first person.4 Although David seems in the Psalms to be speaking on his own behalf, he always speaks collectively as well, on behalf of ecclesia, sometimes in the person of Christ himself. Likewise, as Augustine notes, those who recite the Psalms liturgically speak not only for themselves, but for the entire Church, Christ's Mystical Body. So too, those who imitate the Psalms by writing poetry based on them speak collectively by way of their personae, articulating in these the unexpressed or inexpressible sentiments of others. The notion of persona in the aesthetics of prayer necessarily raises the issue of sincerity. In modern writing, sincerity is often measured by originality or novelty of expression, the peculiar "voice" of this writer as distinguished from that one. Poetic language that draws heavily on the discourse of others is felt to be artificial and false, rather than the true expression of real feeling. Just the opposite is true in Middle English psalmic poetry. In this poetry, sincerity is measured, at least in part, by certain habits of selfconcealment—for instance, maintaining one's anonymity, and the related technique of speaking by way of David's tropes and figures, so as to derive one's literary authority from him rather than from one's own powers of invention. This is not to say that there is nothing original about Middle English poetry based in the psalms. As Rivkah Zim points out in her book on English metrical psalms in the Renaissance, "any imitator was free to exploit the resources of his model inventively. The relationship between the model and the new work could be as close or as distant as the imitator wished."5 Thus, for instance, Richard Maidstone's paraphrase of the seven penitential psalms refers to David by name, quotes (in most manuscripts) the full Latin text of the seven psalms, and in the first half of each Middle English stanza stays close to the phrasing and even syntax of the Latin originals; whereas, at the other extreme, one of the psalmic lyrics in the Wheadey manuscript paraphrases a couple of verses from one of the psalms, but consists mainly of an elaborate amplification of these verses. Nevertheless, in what Zim calls an "interpretive imitation"6—an apt label for either of these Middle English examples — the priority of the Psalter itself is always respected and deferred to, and its details are evoked so that each author's peculiar variations on them may be juxtaposed with the Latin text, either direcdy on the page or in the mind of the informed reader (the root meaning ofpamphmsis being "to say or tell something alongside something else"

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[OED]). All psalm paraphrases, in short, exploit the tension between David's original and the author's variations on that original, as a means of confirming rather than undermining authorial sincerity. Sincerity in psalm-based lyrics is also expressed by a pronounced generalization of sentiment, a deliberate distancing of verbal expression from the exact circumstances or conditions of the author's situation (which, in the case of most of these poems, is hardly recoverable). As in the Psalms themselves, generalization of sentiment in this poetry contributes to a tone of artful self-control, even when violent emotions are being portrayed. More important, it allows and even promotes identification on the reader's part with the speaking voice of the poem, so that his own sentiments might be guided by the artifices of the poem. Just as David deliberately crafted his selfexpressive poems as meditative models for others, Middle English religious lyricists constructed their poems in order to direct or instruct the sentiments of readers. Like David's, their first person lyrics are representative, composed of topoi drawn and amplified from the formulaic language of the Psalms.7 Middle English religious poets construct the illusion of private feeling, spontaneously expressed, as a powerful element in the didactic rhetoric of their verse. That they do so does not mean that they have not had these feelings themselves, but rather that the fact that they have does not explain sufficiendy a poem's function, any more than David's personal history accounts fully for the exemplary power of the Psalms as meditative verse. The issue of sincerity in psalm-based poetry is related to another aesthetic consideration involving this verse, the intentions of the poets themselves and the readers who use their poems as personal meditations. A commonplace in medieval devotional writing is the importance of matching the words of prayer to the spiritual desire or longing behind them. In the Enarrationes, Augustine explains that there are in fact two kinds of prayer. These can be classified as inner and outer, the prayer of the heart and the prayer of the mouth, or devout feeling and devout language.8 Devout feeling, in the absence of the words to express it, is still a potent form of genuine prayer. Devout language without devout feeling, however, is empty or, paradoxically, mute. The anonymous author of a popular Middle English devotional treatise, "The Twelve Lettings [Hindrances] of Prayer," uses David as an exemplum of how the efficacy of prayer is sometimes undermined by a weakness of desire: The tenjje lettinge is litilnesse of desijr. Austyn sei{), " G o d kepij} ]jat J>ing to Jsee, which he wole not giue sone to f>e, jjat |x>u leerne to desire gretly greete

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Psalm Discourse Ringes." Gregor seijj in his morals [on the Book of Job], if we bi πιοιψ asken euerlastynge lijf and desire not in herte, we Jsat cryen ben stille & doumbe. Dauid seij), ' Ύ was stille, while y cryede alle day" [Ps 3 1 . 3 ] ,9

Emotional language for its own sake, then, detracts from the value of prayer, and thus presumably from the effectiveness of Middle English poems designed as psalmic prayers. Those prayers and prayerful poems that are most effective match language with intention, ensuring that what is said reflects how the person praying should feel. Middle English religious poets work to match language with feeling by designing their poems to provoke specific kinds and levels of sentiment, and then to control or manage these feelings by way of psalm topoi. That is, they encourage their readers to identify their own sentiments with David's by way of specific references to David's own language, or language that works conscious variations on psalm discourse. When readers recognize their feelings objectified in Middle English religious verse, and allow these feelings to be guided by the rhetorical processes of the verse, they pray not only with words, but by way of the archetypal sentiments of David. By speaking not just alongside but with David, they ensure that their prayers will not be mute, but will be heard and answered.

Paraphrasing Penance: Maidstone and Brampton Middle English psalmic poetry exists on a broad spectrum, extending from fairly literal paraphrases or imitations of certain psalms, through poems that directly invoke particular psalm texts, to lyrics that echo psalms more distantly, through specific turns of phrase or figures of speech derived from the Psalter. Of the psalm paraphrases that survive in Middle English, two were especially popular, each a complete version of the seven penitential psalms. One is attributed to John of Gaunt's confessor, the Carmelite friar Richard Maidstone, the other to an obscure Franciscan Doctor of Theology, Thomas Brampton. 10 Little is know about the biographies of either Maidstone or Brampton. Maidstone (d. 1396), a native of Kent who is known to have trained in theology at Oxford and was connected with a Carmelite friary there, is associated with Gaunt by a single reference in a Bodleian Library manuscript (e Mus. 86, fol. i6o r ). It is certain, however, that he was involved in the debates about apostolic poverty that raged in the fourteenth century,

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and that he became a prominent opponent of Wyclif. Many works are attributed to him by Bale and others, including a sermon cycle, a commentary on the Song of Songs and a compendium of Augustine's De Civitate Dei. But few of these survive. The attribution of a parphrase of the seven penitential psalms to Maidstone rests on two slim pieces of evidence: the appearance of his name in one copy of one version of the prologue, and the predominantly Kentish dialect of several copies of the work. 11 Even less is known about the life of Thomas Brampton. As one editor of Brampton's psalm paraphrase reports, "except as author of the metrical version of the Seven Penitential Psalms, the name of Thomas Brampton does not appear anywhere in the many available accounts of literature and literary figures of the middle ages."12 Of the six manuscripts of the paraphrase that survive, only one contains an authorial attribution, and this in a sixteenth-century hand (British Library MS Sloane 1853). Other cataloguers, such as Bale, attribute the work to one John Alcock, Bishop of Ely (d. 1500). It is, however, entirely appropriate that—at least in their psalm paraphrases — Maidstone and Brampton should remain anonymous. The broad structural features of both meditations, and many of their verbal details, suggest that these authors worked aggressively to define their fictive personae in terms of the character of the Psalmist. That is, they deliberately suppress the accidents of personality in order to point up the substance of Davidic self-presentation. In order to encourage their readers to identify with the Psalmist, they efface themselves and speak only by way of biblical tropes and figures. In doing so, they make the process of psalm paraphrase itself an exemplum of how to imitate the Psalmist. Many of the copies of Maidstone's and Brampton's paraphrases contain prologues. These indicate that the paraphrases were written to encourage their readers in penance, probably as a preparation to actual reception of the sacrament. In addition, however, the prologues imply that their authors regard the paraphrases not as seven, separate psalm imitations, but as continuous meditative discourse, which moves through seven stages. Furthermore, the prologues seem designed to predispose readers toward the paraphrases that follow in certain ways: that is, each encourages some general mental attitude toward the entire work, which is expected to color the reader's progress through the seven psalms.13 Two distinct versions of the Maidstone prologue survive. One is matter-of-fact, and reads like a simple explanation of the penitential aims of the paraphrase:

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Psalm Discourse To Goddis worschipe, J?at dere us bou3te, To whom we owen to make oure mone Of alle J)e synnes j?at we haue wrou3te In 30uJ)e, in elde, many oone; In Jjese psalmys J>ei ben J)oru3 sou3t, In schame of alle oure goostli foon, And in to Englische j^ei ben brou3t, For synne in man to be fordon.14

The author parallels three activities—praise of God, shaming the devil, and wiping away sin—implying that these are three results of the same activity: searching through "alle J)e synnes Jjat we haue wrou3te" in "Jjese psalmys." Searching through sin in "j^ese psalmys," however, has a double reference in the prologue: to the reader's meditative reading, but also to David's poetic work itself, in composing the seven psalms, which the prologue author marks as distinctive and morally prophetic in its comprehensive examination of all the sins anyone has ever or will ever commit. David, in the first instance, has written 'To Goddis worschipe" and in spite of "alle oure goostli foon"—his enemies or, tropologically, the many varieties of temptation. And David's poems have "ben brou3t" or translated into English by this author with the additional aim of destroying sin in those who read the paraphrase. This version of the Maidstone prologue directs the reader's attention to the dynamic of Davidic imitation, whereby the mimetic process begun by David's translator is carried forward by the act of reading. When the reader's sins are destroyed by reading this paraphrase, the moral prophecies of David's poems are fulfilled. The second, expanded version of the Maidstone prologue is more meditative in character. After describing, like the author of thefirstversion, David's aims in writing "J>e seuen salmes," this author formally ascribes the paraphrase to Maidstone, and then expands the opening reference in the first version to God "J)at dere us bou3te"—that is, Christ crucified: . . . in englische J>ei ben broute By frere Richarde Maydenstoon In mary ordre of £>e carme I>at bachilere is in dyuynite. Sheo bar Ihesu in wombe & barme I>at moder is and mayden fire. To Jiat childe J>en in hir arme, Whiche for vs henge on rode tre,

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I>at he for wreche do vs no harme, Hym to queme, |>ese salmes saye we. (fol. 13 r ) 1 5 Unlike the first version, this one directs our attentions beyond the dynamic of translation and reading, to the mental activity of reflecting on the humanity of Jesus, and specifically His suffering for mankind's sins. Whether the phrase "Jjese salmes saye we" is meant to describe an actual oral-devotional practice involving Maidstone's text is irrelevant. Even the individual private reader, for whom Maidstone probably intended his translations, would "saye" these psalms to himself while reading silently, and in doing so would in Augustine's words "speak for those absent" by giving voice to the plural sentiments of ecclesia, in whose persona David himself always speaks. And in so doing, the reader would be seeking to allay Christ's anger not only at himself, but at all of sinful humanity. The movement in this prologue from the reference to Maidstone's religious order ("mary ordre of the carme"), to images of the Virgin holding the infant Jesus, is artful. The author wants to set a meditative mood before the start of the first paraphrase; he wants to establish a receptive, humble attitude in the reader. Not only do the closing lines of this prologue refer back to its opening reference to Christ's redemption of mankind on the cross, since the author reminds us that the Christ child ultimately "for vs henge on rode tre," but they also provoke a sense of ingratitude and fear in the reader, who in sinning has shown himself to be unworthy of such a sacrifice. Unlike Mary, who carried Jesus in her womb and holds him tenderly on her lap, the sinful reader rejects Christ. The prologue author's imagery is blunt: by sinning, mankind sentenced the divine infant to a hideous death.16 Thus the necessity of reading these psalms, which can assuage Christ's all too justifiable desire to punish rather than forgive. The prologue to Brampton's penitential psalms also survives in two versions. In version A, quoted here from British Library MS Sloane 1853, a first-person narrator describes how he woke in the middle of one winter night in a penitential mood, and came to recite these psalms: In wynter whan the wedir was cold I ros at mydny3t fro my rest And prayed to Jesu that he wold Be myn helpe for he myjt best. In myn herte anon I kest [reckoned] How I had synned and what degre.

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Psalm Discourse I cryed knockyng vp on my brest Ne reminiscarisDomine, (fol. 3r)

The Latin verse, which will become the refrain of the entire meditation, is the antiphon (adapted from the apocryphal Tobit 3.3, the hymn Te deum, and Psalm 85.5) that in medieval breviaries appears at the end of the seven penitential psalms, beginning: "Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers."17 The tone here is clerical, and the language measured and straightforward, occasionally marked by understatement ("he my3t best"), as is the narrator's subsequent explanation of how he then goes, sorrowfully, to confess his sins to a priest ('To schryue me clene and aske penaunce"). When the speaker describes how he "in myn herte anon . . . kest / How I had synned," and then knocks sorrowfully on his breast, the activities of self-examination and humble posturing before God seem deliberate and controlled. The passage is designed, at least at the start, to calm or soothe the reader by objectifying his penitential sorrow in the speaking voice of the prologue, as a preparation for reading the psalms that follow. Not so in version B. In this one, which introduces Brampton's psalms in MS Pepys 1584, the tone is urgent and agitated. The speaker describes how he came to an awareness of his sins only as a result of severe sickness. Unlike the speaker of version A, who reports that he sought out his confessor ("Unto my Confessour I 3ede"), this one is too weak to leave bed, and calls out desperately for his "brodir fid dere" to come to his side: As I lay in my bed And sikenes Revid [robbed] me of rest What maner life J?at I had led For to thynke me thoughte it best. A non my hert began to brest I saide lord haue mercy on me I cryed knockyng on me brest Ne reminiscaris domine. I syghed and made full Ruthefull chere Myne hert for sorowe began to blede I sent aftir a brodir fill dere Of hym me thought I had great nede. ( 1 ; 4) 18

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The suddenness of the speaker's emotion suggests that the author of this version of the prologue wants to dramatize the actual moment of compunction, the unexpected and even violent apprehension of guilt. The nature of the speaker's response to this feeling is also significant: he cries out, impulsively it seems, in David's own words from the start of the chief penitential psalm: "Lord haue mercy on me!" His unexpected feeling of guilt provokes a spontaneous act of Davidic imitation. The advice the father-confessor gives the speaker is essentially the same in both prologue versions. However, his calm tone is more striking in the second version, due to the contrast with the speaker's feverish one. The confessor explains that God will not abandon anyone who is sincere in his penance: N o synfull man he will for fare That sory for his synnys will be This worde schall comfort all thy care. ( 5 ) More important, he then instructs the narrator to say the penitential psalms as a sign that he is reconciled to Christ, and to say them "wit mylde stevyn" —with a quiet or hushed voice. The speaker's prayers for mercy must become more reflective, less impulsive, than his sudden helpless cry for pity to God. He has to learn to control the violent emotions generated by the initial moment of compunction, in order to turn them to moral advantage. To sum up: all four of these prologue versions, despite their many differences of content and tone, are calculated to prepare the reader for meditation on the penitential psalms themselves by objectifying the reader's situation. Either by making the reader conscious of how the process of psalm meditation is connected with the activity of the text's translator, or by creating a fictional persona who is at first not in control of his mental processes, but then calmed by professional advice, these prologues engage not only the emotions but the rational aspect of the soul. They imply that the subsequent meditations will only be successful if the reader is aware of their purposes and strategies, and how these relate to David's own text and its function as a speculum poenitentiae.19 This effort to shape penitential experience is also evident in Maidstone's and Brampton's techniques of psalm paraphrase. Both authors give each Latin verse eight lines of Middle English paraphrase, marked by highly regular metrical and rhyme patterns. In Maidstone's stanzas, the first four

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lines are almost always straight translation, the next four freer amplification of thefirstfour: Dixi: Confitebor aduersum me iniusticiam meant Domino; & tu remisisti impietatempeccati mei. ( Ps 31.5 ) 'To God I schal," I seide, "knowlech Agayns my-self my wrong with-inne," And thow, Lord, as louely lech, Forgaf the trespas of my synne. l'arine spedith it noght to spare speche, To cry on Crist wil I not blynne [cease] That he ne take on me no wreche [vengeance] For wordes ne Werkes j^at I begynne. ( 129-13 6 ) The epithet "louely lech" (beloved physician) does involve another psalm topos in Maidstone's literal paraphrase, the cliché of Christ as the sick soul's physician. One gets the sense, however, that it functions here more as a convenient metrical and rhyming tag, than as a conscious aesthetic effort to enhance the literal sense of the Latin verse by invoking another. This stanza, like most of Maidstone's, falls obviously into three related but still distinct parts: Latin psalm text/literal paraphrase/rhetorical amplification. Maidstone keeps the levels of textual significance clearly separate. The relationship between the parts is, in fact, quite like that in Rolle's English Psalter, where the divisions between the Latin, the literal paraphrase, and Rolle's homiletic expansions are usually kept quite clear. Maidstone's Middle English version of the penitential psalms has a text-gloss feel. His techniques of paraphrase imply a descending hierarchy of literary value from David's divine poetry to the author's own less-inspired inventions, a hierarchy intended to infuse the entire work with a mood of authorial humility. This mood is an important factor in the meditation's meaning, representing dramatically the author's attempt to imitate David's penance by, paradoxically enough, humbly subordinating his own authorial efforts to the poetry of the Psalms. The content and mood of Brampton's paraphrase of the same psalm verse is very different. Unlike Maidstone, Brampton casts himself immediately in the role of confident psalm interpreter, who declares the lesson of this verse to the reader in a direcdy hortatory way: Dixi Confitebor adversum me injusticiam meam Domino : et tu remmsti impietatem peccati mei.

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If fxju wit gode avisement Of thy synnys wilt be schryve Thy soule schall neuer in hell be brent While Jju wilt here Jdì penance dryve. Amend thy life I Red [advise] Jre blyve Or euer thy wittis from J>e fle And thynk J>e while J>u art alyve Of Ne reminiscaris domine.20 Brampton has taken the theme of the Latin verse as the basis for a brief, improvised homily to the reader. The appeal to fear, the urgent cautions, the imperatives—all of these are the language of the pulpit. Perhaps, as in his many other appeals to the reader to learn David's lessons, Brampton is here self-consciously casting himself in the role of the Psalmist as moral prophet. That is, he may be assuming that his homiletic exposition of the psalm verse is a literal rendering of David's intention, as Peter Lombard explains it, to move others to contrition. Whether Brampton was this selfconscious about his acts of paraphrase is arguable. The hypothesis fits, however, with his exposition of David's statement in Psalm 50.15 that, reformed himself, he is resolved to teach others God's ways: Docebo iniquos vias tuas et impii ad te convertentur. The weyes J>at ben to god on hye Ben mercy and trowjje as clerkys teche. Where euyr y be in company Of these two schall be my speche: To turne synfull men from wreche Ensaumple they may take of me, For y cowde neuyr fynde better leche Than ne reminiscaris domine. (67) The phrase "y cowde neuyr" has a retrospective character: it is as if the speaker were looking back on his feverish condition as presented in version Β of the prologue, having survived it, and resolves now in moral tranquility to help others. When he uses the word "Ensaumple" to refer to himself, he particularizes the sense in which Brampton's paraphrase teaches. Like David's Psalms, it instructs by word and by example, by the force of its language and the portrait of the speaker's attitudes and behavior that the language constructs. To be fair to Maidstone, in paraphrasing this verse from the Miserere,

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he also adopts the active, hortatory mode of the preacher. After providing a literal translation of the psalm verse ('The wycked I schal thi weyes teche; / The synful schal to the conuert"), he exhorts his reader to beware of God's anger, by appealing to his fear of damnation. He reminds the reader of the bodily sufferings Christ underwent to save him, and the meekness he demonstrated during these, which the proud sinner presumably should take as a shaming counter-example to his own behavior: Synful man, beware of wreche, And thenk on Crist with al thin hert, How he become thi louely leche, And for thi sake fill sore smert; Ther was no scorne ne spytouse speche, Dispite ne strook j?at hym astert. (491-496) The crucifixion is that moment in sacred history that epitomizes the gap between God's goodness and human badness, between Christ's benign nature and man's depraved condition. For Maidstone, unlike Brampton, it becomes the focus of his meditative paraphrase of the penitential psalms. This is especially appropriate since David's Psalms were thought to have prophesied the events of Christ's passion in an especially direct and moving way. By having his speaker refer persistently to Christ's pitiful death, Maidstone underscores this Christological aspect of the Psalms, and relates it to the tropological aims of David's lyrics and his translation: to reform the soul. His use in this passage of "wreche" (vengeance) and the topos of Christ the physician ("louely leche") recalls and amplifies the speaker's emotional plea for mercy earlier, in Psalm 31, where it had been expressed independently of any reference to the crucifixion. It also establishes as a leitmotif of this meditation the speaker's acute awareness of the contrast between God's justifiable rage at sinners and his precious healing power, which sinners apprehend as grace. Maidstone's constant references to the crucifixión fit with the overall mood of his meditation, which is much more blunt and emotional than Brampton's. Brampton's speaker, for example, remarks at one point that while he feels sorry for his sins, he cannot weep: Myn herte ys feynte fais and drye Ther ben no teerys in myn eye; Thowe y wolde [long to] wepe, hyt wole not be

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I can not preye ryght hertely But [except for] ne reminiscaris domine. (116) This statement might be interpreted as a request for the holy tears of compunction, but it never really comes to that. Like George Herbert's persona in "Discipline," Brampton wants to find a way to make his stony heart bleed—to feel repentence more deeply than he already does.21 He prays, mouthing the refrain of the meditation, but not "ryght hertely," with the fullness and sincerity of devotion he craves. For all of this, however, he seems in control of his feelings. Maidstone's speaker, by contrast, is always asking for the gift of holy tears. He is a neophyte to penance, more susceptible than Brampton's speaker to violent emotional gestures and extreme metaphors: To J)ee myn hondis, Lord, I spradde; My soule is lijk lond watirless; I may not wepe, I am so badde, So bareyn and so sorowlees. Synne constreynej) me ful sadde; Therfor I preye j?e, prince of pees, Helpe me J>at I summe teris hadde, Thatgoostlyfruytemyjtehaue encress. (881-888) Elsewhere in the meditation the speaker refers to the 'Svelle of grace with stremys strong" that sprang from Christ's bloody side at the crucifixion ( 126-128 ), to "holy water" with which Christ will sprinkle the soul ( 441 ), and to "wepyng water" and the "deedly draghtes" of penance, all of these indices to his obsession with the idea of being washed clean, of being completely purged of sin. There is a proliferation of imagery in Maidstone's paraphrase that suggests a mind agitated. He does not speak in quiet or hushed tones, but loudly and repeatedly, as if God's answering his requests depended on their volume. Brampton's speaker is also interested in moral cleansing, but not in promoting it by a violent rhetoric. Rather, he presents what amounts sometimes to a calm analysis of his condition. For example, instead of glossing Psalm 101.9, 'Tota die exprobrabant mihi inimici mei" ("All day long my enemies reproached me"), as Christ's pathetic lament from the cross —the interpretation favored by Maidstone's speaker and the Latin commentators — Brampton's speaker uses it as a literal critique of his own opponents

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and the generally bad state of society, where good people like him do not thrive: Myn enemyes often me repreue, And backbyten me wit owten enchesoun [reason]. Now may no man other leue [trust], For wylfulnesse ys holden resoun. Al day we seen in tryste ys tresoun And preysyng ys preysyd for sotelte; False othes ben holden in sesoun! But ne reminiscaris domine. ( 82 ) The drift in this passage away from the concerns of the individual soul, toward those of corrupt society, is present in other of Brampton's paraphrases of psalm verses, and was probably the reason why a reviser—possibly Lollard—took up the meditation. They are not, however, really corruptions of Brampton's text, but amplifications of a morally prophetic role deduced from David's Psalms. Maidstone's speaker is a model of Davidic interiority. He always defers to the divinely inspired Scriptures in his translations, provokes the affectus with sometimes lurid meditations on the crucifixion, and talks constantly of weeping. Brampton's, by contrast, has moved beyond this stage of the penitential process, to the self-conscious outward activity of preaching. Thus, when he reads the Psalmist on how all the people of the earth, and all of its kings ("omnes reges terrae"; Ps 101.16) must fear God, he presumes to speak about actual kings: All peple in erthe thi name schal drede, And kynges to thi blysse schul bende. Of thi grace a king hath nede: Mercyfiill Lorde, be thou his frende! (LXXXIX) 22 This prayer, of course, is completely orthodox; nothing could be tamer. The reviser, however, expands the Psalmist's reference to God's potentia absoluta, and the implied criticism of the limits of earthly powers: Ther ys no lord but Jx>u in dede, Thy mageste us wythowten ende; Thou lord oonly mayste saue and sehende Bothe hye and lowe of eche degree.

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Perfore oure moost medefull frende Is ne reminìscaris domine. ( 89 ) The reviser does not exacdy turn the Latin refrain into a political slogan, but he is interested more than Brampton in displacing man's responsibility for obedience from the state to God. His tone is more persistent and selfassured than Brampton's, potentially at least more ideological. The Psalm paraphrases of Maidstone and Brampton display the results of two different temperaments responding deeply to David's text. What they find in the Psalms is often divergent, but they go to the Psalms, in the first place, for the same reason: because they have learned from the commentary tradition that David's words speak to the present, to the souls of individuals and to the collective soul of society. Brampton may prophesy in the Davidic tradition more self-consciously that Maidstone; this seems to have been why his work, unlike Maidstone's, attracted the attention of a Lollard reviser. Both writers, however, recover in their own language not only the passions but also the moral teachings latent in David's poetry. And by imagining speakers modeled on the Psalmist, who have learned or are learning from him, they provide their readers with striking fictional models of Davidic imitation.

Lydgate's Psalm Imitations Lydgate's psalm imitations are more problematic for the critic than those of Maidstone and Brampton, for a couple of reasons. First of all, modern readers tend to approach them, via MacCracken's editon of the minor poems,23 in isolation from the long tradition of medieval Psalm imitation of which they are a part. They disappear into the vast corpus of Lydgate's poetry like droplets in a great ocean. Also, because as translations alone they are often clumsy, they have received little serious literary analysis. In his fine study of Lydgate, Derek Pearsall gives them only six pages;24 while we may excuse this brevity in a volume that pays such deliberate attention to long works like the Fall ofPrinces and the Troy Book, it does not extend significantly our understanding of the place of these poems in the Lydgate canon. Their place there is not eminent, but it is important. Despite their overall lack of literary merit, they give us a glimpse of Lydgate operating as a late-medieval literary theorist, laboring to extract from the Psalter (as writers like Maidstone and Brampton do not) a poetics —a comprehensive

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theory of poetry that can account for both its private and public functions. This attempt was not altogether successful, but it deserves notice and credit. When Pearsall suggests that Lydgate's psalm imitations were done for private devotional purposes, he is partly right.25 But they also bear the marks of literary experimentation, evidence of Lydgate's struggles to relate the private and public significance of the Psalms. Lydgate's psalm imitations fall into distinct subgroups. He translated four psalms in their entirety: Psalm 42 (ludica me deus), Psalm 53 (Deus in nomine tuo salvum me fac), Psalm 102 (Benedic anima mea domino), and Psalm 129 (De profundis) ?6 The last three of these stand on their own as independent poems; the first is part of Lydgate's long poem, The Virtues of the Mass, written as a form of lay instruction for Alice Chaucer, Chaucer's granddaughter and Duchess of Suffolk.27 Another translation, of Psalm 88 (Misericordias domini in aeternum cantabo), is not a complete translation at all, but an extended variation on Psalm 88's key theme, the soul's responsibility for giving endless praise to God.28 In this imitation, Lydgate actually translates only the first line of the psalm, making it his refrain, and finds ingenious ways to end each of his twenty-four stanzas with it. The poem must be regarded as a genuine imitation, however, for while it does not translate Psalm 88 word for word, it does exactly what David's own song enjoins, it sings God's praises at great length, indeed in seeming perpetuity. Moreover, it derives from the Latin psalm commentators an argument for the priority of biblical over pagan verse, thereby suggesting a poetics based in the Psalms. To this list we should add the two surviving versions of Lydgate's translation of the Eight Verses of St. Bernard, a popular medieval prayer.29 The prayer consists of verses abstracted from several psalms, arranged as a continuous meditation. Copies of it survive in British Library MS Royal 17.A.27, which contains a copy of Brampton's penitential psalms, and in Bodleian Library MS Lyell 30, a minutely written personal prayerbook from the fifteenth century. In both, it is introduced with a long rubric describing its origin in a meeting between St. Bernard and the devil, and its special grace-giving powers: We redenne in the Lyf of Seynt Bernard, that the Develle seyd to him, he knew viij versus in the Sauter, tho wheche versus and a man sey hem wehe day, he schal never be dampnude. And Seynt Bernard askut whiche they were; and he seyde he schulde wyte fro hym. And he sayde he wolde ellus say tho hoi Sauter uche day. And he answerud and sayd, he wold ra3wr telle him whyche they wer; and jese it arne.30

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The narrative sounds like an effort to defend monastic recitation of the entire Psalter, while at the same time acknowledging the expediency— given the spiritual force of isolated psalm verses — of reciting an abbreviated psalter. In his two versions of the meditation, Lydgate expands each of the Latin verses into an eight-line stanza, appending to the first version another stanza based on an additional psalm verse, and to the second version (which has a rubric by John Shirley mentioning Henry V, one of Lydgate's patrons) three concluding stanzas. These poems fall into fairly clear subgroups, according to their aims. Deus in nomine tuo and Benedic anima mea are essentially devotional poems, the first penitential and the second epideictic. They have instructive elements; indeed, simply as translations they are instructive, making some of the wisdom of the Vulgate available in English. But there is little evidence as to how they might have been used for instruction. A rubric by Shirley in one copy of Benedic anima mea (MS Trinity College Cambridge R.3.20, a Shirley autograph) stresses its devotional aspect: 'Takele goode hede, sirs and dames, howe Lydegate daun Iohan ]pe Münk of Bury, moeued of deuocyioun, haj^e translated the salme Benedic anima mea domino." Here Shirley if anyone, acting as Lydgate's literary agent, takes on the role of moral instructor. The poem itself, however, which like the psalm it imitates is an address by the speaker to his soul, is basically devout. Lydgate's amplifications of the Latin also point up its devotional character. In expanding the psalm's verses, he adds references to the crucifixion, as a way of heightening the poem's affective appeal: And JJOU my soûle, yit blesse him efft ageyne, Haue euer in mynde his consolacyons, Be not forgetful, but be truwe and pleyne, Ay to remembre his retribuciouns. To him haue ay J)y contemplacyouns, Sith he {Dee bought with his precyous blood, Be not vnkynde, but in J>yne orysouns Thenk for Jjy saake he starffvpon J>e rood. (9-16) This imitation, like Maidstone's meditation on the penitential psalms, incorporates references to the traditional imago fietatis, which Lydgate uses more dramatically in such passion lyrics as "Erly on morwe." Their cumulative effect here, across the twenty-two stanzas of the poem, is powerful, occasionally raising the imitation to the level of a meditative lyric and underscoring

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its devout character. They are added to the matter Lydgate is translating, but are absolutely consistent with it because they magnify its devotional intent. In this particular stanza, they are given an additional poignancy by the sharp tonal contrast between the simple rhyme "blood" / "rood" and the pattern of aureate rhymes in which this one is embedded: "consolacyons"/"retribuciouns"/"contemplacyouns"/"orysouns." The poet uses aureate rhymes in order to give praise, fitting his high style to the noble subject matter— David's poetry and its prophecies of the passion and death of Christ. But he implies, in the simple "blood"/"rood" rhyme, that Christ's acts themselves speak with a directness that is beyond poetry's rhetorical range, however ornate. Lydgate similarly adds to the devout character of his translation of Deus in nomine tuo saluum me fac by amplification, but of a different sort. Instead of ending the poem with his expansion of the last line of the Psalm proper ("Quoniam ex omni tribulacione"), he attaches stanzas that translate and expand the Gloria patri. Two manuscript versions of this conclusion survive, one in two stanzas and the other three. MacCracken judges that the second, in the otherwise reliable M S Harley 2255 (possibly written for William Curteys, Lydgate's abbot), is "probably spurious." Whether the second is authentic or not, both conclusions have the same effect: they transform the psalm from a simple biblical paraphrase into a modern prayer. Their stanzaic and metrical form is consistent with the paraphrase itself, as are their sentiments, a combination of the psalmic attitudes of remorse and praise: Glorye be to the Fadir our souereyn lord, To thy blysful Sone be laude withoutyn ende, And to the hooly speryt that madyst of Oon accord Hevene and erthe, whan thou dyst discende Into a mayde, that nevir yit did offende; O lord! to whoom mercy appropryd is, and grace, Haue on me mercy! and froo the feend me dyffende, That I may amende whyl I haue tyme & space. (49-56) The act of translating the Psalms into English lyric verse induces imitatio by encouraging the translator to identify his own personality with David's, an identification further encouraged by the Psalmist's language, which is densely emotive. In this translation of Psalm 53, Lydgate extends that identification beyond the level of words and phrases, to the level of structure.

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He amplifies not only David's language but the argumentative pattern of the original psalm by preventing it from ending where it should. At the end of the translation, in other words, we are left not with David but with Lydgate—not pure Lydgate, to be sure, since his language in the added stanzas continues to borrow from the Psalter (e.g., "Haue on me mercy! and froo the feend me dyffende"), but with a conclusion that is Lydgate's version of the doxology, not the last verse of Psalm 53. Similar extensions of psalm translations can be found in other medieval manuscripts. For instance, at the end of British Library MS Add. 10036, a reader has extended the last lines of Richard Maidstone's paraphrase of Psalm 50: "Now lorde be thou our helpe & guide / And pardon things that conseve il" (fol. 97r). These lines, justified with the left margin of the text, make a poor conclusion to Maidstone's translation. However, they testify to this reader's impulse to identify with the sentiments of the translator, which themselves imitate the sentiments of the Psalmist. By adding his own stanzas to his translation of Psalm 53, Lydgate produces a similar effect of continuity between the Psalmist's sentiments and his own, and extends at the same time the devout impulse of David's original. In his translations of Psalms 42 (ludica me deus) and 129 (De profundis), Lydgate shifts from a private to more public tone, but not by changing his habits of literal psalm translation. He still treats the language of the Vulgate in the same, often awkward manner as in Benedic anima mea and Deus in nomine tuo saluum mefac. However the psalms do not appear now as independent poems. Instead, they are surrounded by instructive matter. This is clearest in the case of ludica me deus, which is only a small part of Lydgate's almost seven-hundred-line poem, The Virtues of the Mass. Lydgate introduces his translation by explaining, first, that Pope Celestine ordered that Psalm 42 be recited at Mass because of its special efficacy in disarming "the power of feendes mortali stryfe." In the five stanzas that follow, the poet goes on to explain some of the interpretive matter associated with Psalm 42 in the commentaries: that, according to Nicholas of Lyra, the poem is a memorial of the Babylonian captivity, which figuratively represents the longing of the captives for the Heavenly Jerusalem and which ought to encourage, on the tropological level, humility. Lydgate's tone becomes that of the moral teacher, in the tradition of David himself: Take of thys Psalme the moralyte, Afore rehersyd on that other syde,

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The modesty topos, because it is conventional, we can forgive. The rhyme "translate"/"Lydegate," however, which seems designed to draw attention to the author's name rather than genuinely to ascribe responsibility for defects in the work, introduces the paraphrase on a leaden note. And the pushy initial injunction itself, "Take of the Psalme the moralyte," nearly implies that if the poet were not enjoining his reader to avoid it, he might take up the chaff of the psalm text (whatever this might be), to the neglect of the fruit. Lydgate handles his introduction to De profundis somewhat more confidently. He still overindulges himself when using the modesty topos; but this poem opens with a striking image of the speaker's heart as an oratory or private chapel, where God's grace guides him in finding an answer to the question of whether fasting, almsgiving, Mass, or private prayer best helps souls in purgatory: Hauyng a conseit in my sympill wyt Wich of newe ys come to memorye, The processe to grounde on hooly wryt, Grace of our Lord shal be my Dyrectorye In myn Inward hertyly Orratorye, — What availleth most while we ben here To the sowlys that lyue in purgatorye, Fastyng, almesse, massys, or prayere. (1-8)

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The locus classicus for the heart as chapel image is the Enarrationes, where in his comments on Psalm 3.4 ("Voce mea ad dominum clamavi"), Augustine discusses how, ideally, prayer ought to be private: Voce mea ad Dominum clamaui. Id est, non corporis uoce, quae cum strepita uerberati aëris promitur, sed uoce cordis, quae hominibus silet, Deo autem sicut clamor sonat. Qua uoce Susanna exaudita est, et de qua uoce ipse Dominus praecipit, ut in cubiculis clausis, id est, in secretis cordis sine strepita oretur. ( C C S L 58, p. 8) ["With my voice have I cried to the Lord." That is, not with the voice of the body, which is drawn out with the sound of the reverberation of the air, but with the voice of the heart, which to men speaks not, but with G o d sounds as a cry. By this voice Susanna was heard; and with this voice the Lord himself commanded that prayer should be made in closets (Mt 6.6), that is, in the recesses of the heart, noiselessly. ] ( 5 )

Lydgate's possible use of the Enarrationes here is not important in itself, although we should note that he does refer to Augustine by name later in the poem, when he seems to rely on the Enarrationes again for a reference to the "Ground . . . tytyl & orygynall" of this psalm, namely Jonah's lament from the whale's belly, which Augustine mentions at the start of his comments on De profundis. Nor is Lydgate's emphasis on private prayer especially distinctive. In his century, spiritual directors increasingly advised private prayer. For instance, at the start of two related fifteenth-century passion meditations, in MSS Douce 322 and British Library Add. 2283, the reader is instructed at length "to haue a pryuy place fro all the noyse, withouten any lettyng" where he or she can conduct the meditation "bi thi self." What is notable in Lydgate's Deprofimdis is this extended emphasis on private prayer at the start of a translation that was actually commissioned for public display, by Lydgate's abbot, William Curteys: "so that it be sent / At his chirche to hang it on the wall." This commission Lydgate frankly presents, two times in the poem, as supplanting his own private meditation, or at least as taking precedence over it: Another charge was vpon me leyd, Among psalmys to fynde a deer sentence, Why De Profundis specyally ys seyd For crystes sowlys, with devout reverence. (9-12)

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This charge, "to fynde a cleer sentence," is more particular, deliberate, and intellective than Lydgate's initial affective search for the best means of helping souls in purgatory. It has more to do with doctrine than with prayer. The sense of the sixteen lines in which Lydgate describes this charge is difficult to paraphrase, but crucial to the poem's meaning, and to Lydgate's thoughts on poetics. Here is its rather convoluted prose meaning: While I was engaged in my private, inward search, another task was given me: to find a clear reason why De profundis of all the psalms is recited devoutly, lovingly, and kindly for Christian souls as people pass by their graves. Even though I'm not at all well-versed in Scripture, I must search there for figures that are set out briefly and directly, not ingeniously but simply, since God sent his grace with preference to the simple, to raise them up because of their meekness — figures I say, according to whose authority I must shape my own style ( that is, according to the style of this particular psalm, De profundis, which I mentioned earlier), using figures that I must put into my own words, eliminating the chaff and gathering up the kernels, (my translation)

This sounds like Polonius promising to be brief. Lydgate's key point is that he sees this public charge as an opportunity to search through the Scriptures, and the Psalms especially, for an authoritative basis for poetic style and composition. Furthermore, he states clearly that what he seeks is a style that is simple and direct, like the Scriptures themselves, rhetorical (i.e., dependent on the use of figures) but not too cunning, for the uneducated rather than for the learned. He ends these remarks, conspicuously, by invoking St. Paul's observation in Romans 15.4 that all that is written is written for our doctrine and its corollary, that writers and readers should distinguish in discourse between style and substance. Knowing what we do about Lydgate's style, which so often compromises the substance of poetry by indulging its accidents, what should we make of this? A t the risk of reading the prologue to De profundis too autobiographically, it is plausible that the difficulty of this passage may be an index to Lydgate's determination to bring together, in his poetry and in his poetics, his two roles as a Davidic poet: the private, or essentially devout one, and the public, or morally instructive and even grossly political one. This suggstion fits with Lydgate's attitudes toward poetry as represented in his paraphrase of Psalm 88 (Misericordias domini in eternum cantabo). As mentioned earlier, this poem is not a full-scale translation of the entire psalm, but a poem on the theme of Psalm 88's first line, which becomes Lydgate's refrain: "Eternally thy mercies I shal syng." Derek Pearsail calls the poem "a Biblical concordance to 'song,' " 3 1 and one is inclined

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to agree with this description. But Lydgate assembled his concordance with a very serious purpose that Pearsall does not touch on in simply naming its technique. It ought to be remarked that the habit of building an entire lyric around one psalm verse is fairly common in Middle English. Sometimes, as in the lyric Salvumfac me domine, which I have already discussed, the Latin verse becomes a refrain to the vernacular poem, punctuating and regulating its metrical progress. In other cases, the Latin verse will appear as an epigraph to several stanzas, as in some of John Audelay's poems,32 or will be quoted only at the lyric's close, inviting scrutiny of how the psalm from which the verse is taken may have influenced the entire Middle English poem. For instance, in Bodleian Library MS Hatton 73, there is a penitential lyric that begins, abjectly, praising God's redemption of mankind and frankly asserting the first-person speaker's "vanitees, and . . . superfluite" (10). That is, the poet begins by establishing the antithetical situation present in all of David's penitential poems: the distance between God's goodness and human badness. After this, the speaker asks for mercy in heavily psalmic language: Therfor mercy y axe, as a wrech in degre [status]. And for y knew not, blyssid savioure, Thy benigne pacience that thou had to me; Thy gastfull [dreadfull] Iugement, lord, y ne drade, Ne lerned what answer y shuld gyf the For the innumerable godes [benefits] that y had, But contrarie, fro day to day ayenst my furst vowe, With wikked dedis prouokid the. Therfor, but oon word y haue to the nowe, That is forto say, domine miserere! ( 15-24) The speaker's failure to fear divine judgment accounts for the intensity of sorrow that moves him to quote the Miserere; the implication is that nothing less than David's best penitential verse will serve to assuage God's anger. Carleton Brown notes that in the second from last line quoted above, the scribe originally wrote "thus" after "the" and then crossed it out, and that in the final line of the passage "domine" is "interlined above the line."33 He misrepresents both manuscript details. First, "domine" is not, as Brown implies, in the scribal hand. More important, in the second from last line, someone —perhaps the scribe — scraped away "thus" (the original is re-

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coverable under ultraviolet light) and at the end of the last line quoted above, also scraped away the words "mee deus." The stanza originally ended, then, as follows (angle brackets mark the erasures) : But contrarie fro day to day ayenst my fiirst vowe With wikkid dedis provokid the (thus). Therfor but oon word y haue to the nowe That is forto say, miserere (mee deus)! In the original version, the stanza concludes with a direct quotation from Psalm 50, which the speaker has recourse to because, as he admits, he cannot speak on his own behalf. The Latin quotation would have had special emphasis as the closing words of the poem, another manuscript detail obscured by Carleton Brown's editing. He prints the poem (to this point, three eight-line stanzas) as ending with the following four-line section: Haue mercy, god, of my mysdede! For thy mercy, that mychell is, Latt thy pitee spryng and sprede, And graunte that nevir here-after y do amys. ( 25-28 ) In MS Hatton 73, a larger space separates the concluding stanza from the rest of the poem than separates the three main stanzas from each other on the page: 3/4" rather than 1/2." Also, the final four-line stanza has a more prominent initial capital than do the previous three stanzas, and the rhymes in the stanza are marked with braces, whereas this is not the case in the body of the poem. The differences in treatment suggest that the final four-line stanza, also written in the scribal hand, is a coda or envoy to the three-stanza lyric, rather than part of the main text itself. It is a discrete textual unit, because the point it makes is an outgrowth, but at the same time separate, from the point made by the lyric proper. The sinful persona who could not speak on his own, and therefore had to have recourse to the language of Psalm 50, has suddenly translated the Latin of part of that psalm into his own vernacular: Haue mercy, god, of my mysdede! For thy mercy, that mychell is. This is a good Middle English paraphrase of the opening of Psalm 50 itself:

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Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam, et secundum multi tu dinem miserationem tu arum, dele iniquitatem meam. ( 1 - 2 ) The Middle English lyric, in short, dramatizes the process whereby a sinner experiences compunction as the result of saying a psalm verse, internalizes the Psalmist's sentiments, and then expresses his own grief in terms of psalm language, translated into his own vernacular discourse. The changes to the original text of the poem, scribal or not, obscure the dramatic process of the poem, concealing a large measure of its meditative power. The dramatic power Lydgate distills from a single psalm verse in his Misericordias is equal to this, but different in kind: it tends toward the theoretical and ideological. In the Misericordias Lydgate traces a poetic genealogy from David in the Old Testament, through the New Testament canticles, and into the historical present, to himself. At the start of the poem he describes David both in his "estât Roial" as musician-king, and in his meekness, as the humble shepherd who slew Goliath and, in doing so, became a type of the crucified Christ: Dauid with his harpe sange solempnely This hooly Salme in his estât Roial, — Misericordias domini, His herte, his boody, mynde, thout and al Erect to godward in especial, With goostly love moost fervently brennyng, With this refreyt, verray celestial, Eternally thy Mercies I shal syng. And whan he shuldfihtewith Golye, Pryde was slayn, the palme gat [won] meeknesse; Figure of Iesu, prophetys speceffye, Whan he slouh Sathan with his gret humblesse, The slynge, the stoonys, .v. woundys did expresse, Of the iij nayles, the spere deep persyng: Which to remembre, Iesu our hertys dresse, That we thy Mercies eternally may syng. (9-24) David's single-mindedness and humility, in Lydgate's conception, become a standard for the poet; as Lydgate asserts in the opening lines of his para-

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phrase, the "Fynal intent" or ultimate purpose of all spiritual songs and hymns, and indeed of "euery creature" in all of his activities, ought to be praise of God. The major biblical poets, all of whom Lydgate lists, meet this standard. The pagan poets, whom Lydgate blithely dismisses as concerned only with "palmys transitorye / With corious [overly ingenious] meetrys that be poetical" (according to OED, this is one of the earliest derogatory uses of "poetical" in English), do not. What are songs of martial conquest, sung by poets such as Virgil, Lydgate asks, when compared with poetry in praise of Christ's spiritual battle with Satan on the Cross? This is an important question, indeed, for a poet patronized by kings. It would be recreating Lydgate in our image, however, to argue that he thought his public service as court poet compromised to any degree his private service as devout psalmist, singing Christ's praises eternally. It is not ahistorical, though, to suggest that Lydgate's approval of poetry in praise of God and disapproval of the great pagan classics contains a healthy dose of self-congratulation, given the subject of the poem at hand. Henry V, perhaps Lydgate's most important patron, was compared like other medieval kings (such as Charlemagne) to the biblical David, and extolled as the ideal Christian monarch.34 The anonymous author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, composed in 1416-1417 as propaganda for Henry, describes him returning victorious from Agincourt and entering London as "another David": . . . And there was written on the front of the gateways on each side: Gloriosa, dicta sunt de te, civitas dei (Ps 86.3) Over [a] bridge there went out from the casde to meet the king a choir of most beautiful young maidens, very chastely adorned in pure white raiment and virgin attire, singing together with timbrel and dance, as if to another David coming from the slaying of Goliath (who might appropriately be represented by the arrogant French), this song of congratulation, following their texts: Welcome Henry yefifte,Kynge of England and ofFrance.35

In the Enarrationes, Augustine explains that the glorious city referred to in Psalm 86.3 is no earthly place, but the heavenly Jerusalem;36 in the Gesta, however, this city is London, rejoicing in Henry's French victory, which after all the author and the English see not as a man's victory, but as God's. The particulars of the king's entrance ceremony were traditional; they were not invented just for Henry. They testify, however, to an analogical ap-

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proach to the Psalms that interprets them as texts about contemporary history, not just the moral concerns of medieval readers. Lydgate exploits this analogical approach in his vicious anti-Lollard poem, A Defence of Holy Church, which is most probably addressed to Henry.37 He too compares Henry to David, and asks that he drive the spiritually feeble from the Church, just as David once drove the physically infirm from his city: And thynke how David ageyn Iebusee When that he fouht, in Regum as I fynde, How he made voide from Syon his Citee Unweldy, crokid, bothe lame and blynde: By which example alway have in mynde To voide echon, and for to do the same Oute of thi siht, that in the faith be lame. ( 85-91 ) 38 St. Ambrose once appealed to Emperor Theodosius to do penance for the massacre of seven thousand at Thessalonica by invoking the example of the penitent David; Lydgate, by contrast, promotes the king's violent suppression of nonconformists by invoking the example of David miles}9 And in the same poem, the English Church becomes, by analogy, the Israelites in Babylonian captivity, crying out to Henry in the words of Psalm 136 ( Super flumina Babylonis) for release: O Goddis knyht, till Jxi list to rewe Upon hir pitouse lamentable woo: Off reuth and mercy to deliuer hir froo The mortal honds that wrought hir al J>is soore, Till thou of grace grauntest libertee Zorobabell and also Neemye Ierusalem ageyn to edyfye. (26-29; 33-35) We must return to Lydgate on Psalm 136 and the Babylonian captivity again in Part III, in connection with Lollard psalm polemic. For now, it is sufficient to observe that, if the poem's tone is any indication, writing this sort of poetry provoked in Lydgate no moral qualms. He regarded Henry as the

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English nation did, and as John Shirley did, or at least as Shirley represents the king in the rubrics to two of Lydgate's Psalm imitations: "in J>e chapell at Wyndesore . . . at euensonge," or reciting St. Bernard's verses "by gret devocion . . . in his chappell at his hyje masses by-twene levacion and J>e consecración of Jse sacrament" — Henry the national moral standard, penitent and devout, Christ's chief knight according to the pattern of David himself.40 The tone of Lydgate's Misericordias is confident. As he traces a poetic genealogy from David through the other Old and New Testament poets to the present, he naturally views himself and poets like him as shoots from this strong branch: devout imitators of the Psalms and servants to the realm. In doing so he could find support from Augustine, who in commenting on Misericordias in the Enarrationes explains that Christ promised to establish David's seed forever, so that his offspring might eternally sing His praises. The only poetry worth writing is poetry of praise to God. The poetics Lydgate tries to derive from the Psalms, and of which he offers a glimpse in his psalm imitations, is always, necessarily both private and public, devout and political. Depending on who we are, as readers and critics, such a totalizing poetic will be either attractive or frightening. One thing seems clear, however. Reading and imitating the narrative of the Psalms was, for Lydgate, what one contemporary Marxist theorist calls a "socially symbolic act."41

Partili Psalm Ideology

5· Two Versions of Captivity: Lydgate, the Lollards, and Psalm Complaint

But now at J)e last we schullen bring to mynde & to witnesse holi Dauij} jje kyng, J>at hadde 30uun to him f>e fill spirit of prophecie; & he seing f>e comyng of anticrist, his lyuyng & his fai, markig fyue hidouse saw3tis, J)e whiche he schal haunt a3en £>e seruauntis of God. Pseudo-Wyclif, The Lanterne of Lip1 For the purposes of this study, a distinction must be drawn between uses of the Psalms in Middle English devotional literature and in political writings of the same period. The devotional prose and poems we have been considering direct psalm discourse at the individual soul, and stress the interiority of the Psalter's teachings—their essentially meditative character and effect on the spiritual condition of the penitent or pious reader. Middle English political verse and prose, by contrast, emphasizes the relevance of the Psalms to what the later Middle Ages called "commun profit"—the good of society in general, rather than of this or that person in particular.2 This "good," like individual well-being, has a strong moral component. It also involves, however, matters of economics and the distribution of religious and secular power. Middle English writers interpreted the Psalms as referring direcdy, across the ages, to these contemporary concerns, in the same way that the Latin and Middle English psalm commentators viewed the Psalter as describing the moral trajectory of every human soul. David's moral prophecies were thought to be relevant not only to personal salvation, but to concrete questions of social regulation and reform. As I argued in Part I, there are essential points of contact, implied by the Psalter itself, between the private and public significances of David's poetry: according to a stricdy theological understanding of the Psalms and the sacrament of penance, each act of individual reform, like David's personal contrition, benefits all. Several late Middle English texts, however, reflect ideological responses to the Psalms that coopt David's teachings to particular political programs or social agendas. It is a curious circumstance

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of the volatility of this period (especially the early fifteenth century), and an odd testament to the richness of psalm language, that two absolutely opposed social ideologies were derived from the Psalter by writers as different as the monk Lydgate and those premature Protestants w h o came to be called "Lollards." 3 Both Lydgate and the Lollards use the Psalms to represent their very different senses of political beleaguerment, and they both invoke David's status as the Bible's chief, moral prophet to argue for specific political actions or social changes that are, essentially, incompatible. Only in Langland's great poem of social crisis, Piers Plowman, do the competing claims of conservative and liberal psalm ideologies get reconciled—and this, ironically, in a Utopian vision of a society based in the Psalms' penitential aspect, expressed decades before the violent 1415 struggles between the Lydgatian and Lollard programs.

Lydgatian Psalm Complaint The psalmic symbolism of Lydgate's Defence of Holy Church, which we began considering at the end of Part II, is far more pervasive than the poet's efforts to provoke Henry V s identification with the biblical David. Associating the monarch or even chivalric literary heroes with Scripture's ideal of earthly kingship was, after all, a medieval commonplace: Alcuin quite unselfconsciously addresses his letters to Charlemagne to "David," and in the Arthurian Grail romances, characters like Galahad trace their pedigrees back to the biblical David. 4 More specifically, R. A. Shoaf has demonstrated, in his analysis of the use of the David story in the alliterative Morte Arthure (ca. 1360), that medieval authors worked in a highly self-conscious way to parallel the careers of their heroes with David's, as recorded in the Old Testament. Citing the Morte author's reference to "David the dere" in his description of the Nine Worthies (lines 3416-3421 ), Shoaf explains that King David was "dere" to the Middle Ages because he was as human, and as fallibly so, as the next man. And the Morte evokes his example for the figure of Arthur precisely because if he was among the Worthiest of mortals, he was also the most nakedly mortal of Worthies. His is the example that articulates more than any other the meaning in the Morte of the particular hero Arthur and of the ideal of heroism, as that ideal was coming under scrutiny during the turbulent and trying times of Edward III and Richard II.5 As Shoaf suggests, Arthur is not simply compared to David by implication in the alliterative Morte. Rather, the Middle English author deliberately

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matches a sequence of events from David's biblical career with Arthur's English one, in order to assert that the ambiguities of David's character continued to manifest themselves in much later fictional representations of Christian chivalry.6 The ideological drift of Lydgate's poem is slightly more complex. For Lydgate in the Defence, Henry is another David only potentially — insofar as he rouses himself, and continues his vigorous suppression of Lollard heresy in the realm. While Henry has to be prodded to this course of Davidic action, the English Church has already been brought, painfully, to its own point of identification with David, in his persona as the collective voice of Israel during the Babylonian captivity. Before Henry's defense of the English Church, she . . . on the floodis of fell Babiloun, Al solitair and trist in compleynyng, Sat with hire children aboute hir euerichoun, Almost fordrowynd with teerys in weepyng; And wher as she was wonde to play and syng In peys and honour of hir eternali lorde, On instrumentis of musik in accorde, Constreyned was, and almost at the prikk Talefft hir song of holy notis trewe, And on the salwys olde foule and thikk To hang hir orgnes, J?at were entvned newe, — ( 1 5 - 2 5 ) The portrait is drawn, with considerable adaptation, from the opening verses of Psalm 136. Lydgate presents this portrait of the Church's captivity in the past tense, but also intends it as a warning of future troubles. Henry has saved Holy Church from captivity at the hands of the Lollard rebels, but is in danger of letting down his guard and allowing future harm to the Church, by not driving all of the heretics from the kingdom. As long as any heterodoxy persists in England, Holy Church is threatened. The solution Lydgate has in mind is a complete purge: "to voide echon... / Oute of thi siht, that in the faith be lame" (90-91 ). The event that prompted Lydgate's poem, the planned Lollard rebellion of 1413, was serious business. According to E. F. Jacob, it involved an assassination plot against the king and his brothers, to be carried out at Christmas. Sir John Oldcasde, escaped from the tower, was the ringleader; his supporters included not only villagers ( some of whom were bribed) but

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also tradesmen—parchment makers, weavers, and scriveners. The leaders were seized and hanged on January 13, and the parliament of April 1414 enacted much stronger measures to repress Lollards, including the confiscation of property. The shock to the nation's sense of religious and social stability, however, must have been profound, and less easily assuaged. Jacob records that, according to one contemporary account, Oldcasde was charged with plotting to destroy Holy Church herself.7 Here were events that were allowed to get out of hand, and Lydgate makes much at the start of the poem of the narrowness of Holy Church's escape. He reminds Henry that ecclesia . . . was oppressid almost in thy rewme Even at the poynt of her destruccioun Amyd hir citee of Ierusalem, Al bysett with enmyes envyroun. ( 8 - 1 1 ) Lydgate's repetition and crosslingual pun ("bysett"/"envyroun") conflates Psalm 136's account of the Babylonian captivity and one of the Psalmist's favorite topoi: his complaint that his enemies surround him, and his prayer that God might be his refuge.8 The rest of the poem, beginning with the analogy of the Babylonian captivity, argues rather deftly that future rebellions should be anticipated, and suspect parties, some of them apparently close to the king, banished now. In his study of Lydgate, Walter Schirmer remarks that, while poets like Hoccleve sought to represent the Lollards to Henry as more of a threat than they actually were, "in all Lydgate's voluminous works there are only a few lines of condemnation, and not a single satirical poem exclusively directed against Lollardry."9 Schirmer's assessment is based on his assumption of a later date for the Defence (ca. 1431), at the time of less serious Lollard uprisings,10 and his belief — based on the manuscript context of one copy of the poem—that it was addressed to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, uncle and regent of Henry VI, rather than to Henry V himself. Two copies of the Defence survive, only one of them complete. This one appears at the very end of British Library MS Harley 1245 , a large folio volume containing the Fall ofPrinces, a collection of Boccaccio's tragedies that Lydgate translated at Duke Humphrey's request, and dedicated to him. The Defence is copied out by the same scribe on the last two pages of the book, and thus Schirmer takes the addressee to be the duke rather than Henry V There is, however, another more plausible explanation for the poem's

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inclusion in the volume: the scribe understood its admonitory matter to be assimilable to that of the main text in the book, the Fall ofPrinces itself. Like each of the stories in the Fall, the Defence is exemplary and (in some measure) tragic. It describes how a monarch's neglect contributed to a near political crisis, and in warning the same monarch against future problems seems to imply that he may not be sufficiently prudent. The Drfence, in short, brings the message of the exempla of the Fall up to date; it is a strikingly appropriate coda to the moral of Boccaccio's encyclopedia of de casibus tragedies: that those in high places, positions of the highest social responsibilty, must guard against their loss of power and the chaotic social circumstances that result from this. In the first instance, it was addressed to Henry V But it could also be read by Duke Humphrey, some years later, as a cautionary tale of political tragedy barely averted. The scribe recognizes, at once, the autonomy of the poem from the much longer work that precedes it, as well as its relation to that work. In copying the Defence, he begins a new column of text. But he uses the same rather formal hand for the shorter poem, and leaves adequate space for the provision of the same ornamented initial capitals at the start of each rime royal stanza of the Defence as one encounters throughout his copy of the Fall. The presence of the Defence in the Harleian manuscript of the Fall of Princes hardly constitutes a strong argument for its being addressed to Duke Humphrey, and there is a plausible argument for its being a poem about events during Henry V s reign, appended as a coda to the exemplary tragedies that make up the longer work in the manuscript.11 The rhetorical force of the poem itself argues for an earlier date and audience. The Lollard uprisings Duke Humphrey encountered never matched in force those of 1413; it is unlikely that they would have provoked a poem so carefully structured and embellished, so artful in its suasive techniques and belligerent in its range of scriptural reference. Lydgate deploys all of his rhetorical skill against the Lollard threat. On the level of structure, this involves the sustained use of enjambment, long periodic sentences that move across poetic lines and stanzas, to suggest an anticipatory mood: . . . ther was noon her malis to withstonde, Cristys quarrel manly to susteen, Til thow were chose for to lay to honde, Only by grace hir champioun to been, For to delyuer out of woo and teen [harm]

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Lydgate consistently places the conjunction at the start of a new poetic line, and immediately before the start of a new stanza, in order to emphasize Henry's sudden and perhaps unplanned action. Henry's past protections of Holy Church have been heroic, but they have had an edge-of-the-seat quality. Whether political and religious stability can be maintained by a monarch who waits until the final hour to act against threats is the central question the rhetoric of Lydgate's Defence ofHoly Church is meant to consider. The poem falls into four basic parts. Part I (lines 1 - 6 7 ) is an epideictic proem that praises Henry as "protectour and diffence... off Cristus spouse douhtir of Syoun" (5; 7), introduces the analogy between the captive English Church and the Babylonian exile, and pays tribute to Henry for having released the captives. Metaphorically, this praise of Henry is threefold: he is extolled for having reedified (rebuilt the walls of) Jerusalem; delivered Noah's ship from the flood; and made the waters of Charybdis and Scylla withdraw from threatening the ark. What at first reads like an agitated series of analogies, leaping between books of the Old Testament and between the Old Testament and pagan literature, is in fact a poetic unity. Each of these analogies for Henry's preservation of Holy Church is introduced with the transitional word "till" ("until that point when," in lines 33, 49, and 56); that is, each of these parallel analogies seeks to reinforce the proem's key idea of contingency —Holy Church's dependence on Henry's good will and timely intervention at moments of crisis. While praising Henry by this threefold analogy, Lydgate also begs the question of whether the monarch had had enough foresight to prevent the Church's "captivity" in the first place. Or to put the matter another way, to what extent has Henry's defense of Holy Church been fortuitous, not the result of careful planning, but of swift and perhaps ill-planned action once matters had gotten severe? As a subordinate offering counsel to his king, Lydgate must begin his poem with praise: Henry is addressed at the very start as "Most worthi prince, of whome the noble fame / In vertue floureth and in hih prudence" ( 1 - 2 ). But the structure of the argument by analogy qualifies that praise in subtle ways, suggesting that what is to follow will be less obsequious, more forthright. Part II (lines 68-77) marks a major turn in the poem's argument, as the tone shifts from praise to advice, from the situation of a political inferior

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talking to his superior to a moral superior addressing his pupil. The phrase "Wherfor I rede" at the start of line 68 makes Lydgate's status as an adviser, and the nature of the advice he gives, depend on his praise of the king's past acts as detailed in lines 1-67. Nevertheless, his cautionary call for vigilance also suggests that he understands something the king does not. Just as the raven Noah sent forth from the ark was unfaithful to him, feeding on carrion instead of returning to the ship, modern-day Philistines wait to seize the Ark of the Covenant, the Church itself, now under Henry's protection. Like David in the company of Saul, Henry is "full innocente" (78), but thus susceptible to deception. Lydgate, thus, advises the monarch to . . . be ware of chaungyng of the moone, Eclipse of falsehed betrassh nat the liht Off thi goodnesse, that shyneth yitt so briht. (75-77) The operative word in this passage, of course, is "yitt." To this point in his career, Henry has guaranteed that his benign influence (in the strict etymological sense) will continue to shine on his people. The future of this influence, however, is uncertain. Falsehood can "eclipse" or block it or, more perniciously, "betrassh" — betray—the light.12 The unexpected movement in this line from a celestial metaphor for Henry's character to a verb suggestive of the literal issue at hand, Henry's resistance to false advice that might lead him astray under the guise of friendship, is an index to Lydgate's desire to bring the terms of the argument down from the poetical to the actual. Derek Pearsall notes that it was not in Lydgate's nature to omit anything. In this passage from the Defence, however, he willfully cancels out his grand astronomical metaphor in order to focus Henry's attention on the real moral choice at hand. The issue is one of judgment and trust, and on it hangs the future of Henry's office and of Holy Church herself. Lydgate's use of the phrase "the liht / Off thi goodnesse" at this point invokes, perhaps deliberately, the psalm topos of the light of divine grace. Medieval political theorists maintained that the king rules not by virtue of his own power, but by God's. That is, the light of the king's goodness is a reflected illumination, a mirrored image of the light of self-knowledge, bestowed by God, that David praises in Psalm 26.1 : "Dominus illuminatio mea..." ("The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? / The Lord is the protector of my life: of whom shall I be afraid?"). The faith expressed in thefirstverse of this psalm is the sort that a king requires, for it offers protection against one's enemies—the Church's enemies. And while

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Psalm 26 ends with David asking, somewhat less than confidendy, that God not deliver him over to those who trouble him, the fact remains that he is still capable of asking: he is, tropologically speaking, ever vigilant. Henry is now at risk of losing his political influence, Lydgate implies, because he has become distracted. He does not "both nyght and day" attend to "chaungyng of the moone" — the shifting loyalties that are the stuff of any political system. One is tempted to identify, in Lydgate's phrase "both nyght and day," an allusion to the Psalmist's "die ac nocte" in one of the penitential psalms: Quoniam tacui, inveteraverunt ossa mea, Dum clam arem tota die. Quoniam die ac nocte gravata est super me manus tua, Conversus sum in aerumna mea, dum configitur spina. (Ps 3 1 . 3 - 3 1 . 4 )

[Because I was silent, my bones grew old, while I cried out all day long, For day and night your hand was heavy upon me: I am turned in my anguish, while the thorn is fastened. ] Perhaps Lydgate aims to turn penitential poetry into polemic, the Psalmist's guilt into a monarch's misgivings concerning his lack of attention to troublemakers. Whether or not this is the case, these lines look ahead to the poet's advice, somewhat later in the Defence (lines 99-105), that Henry should put his devotion to Christ above his fidelity to the order of knighthood, and presumably such figures as the treasonous Oldcastle: For who is blynde or haltith [stumbles] in J>e faith For any doctryne of these sectys newe And Cristes techyng therfor aside laith, Unto thy corone may he nat be trewe. He may dissymule with a feynyd hewe [appearance] — But take good heede, what way J?at he is faire, Thy swerde of knyhthoode, that no swich ne spaire, And Cristis cause alway fyrst preferre And althirnexte [next of all] thi knyhtly state preserue. (92-100) There is a sort of primitivism to Lydgate's argument concerning Henry's kingly authority, summed up in the too easy rhyming of "trewe" and

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"hewe." Lydgate asserts that the only way Henry can reclaim it fully is to circumvent all but the best of his advisers, associates, and acquaintances, in order to return to the author of that authority Himself — Christ, the Son of David and the one Truth. Such an argument sounds, on the face of it, otherworldly; Lydgate certainly grounds the argument of the Dtfence in some of the byways of biblical language and exegetical allegory. But the energy that fuels his discourse is more pragmatic than these. In his poem, he does not see contemporary circumstances reflected in the Psalms and psalm commentary, but refracts contemporary experience through their prism. For him, Henry is in danger of losing his Davidic heritage, which he conceives of in actual rather than merely figurative terms. The only way to recover and preserve this heritage, therefore, is to return to its source, by asserting one's absolute authority over treason, in the person of God's most beloved, David himself. David's teachings in the Psalms are "Cristes techyng" in the poem, the doctrines set aside by the Lollards that Henry must take up in his ideological and physical battle against them. The importance of the relationship Lydgate perceives between Henry and David becomes clearest at the start of Part III of the Drfence, when the poet introduces hisfirstexplicit biblical parallel for the king (the analogy of Holy Church to Noah's ship in lines 45-46 only implies a parallel between Henry and Noah, who is a favorite Old Testament type of Christ). In a phrase that he will echo four times in the next thirty lines of the poem, Lydgate urges Henry to "Thynke how" God protected David from Saul (lines 78-81). As I noted in Part I, the David-Saul relationship is usually interpreted in late medieval allegory as the struggle between humility and pride. For Lydgate, however, it is also an historical account of the struggle between true and false kingship, between a monarch who is able to rule wisely by conquering his own impulses and one who is the victim of his private obsessions and fears. Thus Lydgate follows this Davidic analogy with more advice ("Wherfor I rede," again, in line 82) and the analogy between the heretics and the physically infirm in 2 Samuel 5.8, whom King David drove from Jerusalem after recapturing it and returning the Ark of the Covenant (the Vulgate reports, blundy, that the blind and the lame were hateful to David: "caecos et claudos odientes animam David"). Having prepared Henry for the real point of the poem, Lydgate only now introduces his references to the treasonous "sectys newe" that threaten the Church (93). The suspension of this direct reference to the Lollards to a point late in the poem is not manipulative or evasive. For Henry to understand what Lydgate demands of him, he must first interpret his experience in terms of biblical circumstance, viewing his decisions and acts not as local

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and particular, but as of cosmic significance and general. He must not simply be provoked by David's example, but must reduplicate it in his own behavior. Truth, he must recognize, is stable and unchanging, and thus the same between the Old Testament past and Henry's present troubles. At this point in the poem, as Part IV begins, the poet registers a distina loss of confidence in his monarch. He not only mentions that Henry should put Christ before knighthood, but resurrects the Saul exemplum to explain how that king "whilome was abiect" because he "dide grace," showed mercy, to the Amalechites against God's wishes ("the voluntee / Of Goddys precepte"; 1 0 9 - 1 1 0 ) . The reference is to 1 Samuel 15, where in Yahweh's name the prophet Samuel orders Saul to kill the nation of Amalech and all of its animal property, as retribution for the injustices the Amalech nation did to the Israelites as they came out of Egypt. When Saul spares Agag, the king of the Amalechites, and their best cattle as booty, Samuel tells Saul that Yahweh has taken the kingdom of Israel from him, and hacks Agag to pieces before Yahweh ("et in frusta concidit Samuhel Agag coram Domino"; 1 Sam 15.33). To be sure, Samuel reminds Agag of his murder of innocent women before butchering him. The biblical moment, however, is a dramatic instance of the prophet-adviser taking over divine authority from the king himself, echoed in the Defence by Lydgate's subsequent reference (in lines 1 2 0 - 1 2 1 ) to Elijah's slaying of the false prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18.40. At the close of his poem, then, Lydgate implies that the poet-prophet, he himself in the tradition of Nathan and David, has had to take over the responsibility for moral and civic order that the king has abdicated. Lydgate's praise of Samuel is an apologia for the poet's presumption in instructing the king on political matters, and a powerful warning that Henry's neglect of this instruction might lead him, inadvertently, to imitate Saul rather than David: Wher Samuel, the perfite hooly man, Chosen of God to execute trouth, With a swerde the rihtfull doome he gan And slouh Agag, withouten any routh [pity] In Galgalis wher Saule for his slouth Forsaken was, and hoolly al the lyne Thatcamofhyminmyscheifdidefyne [end]. ( 1 1 3 - 1 1 9 ) Adjusting the biblical record to fit contemporary circumstance, Lydgate changes Saul's crime from preserving war booty for himself to showing

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inappropriate pity for his enemies. He was not greedy, but too humane. Henry, likewise, has been too soft on the Lollards, provoking the ruthless response of Lydgate's poem. In the absence of the king's continued defense of Holy Church, the poet has had to provide one, in harsh poetic form. Lydgate never mentions, in the Defence of Holy Church, that archetypal moment in 2 Samuel 12, when the prophet Nathan confronts the morally blind David with his own sins, in the form of a parable. But for some of Lydgate's readers, the Samuel and Elijah analogues to Lydgate's role must have provoked a memory of the Nathan-David encounter. Lydgate's Defence, ultimately, is less about the king as David than it is about the tense ideological relation between monarch and moral adviser, as this is refracted through biblical discourse. The structural principles of the poem are dictated by Lydgate's political dilemma: his need to maintain a social position subordinate to his king, while asserting an ethical status superior to his. When the poet ends, praising Henry as "noble" and "prudent" (lines 121 and 131, respectively), he almost in the same breath commands the king to "Distroye" the rebels, to "thynke [reflect on] what her entent is." These are implicit criticisms of the crown: the king who needs to be commanded cannot decide for himself; the monarch who must be told to reflect on people's aims has not taken full note of their characters. The pitilessness of Lydgate's attack on the Lollards in the Defence of Holy Church must finally be read in the context of Lydgate's opening image of the Church in Babylonian captivity. The poet recalls the cruelty of Israel's captors in demanding "songs of Sion" and the near despair of the captives themselves, represented by their silence and the pathetic gesture of their hanging their harps in the boughs of the foreign willows. There is little, in Lydgate's portrait of captivity, of the optimistic resolve David records in a striking chiasmus at the middle of Psalm 136: Si oblitus fuero tui, Hierusalem, Oblivioni detur dextera mea. Adhereat lingua mea faucibus meis, Si non meminero tui; Si non praeposuero Hierusalem In principio laetitiae meae. (5-6) [If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten. Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember you; If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy. ]

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The repetition of the conditional clause in the last half-verse, like the chiasmus itself, underscores the speaker's sense of his need to remember. And the progression, with this repetition, from forgetting or not remembering to making the memory of Jerusalem a real cause for joy amplifies our sense of the depth of the speaker's grief: he has to free his captive memory, to argue himself back to happiness. Lydgate's captives, by contrast, nearly drown themselves in tears; surrounded by their children, they are "disconsolat" (12), deprived of any hope, "Al solitair [ entirely alone ] and trist" ( 16 ). In rewriting Psalm 136 in the Defence, Lydgate turns up the emotional volume whenever possible. Most dramatically, he juxtaposes the Church's impulse to sing songs of praise to God and their resistance to their captors' request, the newly tuned instruments they carry with them into exile and the "olde, foule and thikk" trees (24) on which they hang them. We should recall, from our discussion of Lydgate's Misericordias at the close of Part II, that the poet regarded endless praise of heaven as the responsibility of all God's creatures, especially His poets. The Babylonian captivity of Holy Church by heretical opinions has interrupted the Church's proper psalmody, and has driven poets like Lydgate himself from the language of praise to the lesser discourse of social complaint. This frustration, we must assume, Lydgate felt as genuine. Although he describes the captive Church in the third person, he seems to identify with it. The emotions of his portrait of captivity are heightened, but sincere. It was inevitable that Lydgate's attentions would turn, in the Defence, from this plaintive element in Psalm 136 to the language of cursing with which David's poem concludes. In a shocking variation on the "happy the man" theme that begins the Book of Psalms and that, as a topos running throughout the Psalter, emphasizes such virtuous activities as delighting in God's law and responding to the plight of the poor, Beatus vir becomes the one "who shall repay you your payment which you have paid us," who "shall take and dash your little ones against the rock": Filia Babylonis misera! beatus qui retribuet tibi Retributionem tuam quam retribuisti nobis. Beatus qui tenebit Et allidet párvulos tuos ad petram. ( 8-9 ) Not even Augustine, whose commentaries do not shrink from harsh interpretations, could bear to read these verses ad litteram. In his enarratio on the psalm, the "little ones of Babylon" become, tropologically, "Evil desires at

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their birth," which have to be destroyed early if their wasting effect on the soul is to be prevented ("Qui sunt parvuli Babyloniae? Nascentes malae cupiditates"13). The Babylonian captivity itself, according to Augustine's reading, is a figure for man's captivity to his own desires. These he must learn not simply to lament, but to dash forcefully against the rock of Christ. Lydgate probably knew this tropological interpretation of Psalm 136; he draws on Augustine's Enarrationes elsewhere in the Defence, for his allegory of the Church as Noah's ark and for the descriptive details of the Babylonian willows. For his ideological purposes, however, the violence at the end of the psalm must be taken literally, and amplified over its plaintive and self-accusing earlier verses. Although Lydgate does not directly paraphrase the cursing verses at the close of Psalm 136 in the Defence, their tone informs his bitter description of the spiritually blind and crippled, and his self-assured identification with the prophet Samuel, who butchered Agag when Saul would not. In the dreadful circumstances Lydgate saw Holy Church confronting in 1413-1414, strong remedies were needed. These may offend modern sensibilities, but they have firm biblical precedent in the Old Testament chronicles of Israel and in the Psalms. Moreover, polemical readings of the Psalms, such as Lydgate's, have precedent in the commentary tradition. Jerome, in his feud with Rufinus, remarks with frustration that he ought to have quoted psalms at the heretic, and calmed his madness with the language of David.14 The thought gets expressed as a private murmur, but stigmatizes Rufinus's discourse by associating it with the intemperance of Saul. In contrast, of course, Jerome implies that his contentious discourse is grounded in the harmoniousness of the Psalter itself. In its restraint, it mimics David's harping. The clearest late antique use of the Psalms as polemic occurs in Ambrose's address to Emperor Theodosius following the massacre at Thessalonica, which I mentioned at the end of Part II. Ambrose implies by his words that Theodosius should feel as culpable as did David when he confessed his guilt before Nathan and the Lord. Although he does not make the parallel explicit, Ambrose takes on the role of Nathan himself, boldly confronting his David—Theodosius—with his outrageous crimes. It is significant that Ambrose supplemented his letter to Theodosius with a copy of his commentary on Psalm 50, the Apologia David.15 This text argues that David's notorious sins of homicide and adultery may be excused, but only as having been allowed by God as a powerful exemplum to others. In his correspondence with Theodosius, Ambrose thus connects exegesis and moral prophecy, arguing that a proper understanding of 2 Samuel 12 and the

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Miserere ought to convince Theodosius of the magnitude of his own crimes, and the potential for moral exemplarism contained in his penance. 16 Regarding the Psalms of the Babylonian captivity in particular, Nicholas of Lyra is explicit concerning their political import. H e explains, for instance, of Psalm 76 ( Voce mea ad Dominum clamavi ["I cried to the Lord with my voice"] ) : Asaph bi Jje spirit of profesie made ¡DÍS lxxvj salm of £>e comyng of jje caitifte of babiloyne; & of Jae endyng Jserof. Gosdi jjis salm mai be expowned of ech feijjful congregacioun eijjer of a synguler persoone, which is in tribulacioun temporali ei[jer gostli, & preieja god devoutli to be delyuerid Jjerof, & hou myche euere he is anoied of manes freelte; nej>eles he hopij) to be delyuerid of god, bi ensaumple of seyntis bifor goynge, whiche god delyueride fro {>e hondis of tirauntis, in translatynge hem to heuenli blis bi J>e glorie of martirdoom, & sum tyme in keping also in present lijf at a tyme, to J>e confermyng of cristen men in Jje feijs, which seyng [seeing] f>at martris weren delyuerid bi myracle fro f)e hondis of tirauntis, weren confermynd more bi f)is in J>e ίεψ. / Lire here. (fol. 4ο1) The overall point of the gloss is that the persecuted should endure their sufferings as a moral example for others. Nevertheless, Lyra's observations that the voice of the psalm is identifiable either with a collective or individual lament, and that the sufferings being lamented might be temporal (physical) or spiritual (moral) encourages Psalm readers to see their own tribulations reflected in the mirror of David's. Lydgate, in the Defence of Holy Church, simply takes the process one step further. Having observed the parallel between the English Church and the Babylonian captives, he sets it forth for his reader, King Henry V, who, given his action, has presumably been blind to it. One cannot overemphasize the extent to which Lydgate's moral authority in the Dtfence of Holy Church is derived from his rewriting of Psalm 136, according to contemporary events. By finding current circumstances implicated in the text of David's poem, Lydgate asserts the prophetic character of David's discourse, its ability to speak of future occurrences as if they had already happened. For Lydgate, the Psalmist prophesied the English Church's captivity as direcdy as he gave voice to the Israelites in exile, and as directly as he prophesied the sufferings of Christ. By amplifying this prophecy in his own hortative verse to Henry V, Lydgate takes up the mantle of prophecy, and provokes the monarch, in his divine aspect, to do the same: to secure Holy Church and confirm his identity as God's "chose knyghte" (81), another David.

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Wycliffite Psalm Complaint: Interpolating Rolle Like Lydgate, his Lollard opponents saw contemporary events reflected in the prophecies of David's Psalms. Instead of identifying the institutional Church with the Babylonian captives, however, they expressed their own persecution by this Church as the equivalent of David's being surrounded by his enemies, threatened by the opponents of the reformist principles their group espoused. The same David whom Lydgate viewed as an Old Testament archetype of conservative polity, the Lollards understood as having warned of the coming of Antichrist, in the figure of Archbishop Arundel and those who helped to enforce his Constitutions of 1408, which prohibited possession of the Scriptures in English as well as unlicensed preaching. In their revisions to one of the most important and unprohibited English Scriptures, Richard Rolle's English Psalter with comment, the Lollards record their sense of frustration and militancy in the face of conservative persecutions, and suggest a liberal alternative to the conservative psalm ideology of Lydgate.17 As Hope Emily Allen explains in her introduction to an anthology of his English writings, Richard Rolle's vernacular Psalter, which we discussed in Part I within the context of Latin Psalm interpretation, "seems to have been the orthodox English Psalter up to the Reformation."18 That is, the book's use, for devotion and scholarship, had the Church's imprimatur. Allen's judgment is affirmed by the large number of surviving manuscripts, their sometimes lavish production values, and open references to bequests of the work in lay wills.19 Allen also notes, however, that there was a "scandal" attached to Rolle's work in the later Middle Ages because of its use by the Lollards—more particularly, because the protoreformers worked into Rolle's text many of their own ideas and themes, using Rolle's name and reputation, in her phrase, as "a cloak for dangerous material."20 None of the Lollard versions of Rolle's Psalter can be dated before 1400; most were probably written ca. 1410-1450. These facts suggest that Arundel's prohibitive Constitutions of 1408 compelled the reformers to find sanctioned works that could be adapted to their own purposes. Preeminent among these was Rolle's Psalter, which had already circulated widely. To make this observation, however, is different from suggesting that Lollard motives in revising Rolle were simple, or simply nefarious. An attitude of moral disapproval still lurks uncomfortably in the background of postmedieval discussions of revised copies of Rolle's Psalter. Many of the supposedly scandalous aspects of these copies, however, are quite ortho-

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dox, in that they derive from traditional attitudes toward the Psalms encouraged by the standard Latin commentators—Augustine, Peter Lombard, and Nicholas of Lyra. Moreover, it is demonstrable that some of the anonymous Lollard interpolators of Rolle's work might have viewed their efforts not as propagandist revision, but as extensions of Rolle's own method, which is based in a profound, affective identification with the emotionally charged language of the Psalms. Just as Rolle, in writing his commentary, had homileticized Peter Lombard, transforming the language of the schoolroom into a sometimes passionate catechetical discourse, the Lollards, in revising Rolle, politicize him. They take his psalmic arguments for the priority of the contemplative life and translate them into defenses of the life of action, of real struggle in the moral and political arena. The scandal attached to Lollard versions of Rolle has medieval roots. It begins with the unique copy of an anonymous metrical preface to Rolle's Psalter in Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 286, printed by Bramley. After giving some biographical information about Rolle, the author goes on to praise his works as "ful profetabul . . . / To mannys soule, goddys spouse, in charité to make hym stabul." More particularly, the author explains, the copy of the Psalter at hand is free from "Errour" (39); it contains "ne [neither] deseyt ne heresy" (43-44).21 This observation provokes the advice that those who copy it should therefore "write on warly lyne be lyne" (47) — copy it carefully, word for word, without deletion or addition. In other words, future copyists are responsible for preserving the moral truth of their exemplar. This author's effort to protect the orthodoxy of Rolle's text, and its morally profitable intention, is understandable; but it is not his sole or even primary aim. Rather, it is part of a strident attack on the Lollards, whom he regards as having violated the original sense and intention of Rolle's work. The passage just summarized is introduced by praise for Rolle as a saint and miracle-worker: Thys holy man in all his lyfe, lufid god ouer all thing, Therfore myracles mony and rife, be hym wrou3t all myjty kyng. The blynd to se, the halt to go, & tho were slayne he saued eke; And keuord [healed] mony of hur wo, the doumbe the defe and other seke. And many myracles he has wrou3t, & made many a holy boke, And many out of bales [suffering] brou3t, that in lywyng went on croke.

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His werkis were ful profetabul, to pore and rych & all on rowe, That thei bene soth and nothing fabul, at Hampole 3e may hit knowe. (33-40) The author embeds his first reference to Rolle's writings ("& made many a holy boke") in a long, epideictic passage about his miracles, thereby suggesting that the miracleworking and the effects of Rolle's discourse are analogous. Just as by his sanctity Rolle cured many physical infirmities, he heals moral sickness by means of the profitable or orthodox content of his writings. Moreover, just as God ("all myjty kyng") used Rolle as his instrument in working miracles, he uses him as his scribe-prophet, to encourage moral reform. Like the Evangelists and the Psalmist himself, Rolle is a divinely inspired author, a human means whereby God conveys himself textually to mankind. Thus it is important that future copyists preserve Rolle's text and intention exacdy, for these originate not in the contentious opinions of men, but in the one Truth of God. Only after establishing Rolle's authorial purity does the preface author go on to attack the Lollard revisers. They are as heretical as Rolle is orthodox, as corruptive as he is morally profitable: Copyed has this Sauter ben, of yuel men of lollardry: And afturward hit has bene sene, ympyd in with eresy. They seyden then to leude foies, that it shuld be all enter, A blessyd boke of hur scoles, of Rychard Hampole the Sauter. (49-52)

The implied imagery in this passage is important. "Ympyd in with" means not merely "inserted," but "engrafted with," in the sense that a tree's stock might have scion from another stock grafted on to it. The preface author argues that, while Rolle's own text is a natural growth from the orthodox stock of his sources (Peter Lombard most notably, but also Augustine and Gilbert of Porree), the Lollard additions to the text are unnatural: not extensions of the methods and arguments of the Latin commentators and Rolle himself, but artificial digressions from them. Moreover, whereas the preface author praises Rolle as a saint, in conventional hagiographie language, he attacks the Lollards by caricaturing them. He implies that although the revisers know they have corrupted Rolle's text, they nevertheless tell ignorant folk ("seyden then to leude foies"), who cannot read the original, that their copies are entirely ("all enter") the work of Richard Rolle himself:

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The Lollards have no constructive religious or social agenda; they use sophistry to destroy all that is good. The preface author reduces their program to spitefulness: they seek to vex ("to greue") the ignorant, and to discredit maliciously Rolle himself. The author's pun on "warly"/ "waryed" contrasts the care with which the orthodox will follow Rolle and the deliberate evil with which, in his view, the Lollard revisers seek to undermine the mystic's work. Whereas Rolle is assumed to have been God's instrument, the Lollards are the devil's servants; and whereas Rolle's writings contain "nothing fabul" or false ("euery word is sad as stone": steadfast, trustworthy), the Lollard copies are a "fantom" or imposture of the truth. The medieval scandal attached to Rolle's Psalter is based in a confident distinction between Rolle's own work as orthodox, and thus holy, and the Lollards' work as heretical, and thus corrupt—a distinction that the texts of the interpolations themselves are not able to sustain. Critics have tended to read the metrical preface in M S Laud Misc. 286, like the vita prepared for Rolle's proposed canonization, largely as a source of biographical information about Rolle. Its author's more immediate purpose, however, was polemical: to juxtapose Rolle's orthodoxy and Lollard heresy, in order to stabilize the text of Rolle's Psalter. It is ironic, given this aim, that the Laudian preface introduces a revised copy of Rolle — not one usually classified with the Lollard versions, but one certain to contain nonauthorial material. The grounds, in other words, for the author's distinction between what was Rolle's and what was not must have been general rather than specific, a scent in the wind (like Harry Bailey's suspicion of Lollardry in Chaucer's Parson) rather than a careful comparison of the readings in various manuscript copies of the Psalter. The aggressive tone of the Laudian preface, finally, reveals as much as its content, and more about its author's aims those of Rolle's revisers. The same aura of scandal can be found in postmedieval responses to the Lollard revisions of Rolle. For instance, one important Lollard copy, Trinity College Cambridge M S B.5.25, is prefaced on a flyleaf by the following three remarks:

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Commentaries upon ye Psalms of David, & other Scripture — Songs or Hymns, written by Jo. Wicliffe; but never (I think) printed. See ye Oxford catalogue. This comment upon ye Psalms is not Wickleffe's but Richard Rolle's Hermite of Hampole; another very Fair Copy of it is in ye King's Library Westminster E 15 12. but yt is imperfect jn ye 79 Psalm. The prolog to yt is ye same word for word as this, and before ye Prolog to yt is written Here bigynneth the Prologe uppon the Sauter that Richard Heremyte of Hampole translated into Englysche aftir the sentence of Doctours & resun. N B There are several words in ye Comment, especially Pss 76 & 77, scratch'd out, & ye two last leaves are cut out, ye Reason is, because in these places there were reflexions upon ye ignorance & Idleness of ye Priests. This is not a true and faithful copy of the Comment written by Κ Rolle of Hampole about A.D. 1330. But it is Hampole's old comment variously interpolated, and much inlarged beyond its native size; done, as it seems, about Wickleffe's Time by Wickleffe or his Followers. The Language and Spelling quite through are much altered from the antique Language and Spelling of Hampole's genuine one. There is an ancient and true Copy of Hampole in Sidney Sussex College; marked k — 5 — 3. By comparing of which, may be seen how and where the language has been polished and made more modern, and how great a Liberty has been taken in foisting in whatever the new editor pleased; The Reflections upon ["against" cancelled aggressively and overwritten] Priests, or Prelates or Friers are all new, and are none of Hampole's. The first commentator makes the usual early mistake of attributing the entire work to Wyclif; he does not remark at all on the Psalter's content except to refer scholars to the "Oxford catalogue," presumably for other copies. The second writer improves on the first, correcting the error in attribution and referring others to another particular copy of the Psalter, which he describes as "imperfect" in Psalm 79. His remark on the antiprelatical material scraped out in the comments on Psalms 76 and 77 is added as a nota bene, but does not carry any obvious tone of approval or dissaproval. The third writer, however, allows his own attitudes toward the Lollard revisers to break through pretty clearly.22 His cancellation and correction suggest the strong emotional response heterodox opinions could provoke in certain postmedieval readers of interpolated copies of Rolle. So offended is he by the corrupt manuscript that he describes the reviser's work as "foisting" (cheating) matter into the text that is inconsistent with its aims, then disparages the reviser's "Reflections against Priests, or Prelates or Friers"; thinking better of it he cancels "against" and substitutes the more objective sounding "upon." 23 This writer, in short, is not simply interested

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in providing scholarly information. He identifies the reviser's work as contentious and enters the field of battle himself for a moment, before retreating into seeming objectivity. Throughout, however, his words imply outrage. The second writer's correct attribution of the Psalter to Rolle will not suffice. Instead the work of the Lollard reviser has to be stigmatized as untrue and unfaithful, corrupt both ideologically and morally. The reviser has taken liberties with the sense, subjecting it to his own unrestrained desires: "whatever the new editor pleased."24 A similar image of Rolle's Lollard revisers as irreverent and reckless is implied by Dorothy Everett in her landmark article on interpolated copies of Rolle's Psalter.25 These still await editing, and their sources and ideological content need more careful study.26 But Everett's work advanced considerably knowledge of the relationships between individual, revised copies and the often striking differences between some of the revisions and Rolle's original passages. Her method of analysis is objective, based on an evaluation of parallel selections. Nevertheless, her discussion can seem more sharply judgmental than the material she prints warrants. For instance, in discussing British Library MS Royal 18.D.1, a de luxe copy of the Psalter, she remarks on how the reviser's comments get longer after the first few psalms : "He is becoming more sure of himself and has less reverence for his original than when he began" ( 382). The tone here is not as scolding as that of the third commentator on the Trinity manuscript. It does, however, present the reviser as not simply amplifying his original, but as not respecting it, an assessment hardly self-evident from the passages cited.27 Indeed, one could argue that the reviser has taken his original too seriously, identified with Rolle's sense too deeply, and that his expansions are efforts to make more pointed meaning he finds latent in Rolle's text. Furthermore, it is worth noting in connection with Everett's criticism that Rolle himself, in translating Peter Lombard's catena, moves further away from the Lombard's original as he goes along—"becoming more sure of himself." He eliminates or skews certain allegories he finds in the Lombard that are not especially conducive to the vita contemplativa. For instance, he takes "Iudea" and "Israel" in the opening verse of Psalm 75, "Notus in Iudea Deus: in Israel magnimi nomen eius," to refer to the lives of contemplatives, and connects these with the cult of the name of Jesus, which he promoted: "Knawen in iudee god, in israel the grete name of him." In verray iudee is god knawne, that is, in haly kirke that loues god in wele and wa, in israel, that is, in contemplatife saules, lastis the grete ioy of his name, ihesu. 28

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In his catena, however, Peter Lombard clearly states: "Judaea enim interpretatur confession7·9 In Harvard MS Richardson 36, one of the de luxe copies of interpolated Rolle that survives, this is exacdy the interpretation put forward by Rolle's reviser: "Knowen is in iude god, in israel Jse grete name of hym." Vereili is god knowen in iude, for in to preisyng of his name in iude,pat bitokenep confessioun, wherbi jse truj>e is knowen of goddis lawe & kepid. (fol. i74 v ; my emphasis)

In cases like this one, and there are many such throughout the Harvard manuscript, the reviser is not corrupting Rolle's text for his own purposes, but actually restoring matter omitted by Rolle as he shaped the Lombard's work to his own ends. Moreover, throughout the English Psalter, Rolle introduces autobiographical and other personal matter into his version of the Lombard, although no one has ever called these practices disrespectful.30 The tradition of psalm interpretation was necessarily both selective and accretive; each subsequent commentator picked, chose, and expanded from among the several sources available to him for his own ideological reasons. Postmedieval efforts to perpetuate the scandal attached to Rolle's Psalter fail to take this situation into account, and are often based in essentially conservative responses to the content of the Lollard expansions of Rolle's text. Everett's analysis of the Royal reviser is certainly grounded, in part, in the ideological content of his interpolations. While it is difficult to find in Rolle's additions to Peter Lombard anything offensively polemical, the tone and ideas in the Royal expansions are aggressive and, at times, doctrinally questionable. As Pamela Gradon has shown in a recent analysis of Langland and dissent, however, even when Middle English writers seem strongly Lollard in sentiment, they may be drawing on reformist commonplaces that echo Wycliffite ideas without embracing them.31 Many of the passages Everett regards as clearly Lollard could be read this way. For example, she quotes a long section criticizing corrupt clergy, which is followed by praise for faithful priests: Al her [their] bysynesse shuld be forto studye and seche oute J)e vertu of his [Christ's] word, and to lyue so f>eraftir J)at Jjurç her good ensaumple of hooly lyuyng and trewe techyng and pacient suffryng of alle aduersitees, £>e peple in euery degree my3t take of hem ensaumple to loue his heestis and to kepe hem.

(388)

The passage continues, Everett explains, by declaring "that priests should be ready to travel from place to place where their services are required. This

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is what Wycliffe's itinerant preachers did" ( 388). The entire passage, however, reads like a prosaic version of Chaucer's portrait of the ideal Parson in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales'. He was . . . a lerned man, a clerk, That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche; His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche. Benygne he was, and wonder diligent, And in adversitee ful pacient, And swich he was ypreved ofte sithes. Wyd was his parisshe, and houses fer asonder, But he ne lefte nat, for reyn ne thonder, In siknesse nor in meschief to visite The ferreste in his parisshe, muche and lite Upon his feet, and in his hand a staf. To drawen folk to hevene by fairnesse, By good ensample, this was his bisynesse. (I.A. 480-485; 491-495; 519-520) The debate over Chaucer's Parson as Lollard is not settled. All but the most strident, however, seem to feel that Chaucer includes only the suggestion of Lollardry in the Parson's portrait, and that its details derive from a traditional, orthodox view of how any good priest should behave. Where the evidence for heterodoxy is ambiguous, the burden of proof must be on those who wish to prove it. There is little firm evidence of heresy in Chaucer's portrait of the Parson, and it is not conspicuous in the passage on corrupt and ideal priests that Everett cites from the Royal manuscript. Encouraged by her own suspicions, Everett sometimes mistakes the appearance of Lollardry for its reality. Another reason for Everett's misreadings may be her tendency to imagine in many of the passages she quotes "the personality of the writer revealed" ( 392). For instance, in pursuing the character of the Royal reviser, she describes how Sometimes [he] becomes bolder and bolder and almost ignores Rolle's c o m m e n t . . . . A t other times so long a passage is added that Rolle's comment, even if preserved, fades into insignificance beside i t . . . . From about Ps. xli to Ps. xlviii this . . . type of comment becomes more frequent, and Rolle is more and more ignored. Often the reviser omits the original interpretation altogether and plunges into an exposition of his own views. ( 3 8 4 - 3 8 5 )

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"Bolder" and "plunges" imply self-confidence or pride (reflected as well in the sheer length of some of the reviser's additions), joined to interpretive recklessness. The image of the reviser in the heat of interpolation is dramatic, but it moves beyond what the interpolations themselves can tell us about where they came from and why they were made. Instead of speculating on the reviser's possible sources, particular or general, and his rhetorical aims, Everett offers a psychological profile, which depends too heavily on the a priori assumption of his heterodoxy versus Rolle's orthodoxy.32 Of course, it would be bold and plunging to assert that there is no Lollardry whatsoever in the eleven revised copies of Rolle's Psalter that survive. Nevertheless, the search for Lollard particulars or particular Lollards in these revisions is pointless and probably futile. Instead, critics should attend to the sources and purposes behind the interpolations. Where Everett sees in the Royal reviser's work unrestrained irreverence, it is possible to see something else: a powerful yet controlled response to the language of the Psalms as immediate, of direct importance to contemporary events. This response was encouraged by the psalm commentators, indeed felt by Rolle himself, andfindsone expression in the various revisers' imitations of David's role as moral prophet. According to this view, the Psalmist's words are not merely self-expressive, but essentially communal. Ultimately they are a potent form of moral and social discourse. The Lollards seem to have taken very seriously Augustine's injunction, at the close of his enarratio on Psalm 50, that his congregation rule or regulate their households. Besides translating the injunction prominently in one of the margins of MS Bodley 554 (the glossed Wycliffite Psalter discussed in Part I), they incorporated the theme of moral reproof into many of their writings, often connecting it with the Davidic tradition and the Psalms in particular. For instance, on a flyleaf at the end of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 290, a collection of English polemical treatises once attributed to Wyclif himself, there is a brief English passage headed Augustinus. Arguam te. Nescis (Augustine. "I reprove you. You do not know"), referred to by F. D. Matthew in his edition of the treatises as "merely a piece of translation" which he prints "only . . . for the sake of completeness."33 In fact, however, the content of the passage suggests that it was more than an afterthought to the volume—perhaps a coda to the several contentious texts in the book, designed to justify the Lollards' vocation to do God's will by reproving corruption where they found it. The Augustinus text begins by asserting that "I>e holy doctor seynt austyn, spekiyng in {je persone of crist vnto synful men" ( no textual reference is

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given) explains that he is obligated to reprove sinners, once he has noticed their shortcomings. This sort of moral correction the writer represents, in a striking physical metaphor, as setting before a sinner's eyes that which was once behind him, concealed by his moral ignorance: What shal I don vnto {>e whanne jsat I reproue Jse? I schal sette {3in self bifore J)in owene face. N o w sojsly whanne JK>U dost amys jx>u wenest J>at ]x>u art good, for jjou wilte not seen f>i self. Pou reprouest oJ>er folk, jx>u ne lokest not on J>i self; JJOU acusest ojsere folk, but jju ne Renkest not on

self; Jsou puttest

ojjer folk before f)in eien, J)ou puttest J)i self bihinde J>i bake. But whanne I reproue fje I do |>e contrarie. I take Jje fro J>i bak, & putte ¡je bifor J)in owene eien. I>ou schalt loke vpon J>i self & £>ou schalt bewayle £>i self, & ¡3an schal {sere ben no manere hou JJOU schalt amende

self. ( 2 8 1 )

The language here refers distantly to the Nathan-David encounter in 2 Samuel 12, and specifically to David's willingness to render a harsh judgment concerning the rich man in Nathan's parable while remaining blind to his own sins of homicide and adultery. When Nathan forces David to realize that he is the man in the parable, he sets the king's sin before him, and goes on to explain that he must make public what David did in secret ("Tu enim fecesti abscondite: ego autem faciam verbum istud in conspectu omnis Israel, et in conspectu solis"; 2 Sam 12.12). The Psalmist echoes this theme himself in his own act of contrition, the Miserere, when he says that he must now acknowledge his own sin to God, and constantly set it before his own eyes, as a further inducement to humility: Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco, Et peccatum meum contra me est semper. (Ps 50.5) [For I acknowledge my iniquity And my sin is always set before me. ] David's process of setting his sin constandy before his own eyes then becomes translated, via the exemplary character of the Psalms, into a means whereby others see their own culpability objectified, set before them as a reproof. The pattern of moral correction begun by Nathan continues through David, into the present of those who experience moral reform through the Psalms, and in turn become agents of reproof—moral prophets — for others. To confirm the Davidic basis for the idea of moral reproof in the Augustinus text, its author quotes the Psalms, and warns against those who say the Psalter hypocritically, without reforming their lives:

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I>ou dispisest now J>e tyme of mercy, Jse tyme of iugement comejs; for fx>u hast songen to me in holy chirche {ses wordes: Miserkordiam et iudicium cantabo tibi domine, etc.·, "Lord, I schal synge to Jje {51 mercy, & f>i iugement out of oure mouj) comej), & Cristis chirchis proclaymen euere where Cristis mercy & eke his iugement, &c." [Ps 100.1 ] Now is J>e tyme of mercy to amende vs, 31t is not come f>e tyme of iugement. We han space, we han place, we don synne, eke amende we oure giltis. (281) Like the hypocritical David, who cannot acknowledge his own guilt until he is provoked, the sinful soul must be goaded. If, by the prophetic voice of David's imitators, it can be moved to acknowledge its sin, and thus to say the Psalms genuinely, it can learn not only to weep but to rejoice confidently with the Psalmist. Each act of moral reproof that proceeds from the soul of someone renewed with David reduplicates David's moral prophesies, which themselves amplified and extended those of the prophet Nathan. The same ideal of moral prophesying in the Davidic tradition appears throughout Lollard revisions to Rolle's English Psalter. Everett, for example, juxtaposes an excerpt from Rolle's original prologue, quoted from Bramley, and another from a Lollard expansion, in British Library MS Royal 18.D.1: In expounynge i fologh haly doctours, for it may come in some enuyous man hand that knawes noght what he sould say, that will say that i wist noght what i sayd, and swa doe harm til hym and til othere, if he dispise the werke that is profytabile for hym and othere. In expownyng i folewe hooly doctours and resoun, reproeuyng synne aftir {>at i haue knowyng of it, as doctours haue done by fore me and shal do aftir me, as J>ei haue knowyng {sat synne is usid, and tyme askif). For Jais boke may come in summe enuyous mennes honde, or to some proude vicious mannes heryng, {>e whiche is maad blynd Jsorou synne, and hajs enuye Jjat synne shulde be knowen. But in a wikked man, synne may not be hidde; for al £>at he dojs is colourid wijj synne. And suche wolle seye, J)at i wiste not what i seyde, and so do harme to hym silf and to o£>ire, jif he despise f>e worke f>at is profitable to hym and to ojjere. But J)e moste comfort in hope J>at goode men hauejj of trewjje, is J>at yuel men despisij) her wordis and her workis. ( 382) The reviser's tone is more defensive than Rolle's, and his matter is certainly greater. But Everett overstates when, in introducing the passage, she remarks that here "the reviser could not restrain himself" (381), suggesting that he is headstrong or out of control, a slave to his heretical impulses. There are restraints operating on him: Augustine's injunctions in the Enarrationes to imitate David's very words, to identify oneself with his person,

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and to translate the words of the Psalms into the language of moral reproof. For instance, when the reviser writes that in his text he is "reproving sin inasmuch as ('aftir f^at') he has knowledge of it," he means two things: first, that when he recognizes sin he has the moral responsibility to rebuke it; and second, that he has the authority to recognize and rebuke it in that he has experienced, acknowledged, and corrected it in himself. Elsewhere in Lollard copies of Rolle the revisers point to and detail their personal experiences of sin and penance as a kind or moral authority for correcting others. Such an attitude is not necessarily prideful, but the posture of David himself in Psalm 50. Moreover, as this particular reviser remarks, in reproving sin he is imitating what "doctours haue done by fore me" — presumably men like Augustine, who, as we have seen, commands in his closing remarks on Psalm 50 that his congregation should go forth and discipline their households. Like David and his interpreter, Augustine, this writer adopts the role of moral reformer. The reviser's final remark, that his greatest comfort as a follower of truth is his sense that others despise his work, is a typical posture of beleaguerment adopted by the Lollards. Rather than lamenting the captivity of truth in this life, Wycliffite authors flaunt it. They describe how the world's persecutions work to confirm them in righteousness, and therefore should be endured for the greater glory of God's truth. This theme is set forth in a characteristic Lollard expansion to thefirstverses of Psalm 34 (ludica, Domine, nocentes me ["Judge you, O Lord, them that wrong me"] ) : "Derne lord noÌ3ynge me; werreiej) jje fijtyng a3ens me." The prophete in persoon of crist & of alle hise louers seij) to J>e fadir of heuene, "deme lord," jjat is, dampne hem J?at noijen me wit wille to her eende; "werreie hem," f>at is, ouer come hem jjat fi3ten a3ens m e . . . . Perfore loue we god Jse fadir Jjat fijtiJj for us, & kepe we f>e biddyng of crist Jjat preiejj for us; and drede we not to telle f>e troupe, for noon Jsat may sie £>e bodi, for oure soulis no man may punische.... Seinte petir coumfortij) us, sei3ynge, "Who is jsat schal noi3e to 30U, 3¡f 3e be good folowers" — Jjat is to seie, of crist. But if 3e any J>ing suffire for Jje rÍ3twisenesse, 3e ben blessid. Perfore meke suffraunce of persecuciones in jsis lijf makif) men greteli blessid bifore god. Perfore Appréhendé arma & scutum, & exurge in adiutorium mihi; "Take wepens & scheeld, & rise in helpe to me." Goddis scheelde is hillyng of his good wille, his armes ben we, & as we ben armed jx>rou3 his grace wit vertues of hym, so he vsi|> us as armes, whanne he smytij} wit us hise enemies. (Harvard M S Richardson 36, fol. 79 v )

Rolle's exposition of these two verses is only about half as long. The Lollard reviser has built on Rolle's main elements: his identification of the speaker

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of this psalm as both Christ and his lovers; his interpretation of God's shield as the protection ("hillyng") of His good will and His weapons as His followers, who smite His enemies. But whereas Rolle goes on to explain how "the sanie of Crist" did great shame to the enemies of God, the Lollard reviser is more interested in the necessary persecutions God's "arms," the Lollard faithful, suffer in this life. The Lollard expansion, which includes a homiletic cross-reference to the episde of Peter ( 1 Peter 3.13, signaled in the margin of the manuscript), is designed as a comforting message to the faithful: to those who actively reprove the world on the part of Christ, and who suffer in Christ's service. Many of the Lollard revisions to Rolle are designed, as Anne Hudson puts it, "to console and encourage the committed during persecution."34 She notes that these appear primarily (but not exclusively) in two copies, MS Lambeth Palace 34 and British Library MS Royal 18.C.26, apparently companion volumes. Here, Hudson explains, the Psalms are used to reassure the persecuted that suffering comes from God and is "the inevitable lot of the true Christian": I>e techeris of trujje moten be prudent whanne and where and to whom Jsei speke, and mouable fro place to place — not fleynge aboute for drede of bodily persecucioun but in entete for to profite as long as jjei moun, and to whom J>at f)ei moun. For to J>is eende Crist comaundide hise apostlis to fly3e fro citee to citee whanne f>ei weren pursued for to sowe his word; for Jsus dide Crist himsilf and also seynt Poule and alle Jje apostlis.35

The reviser is commenting on Psalm 108.31 {Quia adstitit a dextris pauperis ["Because he has stood at the right hand of the poor"] ), identifying himself and his comrades with those in the psalm text who are protected by God from their enemies: Confitebor Domino nimis in ore meo, Et in medio multorum laudabo eum, Quia adstitit a dextris pauperis, Ut salvam faceret a persequentibus animam meam. ( 30-31 ) [I will give thanks to the Lord with my mouth: and in the midst of many I will praise him. Because he has stood at the right hand of the poor, to save my soul from persecutors. ] "The object of persecution," Hudson observes, "is at no point explicidy the Wycliffite."36 Whether it is or not, however, is unimportant. Rather we

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should underscore the depth of the writer's identification with the Psalmist's situation, his feeling that what David writes of and what he experiences are hardly different at all. The author's rhetoric realizes the typological connection running throughout the Psalms between David and ecclesia, the Psalmist and the entire Church militant. The reviser's arguments assume that his own sufferings, and those of his persecuted associates, were both foreseen and addressed in the Psalmist's words. Hudson's phrasing, "the opportunities afforded by the Psalms for such consolation and encouragement are constantly taken and developed,"37 gives a false impression of the Lollard reviser as nefarious. He might not have been a man looking for opportunities, for texts to appropriate, but a devout soul who unselfconsciously identified his own plight with the Psalmist's — a son of David, not an ideologue. One difficulty with the Lollards' identification of their own sense of persecution with David's is the aura of pride and intemperance that this introduces into many of their interpolations. This aspect of the revisions, however, is considerably qualified by a strong note of self-examination and critique that runs throughout many of the interpolations. For instance, Everett's Royal reviser expands considerably Rolle's original comments on one of the penitential psalms, Psalm 37 {Domine, ne in furore tito). Rolle's remarks on the first verse of the psalm (quoted by Everett from Bramley) are as follows: "Lord in thi woednes argu not me, na chasty me in thi ire." The voice of him that does penance for his syn; in prayere and gretynge he bigynnys, & says: Lord in thi wodnes argu me noght—that is, i pray the that i be noght amange tha til wham thou sail say, in thi dome, ga 3e werid in fire endles; ne chasty me in thi ire—that is, be i noght amange tha that sail be purged in the fire of purgatory, bot here amend me. ( 382)

Rolle compresses the Lombard's scholarly allusions to his sources (Augustine, Cassiodorus, and Jerome), and his cross-reference to Matthew 25.41, in order to elide the space between David's own words and his own: "Lord in thi woednes argu not me . . . that is, i pray the that i be noght amange tha til wham thou sail say, in thi dome, ga 3e werid in fire endles." In other words, he seeks to identify his own sense of moral culpability with the Psalmist's; by juxtaposing his literal translation of the psalm verse with a looser paraphrase, he represents textually his imitation of David. The Royal reviser amplifies this method by heightening the emotional tone of his original, and bringing the implications of the psalm text even closer to his own moral circumstances:

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"Lord in J)i woodnesse argue me not, ne chastise me in J>yn yre." The prophete seyde J>is psalme in voyce of hym Jsat doojj verrey penaunce for his synne, in deuout praiyng and forjjinkyng, for he wij) sorewful herte prayej) to god and seif>: "Lord in £>y woodnesse argue me not"—f>at is, Lord of f>i mercy graunte {>at I be not among hem to whom £>u schalt seye in J>i doom, goo 3ee cursid in to {se fyre eendelees, ne chastise me not in Jjyn yre: Jjat is, be i not among f>ee J)at shal be purgid in the fyr of purgatorye, but gracious lord purge me heere. I seye not ]pis onely for drede of [>e sharpe peyne of purgatorye, but for greett shame f>at I haue in my soule (aat I haue soo defoulid me heere jjat I shulde not be cleene purgid or I wente hennes, for as longe as god punyshijj eny man he is wroojj to hym, and to wite J>at I shulde haue his unblij>elnesse heere and aftir J>is lyf is to me greett sorewe. ( 382)

There may, in the phrase "verrey penaunce," be an intimation of Wycliffite arguments against the necessity of auricular confession. In general, however, the reviser avoids fine theological points. Instead, he adds to Rolle's original a subde exploration of the psychology of the sinner, who presumes to request mercy from God while at the same time being acutely aware of his own unworthiness. A brief note on "Domine ne in furore" (Ps 37.1 ) at the end of a Wycliffite Psalter (later version), now Yale University Beinecke Library MS 360, distinguishes between "woodnesse or wrajjjse" as an intemperate exciting of the human soul to the desire for vengeance and God's anger as described by the Psalmist: "jDat is, rijtwis dome" (fol. i92 r ), which only seems like wrath or intemperance to sinful men, who must endure divine judgment.38 The Royal reviser makes a similar distinction, but then refers to God's anger at the sinner, touchingly, as "unblijjelnesse"—unhappiness39—which he does not want to have caused in this life, let alone in the next. Furthermore, in the last third of his version of Rolle's comment, the reviser brings the meaning of the Psalmist's and Rolle's words very close indeed to his own moral situation, by clearly representing himself as implicated in the Psalmist's text. He describes himself as "defoulid" and asks to be "cleene purgid," anticipating later verses of the same psalm (e.g., "Putruerunt et corruptae sunt cicatrices meae, / A facie insipientiae meae"; "My sores are putrified and corrupted on account of my folly" [Ps 37.6] ) and invoking the language of other penitential psalms (e.g., "Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor; / Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor"; "You shall sprinkle me with hyssop, and I will be made clean; you shall wash me, and I will be made whiter than snow" [Ps 50.9] ). Like Rolle, the Royal reviser has made David's words his own, but in a heightened and more specific way. His additions to his original do not corrupt or compromise Rolle's methods, but extend them. They suggest they he is not responding to the Psalms verse by verse, but more comprehensively, as he searches their lan-

i8o

Psalm Ideology

guage for Davidic tropes that will adequately express his sense of sorrow and desire to repent.40 Similar efforts by the reviser to point up the emotional tone of David's words occur throughout the Royal copy. For example, whereas Rolle in commenting on Psalm 37.2 realizes David's topos of sin as sickness in the phrase, "the wondis of my synnes, hale thurgh penaunce, rotid whils i eft assentid til syn, and thai ere brokyn when i synned eft in dede," the Royal reviser writes: J>e woundis of synnes J)at I haue falsly hilide fx) 1113 ypocrise, rotide \νψ ynne me alle jse tyme Jjat y lay wityngely in synne, and J)ei ben broken out as festride woundis unhelid. ( 383)

Both the reference to the speaker's hypocrisy and the image of "festride woundis" are more potent than Rolle's words, despite the fact that Rolle himself concludes his comment on this verse by mentioning that his sins/ wounds "ere brokyn and stynkis til other men." And the chiastic construction, "falsly hilide" / "lay wityngely," underscores the writer's responsibility for his feigned virtue more strikingly than Rolle's observation that, although healed through penance, he continues to give in to temptation. Given the attacks on prelatical hypocrisy in other of the Royal interpolations, we sense that the reviser in this passage is deliberately representing his experience as a counter-exemplum. Like David before him, he hypocritically hid his sin. He is different from the hypocrites he attacks elsewhere in the text only in this: he recognizes his crimes, and goes on to reprove such shortcomings in others. The Royal reviser's language has greater immediacy, a directness derived from his interest in strengthening the connection between David's penance and his own moral prophesying. If we revert for a moment to the glosses in MS Bodley 554, we find the following gloss to Psalm 37.18, "Quoniam ego in flagella paratus": "For I am redi to betyngis, & my sorewe is euere redi in my S131:." For y woot ]jat y disseruyde betyngis for my synne of avoutrie wij> bersabee, & of manquellynge of vrie. /Lire here. Sumtyme synneris ben not betun in J)is liyf, for her sauyng is dispeirid; but it is nede J>at f>ei be betun here, to whiche euerlastinge liyf, jsat is blis, is made redi. Men maken sorewe for her betingis, but f>ei maken not sorewe whi Jaei ben betun. But dauij) made sorewe not so, but for Jje leesing of rijtfulnesse, not for {je leesyng of money. / Austin here. (fol. ΐ9 Γ )

Augustine's distinction between punishment in this life and in the next is exacdy the one behind the Royal reviser's comments on verse 1 of this

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psalm. And the reviser's comments on the entire psalm are an answer to Augustine's observation that whereas men grieve because they are beaten, they do not grieve for the reasons why they are beaten ("f)ei maken not sorewe whi Jjei ben betun"). This reviser, by contrast, acknowledges his own corruption; he amplifies Rolle's emotionalism —which is already greater than the Lombard's—so that it becomes directly relevant to his own case. In effect, he extends Rolle's process of Davidic imitation into his own immediate present. It is difficult to generalize comfortably about a class of texts as various as the Lollard revisions that survive in very different forms in at least eleven Rolle manuscripts. Two overall points, however, are worth making: First, the interpolations concerning patience under persecution, and those emphasizing the abject moral circumstances of individual interpolators, may be judged as sincere efforts to imitate David, rather than insidious attempts to corrupt Rolle's original. Second, those interpolations that concern the responsbility to reprove individual vice and social ills are related to the first class, in that the Lollards may have viewed them as genuine efforts to imitate David's gratitude for his own moral reform, by teaching others God's ways. This second point does not resolve doctrinal suspicions raised by the more militant examples of Lollard reproof that turn up in some Rolle manuscripts; most of the copies contain heretical statements. It does, however, establish a complex context within which the tonalities of Lollard discourse ought to be situated—the same context, ironically, from which Lydgate's Defence ofHoly Church derives. I began this chapter with a quotation from a late Lollard treatise, The Lanterne of Li g, composed shortly after Arundel's Constitutions of 1408, prohibiting, among other things, the ownership of vernacular Scriptures and unlicensed preaching. The treatise is concerned with three key matters: the nature of Antichrist, the difference between the material (or institutional) Church and the true Church of Christ, and the joy that comes from suffering persecution for the truth. The Psalms are not the most prominent biblical book quoted in the treatise (there are, for example, more quotations from the four gospels), but they are arguably the most important. The tide of the work, for instance, comes from the Psalter, and is explained by the author (once thought to have been Wyclif himself) in his prologue: For who f>at wole not resceyue Crist, in peyne of synne he is compellid & constreyned to resceyue anticrist. Perfore in £>is tyme of hidouse derknes somme seeken J)e lanterne of 113t, of £>e whiche spekijs [3e prophete. Ps. cxviii. "Lucerna pedibus meis verbum tuum' (118.105). I>at is to seie, Lord f>i word is

182

Psalm Ideology a lanterne to my feet. For as fer as f>e 113t of f>is lanterne schinefj, so fer derkness of synne & cloudis of J>e fendis temptaciouns vanischen awey & moun not abide. And algatis whanne J)e lanterne lijtneJ? into Jse hert, it purgij) & clensij) from corrupcioun, it swagijj & heelij) goostli soris. (4)

The writer's observation that sin and temptation vanish "as fer as J)e 113t of J)is lanterne schine]?" is not simply a moral gloss on the Psalmist's text. Its phrasing evokes the New Testament trope of Christ as light, specifically John's statement at the start of his gospel that "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" ("et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae earn non comprehenderunt"; Jn 1.6). This light John then describes as the Word made flesh, the divine verbum become immanent in Christ—in his physical acts and in his human words. By alluding to the connection between the Psalmist's text and John's incarnational theology, the Wycliffite author underscores the prophetic nature of psalm discourse, the extent to which it anticipates the fullest revelation of Christ. And by moving on from this point to the observation that this divine light cleanses the soul ("heelijj goostli sooris"), the writer translates David's prophetic reference to Christ into the topos of the sick soul so prevalent throughout the penitential psalms. We move, then, from the Psalms, to the New Testament, and then back to the Psalms. The author of The Lanterne of Lijf evidently sees David's Christological and morally prophetic character as finally inseparable. The superabundance of biblical quotation and translation in the text suggests that one of its primary aims was to make the words of God more readily available to the persecuted in dark times, to ensure that the light of God's lamp, sacred Scripture, would shine as far as possible, illumining and cleansing the souls of the faithful, who were suffering the assaults of Antichrist. Whenever a biblical quotation appears, the Latin is full, and the English is a close but readable version of the Latin sense. The ideological "feel" of The Lanterne of is both summary and aggressive: it is a tract designed to present the entire Lollard belief system in small, and to connect that system at each point, relentlessly, to the Scriptures. In the first instance, it is directed at those already converted; one John Claydon, currier of London, was burned in 1415 for possessing a copy, and having it read aloud to him. 41 Others, however, are known to have been present when these readings occurred. We must assume that the circulation of a text like The Lanterne ofLijf was oral as well as textual, and that the surviving two copies are no accurate index to its popularity.

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The author not only derives his controlling metaphor from the Psalms; he searches them for prophecies of the coming of Antichrist, and sets before his reader the five "assaults" ("sa^tis") Antichrist aims at devout souls, for each of these citing and translating a text from the Psalter as proof. Most notably, Antichrist's first assault "is constitucioun" — that is, principali Jaise newe constituciouns, bi whos strengte antichrist enterditij) [places under interdict] chirchis, soumnef) prechours, suspendí^ resceyuours, priuej) hem [takes from them] ¡Der benefice, cursij) heerars, & takijs awey (se goodis of hem Jaat forderen ¡3e precheing of a prest, jhe [>0113 it were an aungel ofheuene. ( 1 7 - 1 8 )

The "newe constituciounes" are Arundel's.42 The Lanterne author finds a direct prophecy of these persecutions in Psalm 9.21 : "Constitue domine legislatorem super eos; Lord, suffre ]x>u to ordeyne a lawemaker vpon peple, in peyne of her synne, for {^ei wole not consent to the troupe" ( 17). His implicit identification of Antichrist with Arundel himself, or at least with what Arundel represents, is indeed contentious, but his reading of the psalm verse as a reference to persecution by Antichrist, permitted by God because of the immorality of the people, is strictly orthodox: Peter Lombard traces the interpretation back to Jerome and Augustine,43 and Rolle in his Psalter translates the Lombard faithfully: "For [because] thai wild noght luf the and thi laghe, sette antecrist, bryngere of wickid laghe, obouen thaim, that is in dampnacioun of thaim" (35). Antichrist's assaults are God's punishments for the Church's decline, and the resulting moral decline of society at large. The sense of urgency and fervor that pervades many of the Lollard interpolations to Rolle's English Psalter must be appreciated in the context of deeply troubled times, when sincere men felt the responsibility to preach the good news to "lewed" folk, lest the lantern of God's teachings be extinguished. For the author of the following interpolation to Rolle's comment on Psalm 46.7, ("Psallite Deo nostro, psallite"), psalmody and preaching God's word are in effect synonymous. Although he allows to stand Rolle's interpretation, following Peter Lombard, of psalmody as "inwardli ioi3yng" to God, he supplements it at length with his own view: aftir jjeire werkis [good deeds] men of bileeue may see Jaat |je moost plesyng songe to £>er god & kyng, crist, was to fulfille his moost perfite biddyng, " Π Έ Ε Γ PREDICATE," pat is, go 3 e & preche, & do {jis duely [direcdy], Moost helpide to hem to stable in good, ruel Jjeire fyfe wittis, closide fro J>e world & jje luste Jsereof. And so, acordyngli, alle in 00 tewne songe moost plesyngli to

184

Psalm Ideology god, in doynge her office, as a crosse puttynge hemself ouerwherte to [in opposition to] ¡3e world, & Jje world to hem. For ojsere wise moten feij>ful men synge to god {jat in alie fingís is good, J>an wode men done to J>e world. ( M S Richardson 36, fol. 119")

After this point, the interpolation degenerates into an attack on loud music in churches, the "curiouse song . . . motetis & hije roryng" that pleases the world, but offends God. The author's main point, however, highlighted by the Latin quotation in large textura letters and a marginal nota, underlined in red,44 is Christ's command that the aposdes preach, a charge the interpolator himself takes up and encourages others to imitate. Preaching, some of Rolle's Lollard revisers believe, is the sort of ethical teaching David himself describes in Psalm 50: conferme me in mekenesse f>at I falle nomore, & Docebo iniqtws vias tuas, & impii ad te conuertentur, " I schal lerne wickid men jji weies, & vnpiteuouse men schule togidre be turnid to jsee." That grace J>at god sendif) to a man schulde not be hid, but charitefulli comonede [shared] to ]je preisyng of his god, & profite of his neiîbore. And perfore dauif) seij), I schal teche wickid men j}i weies, & vnpiteuouse men schal be turnid to jse. For meke conuersacioun & debournesse of hym j)at is sett to god alonen in hÍ3er degre refreynij) J>e malice of many, & drawe£> hem to vertues bofje bi awe & bi loue. ( M S Richardson 36, fol.

I28V-I29R)

The observation here that teacherly conversation ought to be "meke" and debonair, or gende, does not fit the character of many Lollard interpolations to Rolle, such as the frequent condemnations of false prelates as "smokyng synagogs of sathan." Nevertheless, the idea that the reformed soul is responsible, as David was, for sharing divine grace with others is derived direcdy from the Latin commentaries on the Miserere. The light of God's divine word must not be placed under a bushel. Like the Psalmist, the Lollard must teach both by his example and by his words. Not to do so, not to spread God's influence by "conuersacioun" (a term that must cover a wide range of verbal expression: reproof, debate, hortatory instruction, scriptural exposition, etc., but also social interaction) is to fail in charity. The Psalms, like the other Scriptures, must be lived; preaching involves not only speaking but acting well. The fact that one might suffer persecution for such teaching is beside the point. As the interpolator notes in his comment on a later verse of the same psalm ("Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus"; "A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit" [Ps 50.19] ), "A meke herte JJUS troublid contynueli for his owne synne & his neijbores kyndelij) moost

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charité in j?at man, & maki{) hymn to sette at η ο ι φ al tribulacioun, & to fócete prospérité of J>is lijf ' (fol. 129 r ). Here we have the identity between humility and praise of God, those two essential psalmic attitudes: preaching to one's neighbors is a form of praise, especially if it involves the preacher's suffering for the cause of right ("sacrificium"). The position, we might observe again, derives directly from David's own poetry and his status as a moral prophet. Thus, in the margin of Harvard MS Richardson 36, it merits a formal nota. The role of notations in interpolated copies of Rolle is itself worthy of note, as yet another aspect of Lollard psalm ideology. The interpolated copies tend to be much more heavily noted than copies of the original version, most often (in the first instance) by the text scribe himself. Indeed, in de luxe manuscripts, such as MS Richardson 36 and Lambeth Palace MS 34, the pages may have been ruled to receive notes and glosses.45 These notes appear against both original and interpolated matter and, among the latter, next to both contentious and non-contentious passages. In other words, rather than taking pains to hide or "cloak" their opinions in a presumably orthodox text, the Lollards seem intent on drawing attention to them, as if their programs of notation were a further extension of the bold preaching function of their work. These features are especially apparent in the notes to MS Richardson 36. They consist of notas, nota benes, and admonitory-looking, pointing hands, always very precisely set on the page, in each case immediately across from the start of the sentence that begins the signaled passage (Plate 4). This care suggests that they were not made occasionally, as the scribe became interested in this or that passage, but that they were part of the plan of the book, and perhaps present in the book's exemplar. Furthermore, there is an hierarchy of glosses in the book, only dimly evident from the black-andwhite picture reproduced here. There are simple notas, nota benes, notas and nota benes underlined in black and in red, notas and nota benes entirely in red, and simple notations paired with pointing hands for additional emphasis. On this page, the first note is underlined in black, and the second, paired with the pointing hand, is entirely in red. The first noted passage is contentious (e.g., the remark "who Jjat is not goddis temple & his tabernacle, in veyne is callid religiouse"), but the second—while it is added material — is strictly consistent with Rolle's mystical imagery and message. There is no rigid system to the hierarchy of notes in MS Richardson 36, no obvious preference, for instance, in asserting the greater importance of passages of Lollard polemic over Rolle's originals. There is, however, a

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Plate 4. Richard Rolle's English Psalter, with Wycliffite interpolations. "In voce exultacionis et confessionis sonus epulantis" ( Ps 41.5 ). Houghton Library, Harvard University M S Richardson 36, fol. ioi v , mid-fifteenth century. By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. (Note in the Latín that the scribe has tried to correct "nocte" to "uoce" by scraping away some of the letter "t.")

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careful and consistent effort to point up and assess the relative merits of key passages, to make the "preaching voice" of the text a bit louder and more insistent, when the meaning warrants.46 Flagrant preacherly notes appear throughout an imperfect, more workaday copy of interpolated Rolle deposited in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, University College MS 74. In this manuscript there are both simple and hortatory notations, all of them in the scribe's hand, aligned with narrow marginal columns. For instance, on fol. 4Γ, the following comment on Psalm 24.7 ("Delieta iuventutis meae, et ignorantias meas ne memineris"; "The sins of my youth and my ignorances do not remember") is signaled by the phrase "nota of ignoraunce": whiles synne is in custome, £>e wey of god is vnknowen. I>is ignoraunce Jjat men ben broi^t to f)oru customable synnynge is deedly synne, where of no man ne womman is excusid fro iust dampnynge, if Jjei ben taken Jjerynne.

The nota, then, draws attention to an especially cautionary passage, underscoring its preacherly effect. The more interesting notes in the book, however, allow the voice of the preacher to bleed into the notas themselves. For example, on fol. 24', the note "lo be war riche men" appears in the margin, circled in red, next to the following comment on Psalm 33.23 ("Redimet Dominus animas servorum suorum, / Et non delinquent omnes qui sperant in eum") : "Oure lord schal a3einbigge [redeem] J>e soulis of his seruauntis, and f>ey schulen not trespace, alle f>at hopij) in hym." I>at is, £>at jjey truly hopif) in oure lord, & mekij} hem in £)is lijf, schulen not synne to her deej), for jx>ru her mekenesse |>ei fynde grace in hym But false riche men & proude couetous beggars, f>at contynued in her synnes til Jjeir eende, hopid not in god truly, in whom is verry hope. For riche folk of f>is world Ιιορφ in greet solempne enteermentis, and veyn comendacyouns of her false brejjerin.

This passage and the note signaling it are a Lollard vox clamantis, simultaneously decrying the corruptions of the world and comforting truth's comrades in the thought that their devotion to the "verrey hope," which is God, will vindicate them in the end. The rest of University College MS 74 is punctuated by similar gestures of moral outrage, in the text and in the margins: "lo religioun," "lo freris," "nota lo be war," "loke wel here." On occasion, the notes have even been arranged in the margins as a guide to the steps in the argument of a particular passage, a modus tractandi for the "lewed." For example, on fol. 39v, next to a long passage decrying hypocrisy

18 8

Psalm Ideology

among prelates and layfolk alike, the following notes appear (each circled in red) in the margin: lo feyners of trujje lo trewe men lo lo how jsou my3t deme [distinguish them] , 47 It is tempting, given the increased restrictions on preaching encouraged by Arundel's 1408 Constitutions, to interpret these notes, and the interpolations they signal in English Psalter manuscripts, as a safer form of Lollard preaching: textual, rather than oral, spoken from within the confines of books, rather than in the marketplace. Whether this is how their authors conceived of them, of course, is a matter of speculation. It is indisputable, however, that many of the interpolations marked by these notas are amplifications of David's own moral statements, and applications of psalm discourse to the religious and political concerns of contemporary life. They endeavor to teach the faithful in imitation of David's moral prophesying. The notas themselves are extensions of these amplifications, simple but effective echoes of the righteous indignation the Psalmist expresses throughout his poems, and evidence of an urgent Lollard psalm ideology.

6. William Langland, Radical Psalmist

Preestes and persons \νφ Placebo to hunte And dyngen vpon Dauid eche day til eue. Piers Plowman Β, III.311-312 Although Langland was writing and revising his poem of crisis, Piers Plowman, after WydiPs ideas were in the air but long before the Lollard uprisings of 1413-1414, a convenient analogy might be drawn between Lollard uses of the Psalms and Langland's.1 Like the Lollards, Langland regards the Psalms in two ways: as a comprehensive source of moral dicta, to be quoted in support of his opinions on contemporary ecclesiastical and social problems, and as a normative devotional and ethical language that must be woven into the very fabric of human conversation, as represented in his poem by the speech of his characters. Piers Plowman, like certain Lollard interpolations to Richard Rolle's Psalter, invokes David's poetry both to comment on public affairs of the realm, and to testify to the soul's private, penitential anguish and reform. That is, like the Lollards, Langland reads the Psalms as speaking direcdy to his age, to its collective self and to individuals, who might become, as David did, moral prophets to the masses. This having been said, it must also be observed that the Psalms command a special, even preeminent place in Langland's literary and moral imagination. We know nothing about the lives or personalities of those who interpolated copies of Rolle's Psalter, despite scholarly efforts to turn up names and to connect these with particular manuscripts.2 Langland's biography is also shadowy, but he does give us some details about how he made his living in the C-text, thefinalrevision of his poem: The lomes [tools] J?at ich laboure with and lyflode deserue Ys pater-noster and my prymer, placebo and dirige, And my sauter som tyme, and my seuene psalmes. This ich segge for hure soules of suche as me helpen, And £>0 Jjat fynden my me fode vouchen saf, ich trowe,

190

Psalm Ideology To be welcome whanne ich comme, oj^er-whyle in a monthe, Now with hym and now with hure, and J^us-gate ich begge, With-oute bagge o|?er botel, bote my wombe one [alone]. (VT.45-52)3

Although these words are spoken by Langland's persona, Will the Dreamer, they have been accepted by scholars as reliable autobiographical report.4 And they account for the preponderance of psalm quotation across the three versions of Piers Plowman, especially in the second or B-text, which I am most concerned with here. If Langland made his living month-tomonth speaking the Psalms on behalf of others ( some of whom, Donaldson argues, may have been his patrons5 ), their language would have become— as it did for devout monks—part of the poet's mental process.6 There is an ease with which the Psalms get quoted in Piers Plowman, a sense offitnessor Tightness when they are invoked, as if the poet were automatically drawing on the authority of that scriptural text that he knows the best, and regards quotation, in these instances, as extending rather than interrupting his discourse.7 Moreover, it is altogether likely that deep acquaintance with the Psalter would have encouraged Langland to think about the ideal poet, and in particular the ideal prophetic poet, as psalmist. Theodore Steinberg is misleading when, in his recent study of prophecy in Piers Plowman, he observes that, in the C-text, "Isaiah is mentioned by name more than any of the other prophets (except for David) and seems to have represented the idea of prophecy to Langland."8 A rough count of psalm quotations in the B-text reveals that the Psalms are quoted about 107 times, and Isaiah's prophecies about 16 times — a ratio of almost 7 to 1 ; the ratio is nearly the same for the C version.9 When Langland thought and wrote, he did so (much of the time) in psalmic ways. And when he thought about the nature of poetry and the role of the poet, he must inevitably have thought about the Psalms and their inspired author, David.10 As Donaldson puts it, in speculating on Langland's ecclesiastical status: Langland's position may have been either that of acolyte or tonsumtus. If the latter was really known in England as psalmist, and if he actually had the job of reading the Psalms, we mightfinda particular felicity in the idea of Langland's having been a psalmist: psalmistatus he certainly was, in heart if not in tide.11 This, at least, is one's sense of things while reading the poem.12 Something should be said, before moving on to specific examples of psalm reference in Piers Plowman, about the distribution of psalm quota-

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tions across the Β version. Langland concentrates his quotations in three places in the B-text: in Passus V (containing the confession of the seven capital sins to Repentance) ; between Passus X and XV; and in Passus XVIII (Langland's account of the passion and his allegory of the Four Daughters of God). The greatest number of quotations — roughly half the total number—appear after the poem's midpoint, between Passus X and XV This concentration is bracketed on either end of the poem by heavy reference in Passus V (eleven quotations) and in Passus XVIII (ten quotations). On either end of the poem, in the Prologue-Passus TV and Passus XIX-XX, there are only seven and two quotations from the Psalms, respectively. The initial impression given by this arrangement is that of a three-part poem, segmented by its patterns of psalm quotation. In fact, however, Langland positions his psalm references so that those in Passus V and XVIII operate as a kind of structural parenthesis, directing more careful attention to the even wider range of psalm references that appear between these, in Passus X-XV, and calling special attention to those few references "isolated" from the dense concentration, those at the poem's beginning and end. This pattern of psalm quotation disrupts linear readings of his poem, instead underscoring what happens ( both in terms of poetic action and psalm quotation) immediately after the poem's midpoint. Moreover, the pattern encourages the reader to account for the status of what comes before and after Passus V and XVIII in terms of poetic and psalmic significance—to relate the beginning and end of Piers Plowman to its middle. It is tempting to see in Langland's design an analogy with the Psalter itself, the extent to which its first and third sections, those devoted to contrition and mankind's endless praise of God, respectively, necessarily direct attention to its middle part, which takes up the theme of the penitent soul's justification through divine grace. If Langland intends the structural analogy, he pursues it only loosely. In one respect, however, the structure of Piers Plowman is very much like that of the Psalter: its end offers no convenient "exit" from the poem, but instead turns the reader's attentions back to the substance and nature of the entire poetic enterprise. The clusters of psalm reference in Passus V and XVIII are conspicuously alike in their emphasis on the theme of divine forgiveness, and the acts of human sorrow and pity to which this limitless mercy ought to give rise. The connection between divine and human mercy is best exemplified in Repentance's words to Covetousness, when he confesses in Passus V After Covetousness details his shameless behavior (e.g., not only lending money at interest, but his failure to show compassion to the poor), Repen-

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tance upbraids him as an "unkynde creature." Α. V C. Schmidt translates the phrase, somewhat redundantly, as "unnatural monster."13 Repentance's point is not simply to express shock at the extent of Covetousness's inhumanity, but to emphasize that in resisting penance, and the restitution it entails, Covetousness is denying the natural impulse to contrition offered the human soul by divine grace. Sinners must accept God's gift, and then use it to make restitution. God's mercy and justice are inseparable; thus Repentance comforts Covetousness, but also stresses the point of satisfaction, and must withhold absolution until the sinner's heart softens: . . . sijjen Jjat Reson rolle it in {?e Registre of heuene That JJOW hast maad ech man good I may f>ee no3t assoile: Non dimitturpeccatum donee restituaturablatum. (272-274) As John Alford notes, the Latin is a maxim of canon law, derived from Augustine.14 Langland, however, immediately establishes a psalmic context for the principle: For al J>at haj> of J31 good, haue god my troupe, Is holden at J>e heije doom to helpe Jjee to restitute, And whoso leuej) |>at 1113e loke in jse Sauter glose, In Miserere mei deus, wher I mene truj>e: Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti etc. Cum sancto sanctus ens: construwe me j}is on englissh. ( 274-279 ) Repentance quotes the start of the Miserere for two reasons: to direct Covetousness to the language of the archetypal penitential psalm, which may provoke compunct tears for his sins; and to connect individual contrition with social responsibility—Langland's normative ethical concept of'trujje" or integritas, as this is represented by the doctrine of restitution. The subsequent reference to the gloss on Psalm 17.26 ("cum sancto sanctus eris") extends this sense of the social import of psalm texts: one way to achieve holiness is to avoid temptation in the first place, by associating with the holy rather than with sinners. If all were to heed this psalm dictum, individuals and society might more swiftly approach the kind of Christian utopia Langland imagines later in his poem. "Constrewe me J^is on englissh" is spoken as a challenge: only those who cannot read and understand David's plain text require study aids. The fit reader might recall, before even picking up the Glossa Ordinaria, any number of psalm texts convergent with the

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moral principle "cum sancto sanctus eris"; the very first verses of the Psalter come quickly to mind: Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence. But his will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he shall meditate day and night. (Ps 1.1-1.2) For Langland, the authority of the Psalter itself is prior to and greater than that of the commentaries: it is the very foundation of exegesis and of canon law. A chief aspect of Langland's psalm radicalism is his disavowal of the common medieval view, discussed in Part I, that the Psalter's meaning could only be apprehended when refracted through the prism of exegetical discourse. Langland certainly uses the exegetes himself, but his absolute trust resides in the naked text of the Psalms — David's literal sense—which he allows to speak bluntly throughout Piers Plowman. Like Chaucer's Parson, Langland "catches" the sense of Scripture directly, and adds to it by way of explanation only the most direct poetic figures.15 It is all the more scandalous, then, that Sloth, who introduces himself at his confession as "preest and person passynge J>ritty wynter," . . . kan . . . ney{>er solue [sound notes] ne synge ne seintes lyues rede; But I kan fynden in a feld or in a furlang an hare Bettre jsan in Beatus vir or in Beati omnes Construe clausemele [clause-by-clause] and kenne it to my parrishens. (415-419) Langland juxtaposes two forms of activity, one frivolous the other very important: hunting and running down the sense of the Psalms, in order to convey David's meaning to others. For Father Sloth, tracking rabbits is more important than fulfilling his spiritual responsibilities to his parishioners — tasks for which he is ill-trained. To suggest just how far Sloth has wandered from the path of righteousness, the poet deliberately has him mention two key psalm incipits in his confession: the first verse of Psalm 1, that psalm regarded by Jerome as the "impressive doorway" ("grandis . . . porta") to the "great house" ("magna domus") of the entire Psalter;16 and Psalm 127. ι, which echoes the first psalm and relates its concept of blessedness to fear of God and walking in his ways ("Beati omnes qui timent

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Dominum, qui ambulant in viis eius"). Instead of applying himself hard to his priestly duties, Sloth merely ambles. Langland does not give his hunting after the hare any of the superficial masculine charm and energy one meets in Chaucer's General Prologue portrait of the Monk; here are no "deyntee" horses or "Grehoundes... swift as fowel in flight" (I.A. 168; 190). The silly and the serious are in sharpest contrast; Sloth's condition is pathetic. Of the seven sins who confess in Passus V, Covetousness and Sloth are clearly the most in extremis. "Pernele proud-herte" cries out for mercy ( 63 ), as does Lechery, who ironically enough calls on the Virgin to intercede for him (71 ). Envy is described as having a "heuy herte" (74) and states outright "I am resolved to change" ("I wole amende"; 134). Wrath is "assoiled" (186), as is Gluttony, who cries out and makes a piteous lament ("greete and gret doel to make"; 379). The Dreamer himself, just before the confession of the vices, is moved to contrite tears by Repentance's words: Thanne ran Repentaunce and reherced his teme [theme] And made wille to wepe water wij> his ei3en. (60-61 ) These tears, like the cries and groans of the sins, are the fruits of compunction. Covetousness and Sloth, however, are incapable of them—even when confronted with phrases from the most penetrating of psalm texts: Miserere mei deus, Beatus vir, Beati omnes. As we saw in our discussion of Middle English devotional prose, reading or hearing such psalm verses could pierce the most hardened of hearts, and as the author of 'The Direccioun of Mannys Lyfe" points out, could save the deeply troubled soul from despair: For ofte tymes temptacionis and pryckynge of conscience are nedefull and medefull for clensyng and purgyng of oure synne, and tokenys of mykill grace aftirwarde. Thyus dyd dauid, and fledde to god in his sowie, whan he seyd, Tu

es refugium meum a tribulacione quae circumdedit me, et cetera·

[ Ps 31.7 ], "Thou

art my refute," sayd dauid "in tribulación and disese." D o o thou thus that art temptyd and dysesyd or dredfull or aferde, and he shall not fayle the. (Cambridge University Library M S Ff.6.33, fol. 112V)

Covetousness, however, cannot give his will over to God. He inclines to "wanhope" or despair (281), and we are told "was determined to hang himself" ("wolde han hanged hymself"; 280) if Repentance had not intervened with his image, based on Augustine, of how all sin is to God's mercy as a spark extinguished in the middle of a great ocean: "Omnis iniquitas quantum ad misericordiam dei est quasi sintilla in medio maris" (283a).

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Sloth likewise tends to despair, and has to be warned against it.17 When he falls asleep during confession, the watcher Vigilate splashes his eyes with water, in a dramatic moment that alludes to the ceremonial sprinkling of holy water at Mass and the psalm sung during it ("Asperges me hysopo, et mundabor"; "You will sprinkle me with hyssop, and I will be made clean" [PS 50.9]): "Repentestow mrçt?" quod Repentaunce, & rijt wij) j?at he swowned Til vigilate ¡De veille fette water at hise eÌ3en Andflatteit on his face and faste on hym cryde And seide, "ware j^ee, for wanhope wol J>ee bitraye. Ί am sory for my synne' seye to Jnselue, And beet piseli on j?e brest and bidde hym of grace, For is no gilt here so gret {>at his goodnesse is moore." (441-448) The dark comedy of these moments in Passus V anticipates the metaphysically frightening one near the end of the poem, when Contrition himself, under the influence of Friar Antichrist, actually forgets how to weep: Contricion hadde clene [completely] foryeten to crye and to wepe And wake for hise wikked werkes as he was wont to doone. (XX.369-370) That is, he forgets how to imitate the Psalmist, who in thefirstpenitential psalm describes his resolve to lay awake all night, weeping for his sins: "I have labored in my groanings, every night I will wash my bed: I will water my couch with my tears." If Will and the other sins are types of compunction in Passus V, Covetousness and Sloth represent the failure of David's message of contrition to provoke a sudden change of heart when especially pernicious sinful habits dominate the soul. In literary terms, they also serve as occasions for Langland to dilate upon two themes that he locates centrally in the Psalms: the boundlessness of divine forgiveness and the sinner's corresponding natural duty to accept God's mercy. These two antitypes of compunction, paradoxically, generate some of Langland's most enthusiastic and powerful psalmic writing. Moreover, by associating Covetousness and Sloth as especially severe cases, Langland joins two of the chief reformist themes of Piers Plowman: the need to break reward's hold over individuals and society at large, and the requirement that priests leave off misdirected activity to

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rededicate themselves to learning the Psalter, and communicating its moral precepts to the faithful. The theme of the greatness of divine mercy is again taken up, and connected with the Psalms, in Langland's allegory of the Four Daughters of God toward the close of Piers Plowman, in Passus XVIII. After he has described the passion and death of Jesus, in meditative language unmatched in Middle English verse, the poet relates how a beautiful woman named Mercy comes out of the west and descends into Hell, where she meets her equally lovely sister, Truth, coming from the East. Mercy suggests to Truth that the patriarchs and prophets, who predicted the salvation bought by Christ, will be released from Hell by a heavenly light. Truth expresses her disbelief that anyone could be released from Hell, quoting Job as an authority: lob J?e parfit patriark repreuej) saws, Quia in Inferno nulla est redempcio. ( 149-149a ) Mercy, who had previously recalled the paradox of Christ's birth by a virgin, explains that just as a dead scorpion can remove the venom from the bite of another, if laid atop the wound, Grace will destroy death, beguiling the old beguiler himself, Satan. Peace arrives on the scene, coming from the south, and announces that she intends to visit Adam, Eve, Moses, and the other figures of the Old Testament, who will be freed by Christ's having conquered death. Justice, taking up Truth's argument, disagrees, asserting that no amount of prayer can help those condemned to eternal punishment. Ultimately, a light appears from heaven and identifies itself as "Rex glorie," commanding Hell to open and harrowing it: Dukes of J>is dymme place, anoon vndo Jñse yates, That christ may come In, j^e kynges sonen of heuene! And wif> J>at breej) helle brak with Belialles barres; For any wye or warde wide opned yates. ( 319-322) The debate between Mercy and Peace on the one hand, and Truth and Justice on the other, Langland derives from Psalm 84. That psalm begins with David praising God for having forgiven the iniquity of his people: Benedixisti, Domine, terram tuam; Avertisti captivitatem Iacob.

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Remisisti iniquitatem plebis tuae, Operuisti omnia peccata eorum. Mitigasti omnem iram tuam, Avertisti ab ira indignationis tuae. (2-4) [Lord you have blessed your land: You have turned away the captivity of Jacob. You have forgiven the iniquity of your people: You have covered all their sins. You have mitigated all your anger: You have turned away from the wrath of your indignation. ] The insistent parataxsis underscores both the Psalmist's joy and the greatness of what God has done. It is as if he could not believe God were capable of such total forgiveness, so that when he witnesses it his response is utterly spontaneous—just like the happiness and accord of the Four Daughters of God at the end of Passus XVIII. Such a reading of this psalm and of Langland's passus, however, is an oversimplification. As with several of the psalms, Psalm 84 begins confidently enough, but lapses quickly into more skeptical processes of thought: Numquid in aeternum irasceris nobis? Aut extendes iram tuam a generatione in generationem? Deus, tu conversus vivificabis nos, Et plebs tua laetabitur in te. Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordiam tuam, Et salutare tuum da nobis. (6-8) [Will you be angry with us for ever? Or will you extend your wrath from generation to generation? You will turn, O God, and bring us to life: and your people shall rejoice in you. Show us, O Lord, your mercy; and grant us your salvation. ] In the Psalmist's second thoughts, one hears once again the supplicatory rhetoric of David's seven penitential poems, which work actively to assuage God's too understandable anger at sinners. These verses raise in the psalm the issue of human culpability, the fact that God's infinite mercy toward the soul is so surprising precisely because it is so undeserved. In his allegory of

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the Four Daughters of God, Langland has Justice present her position forcefully because it does indeed carry weight: At f)e bigynnyng god gaf jje doom hymselue That Adam and Eue and alle J?at hem suwede [followed] Sholden deye downrighte and dwelle in pyne after If J>at Jjei touchede a tree and J>e trees fruyt eten. ForJji lat hem chewe as J>ei chosen and chide we no3t, sustres, For it is botelees bale, {se byte J)at J>ei eten. ( 191-194; 201-202) The only thing wrong with Justice's argument is that it implicitly denies God's freedom to pardon, to overturn his former judgment. Justice's argument will eventually be defeated by Christ's harrowing of hell, but for the time being it serves Langland's purpose: to remind his audience of the root of all wrong, which David himself acknowledges in the Miserere: "Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum" ("For behold I was conceived in iniquities") (Ps 50.7). As a result of Adam's fall, all men are born to sin; they are all, to recall Augustine's phrase from his enarratio on Psalm 50, "death's offspring." And all, therefore, are responsible for the consequences of their sins. To be sure, those who will be freed when Christ harrows Hell were born before his Incarnation, and the special revelation that followed that event. Nevertheless, Langland is concerned in Passus XVIII, as David is in Psalm 84, with avoiding the implication that any sinner somehow merits divine mercy, and will receive it without humbly requesting it. Thus it is significant that when Christ himself appears in Passus XVIII and explains his actions, he quotes the verse from the Miserere that immediately precedes David's reference to the doctrine of original sin (Ps 50.6) : Ac to be merciable to man Joanne my kynde it aske|? For we beej) bre]?eren of blood, ac no3t in baptisme alle. Ac alle j^at bej> myne hole brejjeren, in blood and in baptisme, Shul no3t be dampned to |x deef) f>at durej) wi|x>uten ende: Tibi solipeccaui etc. (375-3783) "To you only have I sinned, and have done evil before you: that you may be justified in your words, and may overcome when you are judged." When Christ quotes the verse, he presumably means to imply that he has the

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prerogative to forgive absolutely, having been the only party injured by mankind's offenses.18 Augustine, however, offers a richer and more moving interpretation. Christ is the supreme judge, and the source of mercy, because he humbled himself and died on the cross: Superas enim omnes homines, omnes iudices, et qui se putat iustum, coram te ini ustus est, tu solus iuste iudicas, iniuste iudicatus, qui potes tam habes ponendi animam tuam, et potestatem habes iterum sumendi earn. Vincis ergo cum iudicaris. Omnes homines superas, quia plus es quam homines, et per te facti sunt homines. (606) [Because you overcome all men, all judges, and he who judges himself just before you is unjust, you alone judge jusdy, having been unjustly judged, who has power to lay down your life, and power to take it up again. You conquer, then, when you are judged. You overcome all men, because you are more than men, and by you were men made. ] (192) Here, then, is the hall paradox of the crucifixion, and the act of divine mercy it represents. By humbling himself, placing himself absolutely at the mercy of his creatures, the maker of all men confirms and extends his authority over them. This humility, in turn, ought to become a model for others, just as David's humilitas in the penitential psalms does.19 He who would save his life must lose it, for the judge of all is supreme judge over mankind because he humbled himself, taking on the form of a slave ("formam servi accipiens"; Phil 2.7) —with one exception. Unlike man, Christ did not bear the stain of original sin, the sin David mentions in Psalm 50 right after admitting that he sinned against God alone. No medieval reader familiar with the Miserere (clerical readers should have been20) would have missed the poignant irony in Christ's statement in Passus XVIII that he and mankind are "brejjeren of blood." In one sense, they certainly are. Christ jousts in the armor of Piers the Plowman, human nature; he takes on flesh so that he may die on the cross. In another profound sense, however, Christ and man are different. Unlike man, Christ was not "conceived in iniquities"— his soul was not touched by original sin. When in Passus XVIII Christ declares that he saves mankind because of the blood-bond between them, he points up not only his infinite mercy, but the origin of human frailty: his own ideal character, and the sinful characters of those first created in his image. The reconciliation of Mercy and Peace with Justice and Truth is a triumphal moment at the end of Passus XVIII, signaled by Langland's last quotation from Psalm 84:

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Psalm Ideology Misericordia & Veritas obuiauerunt sibi; Iusticia & pax osculate sunt. Τηφε trumpede |χ> and song Te deum laudamus, And Jeanne lutede loue in a loud note: Ecce quam bonum & quam iucundum etc. (42ia-423a)

The final line of this passage is another psalm quotation, from Psalm 132.1, which concludes "habitare fratres in vnum" ("Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity"). As John Alford observes, the verse was often associated by Bishop Brinton, one of Langland's virtuous ecclesiastics, with unitas ecclesiae.21 Thus it anticipates the construction of Unity Holy Church in Passus XIX. That Unity shall, however, be seriously threatened by Antichrist himself in Passus XX. And in Passus XVIII as an adumbration of that threat, behind the happy reconciliation of God's four daughters rests the undeniable human propensity to sin. Will's advice to his wife and daughter on waking, at the end of the passus, is appropriately abject and penitential: when they go to church to celebrate Christ's resurrection on Easter morning, they ought to "crepejj to jje eros on knees and kissej) it for a Iuwel" (428). Joy of the resurrection and its consequences must never occlude man's awareness of his need for selfexamination and remorse. Passus V and XVIII of Piers Plowman, each with their twin psalmic themes of human sinfulness and divine mercy, are the chief buttresses of Langland's poem. The Great Confession of the vices and the allegory of the Four Daughters of God describe, together, the most vexing issues of the Christian faith: How are those habitually inclined to sin to be saved? How is God's natural attribute, mercy, to be reconciled with his status as absolute judge of mankind? Passus V considers these questions in terms of the grotesque manifestations of human depravity, against which Repentance sets God's ample desire to forgive. Passus XVIII describes the beauty of that forgiveness in terms of the crucifixion and the discourses of Mercy and Peace, but insists on man's too understandable misgivings about God's mercy due to human depravity, in the discourses of Justice and Truth. Despite its happy ending, Passus XVIII raises the nagging human questions about man's relationship with God that Passus V ignores. The rest of Piers Plowman, organized around these two sections, considers the relevance of these questions to the state of the realm, and all those individual souls who comprise it. In Passus III, before Langland's real barrage of psalm quotation begins, Conscience addresses the King on the nature of "mede" or monetary

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reward, which has been shown to be corrupting government and is represented by the poet as the iconographie antithesis of Lady Holy Church herself. Following Lady Mede's own assertion that "No wijt, as I wene, wijxmten Mede may libbe" ("No person, it seems to me, can survive without reward"; 277), the King concludes that Lady Mede is "wor|)i" (299), and that Conscience thus should agree to marry her. Conscience responds by kneeling, and then humbly disagreeing with the King. His distinction between the two types or "manere" of meed is based squarely in the Psalms:22 Domine, quis habitabit in tabemaculo tuoi Lord, who shal wonye in thi wones with thyne holy seintes, Or resten in J>yne holy hilles: J>is askej) Dauid. And Dauid assoilej? it hymself as the Sauter tellejj: Qui ingreditur sine macula & operatur Iusticiam. Tho J>at entren of o colour and of one wille And han ywroght werkes wij? right and wij) reson, And he J>at vsej) nojt J)e lyf of vsurie, And enformej) pouere people and pursue)? trujje: Quipecuniam suam non dedit ad vsuram et muñera super innocentem, &c, And alle Jjat helpen J)e Innocent and holden with Jje rÌ3tfulle, Wij^outen Mede dop hem good and jse πτψε helped, Swiche manere men, my lord, shul haue J>isfirsteMede Of god at a gret nede whan J>ei gon hennes. (234-245) Here Conscience uses the Psalms in a bookish and polemical way, as a source of moral authority for his arguments, made in public before a law court. First he quotes and translates Psalm 14.1, and then he answers the question posed by the Psalmist by quoting the very next verse of the psalm, in which David answers his own question. Langland's implication is that, on the question of meed, the Psalms (and Psalm 14 in particular) are a sufficient authority. David "assoils" or resolves the question of who will dwell with God himself: he provides, as it were, the best interpretive gloss to his own text. Moreover, the fact that David can, immediately and confidendy, offer an answer to this, the most vexing of theological problems (Who shall be saved?) testifies to his preeminent authority as God's inspired poet, and his authority to pronounce on moral issues. The entire psalm is a prescription for the virtuous life, and a happy afterlife, of how to become Beatus vir:

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Psalm Ideology Lord, who shall dwell in your tabernacle? or who shall rest in your holy hill? He who walks without blemish, and works justice: He who speaks the truth in his heart, who has not used deceit in his tongue; nor has done evil to his neighbor, nor taken up reproach against his neighbors. In his sight the malignant is brought to nothing: but he glorifies them that fear the Lord. He that swears to his neighbor, and deceives not; he that has not put out his money to usury, nor taken bribes against the innocent: He who does these things shall not be moved forever.

In his enarratio on Psalm 14, Augustine deemphasizes the specific qualities of the just man—avoiding usury and bribes, for instance. 'These," he remarks, "are no great things" ("Ista non sunt magna") . 23 He goes on, however, to point out that those who are incapable of avoiding even these sins will never be able to speak the truth, or to aspire to perfect virtue. On the face of it, Augustine's view does not seem especially convergent with Langland's. The poet, unlike the exegete, stresses the particularity of the psalm, its application to a specific moral problem. Conscience's speech, however, must be read in the context of Holy Church's earlier quotation of the same psalm to Will the dreamer, in Passus II: My fader j?e grete god is a ground of alle graces, Oo god wijsouten gynnyng, and I his goode dorter; And haj) yeuen me mercy to marie wij> myselue, And what man be merciful and leelly me loue Shal be my lord and I his leef in ¡De heije heuene. And what man takej) Mede, myn heed dar I legge, That he shal lese for hire loue a lippe of Caritatis. How construe]} David j?e kyng of men j?at cacche]? Mede, And men of Jjis moolde jjat mayntenej) ίηφε, And how ye shul saue yourself? the Sauter berej? witnesse: Domine quts habitabit in tabernáculo tuo &c. ( 29- 39 ) As in the psalm, between Holy Church's discourse and Conscience's there is a progress from the general to the specific, from references to speaking the

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truth and not doing evil to injunctions against false oaths and taking bribes. The Latin here, the psalm's incipit, refers one not to a particular verse from David's poem, but by implication to the entire psalm, and the generalized forms of reference—"what man take]} Mede," "men Jjat cacche)? Mede," and "men . . . jjat mayntenejj ΐηφε" — imply that reward is a much more complex ethical phenomenon than the canonical discourse on such particular sins as usury might suggest. Langland puns on the contrast between the verbs "to take" or "to catch" and "to maintain": thefirsttwo denote snatching or grabbing at something, the last gendy but firmly holding or preserving a thing in the palm of one's hand (from manus + tenere). The pun directs our attention to the motives behind accepting meed, as much as to the act itself. Meed is any personal profit seized at another's expense, and the impulse compelling the forms of moral behavior that lead to this sort of gain: the acquisitive instinct itself.24 It is associated by this poet with falsehood rather than truth because it is disintegrative, whereas truth for Langland is integritas, the moral wholeness capable of holding together self and community. When Langland quotes Psalm 14, he is concerned, like Augustine, with the theme of the virtues of the perfect, not with isolated moral issues. In Passus III, Conscience applies David's meaning to the question of meed in its limited monetary sense, but only as a way of distinguishing earthly meed, the quantitative kind, from heavenly reward, which is beyond measure. That the King must be told there are two kinds of meed—physical and spiritual —qualifies his moral authority, and displaces that authority via Conscience's speech onto that biblical ideal of kingship, David. Conscience's speech draws on the medieval tradition of the Psalms as a vast collection of sententiae or wise sayings, and regard for the Psalmist himself as a great moral prophet and philosopher.25 On matters of moral principle, David's was a name to conjure with in the Middle Ages. Langland's insight is to associate David's moral authority, which in the exegetical tradition he displays almost in spite of his kingly office, with his ideal kingship; he repoliticizes David's moral authority, so that it might be viewed in its public as well as private aspect. When Langland brings together the authority David won by setting aside his crown in penance with the Psalmist's role as monarch, he implies that the king must become not only Truth's representative, but his living voice: I, Conscience, knowe Jsis for kynde wit me tau3te That Reson shal regne and Reaumes gouerne,

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Psalm Ideology And ri3t as Agag hadde happe shul somme. Samuel shal sleen hymn and Saul shal be blamed And Dauid shal be diademed and daunten hem alle, And oon cristene kyng kepen vs echone. (284-289)

The moral authority of the crown will be reestablished only after Meed's reign ends, and if moral prophets in the tradition of Samuel have to force the issue, so be it. Like Lydgate in Defence ofHoly Church, Langland critiques the monarch's loss of authority by implying an analogy between the king and Saul, and an unnamed moral prophet and Samuel, who had to slay Agag when Saul did not. But he does not limit his prophetic vision of an ideal reign of reason to the king's becoming another David. This future, Davidic age will witness the reform of all the estates. Law will be made a laborer, and weapons of destruction will be beaten into plowshares. Priests will leave off hunting to attend to their proper subject, understanding the Psalter: Ech man to pleye with a plow, Pykoise or spade, Spynne or sprede donge or spille himself with sleu{)e. Preests and persons wij} Placebo to hunte And dyngen vpon Dauid eche day til eue. (309-312) Here Langland associates, by juxtaposition, honest physical labor—plowing, spreading manure—with persistent sacred reading of David's text. Each of these activities requires single-minded attention and strenuous effort. Elsewhere in the B-text, Langland uses the word "dyngen" in a more exact agricultural sense, beating sheaves with a threshing flail ("Diken or delven or dyngen vpon sheves"; VI. 141 ). This sense opens up the attractive possibility that, in the Utopian passage, "pounding away at the psalms" is to be taken in two, complementary ways: to denote the personal, meditative activity of priests faithfully reading their breviaries, and the forms of Christian social action that necessarily follow on this: explaining the sense of the Psalter to those "lewed" folk who have no other means of access to David's teachings (cf. Father Sloth's remarks in Passus V ) , separating the fruit from the chaff by means of the interpretive labor of exegesis and preaching. As Clergy explains to the dreamer later, in Passus X: I rede ech a blynd bosard do boote to hymselue, As persons and parissh preestes, Jsat preche sholde and teche, All maner men to amenden bi hire myjtes. (272-274)

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Shortly after this point, however, the tone of Passus X shifts from injunction to lament, and finally, echoing Conscience's speech in Passus III, from lament to Utopian prophecy. "Ac now is Religion a rydere," Clergy ruefully observes, warning monks in particular that . . . f>er shal come a kyng and confesse yow Religiouses, And bete yow, as J>e bible tellej), for brekynge of youre rule, And amende Monyals, Monkes and Chanons, And puten hem to hir penaunce, Adpristinum statum ire; And Barons wij> Erles beten hem ]x>ru3 Beatus vines techyng. ( 322326) Skeat thought this passage to be an eerie prediction of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, a prophecy of the Protestant Reformation. This reading seems too imaginative. More recently, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has argued that revisions Langland made to the passage between the Β and C versions of his poem suggest his belief in "the fluctuations of religious reform prophecies"—that is, his conclusion, between Β and C, that Antichrist might beset Holy Church in "waves" or cycles, rather than once and for all in the immediate future.26 While this may well be the case, I cannot agree when she later states that such passages as this one imply that "Langland seems to look more to David the king than to David the pastor (shepherd) for spiritual leadership."27 In fact, for Langland David's two roles as king and shepherd-poet turned Psalmist are inseparable. The phrase "Religion as rider" recapitulates and amplifies Conscience's criticism of hunting priests, who ought to be reading hard on their Psalter. The king who will beat the monk-riders of this passage, in turn, recalls the ideal Davidic king of Passus III, in that he will be beating the monks with Beatus vir1s teaching — employing the language of David, the Bible's ideal monarch and moral prophet, to compel the monks to a better life. King David in Passus X has been transmuted, poetically, into Beatus vir. The political authority of David dubbing knights earlier in the poem has been transformed, by Langland's métonymie imagination, into the moral authority of David's text itself. The Latin cue of thefirstpsalm, which stands as a kind of epigraph to the entire Psalter as a book of teachings on the blessed or happy life, is a double personification: "Beatus virres techyng" refers both to David's personal wisdom (which is, of course, derived from divine inspiration), and to the book that contains it. Those clerics who do not hammer away at the Psalter are destined to be beaten with it, by those secularfigurescapable of

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imitating the Psalmist by taking up his book, reading it and internalizing its prescription for the virtuous life. It is ironic that monks will have to be forced to conform to the Psalter's moral vision, given that the monastic week (according to the Benedictine rule) was organized around reading through the entire Psalter. Christian utopia will be ushered in by secular figures better acquainted with Beatus vir than renegade priests and monks (like Sloth in Passus V) and who will reform society accordingly. One wonders if Langland the psalter-clerk secretly thought himself, by virtue of the psalmic tendencies of his poem, to be among this number. The preponderance of psalm quotation in Piers Plowman, and the expository contexts in which such quotations appear, suggest that this was indeed the case. An affirmative answer is also suggested when Langland recalls Conscience's prophecy of Christian utopia again, in Anima's speech in Passus XV Will opens the passus by describing how distraught he is by the failure of his search for the meaning of Do-well: "my wit weex and wayned til I a fool weere" ( 3 ). When he again falls asleep, he sees "a sotil Jjyng wi]p alle" (12), the figure of a man without tongue or teeth, who introduces himself as Anima. Will explains to Anima that he would like to comprehend all human knowledge and "alle J)e sotile craftes . . . kyndely in myn herte" (4849), presumably so that he would then, ipso facto, know the true nature of Do-well. Anima responds with strong criticism, accusing Will of having pride like Lucifer's, and explaining—following a quotation from St. Bernard —that this is the sort of ambition that lost Adam and Eve paradise: "Beatus est," seij? Seint Bernard, "qui scripturas legit Et verba vertit in opera fulliche to his power." Coueitise to könne and to knowe science Adam and Eue putte out of Paradis: Seiende appetitus hominem inmortalitatis¿floriam spoliauit. And rÌ3t as hony is yuel to defie and engleymej? |?e mawe, Right so jjat {30013 reson wolde {>e roote knowe Of god and of his grete my3tes, hise graces it lettej}. (60-66) The two Latin quotations from St. Bernard are directed against human knowledge, but support study of divine wisdom as it reposes in Scripture and may be translated into good works ("opera"), each man according to his capacities.28 John Alford suggests that the idea of the first quotation "is probably based on Matt. 7.24 ('Everyone therefore that heareth these my words, and doth them, shall be likened to a wise man that built his house

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upon a rock')."29 This covers the second half of the quotation concerning "opera," but not the first half. Bernard is not concerned here with the wise man of the Gospel verse, but Beatus vir—the "blessed man" David works so hard to describe over the course of the Psalter. Indeed, the burden of Anima's argument is the distinction between wisdom considered in a purely intellectual sense, and blessedness, a more elusive and attractive quality that translates the verba of Scripture into good living. Bernard's "Beatus est qui scriptura legit" echoes the very beginning of the Psalter, Psalm 1.1-1.2: Beatus vir qui non abiit in Consilio impiorum,

Et in via peccatorum non stetit, Et in cathedra pestilentiae non sedit; Sed in lege Domini voluntas eius, Et in lege eius meditabitur die ac nocte. [Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence. But his will is in the law of the Lord, And on his law he shall meditate day and night. ] We saw, in Clergy's speech in Passus X, how "Beatus vines techyng" is associated by Langland with ecclesiastical reform. In Passus XV, in Anima's speech, it is in turn connected to the right kind of study—with the reform of learning itself. The psalm subtext to Bernard's "Beatus" quotation implies that the only right study is hard meditation on God's law, a judgment Anima confirms a bit later in his address, after a long quotation from pseudo-Chrysostom30 on the pernicious effects of a corrupt clergy on Holy Church: If lewed ledes [men] wiste what J>is latyn menej), And who was myn Auctour, muche wonder me Jjinke]? But if many preest forbeere hir baselardes and hir broches And beere bedes in hir hand and a book vndir hir arme. Sir Iohan and sire Geffrey haj) of siluer a girdel, A baselard or a ballokknyf WÌJD botons ouergilte, Ac a Porthors [breviary] [)at sholde be his Plow, Placebo to sigge— (119-125)

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Anima intimates that his long Latin passage is a test, a gobbet Langland's clerical audience ought to be able to translate, situate in its textual context, and perhaps gloss. Anima implies that the ignorance of priests is destroying ecclesia, and that a remedy to that ignorance might be diligent return to the breviary, that portable book of psalms in which the secular clergy were expected to follow the divine office.31 The association Langland draws in this passage between honest, physical labor and praying the Psalms is closer, and more trenchant, than the analogy in Passus III between spreading dung and hunting with Placebo. Here the breviary is a plow, the Psalms are in fact the means whereby God's half-acre is cultivated. One physical object, a book of psalms, has become another, a tool; reading has become farming. Anima's speech is also sarcastic: today's priests don't know much Latin, but they like to have their tides of respect, and to carry around weapons (which were forbidden), adorned with jewels. The sarcasm, however, is in deadly earnest. These forms of self-indulgence threaten Holy Church herself, and are in part responsible for the honest ignorance of Do-well displayed by Langland's narrator, Will. In a land peopled with good priests, the sort of poem we have in Piers Plowman would not be needed. It is notable, in connection with this last point, that Langland chooses Anima's speech as the opportunity to inscribe his authorship of the poem. When Animafinallyextols prayer, penance, and "parfit charité" ( 148 ), Will amends his earlier wish to command all worldly wisdom to the touchingly simple question, "Where sholde men fynde s wich a frend wij? so fre [generous] an herte?," and goes on to offer Langland's anagram: "I haue lyued in londe," quod I, "my name is longe wille, And fond I neuere ful charité, bifore ne bihynde." ( 151 - 1 5 3 ) When Langland has Will describe his frustration in terms of a cryptic version of his own proper name, he directs our attention to two things: the real authorial frustrations behind thefictivepersonality of his dreamer, and also the sincerity of the dreamer's questioning, which stands in dramatic counterpoint to the mindless unconcern of the clergy, as the poem presents them. Langland's Will may never be represented as meditating hard on the Psalms (he certainly overhears quite a few during the course of his visions), but Langland himself had, and offers up the fruits of his meditations in his poem. His alter ego's ceaseless questioning is a reflex of Langland's own serious attention to the Psalms, that text to which Conscience, Clergy, and

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Anima all direct England's corrupt clergy. When Will asks where charity might be found, and is told by Anima that he is at times a launderer, and washes contrite souls with the penitential psalms, we hear in the calm cadences of the poem Langland's confidence that this kind of humble activity is the key to Holy Church's full reform: wole he som tyme Labouren in a lauendrye wel {je lengjse of a Mile, And yerne into youJ?e and yepeliche [eagerly] seche Pride wìjj al J>e appurtenaunces, and pakken hem togidres, And bouken hem at his breast and beten hem dene, And leggen on longe wij? Laboraui inßemitu meo [Ps 6.7], And wif) warm water at hise eijen wasshen hem after. Thanne he syngejj whan he doj) so, and som tyme wepynge, Cor contritum & humilitatum deus non despides [Ps 50.19]. (186-194) The Psalms are textual, but Langland here makes them actual. In the universe of Piers Plowman, psalms and psalm verses do not merely have the force of ideas, but the palpability of objects; words become things. Psalm phrases can not only be acted on, but acted with. The association between singing and weeping in the passage suggests that Charity is a Davidic figure, a suggestion confirmed with the startling trope whereby a psalm verse (from the very first penitential psalm) becomes a launderer's implement, and another (from the chief penitential psalm) the song with which he accompanies his work. Langland's allegorical reality has become suffused with the Psalmist's moral lessons. Charity's honest labor is the antitype of the negligence of priests, in the same way that Will's incessant questioning is the converse of their blithe disregard for the faithful. Between Passus III and Passus XV, Langland's faith in the Christian utopia might have slipped somewhat. But his willingness to portray the ideal Christian life in psalmic terms has grown stronger and more pointed. Langland's most radical use of the Psalms occurs when he makes his key psalmic figure not a priest, but a humble plowman. In Piers himself, Langland suggests the ethically normative character of psalm speech by having his spiritual hero instinctively identify with and speak it. David's words are thus revealed to be not only one way of speaking, but the best and most virtuous way available to fallen human nature. The preeminent example in the B-text is the famous pardon scene, in Passus VII. Langland

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concentrates attention in the scene on the conflict between the priest, who fails to understand the import of the pardon sent to Piers by Truth, and Piers himself, who responds instinctively and violently to the document. After Piers opens the pardon (the Dreamer reads it over his shoulder), its contents are revealed as enigmatic: "Et qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam eternam; / Qui vero mala in ignem eternum" ("And those who do well shall go on to eternal life; but those who do evil will go into eternal fire"; 1 1 1 1 1 2 ) . A priest tells Piers that this is no pardon at all, but simply do well and have well, do evil and have evil: that is, the priest debases the language of Truth's pardon by translating it casually into vernacular proverb. Piers, by contrast, translates the import of the pardon into aggressive action. In sheer anger he tears up the pardon ("for pure tene pulled it asonder"; 1 1 5 ) , and responds to it and the priest using the language of the Psalms. His first response is in untranslated Latin, the words of Psalm 22.4: "Si ambulauero in medio vmbrae mortis / Non timebo mala quoniam tu mecum es" ("For although I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death I will fear no evils, for you are with me"). In opposition to the priest's sophistical doubting of the pardon, Piers sets a blind declaration of faith, quoted from David's words as if they were his own. But his response does not end here. Immediately after the Latin, Piers states that he will stop sowing and give up hard labor ( "swynke"; 122 ). Instead he intends to plow with his prayers ("Of preieres and of penaunce my plou3 shal ben herafter"; 124), and to weep in penance "whan I sholde werche J50U3 whete breed me faille" (125). 3 2 This last statement is a loose paraphrase of a popular verse from one of the penitential psalms: "Fuerunt michi lacrime mee panes die ac nocte" ("My tears have been my bread day and night"; Ps 41.4). Piers goes on to quote this verse in Latin after his paraphrase of it, underscoring his resolve to give up physical labor for the spiritual industry of prayer and confirming the authority of his statement by identifying it with its source, in the Latin Psalter itself. Langland has structured Piers's response to the priest so that it begins with a direct, untranslated verse from the Latin Psalms (spoken as if it were Piers's own words), proceeds to a loose paraphrase of a related psalm text, and concludes with an untranslated quotation from the psalm just paraphrased, cited formally like a scholastic authority or gloss to his English. Or to put the matter another way, Piers first identifies with the Psalmist so deeply and instinctively that he can speak his words as if they were his own, proceeds to speak in the vernacular in words and imagery derived naturally

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from the Psalms, and concludes by quoting in Latin the psalm he just paraphrased as an authoritative analogy for his own discourse, a Latin footnote to his vernacular psalm speech. Piers's psalmic response to the pardon threatens to erase our easy critical distinctions between scriptural quotation, paraphrase, and citation. Langland's point, following on Conscience's vision of the Christian utopia in Passus III, is that in an ideal community Davidic speech will have become so much a part of everyday ethical discourse that the boundaries between it and the common expressions of men and women will disappear. "Loquentes vobismetipsis in psalmis, et hymnis, et canticis spiritualibus " Paul writes to the Ephesians (5.19), "Speaking amongst yourselves in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs." Everyone in a Christian utopia should speak the language of David as unselfconsciously as Piers does, because that language is the common property of all sinners and penitents. This is the understanding Langland shares with some of Rolle's Lollard revisers, a faith in the essentially communal and ethical nature of Psalm language. This faith justifies the morally prophetic nature of the Lollard revisions to Rolle, as it does Piers's response to the pardon, both of which supersede the ecclesiastically-sanctioned practices of scriptural exposition and glossing that the priest tells Piers he would be capable of, if he were learned: "Were J>ow a preest, Piers," quod he, "JJOW nutest preche whan J>ee liked As diuinour in diuinite, wi|? Dixit insipiens to J)i teme." ( 140-141 ) Piers's subsequent dismissal of the priest as a "lewed lorel," who spends little time reading the Bible, is appropriate but unnecessary: "Dixit insipiens" ( Pss 13. ι and 52.1 ), the fool speaks, convicting himself of ignorance by his failure to recognize the real nature of Truth's pardon. And Beatus vir, Piers himself, suggests the spiritual aridity of those doctors of divinity who know how to quote the Psalms, but not how to live them. As the poem's several editors note, Truth's pardon is really the penultimate verse of the Athanasian Creed, a rhythmic statement of faith that was part of the breviary (recited at prime in the Sarum rite) and the liturgy through the nineteenth century. Most of the creed concerns trinitarian doctrine and the concept of Christ's dual personhood, but the clause sent by Truth to Piers addresses a key element of the moral life: an individual's absolute responsibility for the consequences, in the afterlife, of his just or evil acts. John Alford notes a Wycliffite sermon reference to this verse of the

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creed in connection with the Last Judgment, and quotes Rosemary Woolf's less qualified statement that the verse here in Piers "refers solely and emphatically to the Last Judgment."33 Surely for Langland, however, the significance of the verse must somehow be connected to Piers's strong response to it—in the first instance, his "sheer anger" ("pure tene"), which causes him to tear the pardon, and more important, his subsequent penitential resolve, expressed unabashedly in the language of the Psalter. The Last Judgment is only at issue at this point in Piers inasmuch as it is at issue at any moment in a person's life: all of one's actions, potentially, have long term spiritual consequences. What seems of greater interest to Langland is the nature of the pardon's language (the dreamer's observation that "In two lynes it lay and nojt a lettre moore" draws attention to this), and the language used by Piers in response to it. Piers may respond to the pardon in psalm language not simply because penitential discourse is always appropriate for a fallen creature, but because he recognizes that the language of the pardon he has received is itself related to the Psalms. In fourteenth-century England, the Athanasian Creed was regarded as a psalm—not, of course, as one of David's own poems, but as a metrical expression of doctrine assimilable, like the biblical Canticles and certain hymns, to the Psalter. Daniel Waterland notes of the year 1240, in his Critical History of the Athanasian Creed: In this Age, Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, in his Synodical Constitutions, exhorts his Clergy to make themselves competent Masters of the Psalm called Quicumquevult, and of the greater and smaller Creed (that is Nicene, and Apostolical) that they might be able to instruct their people. From whence we may observe, that at this time the Athanasian Formulary was distinguish'd, here amongst us, from the Creeds properly so called; being named a Psalm, and sometimes a Hymn . . . suitably to the Place it held in the Psalters among the other Hymns, Psalms, and Canticles of the Church.34 Truth's pardon is a test, one that Piers passes brilliantly and that the priest dismally fails. By not recognizing the psalmic character of its text, by not associating it as Piers does with "Beatus vines" teachings in the Book of Psalms, the priest convicts himself of ignorance: he marks himself as one of those ignorant shepherds, who fail to read their breviaries and thus mislead their flocks. It is no coincidence that as Truth's pardon appears, earlier in Passus VII, Will recalls Conscience's discussion of Psalm 14 in connection with meed, in Passus III:

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Men of lawe leest pardoun hadde, leue ]x>u noon oojjer, For the Sauter sauej) hem 1103t, swiche as take 3Ìftes, And nameliche of Innocent3 J>at noon yuel könneJJ: Super innocentent muñera non accipies. (40-43 ) Being able to construe the psalm Dixit insipiens will not save an ignorant priest, any more than the Psalms —or a pardon associated with them textually—will guarantee salvation to those who fail to behave well. The pardon Truth sends Piers is a psalmic text that encourages him to accept full responsibility for his behavior—a text that, lamentably, a priest misconstrues. In an ideal Christian society, as Conscience describes it in Passus III, clerks will stop wasting their time hunting and hawking, and will "hammer away at the Psalms" so relendessly that, as in Piers's case, David's speech will become their own. Everyone, under the care of these ideal clerics, will come to acknowledge the Psalter as their "manual of just action, of Do-well."35 The world of Piers Plowman, however, is finally not ideal — nor is it, at the poem's close, even tending toward utopia. The humble storehouse of wattle and lime that Piers erects in Passus XIX, "J>at hous vnitee, holy chirche on englissh" (328), is almost immediately threatened by Pride and his army. Perhaps as an index to his own sense of spiritual confusion, Langland ceases quoting the Psalms directly, and instead infuses the action of Passus XIX and XX with one of the Psalmist's most pessimistic topoi and one of his most optimistic themes: mankind's soul is under siege, and apparently unable to defend itself; yet in the end, in the figure of Conscience, it pursues a new pilgrimage toward God's truth, now embodied in Piers Plowman himself. After Christ ascends to heaven in Passus XIX of the B-text, and his messenger ("messager"), Grace, is introduced by Conscience, Will sings Veni Creator Spiritus (a hymn traditionally associated with Psalm 50), 36 and Grace goes on to appoint Piers as "my procuratour and my reue" ("my officer and my steward"), in charge of recording the accounts of "redde quod debes": "pay what you owe." Thus the doctrine of restitution, first set out in Passus V, is recalled at the end of the poem. And Piers will also "tilie truj?e" — plow up truth. That is, the ethical base for the doctrine of restitution will be reasserted by Piers's labor, the hard and persistent work of penance. Piers's association with penitential labor, declared by himself in the pardon scene, is realized in Passus XIX in the physical details of Piers's cart:

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Psalm Ideology Grace deuysede A cart highte [called] cristendom to carie home Piers sheues, And gaf hym capíes to his carte, contricion and confession; And made preesthod hayward [fence-keeper] J)e while hymself wente As wide as J>e world is wij> Piers to tilie trujse And J>e lond of bileue, j?e lawe of holy chirche. (329-334)

Prelates are now assistants to the plowman. A humble laborer is the one who turns up integritas by his penance: by his agency truth will be revealed in the world. Piers may, as Stephen Barney has argued, come to represent in Langland's poem a prelatical and preacherly ideal. Even if he does not, however, Barney's point about Langland's double sense of "labor" as a figure holds: Langland is anxious to make clear the relationship between everyday labor and the spiritual labor required to reach Saint Truth. The metaphor of pilgrimage, an excellent and antique image for religious travail, disappears slowly in favor of an image at once more generalized and more particularized, the labors of the various classes of men in their various vocations. Work for the common good in terms of one's own status is paradoxically both an analogue of the work of the spirit on the way to God, and the way itself.37

The priest's demotion to "hayward" is in fact the poet's assigning curates to their proper duty: maintaining spiritual fences that have long ago collapsed, and become too pregnable by wolves and thieves. And while priests stand guard ( itself a form of labor ), Piers will work—more actively—digging up truth. Langland has deftly shifted his reader's attentions from the corrupt clergy to his fictive ideal, an ideal based in the Psalter. At least within the bounds of his fiction, he has established an irreducible biblical foundation for reform. In a corrupt age, Piers will lead Holy Church to virtue as the Psalmist does, by his actions and his words. At the close of Piers Plowman, Holy Church has been infiltrated by Antichrist. But Conscience comes to his senses and resolves to go in search of the penitential laborer Piers, "J>at pryde my3te destruye" (382). Piers, in short, becomes Langland's chief antitype of pride, the true inheritor of the legacy of Christ and his apostles (in this sense, a priest) and the last best hope of ecclesia. As the Wycliffite glossator of MS Bodley 554 records, translating Nicholas of Lyra on Psalm 66 (Deus misereatur nostri ["God have mercy on us"] ) : god is oure erjjetiliere bi aungelis, bi profetis, & bi apostlis; & j^e posdis ben erjDtilieris. (fol. 33 r ). 3 8

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As long as Piers continues to till the earth, he continues the work of God, the apostles, and the prophets. As they set their hands to the plow without looking back, so does he. Unity Holy Church has hope. Barney has shown, in some detail, the late antique and early medieval origins of the figure of plowing as preaching; its earliest postscriptural appearance is in a treatise of St. Eucher (d. 449). From here it was passed on to Rhabanus Maurus, who in his De universo (9th c.) compares the souls or hearts of the faithful tofieldsunder cultivation.39 More important, even before Rhabanus, it appeared in Augustine's Enarmtiones as a gloss to Psalm 8.8, where oxen ("boves") — previously identified by Augustine with angels — are said to be preachers because "by evangelizing the word of God they imitate angels."40 Piers is such a preacher, associated by Langland both with tilling the land and with spreading the word of God. His labor in Langland's poem is at once real andfigurativecultivation, his social duty as an individual and his proselytizing as a representative type. To invoke again Cassiodorus's praise of the Psalmist: like David, Piers preaches both by his example, as a virtuous hard-working individual, and by his words, as a figure who represents something more than the estate of a simple farmer. Langland's plowman is, paradoxically, a literal emblem of the moral authority to be gained from the penitential life. Just as, in Augustine's Enarmtiones, David must be both historical king and figurative type of penance, in Langland's poem, Piers must be both literal plowman and representative type of the virtuous life. And just as Augustine argued that David's example is useful only inasmuch as it is imitated by others, Langland'sfinalclaim is that if his poem is to be useful, its hero's spiritual ideal must be internalized by its audience. Like the Psalmist's, Piers's example must be passionately imitated. Whether Conscience can catch him after the end of Passus XX is uncertain:41 the journey is certainly worth the effort. Even before he disappears from the poem, though, he is Langland's chief personification of the wisdom to be gained from humility—from the meekness of David and of Christ. The author of Piers Plowman would have agreed unequivocally with this psalmic maxim, recorded on the front flyleaf of afifteenth-centurycopy of Rolle's English Psalter (MS Bodley 467) : "Inter sapientes sapientior est qui humilior est."

Afterword

Consider the Psalter—are there no ornaments, no rhythm, no studied cadences, no responsive members, in that divinely beautiful book? And is it not hard to understand? John Henry Newman, "Literature" 1

The late medieval translator John of Trevisa (d. ca. 1402), in one of his prefaces on English translation, imagines a dialogue between a lord and his clerk on the possibility of accurate translation from Latin into the vernacular, and the advisability of translating the Bible into English. At one point in this exchange Dominus, who has rather aggressively asserted the need for English Scripture, draws an analogy between preaching and translation. Vernacular preaching on Scripture, he asserts, is a form of translation, and since it "ys good and neodful," so therefore is written translation. Clericus responds that any written translation that might be bettered ("amended") "som men hyt wolde blame," and Dominus retorts: 3¡f men blamej) f>at is no3t worjjy to be blamed, Jeanne hy buj> [are] to blame. Clerkes knowej) wel ynow jsat no synfol man do]j so wel (sat he ne myjte do bette, nojDer makejj so good a translacyon jsat he ne myjte make a betre. I>arvore Orygenes made twey translacions and Ierom translatede fwyes £>e Sauter. Y desire no translación of {>eus bokes, J>e beste Jjat my3te be, for Jsat were an ydel desyre vor eny man J>at ys now here alyue, bote Ich wolde haue a skylfol translación {3 at myjte be knowe and vnderstonde. 2

After this point, the issue shifts to translations of other kinds of texts, namely "cronyks" or histories. But not before implying some rather heady points about the essential untranslatability of the Psalms themselves. Trevisa's point is twofold. First, translators as expert as Jerome did not succeed in rendering the sense of the Psalter exactly, even after three attempts, because all of sinful man's works are necessarily flawed: Jerome could always have done better. There may, behind this observation, be the witty acknowledgment that in failing as a psalm translator, Jerome paradoxically succeeds at Davidic imitation — at least in imitating David's fall,

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which is a type of mankind's propensity to sin. Jerome's failure as translator, like David's as king, is exemplary; it teaches the valuable lesson that no human is perfect. There is a second, less subtle point to the passage, however. This has to do with the contrast between Dominus's resistance to his "ydel desyre" to have the Psalter translated again and his statement, nevertheless, that he wishes he had ("wolde haue") an adept translation that could be easily read and comprehended. His dilemma is, in a way, like Will's in Passus XIII of Piers Plowman Β, where he implies to Imaginatif that he would leave off versifying if all the books already written about Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best were helpful in defining them. As we have seen, many in the Middle Ages regarded the Psalter as what R. W. Chambers calls "a manual of . . . Do-well," a summary or compendium of the virtuous life. Why doesn't Will go directly to the Psalms for his answers? Why can't Dominus be satisfied with the admittedly imperfect but serviceable versions of Jerome? Middle English writers suffered from an irrepressible impulse to amplify, and (they hoped) thereby to clarify, the meaning of David's divinelyinspired poetry. David's psalm prophecies may, according to Peter Lombard, be uniquely direct. But medieval readers found them frustratingly "murky," to recall the adjective used by the anonymous author of the metrical preface to Rolle's English Psalter, in MS Laud Misc. 286. They required exposition, informed comment, to be properly apprehended. All of the texts I have been discussing—sermons, lyrics, exegesis, polemic—are in one way or another nothing more than glosses on the Psalmist's text, adjuncts to it that struggle both to decode its verbal sense and to turn this sense to moral advantage. Wisdom may have been more directly available to medieval readers in Jerome's Latin versions of the Psalms, but few would have been able to drink from the source. Rather, they had to have David's sentence mediated for them, by the suasive strategies of the often anonymous authors of the texts we have been considering. To invoke the remarks of Dominus in Trevisa's preface, it would be nice to have a "skylfol translación J>at my3t be knowe and vnderstonde." In the absence of one, most medieval readers had to make do with the translations of the Psalms available in short paraphrases, quotations and translations within devotional or homiletic contexts, and—when to hand—glossed vernacular psalters executed by such scholars as Rolle and the Wycliffites, where the anxiety of Davidic influence sometimes registers itself in the form of awkward syntax and diction. It is one of the great paradoxes of the Psalter's nature that the one biblical book regarded as the common property of all the faithful should

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normally be approached only within the confines of texts that assert at every turn the authoritative control of their authors. Even in a prose work like 'The Direccioun of a Mannys Lyfe," where the author's tone is friendly and comforting, the carefully-disposed references to and translations from the Latin Psalter emphasize the writer's control over the text's structure, and thus over the reader's process of psalm apprehension. Until the Renaissance biblical versions, the Psalms could not in any real sense be possessed by most members of the Church, studied by each to his or her personal moral and intellectual advantage. In the Middle Ages, the Psalter was held in trust for most of ecclesia by those in a better position to comprehend and expound it: scholars who had access to, and the ability to use, the Latin commentary tradition. It is poignant when, at the end of the prologue to his English Psalter, Rolle states that he has written so that many who know no Latin may come to some knowledge of it; or when, in their interpolated copies of Rolle, the Wycliffites assert the priority of the Latin text by having it scrupulously corrected and underlined; or when, in certain manuscripts of Maidstone and Brampton, the full Latin text of each psalm being paraphrased is given in letters larger than those used for the vernacular. All of these textual details are indices to a desire to share the directness of Jerome's Latin version, however flawed, with as many readers as possible, to circumvent as much as possible the necessary evil of vernacular translation itself. At the same time, the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in many of these psalmic texts afforded Middle English moralists a strategic rhetorical opportunity, the chance to assert visually, in terms of the mise en page, the process of David's experience becoming the reader's own. Even when, for instance, the tone of some of Maidstone's paraphrases becomes hyperemotional, the vernacular expansion is securely anchored to the Latin original. This is not true, by contrast, in the case of Wyatt's early Renaissance paraphrases: Psalm 32. Beati quorum remissae sunt. O happy are they that have forgiveness got Of their offence, not by their penitence, As by merit, which recompenseth not (Although that yet pardon hath none offence Without the same), but by the goodness Of him that hath perfect intelligence Of heart contrite and cover'th the greatness Of sin within a merciful discharge.3

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Wyatt's paraphrase of Psalm 32 goes on for nearly seventy more lines, not in the flaccid style of bad Lydgate, but in a long series of taut images and meters. The paraphrase becomes, in effect, an independendy impressive poem, tied to its opening Latin tag only distantly. Wyatt is a much better poet than Maidstone, but the structure of his paraphrase breaks free from the symbiosis between Latin original and vernacular translaton that is central to Maidstone's suasive discourse. In Wyatt, the aesthetic has not exacdy eclipsed the ethical. But the ethical force of David himself, as an actual and authorial figure behind his poem, has been obscured by the English poet's skill. This may be why Wyatt begins his paraphrase of the seven penitential psalms with a long dramatic prologue on David's penance, and inserts narrative interludes describing David's contrition between each of the psalm paraphrases. These passages emphasize what is forgotten in the paraphrases proper, the presence of the Psalmist himself.4 It is worth remarking, in connection with Wyatt's paraphrase, that metrical imitations of the Psalter experienced a kind of vogue in the Renaissance, which carried forward many of the exegetical and literary commonplaces about David and his poems developed throughout the Middle Ages. In addition to Wyatt, Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, Sternhold, Milton, and many others worked English variations of David's poems.5 And as in the Middle Ages, many Renaissance religious lyrics were composed that do not quote or paraphrase the Psalter direcdy, but clearly betray its influence, such as Donne's Holy Sonnets and some of the poems from Herbert's The Temple: Come Lord, my head doth burn, my heart is sick, While thou dost ever, ever stay: Thy long deferrings wound me to the quick, My spirit gaspeth night and day. O show thyself to me, Or take me up to thee! How canst thou stay, considering the pace The bloud did make, which thou didst waste?6 Here, much of Herbert's poetic statement can be traced back to psalm topoi: the speaker's characterization of himself as a soul sick from sin and separation from God; the intensity and duration of the spirit's groanings; the crafty argument that, if Christ does not save the soul now, he will have

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wasted the torturous effort of the crucifixion; the rapid tonal shift from command to interrrogation. Like Donne, Herbert found in the Psalms models of how the soul ought to frame its discourse when spealang to or arguing with God. 7 Nor did fascination with David's character and works end with the Renaissance. In the eighteenth century, Christopher Smart composed an expansive poem of praise to David the Psalmist, which is shot through with imagery derived from the Psalter. In a clever turn, Smart offers his poem as a psalm of praise for the Bible's preeminent author of the poetry of praise: His muse, bright angel of his verse, Gives balm for all the thorns that pierce, For all the pangs that rage; He sung of God—the mighty source Of all things, the stupendous force On which all strength depends; From whose right arm, beneath whose eyes, All period, power, and enterprise Commences, reigns, and ends. (97-99; 103-108) 8 Unlike the Latin exegetes, Smart does not merely play down the unfortunate aspects of David's character; he barely mentions them at all: Precious the penitential tear; And precious is the sigh sincere, Acceptable to God: More precious that diviner part Of David, even the Lord's own heart, Great, beautiful, and new. (487-489; 493-495) His David's poetic power is conflated with God's creative force, and is exalted with the same unqualified epithet Smart applies to the entire universe at his poem's close — "Glorious" (506). David, it would seem, is not only God's beloved, but his cocreator. He extends the realm of nature by his adroit verbal craft. Smart's friend and defender, Dr. Johnson, composed personal prayers and meditations that, while in prose, rely heavily on psalmic language and themes. Smart's own poem, however, is an effort to

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unleash again, by way of his own religious enthusiasm, the sheer rhetorical energy of David's poetry. What one misses in the psalmic poetry of writers like Herbert and Smart is any clear sense of the Psalter's importance as a public text, of the social implications of Davidic language. In the Renaissance and eighteenth century, writers who draw on the Psalms for inspiration stress their interiority, their capacity to generate other highly personal poems of penance and praise. According to Rowland Prothero, in his belletristic survey of the significance of David and the Psalter in history, it was the Victorian obsession with moral rectitude and work that recovered the medieval sense of the doubleness of the Psalter: its status as a record of David's private experience and its value as a public guide to devotion and morals. Ruskin in particular, Prothero notes, believed that the first half of the Psalter "sums up all the wisdom of society and of the individual," and that those psalms that take up God's "law" as their theme, such as the fifteen gradual psalms (beginning with Psalm 118 ), are an optimistic social antitype to the sorrowful poetry of David's penitential poems. The Psalms, in short, provide "a compendium of human life," in both its individual and social aspects.9 They are a prayerbook and a guide or manual for living. Perhaps one of the most curious modern survivals of medieval attitudes toward the Psalms, however, appears in the poetry of Thomas Hardy. In 1922, in his eighty-second year, Hardy set out reluctandy to assemble what he had every reason to suppose would be his final volume of poems, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses. Everything about the book has an air of closure, especially the tone of a prose "Apology" that Hardy prefaced to the volume, in which he defends his philosophy of "evolutionary meliorism" and laments the English Church's failure to pursue liturgical reform, specifically by rationalizing the English prayerbook. 10 O n this second point, he explains in a letter of the same year to Lady Grove that he feels strongly that "some form of Established ritual and discipline should be maintained in the interests of morality... some ethical service based on the old liturgy" — a secularized form of the divine office. 11 Throughout his life, Hardy exhibited, even in his most agnostic moments, a disciplined devotion to the Psalter. He copied out bits of the psalms from the Book of Common Prayer while teaching himself how to write poetry, regularly attended evensong at Salisbury Cathedral, and purchased in 1897, for annotation, a pocket Canterbury psalter.12 Thus it is not surprising to find, in Late Lyrics, a poem on reading the psalms, "After Reading Psalms XXXIX., XL., Etc.":

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The poem's theme is the speaker's naive devotion to writing poetry as a religious vocation, a high calling for which he has sacrificed the routine pleasures of youth. The lyric ends in bitterness, however, as the speaker despairs of his talent and doubts whether he was indeed set apart, as one of God's chosen: And at dead of night I call: 'Though to prophets list I, Which hath understood at all? Yea: Quem ekßisti?" [Ps 64.5: "Whom have you chosen?"] (21-24) On its own formal terms, the poem is curious. It is clearly in the tradition of the psalms it quotes, a poem of inquiry and lament addressed to God. Also, it is macaronic, a strange form for a modern poet—a medieval lyric type that rhymes words and lines in two or more languages. Of greater interest is the poem's witty place in Hardy's volume, as the book's penultimate and 150th poem. In his defensive preface to the volume, Hardy derides those critics who have picked over the minutia of his poems, while missing the structure of his achievement, as if it were a cultivated habit in them to scrutinize the tool-marks and be blind to the building, to hearken for the key-creaks and be deaf to the diapason, to judge the landscape by a nocturnal exploration with a flash-lantern.13 If we examine the building rather than the tool-marks, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses takes on a more substantial shape than the rather casual anthology suggested by its title. It may seem a cottage when compared to the "great house" of Jerome's Latin Psalter, but the textual evidence suggests that Hardy assembled the book as a kind of secular psalter, a collection of lyric pieces by one poet in different voices, preoccupied

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with matters of sin, faith, and doubt.14 It is a book of psalms that nears its close, and marks its psalter-like extent, with one of his youthful efforts, dated obscurely to the 1870s, about reading and identifying with the great biblical model for lyric poetry. Thefinal,151st poem in the book is entitled "Surview" (survey), a backward glance by Hardy across this particular volume and his entire poetic career. It is a sad leave-taking from poetry, which concludes with the line, "And my voice ceased talking to me." In "Surview" the Psalms are not an integral part of the lyric text, but appear only as an epigraph, as the poem opens: "Cogitavi vias meas" ("I thought on my ways"; Ps 119.59). As Hardy ends what he expected to be his last volume of verses, he represents his self-analysis as a poet in terms of David's self-scrutiny, admitting his failure to teach the summary lesson of the Scriptures: You taught not that which you set about, Said my own voice talking to me; That thegreatest of things is Charity. (16-18) If in his heart's "arrogancy" ( 5 ) he has failed to imitate the Psalmist's role as prophet of humility and spiritual affection, Hardy has recovered, in the structure of his book and the honesty of the volume's closing self-analysis, what he wrote about in his letter to Lady Grove: a form of verbal "ritual and discipline" of some social use, a model for others' reading and verse composition that reaches back through the Middle Ages to its original model, King David's divine poesy. Like the Psalter, Hardy's lyric pieces—generated over a lifetime and assembled in Late Lyrics only in haphazard chronological sequence—serve two high aesthetic purposes. They chart the moral vagaries of an individual soul, and offer society's collective self a basis for ethical evolution and reform.

Appendix A: ccThe Direccioun of a Manny s Lyfe" Cambridge University Library MS Ff.6.33, fols. 98 v -i i4 r (emended from Trinity College Cambridge MS 0.7.47, fols. 87 r -95 v )

Here begynnyth a litell short tretys of the direccioun of a mannys lyfe, and it conteyneith .vii. chaptres necessary to euery man to vndirstonde that will be the seruaunt of god. Every man and woman that by grace of god is in wille for to plese god and for to be his seruaunt behouyth, for nede, for to kepe hym from his thre gosdy enemyes — that is for to sey, jse flesshe, the worlde, and the feend— the which are besy day and ny3te for to tempte vs and bryng vs in synne and in euyll lyvyng thurwe her manyfolde wyles, and panterys, and snarys that they ordeyn and leyn to cacche cristen soules. And dauid therof beryth wittenesse wher he sayth, Laqueum parauerunt pedibus meis, et incuruauemntanimam meant [Ps 56.7], "|?ei haue dight a snare to my fete & worked my sowie amys." These snaris are the sevyn dedely synnys, and for to breke the ten commaundementis of god, and misspende and mysvse oure .v. wittis, and for to make vs mystrowe the articlis of the feyth and of oure beleve, and such other temptaciouns. Of sich ojser temptacionis, snarys, and disseytis ich man wysely, by the grace of god, must be ware and agayn stand that he fall not to them ne consent wilfully. And than shall thes disseytis and temptaciouns turn hem to mykill mede. Of this spekith god and beryth wittenesse where he sayth in thys maner, Estote fortes in bello et pugnate cum antiquo serpente, et accipietis regnum eternum [cf. 1 Tim 6 - 1 2 and Ap 12.9], "Bee 3e stronge in gostely bateyl," seyth god, "and fy3tith with the olde serpent tho feende, and 3e shall haue euerelastyng blisse." And 3e shall vndirstond that J>e feende temptith vs for to fall in synne be thre maneres. First he temptith vs by suggestion, and that is whan he puttith first steryng of eny synne to mannys sowie and kyndillith it in his thou3t. And that steryng is venial synne and sumtyme no synne, for a man may not lette the sterynge of temptacionis no more than a man may lette the evyll eyer that bloweth aboute with the wynde. And aftir suggestion he

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puttith anone, if he may, the second manere of temptacion. That is clepid delectacioun, when he kyndelith that steryng of synne farthermore and delityth a man therin. And this is also veniali synne if a man be ware therof be tyme and putte it soon awey, and consente not Jjerfor wyth full plesaunce of wyll. The thridde manere of temptacioun is consentyng. That is whann a man thruwe temptacioun of his forseyde enemyes is with a full will and a resonable auisement fully and wilfyully consentyng to synne, and fulfillith it in dede or ellis in ful will to doo it, filone he doo it not. And this is dedly synne. Or ellis if a man consente to fowle lustis of synne with good deliberacioun and full pleasaunce of wyll for to delyte hym in swych fouwle lustis with his herte, thou3e that he will not doo hem in dede, he may note welle excuse hym of dedly synne if he putte not hem awaye, ne myslyke hem not with somm grace of geynstondyng of reson. For if a mannys reson ageynstonde and acorde not fully to temptacioun and such delectaciouns of synne he defowlith not his sowie therwith, as a clerk berith wittnesse, sayng in this manere, "Be it neuere so fowle a thou3t, it defowlyth the sowie noujt, if reson of hert consent not." I>ou3e parauenture he may not put it awey and withstand it anone as his reson wolde, 31t that lityll grucchyng and myslikyng in his will and reson ageyn the steryng of synne kepyth hym fro dedly synne, and somtyme both from dedly and venial, and getyth hym more mede of sowie than he had beforn. This wittenessith wele a clerke, wher he sayth, Si in te agis, agitur, et si non agis mains tibi meritum. For seynt Austin seyth that synne that is so wilfull, if it be not ful wilfull it is no synne: Peccatum adeo est voluntarium. And if a man may not lyjtly putte awey such sterynges and temptacioun, a good remedye ther is than—j?at he thynke of the passion of cryst and of the crosse, and that shall 3eve hym grace to putte awey all manere synne. And a deuoute clerke berith wittenesse, where he sayth, Cruxpellit omne crimen, fugiunt crucetn tenebrae, tali dicata signo mens fluctuare nescit. And also another remedy is for to thynke on his deth and his laste ende. These woll helpe the to putte awey synne. As the wyse man sayth, Memorare nouissima et inetemum nonpeccabis. And also, oure lord god almy3ty tellith vs a remedie that he taujt his discipulis whan he sayd thus, Vigilate et orate, ne intretis in temptacionem [ Mc 14.38], "Waketh" he sayeth, "and sayeth 30ure prayers, that 3e fall not into temptacioun." How a man shall doo pat is in wykkid lyfe. The .iid. chapitre. Bvt nowe thou saist, Howe shall a man doo that is fallyn in grete synne and in wyckid lyfe? To this sayeth god and techith vs what we shuld doo, when he sayd thus, Ite, ostendite vos sacerdotibus [Lc 17.14], "Goo," he sayeth, "and shewith 30ure lyfe to preestys." And therfor, if thou be fall in

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neuere so many horribylle synnes that thou thynkist parauenture f>u were worthy to synke euyn down for synne, ]x>u shalt not fall in dispeyre for no thyng, but goo and be auised in thy self how thou hast synned all aboute and agreuyd god, and forthynke ^at synne that thou hast doon, and than doo shryve the faste and 3erne, and do penauns with al thi hert bi discrecioun, and moorne and wepe for thy synne, and than may thou comme to good lyvyng and be turnyd to god, as he sayeth hymselfe, Conuertitnini ad me in foto corde vespro, in ieiunio etfletu etplanctu [J12.12], "Be 3e turnyd to me," seyeth god, "in all 30ure hert—in fastyng, wepyng, and moornyng for 30ure synne." Perchaunce thou saist, I may no repentaunce haue; thou art so saddid in synne, or ellis ouere mych discomfortist thi self in mystrust of thi self for thy synne, that thi hert thurwe steryng of {je feend wyll no repentaunce take. And to this I say, Forthynke the than and be sory that thou may no repentauns haue, and so by grace thou shalt haue it. Farthermore thou saist or thynkist, I wote neuere whethir I haue repentaunce or I haue nou3t. I say, Thou mayst sone wote, for eyther art thou wele payde that |K)U haste doo synne, or ellis thou art euil payde or sumwhat thou myslikest it. If thou be wele payde in thyn hert, than hast thou no repentauns; and if thou be not wele payde in thyn hert Jjat JXJU hast synned, or myslykist it, than hast {JOU repentaunce. Be it neuer so lityll, holde the payde therwyth and praye god of more, for all suche grace cummyth of hym. Than thus perchauns thou sayst or thynkist in thi hert, I haue do so mykyll synne that I dou3te whether god will forçeue it me, that am so fowle a synner passyng all other or nou3t. I say, 3ea, forsothe, wyll he, for he sayth in his gospel thus, Nolo mortem peccatoris, sed ut conuertatur et viuat [cf. Ez 18.32], "I wylle not," he sayth, "the deth of a synner, but more that he be turned and lyve." Than saist J>u, Whan am I turnyd to god? I sey, Whan JJU repentyst thy euyll lyvyng or shryvist the, or art in wyll to be shrevyn and for to kepe the fro synne, ^ouje thou haue doo neuere so mykill synne, as god almy3ty wittenesith in his gospell where he sayeth and makith noon excepción, Quacumque hornpeccator conuersus fuerit et ingemuerit saluus erit [cf. Ez 18.27]. That is to sey, "What tyme so euere it be that a synner is turnyd, and hath lamentacioun and forthynkyng for his synne, he shall be save." He exceptyth no synne, smal ne grete, ne be there neuere so many. Of this matere spekith dauid in the sawter thus, Dixi confitebor aduersus me iniustitiam meam domino, et tu remisisti impietatem peccati mei [Ps 31.5]. That is to sey, "Lorde I haue sayde in my hert, I shall shryve me, and knowlech agayn myself myn vnry3twisnes and my synne, and thou hast forçevyn me the wyckidnes of my synne." And this wittnessith wele ezechiel the prophete, sayng thus, Si autem

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impius egeritpenitentiam, et cetera. Omnium iniquitatum eius quas operatus est, non recordabor [Ez 18.21-18.22]. That is to say, "If the wickid man," he sayeth, "doo penaunce for all his synnes that he hath done, and kepe my biddyngys and doo ryjtwisnes, he shall lyve and not dye, and god almyjty shall not haue mynde of all his synnes that he hath doon." Ezechiel seyd that thes are goddis own wordys. And Iohel J>e prophete sayeth, in the persone of oure lord, thus, Haec dicit dominus deus, Conuertimini ad dominum deum vestrum, quia benignus et misericors est, paciens et multae misericordiae, et praestabilis super malitia [ J12.13 ]. That is to say, "Sayeth oure lorde god, 'Be 3e turnyd to youre lord god for he is benigne, mercyfull, paciens, and of mych mercy and abydyng vpon malice.' " Thus he saith, and lokith euere whan a synfull man wyll turne hym and amende hym of his lyfe. How a man shall doo that is in wyll to doo wele, and jetefallyth ofte in synne. The .Hide, chapitre. Thanne perchauns thou sayst, I may not kepe me fro synn no while, but all ajen aftir my shryfte. 3it I say, Doo as I sayde before, but be thou neuer the bolder to fall wilfully in synne. And if JJU doo, say to thy sowie as the prophete dauid sayth, thus, Quare tristis es, anima mea? Et quare conturbas me ? Spera in deo, quoniam adhuc confitebor illi [ Ps 41.6 ]. That is to sey, "Why art thou so sory my sowie, and why trowblyst so me." 'Truste and hope in god," he sayth, "for 31t shall I shryve me to hym and amende me." For we are freyle of kynde, and that witnessith wele dauid, where he sayth, Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum, et in peccatis concepii me mater mea [Ps 50.7], "Lo" he sayth, "Lorde I was conceyued in synnes and wickidnessis, and my modyr conceyued me in synnes." As who sayth, I comme of a synfull stok, and therfor it ys lesse wondyr t h o ^ e that I be freyle. Doo thou so, and when thou shryvest the be in full wille no more to synne. For so bade god hym self to the synful woman that was fownde and take in avowtre and brou3t furth be fore god with wykkyd men. And they accused her of hir synne, and sayd to god that the lawe wolde [?at such a woman shulde be stonyd to the deth. And god answeryd mercifully to hem and sayde, Si quis vestrum est sine peccatorum, prius in earn lapidem mittat [Jn 8.7]. That is to sey, "Which of 30we," seyd god, "that is withowtyn synne caste first at hir a stone." And whann they herd that they 3edyn awey for shame of hir owne synnes. Than seyd god to the woman, Mulier, vbi sunt qui te accusabant. Nemo te condempnauit? [Jn 8.10], "Woman" he sayde, "wher are thyn accuseres? N o man hath condemnpned the?" Than sayde the woman, Nemo domine [Jn 8.11], "No man, lorde," she seyde. Then seyd god to hyr thus, Nec ego te condempnabo. Vöde et amplius noli peccare [Jn 8.11], "Ne I shall not

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condempne the woman," seyd god, "Goo and will not synne more". And therfor, if thou by freylte falle ofte in synne, doo as I haue sayde and kepe the bettyr another tyme. And pray god than as dauid dyd, whan he sayde thus, Usquequo domine exaltabitur inimicus meus super me? Respice et exaudí me, domine deus meus [Ps 12.3-4]. That is to sey, "Lorde, howe longe shall myn enemye haue maystrye ouere me? Behold me lord god and here me." And so by a lityl and a lytyl shal thou withstonde synne bettyr and bettyr. Perchaunce thou mayst not shryve the as tyde or at som tyme whan {>ou woldist. Than shuldist thou haue forthynkyng for thy synne, and haue a good purpos for to shryue the and to make amendys as soone as thou mayst goodly. And shryve the to god in the menetyme and thann art thou shryuen afor god, for thy wele purpos and good desyre, so Jjat ]DU shryve the aftirwarde to a preest. But if it were so that thou dyedist sodenly and myjtyst speke with no preest, than thy desyre and good intente (as I sayde before) and repentauns in thy herte suflysith to the for saluacioun of thy sowie, for god acceptyth it for thy desyre and good repentauns. To this berith dauid wittenes, where he sayeth thus, Desiderium pauperum exaudiuit dominus. Preparacionem cordis eorum audiuit auris tua [Ps 9.38], "Oure lorde," he sayeth, "hath herde the purpos of her hertys." Here my3t j?ou se the curtesy of god, that if thou doo thus and haue this wylle of shryfte and forthynkyng, thou3e thou dyed sodenly withoute shryfte J>ou were saue. Oftemptacions: how they shulde be ouercome. Pe .iiiith. chapitre. But thanne whanne the devili seeth by procès of tyme jwu kepist the bettir and bettir fro synne, J>at he may not ouercome the as he wolde, than he will put ajen to the harder temptacionis — as sumtyme by vgly sy3tis in thi siepe for to fere the, and make the to bileve J>at |x>u art forsakyn of god, and for to mystrust thi self. And for this prayeth holy chirch in an ympne to god, and sayth thus, Negrauis sompnus ineat, nee hostis nos surripiat, et cetera. That is to sey, "No grevous siepe fall vpon vs that oure enemy shuld shende vs." And also the fende will sey in happe that fm kan not shryve the of all thy synnes, for J?ou hast forçetyn hem, or thou hast kyueryd thy shryfte and thy synnes and not shrevyn the clerely, and such many other, and make the to suppose of thy self was perchaunce than J)ou art worthy, and for to trouble the vp and downe in thy hert. Loke than wysely by discreción ^at it be so, and amende that J>at nedyth anothir tyme by the discrecioun of thy shryfte fadir, and studye not ouere mykill ther vpon for bryngyng the ouer mykyl in heuynes. And for venial synnes that a man or woman fallith yn allway, the devili syll caste hem in his syjte and say, Thou hast doo so many synnes! Wenyst thou for to be clene? Thou were neuere shryuyn of the thryd party!

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— and make the gredy aferde of sich synnes. And perchauns )ju hast shreuyn the of them for the moste party before. Than may thou say and thynke that ther are many thyngys that fordoon venial synnes — as heryng of messe, the Pater noster, Aue, and the Credo, Confiteor, and blissyng of ych a bisshope, knockyng on the breest, and contricioun principally; holy brede and holy watyr. As dauid sayeth, Asperges me domine y sopo, et mundabor; lauabis me et super niuem delavabor [Ps 50.9], "Lorde," he sayth, "thou shalt sprenkle me with thi holy watyr stycke, and I shall be made clene." And also dedly synnes J>at thou hast forgotyn and woldist be shreven of, and they come to thy mynde, are done awey on the same wyse, and thurwe general shryfte and good contricioun. To this acordith seynt gregory in his moralia, where he sayth thuys, Omnis strepitus prauus obmutescit in bono corde compunccionis. Si dolet, vicia contra nos obmutescunt, et a mente tribulacione doloris attrita. Sicut fumus euanescunt. That is to say, "Ych a sowndyng of wickyd dedys and synnes waxe dumme and dedde in an hert that is of good compunccion. And if an hert made sothfasdy sorye for his synnes, tho synnes waxe dowmm and mowe no more speke a3ens vs, and they vanysshe awey fro the sowie as smoke, brokyn and dissoluyd thurwe tribulacioun of sorwe." Of this matere spekith Alyxaundyr the pope, and sayth, Nichil enim misericordia dei cupit, quemadmodum cor penitentis. That is to sey, "The mercy of god couetyth no thynge so mykyl as the erte of repentaunce." And seint gregory seyth also, Lacrimis nostris conscientiam baptijemus, "Baptise we," he sayth, "and make we clene oure conscience with terys and wepyng of oure yen." And se here also a comfortable worde that dauid seyth for this wepyung and terys, where he sayth thuys, Posuisti lacrimas meas in conspectu tuo sicut et in promissione tua; tunc conuertentur inimici mei retrorsum [Ps 55.9-55.10], "Lorde," seyd dauid, "thou hast put my terys and my wepynges in thy sy3te. And than thurwe thyn owne behest myn enemyes shall be turnyd a bak." And 3ite oure merciful lorde sayth to vs a gladsum worde for to clens oure synnes, and sayth thus, Date elemosinam et ecce omnia munda sunt vobis [Lc 11.41], "3euyth almes," seyth god almyjty, "and loo all thynges are clene for3evyn 30we." Of horde temptacionys, and howe they shall be ouere comme. Pe .vth. chapitre. Ande sumtyme also whan the devyll perceyueth a synfull man that is in full wyll to plese god, and purposith hym sadly to lyve in clene lyfe, and besy for to kepe hym fro synnes, than he will make hym to be of streyte consciens many tymes, and bryng his olde synnes and newe to his mynde for to make hym pensyfe, and put hym in dowte whethir he be clene shryuen of hem or

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nou3t—whan he wotyth wele jsat they are owte of mannys mynde and for3eten—for to distrowble hym and his consciens. And that that is veniali synne, he shall make hym byleve that it is dedly, and for to deme his synnes hymself and so, thurwe his own foly demyng, he shal make thurwe tysyng of the deville a venyall synne to seme dedly many tymes, there it shulde be but venial in sothfastnes. Thanne he shulde put it in goddys dome and in his shryfte faderys, and not deme it hymself. And also the feende woll make a man to thynke thus: Thou haste goo longe and ofiyn tymes vnshryven, and all the good dedys J>at Jxni dedist that tyme thou hast loste. Thou art lyke none othir man. Wenyst thou nowe to plese god and haue mercy? Than thynke ]x>u thus: that thou wilt put it all in goddys dome and in thy shryft fadir, and be rewlyd by discrecioun. And thynke also that god is euere more redy to 3eve mercy to synfull men \>zt are repentaunt, as redy as they will aske it. This wittnessith wele god hymself, where he sayeth, Petite, et dabitur vobis. Pulsate, et aperietur vobis [Mt 7.7.], "Asketh mercy," sayeth god, "and 3e shall haue. Knockyth and it shall be openyd to 30we." This is a grete curtysy of god. Here it semyth wele that he will alway oure hele, and desireth to be as kid—and he woll gladly 3eve. This trust hadde dauid whan he sayde, Quoniam ad te orabo domine. Mane exaudies vocem meam [Ps 5.4], "Lorde," he sayeth, "for I shall pray to the, thou shalt here my voyce." And thou shalt thynke thus and comforte thi self in thy disese. For dauid, whan he thou3te of the mykilness of his synne, he sayd to god thus, Propter nomen tuum, domine, propitiaberispeccato meo; multum est enim [Ps 24.11 ]. That is to say, "Lorde," sayd dauid, "for thy name thou shalt haue mercy of my synne and my wrecchidnes, for it is mykill." But he wolde not dispayre for his synne for no temptacioun, but he hadde alway a good trust in god, in exaumple to vs sayeng to god in this wise, Dominus ittuminacio mea et solus mea, quem timebo? Dominus protector vitae meae, a quo trepidabo? [Ps 26.1 ], "The lorde god," he sayeth, "is my ly3tenyng and myn helth, whom shall I drede? He is the defendoure of my lyfe, for whom shall I qwake?" And in tyme of goddis seruice, and whan a man shulde be occupyed in good occupacioun, J>e feend shall put his synnes in his hert and in his si3te, and sey that he is fowle in synne, he hadde nede to be shryven, or he prayed or dyd ow3te ellis. But this menyth not the feende for that he wolde haue hym dene, but for to trouble his deuocioun and lette his other good occupacionys, that he shulde haue no lyste to doo no good, but for to thynke all wey on his synnes, and make hym to vgge with hymself and to be all wey sory and hevy and rewe hym self of his mete and of hys siepe, and thurwe vnskylfull hevynes to bryng hym to dispeyre or to vnrepentauns, that is the

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most syn that may be forçeven, for it is the synne ajens the holy gost and trouble hym in many a wyse. A remedye a3ens all thes is that a man take noon entent to such temptacionys and thowjtis but put hem awey, and say his prayers, and doo other honest occupaciouns that he hath for to doo, and aftirward be councellid and gouernyd in all such disesis by discreción and corniceli of sum wise man and not aftyr his marryd wytte, and leve not his prayers ne his good dedys, but bere these dysesys paciently as for the love of oure lorde and clensyng of his synnes — and f>at god lovyth. For god sayth hymself, Quos diligo, castigo [Hb 12.63], "Whom I chastyse I love." For Iacobus sayeth thus, Omne gaudium existímatefratresmei, cum in variis temptacionibus incideritis [Jc 1.2], "Hope 3e it all maneer of ioye," he sayth, "my moste dere brethernn, whan 3e are temptyd with dyuers temptacionys." And Bernard super canticum sayeth thus, Necesse est enim vt reniant temptaciones, nequaquam enim quis coronabitur, nisi legitime certauit. Et quomodo certabit, si desit quo pugnet, "Nedefull it is," sayeth seynt Bernarde, "J?at temptacionys comme." "Neuertheless" he sayth, "there shall no man be crownyd but if he fy3te lawefully. And howe shulde he fy3te whan that fayleth that he shulde fy3te with?" Dauid was thuys dysesyd and sayde, Miserere mei domine quoniam infirmus sum. Sana me, domine, quoniam conturbata sunt omnia ossa mea. Et anima mea turbata est valde [Ps 6.3-6.4], "Haue mercy on me lorde," he sayeth, "for I am seke of synne. Hele me lorde, for all my bonys are troublyd and my sowie ys grcdy distrowblyd." But what seyth he more? He sayth, Laudans inuocabo dominum, et ab inimicis meis saluus ero [Ps 17.4]. That is to say, "I lovyng and praysyng my lorde god shall call hym, and I shall be save," he sayeth, "or all myn enemyes." This prouyth dauid sooth, to oure example, where he sayeth in the sawter thus, In tribulacione mea inuocaui dominum, et ad deum meum clamaui; et exaudiuit de templo sancto suo vocem meam [Ps 17.7], "I cryed and callyd" he sayth, "in my tribulacioun to my lorde god, and he hath herde my voys from his holy temple." Doo he thus that is temptyd and dysesyd and he shall be safe, and god shall not forsake hym, but he shall loke to hym and helpe hym whan his wyll ys. And dauid also beryth wittnes thus, Nec auertitfaciem suam a me, et cum clamarem ad eum exaudiuit me [ Ps 21.25 ], "God hath not turnyd awey," he sayth, "his face fro me, but whan I cryede to hym he herde me. That a man shall notgrutche wyth temptacion. Pe .vith. chapitre. And for a man shulde not be ouere saddyd or sory for temptacionys, Iohnn Crisostum sayeth, Qui murmurât contra periculum temptacionis murmurât contra premium probacionis. In nullo enim negocio potest inueniri requies nisi processerit labor. Quanto magis in spiritualibus rebus nisi processent temp-

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tocio, non potest esse probacio, "He that grutchith," he sayth, "of the perell that he seeth in temptacioun, he grutchith a3en the mede of his provyng." "In no nede," he sayeth, "may reste be founde, but if travayle go before." "Myche more than," he sayth, "in spirituali thyng may be no prevyng to godward, but if temptacioun go before." Seynt gregory also sayeth, in his moralia, thus, In bonis cordibus agitaciones illicitae veniunt, sed tum prohibentur plerumque. Qui plus in contemplacione rapitur, contingit ut amplius in temptacionefatigetur, ne his ad quae raptus est extollatur. He sayeth, "In good hertys ofte tymes commyn vnlefull thoughtys, but thanne are they withstonde many tymes." He sayeth, "He that is myche rauysshyd in contemplacioun, hit happyth hym to be more trauelyd and made wery, leste he waxe prowde in the goodnes that he ys 3evyn to." And therfore a man shulde suffyr and praye fast, and haue a goode wylle to god all wey to be his seruaunt, and he shall haue mykyll of his wyll and pes and ese in hert full wele whan tyme best is to hym. For the angellis songyn thus, Gloria in excelsis deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis [Lc 2.14]. That is to sey, "Ioye be to god in heyth above, and pes be to men of good will in erth." And farthermore, haue alwey good hope in god that he woll helpe the in thy dysese, and than thar the lytell drede. For of this hope and truste spekyth the prophete dauid, and sayth graciously thus, Quoniam in me sperauit et lïberabo eum. Protegam eum, quoniam cognouitnomen meum [Ps 90.14], "For he hath hopyd in me" sayth god, "I shall delyuere hym, and I shall defende hym, for he hath knowyn my name." Lette a man than haue this hope and this trust, and kepe hym as mykill as he may fro synne, and J^ouje he may fynde no cumforte of longe tyme, stände he styll in hope and prayer, and aske all wey help of god. And than wyll he helpe hym and be with hym in his disese, thou3e he wot it not. For god sayth thus by dauid to oure example, Clamabit ad me et ego exaudiarn eum, cum ipso sum in tribulacione; eripiam eum, etglorificabo eum [Ps 90.15], "He shall crye to me," seyth god, "and I shall here hym. I am with hym in his tribulacioun, and I shall delyuere hym and make hym ioyfull." Lo here the goodnes and the pyte of oure lorde god on this maner, to be meke and sufferaunte of temptacionys, shall a man by the grace of god come awey fro hem and ouerecomme hem. To this acordyth seynt gregory, where he sayeth thus, Qui appetabit piene vicia vincere, studeat humiliter purgacionis flagella tolerare. He sayeth, "He that couetyth fully to ouerecomme vices, lette hym suffir mekely the dysesis in the turmentyng of purgynge for his synnes." Of this dysese and mekenes spekyth dauid also, Iuxta est dominus bis qui tribulato sunt corde, et humiles spiritu saluabit [ Ps 3 3.19 ]. That ys to sey, "God ys nye and fast by hem J)at are trowblyd and disesyd in hert, and he shall save the meke and pacient of spyrit."

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Howe a man in tyme of temptacioun shall hope and truste in ¿¡ode. The .viith. chapitre. Also in cas that oure lorde sende a man eny tyme or woman esement of temptacionis and dysese, and aftirwarde they comme a3en or ellys he fallyth in synne and wretchidnes, 3ete doo as I sayde the byfore and fle to oure lorde that ys mercifull and meke, and fall downn before hym with a good hope of helpe, and pray hym of that thyng that thou nedyst. For thou wotyst neuere whethir it were bettyr that thy temptacionys ware awey or nou3t. For seynt Powle prayed god that his temptacionys shuld goo awey fro hym, and god seyd vnto hym, Sufficit tibi gracia mea, nam virtus in infirmiate teperficitur [2 Cor 12.9], "My grace," sayd god, "suffysyth vnto the, for vertue ys perfy3tly done in sekenes and dysese." For ofte tymes temptacionis and pryckynge of conscience are nedefull and medefiill for clensyng and purgyng of oure synne, and tokenys of mykill grace aftirwarde. Thyus dyd dauid andfleddeto god in his sowie, whan he sayd, Tu es refugium meum a tribulacione quae circumdedit me, et cetera [Ps 31.7],'Thou art my refute," sayd dauid, "in tribulación and disese." Doo thou thus that art temptyd and dysesyd or dredfull or aferde, and he shall not fayle the. For dauid seyth, Videbunt multi et timebunt et sperabunt in domino [Ps 39.4], "Many folke," sayd dauid, "shal se her wretchidnes, and the shall drede hem self and be a ferde, and then shull they hope in oure lorde." lob sayde also thus, Dies mei transierunt agitaciones meae dissipatele sunt, torquentes cor meum, et cetera. Et rursumpost tenebras spero lucem [Jb 1 7 . 1 1 - 1 7 . 1 2 ] , "My dayes and the ly3tsumnes of herte are passid awey. My thou3tys are spred a brode turmentyng my hert. They haue turnyd the day into the ny3te. And efte sonys aftyr this darknes I hope to haue ly3t." Take thou than this hope, and trust and holde the vndir cristys baner with mynde of his woundis and passion, and ther shalt J>ou fynde reste. As dauid sayde, Et in vmbra alarum tuarum sperabo, donee transeat iniquitas [Ps 56.2], "I shall hope," he sayde, "vndir the shadwe of his wynges tyl my wyckidnes be passid awey." For god ys well plesyd that a man trust in hym. As dauid seyth, Beneplacitum est domino super timentes eum, et in eis qui sperant super misericordia eius [Ps 146.11 ], "God," he sayth, "is wele plesyd with hem Jjat wyll drede hym, and that hope in his mercy". And 3ete he sayeth, Multa flagella peccatoris. Sperantem autem in domino misericordia circumdabit [ Ps 31.10 ], 'There are many chastysyngys of a synner, but mercy shall belappe hym that hopith in oure lorde." As it is sayde before, that mercy and that hope graunte vs he, whose mercy is to all men fre. Amen.

Appendix Β: ccThe Remnant of My Thoughts" Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Bodley 423, fols. i56 v -i6o r

Reliquiae cogitacimis diemfestum agent tibi [Ps 75.11]. Mj good Lord, & merciful fader almighty, whan I wrecche and synner bring sobirly to my mynde, & by inwarde remembraunce bithenke me thorugh Jjy grace how I stonde a dedly creature, and euery day my body drawith towarde J>e erj>e, as a childe by kynde neighith to the moder, than myn herte and my spirites, as they may wel with suche thoughtes, ben in gret trouble and anguisshe— wherfor I may wel say with lob, Cogitaciones meae dissipatae sunt, torquentes cor meum [ Jb 17.11 ], "My thoughtes wasten away, and dissesen gredy myn hert." And so merciful lord to this langour can I haue no comfort, ne gladnes in no creature heuenly ne erthely, tyl I come and resorte, and yeue to {je Jjat art via, "Jx; way" not failyng; Veritas, "the trouthe" not disceyuyng; et vita, and "the lyf" euerlastynge. And fer as muche as thin apostil poule seith, Pater misericordiarum, et deus totius consolacionis, qui consolatur nos in omni tribulatione nostra [ 2 Cor 1.3-4], that thou art "fader of mercyes, and the god of al gladnes the whiche cherist and comfortist vs, in al our tribulacioun." And also philosofres seien, that gladnesse is lengthyng of lyf, therfore to lyue longe, myn hert tellith me that it is best to drawe toward the, that art wijxmte sorwe, verray gladnes, & withouten deth, verray lif. This mynde lorde of verray gladnes and lyf, not oonly is ioyful to me alone {sat abide styl in wrecchidnes of Jjys deedly lyf. But also lord thou sayst, it is to the as a festful day and gret gladnes, whan thy seruauntes ben occupied in holy thoughtes —of whiche thou saist f>ese wordes, by j^e prophete dauid, Reliquiae cogitacionis diem festum agent tibi, "The remenauntes of oure thoughtes shal make to the a ioyful & a festful day." O my lord & my trewe loue, in J>ese wordes I parceyue too thinges: one is in j>e gret haboundance of gentelnesse in the; another is in me gret vnkyndenesse. Thy plenteful gentilnesse is, whan not oonly thou seest alle my thoughtes reioyse the, but "the remenauntes of my thoughtes," Reliquiae cogitacionis etcetera. Allas I wrecche, hou much shuld alle my thoughtes, my wordes, & my werkes

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píese my lord & J>ei were wel gouerned, whan he so curteisly reioicith of my remenauntes. Ayenst j?is large bénignité of my lord, hou often haue I lustily eten and drunken, slepte & waken, spoken & laughen, sported & pleied; and I, as an vnkynde beste, haue neiger yeue to my lord alle my thoughtes, neiger J>e remenauntes of my thoughtes; and—ouer alle jjys — my curteys lord stondith atte J)e dore of my conscience, & in manere beggith of me & askith but remenauntes of my thoughtes, Ecce ego sto ad ostium, et pulso; Apoc .iij. chapitre [Ap 3.20]. Why cometh my benigne lord J)us, to his proude thralle, my maker Jxis to his soget, my maister heuenly to his vnworthy disciples erthely? Why trauailith thus my good lorde to se jje remenauntes of my thoughtes, sithen it owith to me on my bare knees & wij} wepyng eyen to beseche, aske, & hertly to desire of him to haue |je leste croume of his graciouse table, for myn owne profyt & myn owne auaile. But f>us my lord seeth Jsat I am slowe, and feintly Jrenke on him, and perfore he cometh to me, & askith the remenauntes of my thoughtes, wel I wote his leste grace were to me sufficient, and alle my nedes gostly & bodily, and alle my thoughtes, wi¡3 alle her remenauntes, is to him right nought worth. Sauf JJUS lo, I bileue wel, £>at if eny of my thoughtes be to him plesinge, he by his gret power & gentilnesse may encrese it, & make Jserof to me a gret grace, and a sufficient to drawe me £>e more feruendy to his loue. And J^erfor my soule I cannot se, but |>at it is bedst, sijjen j?y lord J>us graciously askith Jjy remenauntes J>at thou yeue him louyngly, not proudly, bothe Jre hool ¡Douâtes and eke J)e remenauntes. Now treuly lorde, I conceyue by thy grace, that though thou aske of me J)e remenauntes, yhit thou askist f)e better parte. For now I se in myself that j?e moost parte of my thou3tes, sithen I coude eny discreción, han rather be corrupte & synful than clene and able for the. For ofte haue I dryue forthe my tyme, whan I neither thoughte on the, ne spake of j^e, ne wroughte for jje, not withstondyng to sture my thoughtes toward the. Thou hast yeue me thy comaundementes that I haue leite recchelesly, thy benefetes {jat I haue resceiued vnreuerendy, Ensample of seyntes |?at I haue not folewyd deuoudy, to thenke on my synnes, {3at I haue vsed wanntounly, the peynes of helle, that I haue deserued folely, and ]?e blysse of heuene that I haue not desired louyngly. And so good lord alle J)ese considred herdy, I can not say, but if I haue had eny gode Jjoujtes, they mowe wel be cleped remenauntes in comparison of my bad thoughtes. And Jjerfor good lord, sith it is so, that I may not ne can not haue no good thought, be it neuere so litel a thought, but if I haue it of J>e, as thou saist thiself, Sine me nichilpotestis facere [Jn 15.5].

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Therfor lorde I knouleche wel, jjat J30U art of my soule bothe the dore and the keye, as thy gospel saith, Ego sum ostium. And holichirche clepith the J>e keye, saieng, O clauis dauid, "O thou Ihesu the keye of dauid." And sithen good lord I am of vnpower, & thou art J>e dore and keye, therfor my swete lord now at this tyme I falle dowun to thy mageste, knowyng that I am not worthy, to lifte vp myn eyen towarde the for the multitude of my synnes; but wit a meke wille I say, Domine labia mea aperies [Ps 50.17], "Lord thou shalt opene my lippes" with Jje keye of thy mercy, and so come in and lete in thiself into myn herte, thy pryue chambre. I pray the Lord, Cor mundum crea in me deus, et spiritum rectum innoua in visceribus meis [Ps 50.12], "Make in me a clene herte god, and renewe in myn inwardes the spirit of Rightwesnesse." And so good lorde, make parfyt in me, that thou hast graffed in me, the verray loue of obedience, the clene kepyng of chastite, & spiritual pouerte for thy sake, that I may saie wijj profite, Petfice βressus meos in semitis tuis [Ps 16.5], "Lorde make my passages parfit in thy waies." One of thy waies lord, was wilful pouerte, as jjy prophete saith by the, Pauper sum ego et in laboribus a iuuentute mea [Ps 87.16], "I am right pore & vsed in labours fro my yonge age." Another way of thyne was louly obedyence, as seynt Poule saith, Christusfoetuspro nobis obediens vsque ad mortem [Phil 2.8], "Crist was obedient vnto the deth," and not to J>e fairest deth, but to the moost shamful and peynful deth, mortem autem crucis, "jje deeth of J>e crosse." Another way was chastite in thoughte, in worde, in dede, hauynge a chaste virgyn to moder, chaste disciples, and chaste doctrine. And for as muche as I haue behote Lord to the, to folewe the in these thre ways, therfor I aske that thou make these thre waies parfit in me, that whan the fende of pride, wratthe, or enuye assaileth me, that I may than withstonde hym WÌJD meke obedience after thy techinge. And whan j^E fende tisith me by desires of worldly couetyse, than sette in me, good lorde, trewe wilful pouerte of herte. And whan he arisith ayenst me by J3e βφε of fleshly heed, within myself or wijxmte forthe, than good lorde, arme thou me WÌ|D thy clene chastite & deuoute thought on the. And whan thou hast made these waies thus stedefast in me, than gode lord I may the wisloker pray to the, and clepe on the. But for as moche as it is perilouse for a febei brayn as I haue, to clymbe to the hyest first, for drede of fallyng in to presumpcion, perfore I dar not sodenly pray to j?yn almyghty, Jje which is appropred to the fader, ne to his highe wisdom, that is appropred to Jse sone. But I dar wel & boldely praye to thy grace, that longith to the holygost. And for J>ere may no power ne wisdom be had wijx>ute the yefte of j?y grace, therfor I

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wrecche come to the holy spirit, clepyng to thy grace, Qui datar es et donum, "The whiche art bothe the yifte and {je yeuere." And I say homly to the Lorde, Veni, "come to me" by ¡?y gentelnesse. And why say I thus to the, for sothe thou art my creator, "my maker" whan I was nought, who may better helpe that is amys, than he that made it first good. Thiself Lord madist my soule right good, & I haue appeired it thorugh my foly, but I can not by my self bringe it ayen to be good, but yf thou helpe. And why, for thou art omnium artifex, "the crafty lorde of alle thynges." And by cause that my dissese and nede is rather on the party of my soule than of my body, and a gosdy thing may best helpe another gostly thyng, perfore I clepe |je spiritus, "a spirit," for J>e comfort of my spirit. And why clepe I the lord thus is, for I wolde that thou shuldest "visite me," visita, not with thy fersnesse & drede, as thou didist the peple of israel as it is writen in Exodi the jex. chapitre hou J)ey were fered & stonyd, but I wolde be visited superna gratia, with thin "hiest grace," that is moost needful to me, J>at is that I may knowe myn owne freel & wrecched lyf, and so to come to verray & trewe contricioun, to loue wepynge, to haue holy confessioun, and to abide in stedfast wille and trewe purpose, and ioye in thi seruice, and so to resceyue thyn hyest grace, that is my sauyour, the sacrament of the Auter, my lord, my loue, my spouse, my comfort, my ioye, and the fader of my faith. And this is the hyest grace f)at I may haue et que tu creasti pectora, "And all the soules that thou hast made," may noon other ioye haue but thys. For whan this lord is wel had, al maner ioye gosdy is had, and whan he failith, than is there noo good thynge had. And in suche a veyn soule is matere of gret heuynesse. Paraclitus diceris, "Thou art cleped a comfortour" and thyn office is to clepe ayen suche soules that han goo astraye from thyn hyest grace by dyuerse synnes, that thei shuld not falle in to the worst synne, the whiche is cleped desperacyoun. In the lord trusted muche dauid the kynge, whan he had synned, that he not falle in to the synne of desperacyon, seieng, Emundabor a delicto máximo [Ps i8.i4],"Ishallbeclensedfromthegrettistsynne."Andthereas ]pe grettest synne hath had maistrie, it were necessary that there shuld come the hyest remedye. And sich remedye is there noon, lord, but thiself, for thou art clepid donum dei altissimi, "the yifte of the hyest god." O and I shuld resceyue a yifte of an erthely kyng, it were gretly to be worshiped. If it were a yifte of an aungel of heuene, it were moor to be worshiped. But the yifte of J)e hyest god, ought ouer al thyng to be moost worshiped, & had in moost deynte, for it is not youe to oo persone, or two or thre oonly, bot to alie persones, and in dyuerse wyses. And therfor dere lorde thou art clepid fons vimis, "O welle of lyf" that spredist thy ryuers to euery cuntre, to euery

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londe, to euery kyngdom, and to euery man as him nedith. As to somme thou yeuest water of gret wysdom & wise counsail yeuyng, as holi chirche syngeth of J>e, Aqua sapiencie potabis Mos dominus, "Oure lord drinketh to hem the water of wisdom." To somme J>u yeuyst the water of graciouse prechyng & techyng. And to this water thou clepist al peple, as ysaie seieth the .lv. chapitre, Omnes sicientes venite ad aquas [Is 55.1], "Alle folkes J?at thirsten gostly comfort, come thay to the waters" of preching of goddis worde. To somme thou yeuest ]?e water of penaunce, as to thine aposdes and manye other seintes. To somme the water of gret deuocyon, as many of thy pryue and tendre louers, that könne not here ne speke of the, by holy contemplacyon and desire, as the prophete dauid seith, Sitiuit anima mea ad deumfontem viuum [Ps 41.3], "My soule hajj thirsted to my lord god the welle of lyf." And this gret desire in thy seruauntes thou turnyst to "a chariteful fire," and so thou art clepid ignis caritas. And thus were thou shewed on penthecoste day to oure blessed lady J>e quene of heuenes, and to J>e Apostles alle in tonges of fyre, in token that thorugh her prechyng, alle good peple of the worlde were warmed be deuocion & charité, in so moche that l?ey wolde al the world had be in that saam grace that they had, al though they had many aduersaries Jjat wijjstode hem & dissesed hem. For it is al day seen, that among clene whete growen yuel wedes, and among fair herbes crepen naddres, snayles, & othre venemous wormes. And so gode lorde, amonge good creatures thou suflrist the angry eddres of proude and envious peple, to dissese the good peple, the snayles of slowe folk, & J>e venemous wormes of lecherouse & glotenouse folke, and J?e wastful wolf of couetouse peple. And why doost thou thus? For sothe, for good folk, seeng |>e meschif of suche synners, shold J>e moor be stured to thankyng of the, that thei neuere filien in suche synnes. Also, that thei shold haue f>e moor pyte of synners and the moor feruendy turne to deuoute preiers for hem. And jjis is J>e charitefulfireof the lord, and to suche hard herted peple thou art spiritualis vnctio, "A gosdy anoyntyng." Gode oynement esith harde bocches, & akinges of bones, and so good lord thiself to hertes that han longe leye in custom of horrible synnes, and ther in haue harded her hertes thorugh shame of tellyng in confessyon, & for drede of penaunce doyng in satisfaccioun, that they felen gredy akyng in conscience, and makith hem fol drye fro {?e swetnes of deuoute prayer in almesdede. And j?is dissese contynueth in hem longe tymes and many yeres, so for sojx: that many be dampned wilfully thorugh presumpcyon of the mercy of god, rather than J>ey wold accuse hemself to her lauful curates. But good lord, ayen suche peynes of synnes, thou art an holsom oynement, for to suche peple thou

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profrist o ¡Der while oyle of foryifnes to hem that wil turne toward the, and grauntist hem grace of gode lyf, and after her decesse, J?e reward of blysse euerlastynge. And yf Jse akche be so gret in conscience, that J>ey wil not turne for ]?is oyle, than thou leyest on jje fretyng corrosyve of the peynes of helle, & jse losse of blisse, & of alle other seintes & of her good workes. And so lord I doute it not, but with these two gosdy oynementes thou bringist perilouse & gret siknesses in to gret eese & parfit helj>e. And so this lechecrafte longith wel to ¡?e lord, for why, Tu septiformis muñere, Dextrae dei tu digitus, "Thou art Jje fynger of J)e right hond of god by a seuenfold yifte." I knouleche wel by example that oute of Jse body cometh an arme, and oute of jse body & arme cometh a fynger, and yet |>e body, arme, and fynger—alle thre maken oo body. By J>e body J>at hath gret strengthe, I lykne the fader. By [>e arme that cometh of j?e body, I likne Jje sone. And thorugh J>e fader & sone, cometh ¡De holigost, that is the fynger. And as J>e body, arme, & finger maken but oo body, so the fader, sone, & holigost—iij persones — maken but oo god & oo lord; & so what euere fynger doth, ¡3e body and |)e arme doth. And Jjerfor blesful holigost, thou art wel cleped jje fynger of Jsi right honde, that is ^e sone crist ihesu, and of god |je fader. And with JDÌS fynger thou seruyst thy louers wij) a seuenfolde seruice, as ysaie rehersith, the seruice of wisdom & vnderstondyng, of counsail & of strengte, pyte, & konnyng, and f>e last with "(se drede of god" seruynge, Timoris domini. And as a good Coke temperith & seseneth discretly alle his metes with salt, and assaieth hem with his fynger, so thyself lord temperest with the fyngre of J>y grace & drede alle thin other yiftes. And as alle other metes ben vnsauory but j^ey be mesured wi£> salt, so al maner wysdom, konnyng, vnderstondyng, pyte, or counceylyng, or strengthe, & alle other good werkis — they ben vnsauory but they ben tempred discretly with J)e drede of god. As Salomon saith, Initium sapientiae timor domini [ Prov 9.10], "The begynnyng of wisdom is the drede of god." And this salt of drede bringith in holynesse. As Dauid saith, Timor domini sanctus [Ps 18.10], 'The drede of god is holy," ffor it bringith folke to holynesse. The fende our enemy waitij) euere night & day to take a way from vs Jjese vij yiftes youen to vs by {3e fynger of grace, by his vij cursed yiftes of J>e vij dedly synnes. But good lord ayenst his cruel malice, Tu rite promissum patris Sermone ditans ¿juttura, "Thou makist ryche oure throtes thorugh {5e behest of thy fader." Experience tellith wel, that oute of the brest cometh J>e throte, and jje mouthe is J>e ende of J>e throte. And he that spekith of ]?e myddes of a thyng, he vnderstondith J)er in bothe endes. Therfor good lord I vnderstonde not elles, but whan oure enemy assailith

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vs to putte vs a syde from Jjy grace, than is it thy wille that we shulde make oure brestes, throtes, & mouthes ryche with holy preiers & deuoute thoughtes on thy peynful passyon & deeth, that made vs ryche from euerlastyng bondage, and so to scomfite the batail offje deuel, the worlde, and Jjeflesshe,by J)e preciouse & riche blood & the water Jjat thou yauest for vs. But yhit good lord, we ben so freel, that we grounde vs not stedfasdy on the tymes of temptacyoun, but we faute, as thyself berist witnesse in thy gospel, Ad tempus credunt & in tempore temptacionis recedunt [Lc 8.13 ], "Atte a tyme we bileue wel, but whan tyme of temptacyons cometh, than we falle of fro f>e worke of good purpos." And therfor ayenst jais defaute of vnstedfastnesse blessed lord holy gost, Accende lumen sensibus, Infunde amorem cordibus, Infirma nostri corporis Virtutefirmansperpetim. In thre parties, lord, stondith oure greuaunce, and J^erfor we aske of the thre souerayn remedyes. Thefirstgreuaunce is in oure bodily wittes, the whiche bringith ofte tymes gret stormes of vnclennesse to the soule, as ben vnleefful heryng, seeng, smellyng, tastyng, & felyng. And these wittes ben contened in the heed. And therfor we pray the, Accende lumen sensibus, "Kendle light in our wittes" from besdy desires, ffor to these wittes the deuel makith sotel sautes & lusty by consentyng to synne. And therfor holy gost, Hostem repellas longius, "Putte a way with thy light, jse derknesse of |x fende." The secounde greuaunce is in oure gostly wittes, the whiche ben troubled by waxing wery & slowe of good & honest thoughtes and werkes. And these wittes ben contened in the herte, and therfor we pray, Infunde amore cordibus, "Putte loue in oure hertes," that we mowe growe de virtute in virtutem, "By vertu to vertu." And ayenst the deuel that is maker of enuye and grucching, Holy goost pacem dones proHmis, "Graunte vs pees hastily," that jDe fende haue noon entre to distourble vs. The thrid greuaunce is in oure owenflesshelyprickyng, and J)is rennyng ouer al the body. And therfor we pray the, Infirma nostri corporis Virtutefirmansperpetim, "Make stedfast J>e likenesse of oure body," for oure enmy besieth him to defoule oure body by consentyng, by dremyng, by touchyng, and other vnclene menes. Wherfor we praie {>e, Ductore sic tepraeuio, Vitemus omne noxium, "Be to vs suche a forleder, that we may be war of al euel" and oonly to take hede to the, for thou art |?e leder in to trewe knowyng. For Per te sciamus dapatrem, "By thy grace we mowe knowe fader of blisse." Noscamus atquefilium, "By the we may knowe the sone," that is, lord of oure redempcioun. Te vtriusque spiritum Credamus omni tempore, "Graunte J?at we may bileue the," for Jse spirit of hem bothe 00 god, 00 lord, & 00 maieste, to whom aungels yeue praisyng WÌJD ioyful syngynge wijjout cessynge: Sanctus pater, sanctusfilius,sane-

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tus spiritus dominus, deus sabaoth. God & lord of the grete ostes in heuene, in erthe, & in helle, with hom alle we may saie, Sit laus patri cumfilio,Sancto simulparaclito, "Praisyng with hert and mouthe, wijj voice & wille, be to fader & J>e soné and also to Jse holy spirit." And whan we haue moost nede, In hora mortis sucturre nobis domine, "In the houre of deth, helpe vs so good lord," then Nobis vt mittat filius carisma sancii spiritus, "Oure alther sauyour ihesu crist sende to vs J>e grace of the holy goost." Amen, Amen.

Notes

Preface ι. To my mind, Geraldine Hodgson's view that Rolle's Psalter is more directly related to the Enarmtiones than to Peter Lombard (who himself draws on Augustine more than any other psalm exegete) has not received the serious critical attention it deserves, and is dismissed unfairly as "dubious" by Nicholas Watson in a footnote to his recent study of Rolle (Richard Rolle and the Invention ofAuthority, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 13 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ], p. 329, n. 13). It is true that Hodgson puts forward her argument in a book burdened by what Watson calls an overly "sentimental" view of Rolle ( The Sanity of Mysticism: A Study ofRichard Rolle [London: Faith Press, 1926], pp. 151-188). But the textual evidence, which I am currendy assembling for publication, is more convincing than Hodgson herself realizes. 2. See Marcia L. Colish, "Psalterium Scholasticorum: Peter Lombard and the Emergence of Scholastic Psalms Exegesis," Speculum 67 (1992): 531-548. 3. On psalmody as a literary process in the postmedieval period, see especially Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, is3s~i60i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Donald Davie, The EighteenthCentury Hymn in England, Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth Century English Literature and Thought 19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 71-86 esp. 4. Edward B. Pusey, trans., The Confessions of Saint Augustine (London: Collier Macmillan, 1961), p. 176. 5. The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 38. 6. On the apocryphal 151st psalm (Pusillus eram), which appears in such prominent medieval psalters as the twelfth-century Canterbury Psalter (Trinity College Cambridge MS R.17.1), see Richard W. Pfaff, "The Tituli, Collects, Canticles, and Creeds," chapter 4 in The Eadmne Psalter: Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Tveìfth-Century Canterbury, ed. by Margaret Gibson, T. A. Heslop, and Richard W. PfafF (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), p. 104, n. 45. 7. Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987), Fragment IX.H, 300-362. All Chaucer quotations are from this edition and are identified parenthetically in the text. 8. Cf. Christopher Hill's remarks on the relationship between biblical metaphors and politics in seventeenth-century England: "A Biblical metaphor is a programme in shorthand. . . . Provided we interpret it correctly, [it] both states a

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problem and provides a programme for solving it" (The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution [London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 1993], p. 1 2 5 ) .

9. See E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans, by Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), ΡΡ- 353-355 esp. 10. Quintilian warns that invention may degenerate into "clever display" ("ingenium") if not ruled by "literary judgment" ("iudicium"), and that judgment is shaped by study of the exemplary writers of the past. See Curtius, European Literature, p. 296. 11. CCSL 123a, pp. 142-143. Cf. Augustine's remarks, in De Doctrina Christiana, on the identity between wisdom and style in the writings of biblical authors: "Ubi eos intellego, non solum nihil eis sapientius, uerum etiam nihil eloquentius mihi uideri potest" ("Where I understand their meaning, not only can nothing seem to me more wise than they are, but indeed, nothing can seem to me more eloquent"; my translation) (ed. Iosephi Martin, CCSL 32 [Turnholt: Brepols, 1962], p. 122). 12. The manuscript has been dated to the mid-fifteenth century. This description is adapted from David Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical Texts (New York: Garland, 1979), pp. 278-279. See alsoF. Falk, Bibelhandschriften und Bibeldrücke in Mainz von achten Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1969), pp. 28-29, andCoraE. Lutz, Schoolmasters ofthe Tenth Century (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977). Margaret Deanesly records that, "in the middle of the Wycliffite controversy, one writer refers to a practice of translating the epistles and gospels in schools, as well as the psalms," although she is uncertain whether the school was a grammar or cathedral theology school. See The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920; rep. 1966), pp. 190-191. 13. Victor Leroquais, Les Psautiers manuscrits latins des bibliothèques publiques de France, 3 vols. (Macon: Protat frères, 1940-41), vol. 1, p. vii. For examples, see pp. vii-ix. 14. See Henry Litdehales, ed., The Prymer or Lay-Folk's Prayer Book, vol. ι, EETS o.s. 105 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1895). 15. Leroquais, Les Psautiers, p. vii, η. s. Systematic study of the Latin Psalter, however, was not reserved for clerics in the Middle Ages. Bede, for instance, tells the story of the seventh-century Irish bishop, Aidan, who instructed both clerics ("adtonsi") and layfolk ("laici") in the Latin Psalms (Historia Ecclesiastica, Book III, chap. 5, ed. and trans, by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969] ). Skeat reports that in medieval England, being able to read a verse from one of the Latin Psalms was sufficient to save a man condemned to be hanged: "the opening words [of Psalm 50] Miserere mei Deus came to be considered the neckverse, par excellence''' (Piers the Plowman and Richard the Redeless, vol. 2 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1886], p. 184, n. 129). 16. One might note, in this connection, that many medieval psalters contain additional Latin prayers modeled directly on the Psalms. See, for examples, Virginia Brown, "Flores Psalmorum and Orationes Psalmodicae in Beneventan Script," Mediaeval Studies 51 ( 1989) : 424-466.

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17. For a good survey of the dispute, see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984; rept. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 43. 18. Deanesly, Lollard Bible, pp. 221-222 esp. 19. Minnis,Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 45-46. 20. Mimesis: The Representation ofReality in Western Literature, trans, by Willard R. Trask (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1957), p. 17. 21. See, respectively, "Discriminations against David's Tragedy in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature" and "Frail Grass and Firm Tree: David as a Model of Repentance in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance," in The David Myth in Western Literature, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1980). 22. Cf. Isidore, Etymologiae, Book VII, sec. 8: " D E PROPHETIS. Quos gentilitas vates appellant, hos nostri prophetas vocant, quasi praefatores, quia porro fantur et de futuris vera praedicunt" ( W. M. Lindsay, ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1 9 1 1 ] , vol. 1). On David's character as a prophet, see James L. Kugel, "David the Prophet," in Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition, ed. by James L. Kugel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 45-55. It is noteworthy that Kugel focuses his attentions on the tradition of David's divine foresight, although early in his essay he acknowledges that David's role as prophet "is not merely an ad hoc Christian invention," but indebted in part to rabbinic regard for him as a sage. 23. Reformist Apocalypticism and "Piers Plowman" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 1 1 2 - 1 1 4 . See also Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 396 and 420 esp., for examples of David as an apocalyptic prophetic figure. 24. ReformistApocalypticism, p. 114. Cf. the start oftheNiw Catholic Encyclopedia entry on prophecy: "The primary sense of prophecy in the Bible is not prediction, but rather the word of a man inspired by God to speak in His name. First and foremost, it was revelation and admonition" (vol. 1 1 , p. 861); and the entry in Vergilius Ferm, εά.,Αη Encyclopedia ofReligion: "The prophets were not forecasters or philosophers, but mystics, preachers, moralists, poets, and men of action who felt themselves to be mouthpieces of Yahweh . . . and instruments of Yahweh's creative purpose in man's historic life" ([New York: Philosophical Library, 1945], p. 614). 25. George Kane and Ε. T. Donaldson, eds., Piers Plowman: The Β Version (London: Athlone Press, 1975), Passus X, line 326. Unless otherwise noted, all Piers Plowman quotations are from this edition and are identified parenthetically in the text. 26. See Paul Gehl, "Mystical Language Models in Monastic Educational Psychology," Journal ofMedieval and Renaissance Studies 14 (1984): 221 ff. Gehl points out that thirteen of the seventy-three chapters of the Regula are devoted to organizing the prayer cycle around the Psalter, and that Benedict seems to have arranged the psalter readings "to provide a certain thematic variety, and therefore to make the effect of the [Psalter's] repetitions gradual" (p. 224). 27. "Biblical Imitatio in the Writings of Richard Rolle," English Literary History 40 (1973): 6.

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28. The phrase is Stanley Fish's, in ir There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 338355 esp. According to Fish, interpretive communities set, consciously or not, the ideological parameters within which particular texts (indeed any verbal phenomena) are received and understood. In the case of late medieval attitudes toward the Psalms, it is clear that many interpretive choices, both on the part of writers and readers, were dictated by what might be called divergent social ideologies — for instance, in Rolle's case, his and his readers' desire to promote the contemplative life, in the case of Rolle's Wycliffite interpreters, their impulse to escalate one particular form of the vita activa, the cause of institutional Church reform. Curiously enough, though, both Rolle and the Wycliffites draw on many of the same psalm commonplaces, suggesting that the Latin exegetical tradition may have exerted more control over discrete psalm interpretations than Fish's approach would allow. On reception theory in general, see Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). An excellent guide to reception theory and history, both literary and political, is Martyn P. Thompson, "Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical Meaning," History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 32 ( 1993) : 248-272. 29. Cassiodorus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979),p. 137. 30. After Babel: Aspects ofLanguage and Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 401. 31. When I use the term "ideology" in this book, I mean it in a neutral sense: "The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture" (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, ed. by William Morris [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980]). Readers will inevitably bring their own attitudes to bear on the politics of Lydgate or the Lollards, as I discuss them in Part III. I describe their conflicting psalm ideologies as objectively as possible, as an instance of the frustrating ambiguity of the Psalter when its verses are applied to specific political circumstances. As Jerome's dispute with Rufinus testifies, the fifteenth century was not the first time the Bible was quoted against itself, in polemical contexts. Nor, as Christopher Hill has documented in his discussions of the English Civil War, would it be the last. See The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, passim. 32. A good summary discussion of the three Latin texts of the Psalter appears in Celia Sisam and Kenneth Sisam, The Salisbury Psalter, Editedfrom Salisbury CathedralMS iso, EETS o.s. 242 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 47-52. 33. For a table of variants, demonstrating that Cassiodorus also had access to the Gallican and Hebrew versions, see P. G. Walsh, trans, and annot., Cassiodorus: Explanation of the Psalms, Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation 53-55 (New York: Paulist Press, i99i),vol. 1 (Pss i - i 5 o ) , p p . 583 ff. 34. See Hope Emily Allen's reference to Everett's unpublished thesis on the English Psalter, in Allen, ed., English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit ofHampole (Gloucester: Allen Sutton, 1988), p. 121. 35. The Sisams explain how "the replacement of the Roman version by the Gallican in English church services, monastic and ordinary, was the result of the

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Benedictine Reform, which drew its inspiration and practice mainly from those Continental countries which had first adopted the Gallican text." At Canterbury, however, use of the Roman version persisted to about 1050 (Salisbury Psalter, pp. 48-49). 36. "In comparison with the Roman, the Gallican text is well defined: so much so that the Benedictine critical text... may be treated for most purposes as the text issued by Jerome" ( Sisam, Salisbury Psalter, p. 51 ).

Chapter ι. David the "Maker" ι. Cassiodorus quotations are from Expositio Psalmorum, ed. by M. Adriaen, CCSL 96-98 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1958). Translations, with slight adaptations, are from P. G. Walsh, trans., Cassiodorus: Explanation of the Psalms, Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation 53-55, ed. by Walter J. Burghardt and Thomas Comerford Lawler (New York: Paulist Press, 1992). All page references appear parenthetically in the text. 2. Oxford, All Souls College MS 24, fols. 86v and 99". The book is a collection of Middle English translations from pseudo-Augustine, the references to David as psalm maker appearing in the last item, "A treatise [sat seynt austen maad to an eerie" (trans, of Dì Salutaribus Documentis/Exhortationes Beati Augustini adJulianum Comitem, PL 40.1047) · For the complete contents of the manuscript, with bibliography, see S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, A Handlist ofManuscripts containing Middle English Prose in Oxford College Libraries, The Index of Middle English Prose 8 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991 ), pp. 1-2. The handwriting in the book may be that of the scribe of Harvard University MS Richardson 36, an interpolated copy of Richard Rolle's English Psalter with comment. 3. The fullest description of the Vespasian David appears in David H. Wright, ed., The Vespasian Psalter, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 14 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), pp. 24-25 and 68-75. Wright argues that the diptych scribe, who is concentrating on his writing, represents the textual transmission of the Psalms, and that the scroll scribe, who is looking at David, represents the Psalms as divinely inspired (p. 69). For the different view I refer to, see Carl Nordenfalk, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Painting: Book Illumination in the British Isles, 600-800 (New York: George Braziller, 1977), p. 95 (Plate 32 facing). In short, the meaning of the twofiguresis disputed. For the Vespasian David's harp as an Anglo-Saxon one, note Nordenfalk's cross-reference to the Durham Cassiodorus and p. 85 in his book (Plate 27 facing). 4. Minnis, Medieval Theory ofAuthorship, p. 6. 5. "Psalmody" means, literally, "psalm-song," or "the action, practice, or art of singing psalms" (OED). By extension, it means any form of psalm recitation, silent or vocal. For psalmody to be genuine, however, the psalmist's acts must embody the principles sung about in psalms. Or, as Augustine might put it, there must be a convergence between what the voice says in prayer, and how the praying individual behaves. 6. Augustine quotations are from Enarrationes in Psalmos, edited by D. Eligius

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Notes to Pages 6 - 1 5

Dekkers and Iohannes Fraipont, CCSL 38-40 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1956). Translations are from Saint Augustin: Expositions of the Book of Psalms, ed. by A. Cleveland Coxe, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979). This is an abridged version of the standard translation by J. Tweed, et al., Expositions on the Book ofPsalms, 6 vols., Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church 24-25, 30, 32, 37, 39 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1847-57). All page references appear parenthetically in the text. 7. For an extended discussion of harp symbolism in the Middle Ages, and for the argument that David's harp came to represent for medieval writers and readers the imposition of divine order on human moral chaos, see Martin van Schaik, The Harp in the Middle Ages: The Symbolism of a Musical Instrument (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992). 8. "Prophetae per excellentiam cum dicitur Propheta sine adjectione proprii nominis intelligitur David, ut cum dicitur Apostolus intelligitur Paulus, et Urbs Roma" (Peter Lombard, Commentarium in Psalmos: Praefatio, PL 191.59). 9. For the translation of the prologue quoted here, see A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. noo-c. 137s: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 105-112. The Latin text is quoted from PL 191.55-62. All other quotations from the Lombard's catena are also from Migne, PL 191.61-1296. Column references appear parenthetically in the text. On Peter Lombard and the development of "scholastic exegesis" of the Psalms, see Marcia L. Colish, "Psalterium Scholasticorum·. Peter Lombard and the Emergence of Scholastic Psalms Exegesis," Speculum 67 (1992): 531-548. Colish discusses the Lombard's key role in transforming monastic attitudes toward the Psalter as an essentially affective text into regard for the book as the basis for "professional" and "systematic" theology (531). My argument concerns the degree to which, in late-medieval England, affective and intellective approaches to the Psalms were combined, as the text became the basis for practical ethical instruction. For the distinction between xhe. parva glassatura or ordinary gloss, and the media glossatura of Gilbert de la Porree and magnaglassatura of Peter Lombard, see R. W. Hunt, The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings ofAlexander Νequam (1157-1217), ed. and rev. by Margaret Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 98. Hunt observes (n. 18), that "Peter Lombard's magnaglassatura is found in twenty-two manuscripts in Oxford, twelve in the Royal collection in the British Library, and eight at Lincoln Cathedral; the corresponding figures for theparvaglossatura are three, one, and nil." 10. Edited by I. Fraipont, CCSL 123a (Turnholt: Brepols, 1955), pp. 142-143· 1 1 . On the later, medieval development of this idea, see Caroline Walker Bynum, "Docere Verbo et Exemplo": An Aspect of Twelfth-Century Spirituality, Harvard Theological Review, Harvard Theological Studies 31 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 12. Henry Bramley, ed., The Psalter, or Psalms of David, with a Translation and Exposition in English by Richard Rolle of Hampole (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), p. 418. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Rolle's English Psalter are to this edition, and are identified parenthetically in the text. 13. Rolle and the Invention of Authority, pp. 223-224 esp. It is significant, in connection with Watson's point, that Rolle wrote a Latin Psalter and commentary as

Notes to Pages 1 6 - 2 2

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well. The English Psalter uses material from the Latin one, but is not a strict translation of it. 14. On Rolle's identification of his own personality with David's, see John Alford, "The Biblical Identity of Richard Rolle," Fourteenth-Century English Mystics Newsletter2/4

(1976): 2 1 - 2 5 .

15. "Duo sunt enim genera doctorum, unum quod instituit exemplis, aliud quod uerbis tantum noscitur admonere peccantes" (Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalmorum, CCSL97, p. 465). 16. For the complete texts, see Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds., The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions madefromthe Latin Vulgate byJohn Wycliffe and his Followers, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1850). All page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 17. "Quem vero Urias, nisi Judaicum populum signât?" {Moralin in lob, Book III, chap. 28; PL 75.626). For a recent politico-theoretical analysis of the deep contradictions in David's character, see Regina M. Schwartz, "Nations and Nationalism: Adultery in the House of David," Critical Inquiry 19.1 (1992): 131-50, p. 1 3 8 esp. 18. Letter 77, in Selea Letters ofSt. Jerome, ed. and trans. F. A. Wright (London: William Heinemann, 1933), p. 318. 19. On the dating of the Enarrationes, see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 74. Brown notes that the first thirty-two enarrationes had been written by A.D. 392, and the work completed by 420. 20. Helmut Gneuss, "A Preliminary List of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1100 " Anglo-Saxon England 9 (1981): 1-60. 21. N. R. Ker, English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, i960), pp. 4-5. Ker lists thirty-four cathedral libraries that had at least one volume of Augustine on the Psalms, although some of these (e.g. a single leaf from St. Augustine's, Canterbury) survive only in fragments. 22. See Paul H. Saenger,^4 Catalogue of the pre-isoo Western Manuscript Books at the Newberry Library (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), for a full description. 23. Sometimes the glossator's marginal citations do not just specify, but clarify attributions in the text, where for instance it refers vaguely to "th'exposicyoun of doctors" (fol. i43 r ), when in fact the reference is specifically to the Enarrationes. It should also be noted that the Enarrationes are cited and quoted from many times in popular late-medieval theological compendia, such as the Speculum Christians, which survives in forty-seven Middle English copies. See Gustaf Hohnstedt, ed., Speculum Christiani: A Middle English Religious Treatise of the 14th Century, EETS o.s. 182 (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). 24. See M. R. James, "Bury St. Edmunds Manuscripts," English Historical Review 4 1 ( 1 9 2 6 ) : 2 5 1 - 2 6 0 , n o s . 1 a n d 2. Part 2, c o v e r i n g Psalms 5 1 - 1 0 0 , is lost.

Parts ι and 3 are now Bodleian Library MSS e Mus. 8 and e Mus. 7, respectively. 25. Fam. XVIII, 3, "To Giovanni Boccaccio, an expression of gratitude for sending Augustine's book on the Psalms of David," in Letters on Familiar Matters:

250

Notes to Pages 2 4 - 3 0

Rerum familiarium libriXVII-XXIV, trans, by Aldo S. Bernardo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 26. For a twelfth-century example of medieval advice on proper Davidic imitation derived directly from the Enarrationes, see John of Salisbury's letter to Barth, Bishop of Exeter (1169), in The Letters of John of Salisbury: Volume Έvo: The Later Letters (1163-1180), ed. W. J. Miller and C. N. L. Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 642-643. 27. Compare Abelard's important discussion of the same point in his ethical treatise, Scito te ipsum (Know Tourselfi (Peter Abelard's Ethics, ed. and trans, by D. E. Luscombe [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971], pp. 20-23). 28. The term "embarrassment" itself is HuttarY See "Frail Grass and Firm Tree: David as a Model of Repentance in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance," in The David Myth in Western Literature, ed. by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1980), p. 42. 29. "Discriminations against David's Tragedy in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature," in The David Myth, p. 32. Cf. this remark from Wojcik's concluding paragraph: "Hope in the coming Messiah predisposed the rabbinical exegetes, as faith in Jesus as Messiah predisposed the early Christian exegetes, to follow Nathan's gaze as the true perspective on the story" (35) — that is, to interpret the Bathsheba story as essentially about prophecy, not human frailty. 30. Ibid., p. 32. 31. Huttar, "Frail Grass and Firm Tree," p. 40. 32. Ibid. 3 3. On pride as the root sin, see Morton Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State College Press, 1952), p. 70, et passim. 34. It is significant that most of Wojcik's Augustine examples are from the De Cintate Dei (esp. Book 8), where the polemical impulse dominates Augustine's discourse, rather than the Enarrationes. Also, Huttar's remarks on Lyra overlook the fact that he sought to remedy the mystical biases of many Psalm commentators by restoring the literal sense of psalm readings. Accordingly, his thoughts on David's motives might be interpreted not as generalizing, but as a means of specifying the literal psychological processes that may have informed David's actions. In other words, Lyra takes David seriously as an individual case, with peculiar motives, before raising him to the status of a type. 35. Line 65. Dante quotations and translations are from The Dipine Comedy, 6 vols., trans, with commentary by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series 80 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). All subsequent line references to the individual volumes are given parenthetically in the text. 36. "Et viliorfiamplus quam factus sum: et ero humilis in oculis meis" ("And I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my eyes") (2 Samuel 6.22). 37. Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the "Comedy" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 276-278.1 read Ms. Barolini's book only after writing this analysis of the Commedia. Our points converge in several respects, with an

Notes to Pages 3 1 - 3 7

251

important exception. I agree with her that Dante seeks to identify himself with David in order to create what she calls "his own humbly superior poetics" (2,78). I disagree, however, with her implicit reduction of poetic questions to an aesthetic level, somehow separate in kind from Dante's moral self-scrutiny as it is reflected in the Comedy. In a poem preoccupied with judgment, one expects the ethical gaze to be directed not only at others but toward the writer's self. This kind of rigorous selfanalysis offered Dante the chance to define a poetic genre (and a poetic) that could accommodate his misgivings about attempting divine poetry. Perhaps, instead of Barolini's description of Dante's poetic as "humbly superior" one would want to describe his psalm poetic as "superior in its humility." The distinction is not merely semantic. In a note, Barolini points out that "Dante deliberately set out, in [her] opinion, to write a poem that would be unclassifiable" (271, n. 88). Moreexacdy, in my opinion, Dante wrote a poem that was at once lyric and narrative: an epic organized around lyric interludes, in effect a three-part sequence of psalms. For a view of Dante and the Psalms less aestheticized than Barolini's, see Robert Hollander, "Dante Theologus-Poeta," Dante Studies 94 (i976):9i-i36. Also, note John Freccero's remark that Dante and Augustine "used scriptural exegesis in order to structure their experience, superimposing (or discovering, they would insist) a biblical pattern of meaning upon their own histories" (Dante: The Poetics of Conversion [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986],p. 13). 38. Barolini, Dante's Poets, p. 278. 39. Purgatorio (Commentary), pp. 206-207. 40. See Boccaccio's comment on how Moses, "impelled b y . . . poetic longing, at dictation of the Holy Ghost, wrote the largest part of the Pentateuch... in heroic verse," in De Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, Book XIV, chap. 8 (Boccaccio on Poetry, trans. Charles G. Osgood [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1930], p. 46). 41. Book IV, chap. 1 1 , CCSL 32, p. 134. Augustine is writing at this point about good and distinguished students ("bonorumque et ingeniorum"), who will delight in the moral substance of a teacher's rhetoric, rather than in its style. But the remark follows on direct advice to teachers: that in their teaching they should emphasize clarity and directness over eloquence ("non curante ilio, qui docet, quanta eloquentia doceat, sed quanta euidentia"; Chapter 9, p. 132), and that they should avoid using any words that do not teach ("Qui ergo docet, uitabit omnia uerba quae non docent"; Chapter 10, p. 13 3 ). The advice would apply, presumably, to poets in their capacity as moral teachers. 42. Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 42. 43. Rolle also refers to "Cassiodore" in his Psalter commentary. See Bramley, The Psalter, p. xvi. This does not, of course, mean that he had access to a full text of Cassiodorus on the Psalms. He might simply have gotten his bits from Peter Lombard. 44. See James O'Donnell, Cassiodorus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 131-176. O'Donnell notes that the only proper way to read the Expositio Psalmorum would be to adopt, first, a monastic devotion to learning the Psalter by heart (176), alas an insurmountable obstacle to most modern scholars. Beryl Smalley best captures the sense of Cassiodorus's instinctive pleasure in the Psalms when she describes how "Cassiodorus expounding the 'letter1 reminds one

2ζ2

Notes to Pages 37-48

of a small child, importantly filling his bucket with water and pouring it out" ( The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964], p. 31). 45. See James Thompson, "Literary Associations of an Anonymous Middle English Paraphrase of Vulgate Psalm 50," Medium Aevum 57 ( 1990) : 38-55. 46. Quoted from Carl Horstman, ed., Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle ofHampole, an English Father ofthe Church and His Followers (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895), vol. ι, pp. 383-392. The same text is quoted by Thompson, "Anonymous Middle English Paraphrase of Vulgate Psalm 50," p. 40. 47. The Psalms, and the penitential psalms in particular, were a popular penance throughout the Middle Ages. For examples, see John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), pp. 30, 36,102 et passim. 48. The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 114. Alter is arguing against a view of the Psalms as "a spontaneous outpouring of feeling expressed with directness and simplicity, almost without the intervention of artifice" ( 112). In the Psalms, emotion and artistic craft, what I call weeping and "making," are as inseparable as David's subjective experience and his literary objectification of it. Alters analysis is concerned with the parallelisms of the Hebrew Psalter in particular. Many of his arguments, however, apply to the Latin Psalms as well, in which Jerome struggled to preserve the original Hebrew parallelisms. On this last point, see M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: A History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 103. 49. On the Psalms and monastic rhetoric, see Paul Gehl, "Mystical Language Models in Monastic Educational Psychology," passim. Note especially Gehl's argument that "psalmic imagery . . . and the practice of psalmody as well, were linguistically self-conscious. Psalm-singing embodied an attitude toward language which is never far below the surface in monastic literature or education, that language is a sacred medium of human participation in the divine plan" (225). 50. This list and these dates are from Laurence Muir, "Translations and Paraphrases of the Bible, and Commentaries," in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, ioso-isoo, ed. by J. Burke Severs (Hamden: Archon Books, 1970), vol. 2, chap. 4, pp. 381-409; bibliography pp. 534-52. 51. Bede compiled a catena from the Psalms (Collectio Psalterii Bedae, ed. I. Fraipont, CCSL 122, pt. 4), and an abbreviated psalter attributed to Jerome survives, in a Middle English translation, in several manuscripts, among them MS Bodley 416, Bodleian MS Hatton 1 1 1 , and Huntington Library MS 501. MS Hatton h i , most of it written pre-1400, is pocketbook size, suggesting that the abbreviated Middle English Psalter might have been used for private devotion. This possibility is extended by the considerable wear-and-tear on the book. 52. These are the paraphrases commonly ascribed to Richard Maidstone and Thomas Brampton, which I discuss in Chapter 4, below. 53. Langland laments, in Piers Plowman B, that priests spend more time hunting and hawking than applying themselves to the Psalms. His vision of a Christian utopia, by contrast, involves intense clerical devotion to the Psalms: "Ech man to pleye with a plow, Pykoise or spade, / Spynne or sprede donge or spille hymself with

Notes to Pages 49-62

25 3

sleujje. / Preestes and persons wijs Placebo to hunte / And dyngen vpon Dauid eche day til eue" (III.309-312). See Chapter 6, below. 54. The Art of Biblical Poetry, p. 144: "Prophetic poetry is . . . very often constructed as a rhetoric of entrapment, whether in the sequence of a few lines or on the larger scale of a whole prophecy." 55. Regulae Pastoralis Liber, Part III, chap. 2, PL 77.53. The translation is from St. Gregory the Great: Pastoral Care, trans, by Henry Davis, Ancient Christian Writers i l (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1950), pp. 94-95. Chapter 2. Imitating

David

ι . Enarrationes in Psalmos, CCSL 38, p. 600. See Chapter 1, above. 2. "I am prevented from including everything by my intention to shun prolixity; on the other hand, I am afraid that if I selected a limited number of points, I may seem to many who are versed in the subject to have omitted more essential matter. Again, the evidence adduced needs to be corroborated by the context of the whole psalm, at least to the extent of showing that there is nothing there to refute it, even if every detail does not support it. Otherwise I might seem to be collecting short excerpts suitable to a chosen theme, using the method of a cento [patchwork], where selections are taken from a long poem not written on the subject in hand, but about something else, something very different. Now to be able to demonstrate this in every psalm, the whole of it has to be explained; and this is no small task, as can be seen from the works of other authors and from my own, in which I have done just this" (City of God, Book XVII, chap. 15, trans, by Henry Bettenson [London: Penguin Books, 1984], p. 745). Augustine refers to his own Enarrationes as an example of individual psalm verses expounded in context. 3. Mirk's Festial: A Collection ofHomilies byJohannesMirkus (JohnMirk), ed. by Theodor Erbe, EETS o.s. 96 ( 1905), p. 76. 4. By contrast, see Abelard's discussion, in Scito te ipsum, of the extent to which David's simple humility before Nathan actually performed a large amount ("magna pars") of the required satisfaction for his sins {Abelard's Ethics, pp. 98-99). 5. In Septem Psalmos Poenitentiales Expositio, PL 79.549-658. Column numbers appear parenthetically in the text. For the correct attribution, see Pierre Glorieux, Pour Revaloriser Migne: Tables Rectificatives (Lille: Facultés Catholiques, 1952), p. 47. For the arguments concerning Eribert's authorship, see Angelo Mercati, Saggi di Storia e Letteratura, voi. 1 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, I 9 5 i ) , p p - 45-54-

6. PL 75-555· 7. Ibid., column 603. 8. For the full text, see Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, ed., "The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems," in George Philip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, gen. eds., The AngloSaxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition, vol. 6 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), pp. 88-94. 9. For a useful discussion of the pictures in this manuscript, see Ralph Hanna, "Sir Thomas Berkeley and His Patronage" Speculum 64 ( 1989) : 885 esp.

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Notes to Pages 6 5 - 7 4

10. On this series of pictures, see Günther Haseloff, Die Psalterillustration im 13. Jahrhundert (Kiel, 1938), pp. 31, 88-89. For a full description of the pictures, see Francis Wormald and Phyllis M. Giles, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Additional Illuminated Manuscripts in the Fitzmlliam Museum, Acquired between 189s and 1979 (Excluding the McClean Collection) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. ι, pp. 280-284. 1 1 . Enarrationes in Psalmos, CCSL 38, pp. 599-600. See below. 12. See, esp., the prologue to his meditation, PL 79.549-552. 13. Commentary on Saint Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, by St. Thomas Aquinas, trans, and intro. by Matthew L. Lamb (Albany: Magi Books, 1966), pp. 214-215. For the Latin text, see Super Epístolas S. Pauli Lectura, ed. P. R. Cai ( Rome: Marietti, 1953), vol. 2, pp. 72-73· 14. See Pierre Salmon, ed., Les "Tituli Psalmorum"des manuscrits latins, Collectanea Biblica Latina 12 (Rome: Vatican City, 1959), which identifies six different series of Christian tituli and associates these with St. Columba, St. Augustine of Canterbury, St. Jerome, Eusebius of Caesarea, Origen, and Cassiodorus. See also Patrick P. O'Neill, "Latin Learning at Winchester in the Early Eleventh Century: The Evidence of the Lambeth Psalter,'"Anglo-Saxon England 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 155. 15. Lyra's interpretive project, based in rabbinic as well as Christian exegesis, was to undo the damage of excessive "mystical" interpretations of the Scriptures, by reconcentrating attention on the literal sense of the Bible. In the second prologue to his literal postili on the entire Bible, Lyra observes that "the literal sense of the text has been much obscured because of the manner of expounding the text commonly handed down by others. Although they have said much that is good, yet they have been inadequate in their treatment of the literal sense, and have so multiplied the number of mystical senses that the literal sense is in some part cut off and suffocated among so many mystical senses." Lyra especially criticizes the practice of quoting bits of Scripture out of context ("chopp[ing] up the text into so many small parts"; cf. Augustine on unto in the City of God), and the free concordance of these bits and pieces. He concedes, however, that some of Scripture's literal sense has been obscured "partly through the fault of scribes who, misled by similarities between letters, have in many places written something which differs from the true reading of the text." By the literal sense, Lyra means those senses (plural) consistent with the author's intentions. As he states in the general prologue to his literal postili, the Bible "has this special quality, that one text (litera) has several senses (sensus)" — the literal, the allegorical, the tropologica! (or moral), and the anagogical (or eschatological). Thus, to speak of the "goostly" or tropological significance of a psalm verse is simply to address another of its literal levels of meaning. On Lyra's interpretive practices, and for these translations, see Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, pp. 266-276. The intensity of Lyra's attention to the literal meaning of Scripture was felt by counter-reformers to have been the impulse behind Luther's Protestantism, as evidenced from this famous couplet, which plays both on Lyra's name and traditional Davidic iconography: "Si Lyra non lyrasset, / Lutherus non saltasset" (A. Vacant, gen. ed., Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique [Paris: Letouzey etAnè, 1903-1950], vol. 1 1 , p. 1420).

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16. The compiler was also interested in convergences of meaning between different commentaries. For instance, his long gloss to Psalm 40.1 (Beatus qui intelligit) concludes: "Lire here & Austyn here in sentence [in agreement]" (fol. 22r). Another gloss, to Psalm 31 (Beati quorum remissae), ends with the attribution: "Cassiodore here, & J)e comyn glos here" (fol. I4V), suggesting that the compiler might have been, at least some of the time, concording separate commentaries, rather than working from a catena. Chapter 3. David as a Model of Compunction ι. This is the phrase used by the anonymous author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, a propagandist tract written for Henry V (ed. and trans, by F. Taylor and J. S. Rosiceli [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1 9 7 5 ] , p. 1 1 0 ) . See Chapter 4, below. 2. A good introduction to types of prose texts appears in W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955)) chapter 10, "Religious and Moral Treatises in the Vernacular," pp. 220-243. The religious lyrics have been much less systematically studied, the best work still being Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). It is worth noting that in many tables of contents to Middle English religious miscellanies, lyrics are also referred to as "treatises," after Latin tractatus, evidendy to associate them with the discursive and argumentative modes of prose texts. The standard guide to less canonical Middle English religious prose writings is P. S. Jolliffe, A Checklist of Middle English Prose Writings cf Spiritual Guidance (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), which groups materials according to subject. On the circulation of texts, the most informative work is A. I. Doyle, A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the 14th, isth, and Early 16th Centuries with Special Consideration ofthe Part of the Clergy Therein (unpublished Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 2 3 0 1 - 2 3 0 2 ) . In the fourteenth andfifteenthcenturies, it was common, as Jolliffe and Doyle both observe, for materials written for religious to pass into lay hands, and for materials commissioned by pious layfolk to be used among the clergy. On the Wheadey manuscript, see the introduction to Mabel Day, ed., The Wheatley Manuscript: A Collection of Middle English Verse and Prose Contained in a MS. Now in the British Museum Add. MSS. 39S74, EETS o.s. 155 ( 1921 ). 3. For some examples of the devout routines of pious layfolk at the end of the Middle Ages, see Pantin, English Church, pp. 2 5 3 - 2 5 6 . It is impressive, given their daily secular responsibilities, just how much of an organized prayer life many latemedieval laypersons maintained. 4. On the increasingly private nature of reading in the later Middle Ages, see Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers and Writers, 13S0-1400 ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), esp. pp. 2 7 5 - 2 7 6 . 5. See especially Moralia in lob, PL 7 6 . 2 7 5 - 2 7 7 and 76.291-292. Gregory explains how compunction moves through four stages: the soul's sense of overwhelming shame, its acceptance of punishment, its recognition of the persistence of temptation in this life, andfinally,its longing for heaven. The stages proceed from

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Notes to Pages 85-88

"compunctio per timorem" through "compunctio per amorem," the intellectual component becoming greater toward the end of the process, as the enlightened soul is able to distinguish more clearly than before between the badness of this life and the superior attractions of the next. 6. Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin Marty (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 109. 7. For the references to Gregory's several discussions of the two streams, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans, by Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), p. 39, notes 26 and 27. 8. PL 191.319. 9. On the necessity of confessing to a priest, see Thomas N. Tender, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp· 57-70. 10. PL 191.317. 11. Leclercq, Love ofLearning and the Desirefor God, p. 3 8. 12. "Et nota, quod ait, rigabo, cum supradixit, lavabo. Amplius enim est rigare quam lavare, quo potest aliquid in superficie lavali, rigatio vero ad interiora pertinet. Per quod significat fletum usque ad cordis intima permanare" (PL 191.107). 13. The Latin text is quoted from PL 184.1199-1306. Column references are given parenthetically in the text. For the attribution to Thomas of Froidmont, see P. Glorieux, Pour Revaloriser Migne: Tables Rectificatives, p. 74. For a general discussion of the medieval theory of compunction, with reference to Middle English literature, see Sandra McEntire, The Doctrine of Compunction in Medieval England: Holy Tears (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), p. 64. McEntire discusses the Liber, but does not refer at all to the Middle English translation, which is as yet unedited. Moreover, although she refers to the Psalms preliminarily in her discussion of compunction (pp. 23-24), she does not address how central the Psalms and psalm commentaries are to the doctrine, as it appears in Middle English writings. In fact, she never mentions David as a prominent model of compunction, although her remark that Cassiodorus's Expositio Psalmorum "contains several references to both tears and compunction" might be taken broadly to imply this point. 14. MS Bodleian Library Laud Misc. 517 is the only identified copy of the translation. The text begins: "A deuoute tretes of holy saynt Bernard drawne oute of latyn in to english, callid the manere of good lyuynge, which he sent vnto his own Suster. Wherin is conteyned the Summe of euery vertue necessary vnto cristis religion and holy conuersacion" (fol. i r ). This remark hardly suggests, however, that the Liber would be inadvisable reading for a pious lay person. Indeed, copies of Richard Rolle's Form ofLiving, written originally for the recluse Margaret Kirkeby, circulated widely among religious and layfolk alike. For a complete list and description of Form of Living manuscripts, with notes on provenance, see S. J. OgilvieThomson, ed .,RichardRolle: Prose and Verse, EETS o.s. 293 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. xxxvi-xliv. On the mixed life, see S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, ed., Walter Hilton's "Mixed Life" EditedfromLambeth Palace MS 472, Salzburg Studies in English Literature 92:15 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1986). 15. JollifFe, Checklist, G.19 and J.4.

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16. The manuscript was copied ca. 1500 by William Darker of Sheen. See H. O. Coxe, comp., Bodleian Library Quarto Catalogues II: LaudianManuscnpts, reprint of 1858-1885 ed., with corrections and additions by R. W. Hunt (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1973), p· 374-

17. PL 184.1274-1276. 18. On the central place of lectio divina, or sacred reading, in medieval spirituality, see Smalley, Study of the Bible in the Middle Âges, p. 29. 19. English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle de Hampole, ed. by George G. Perry, EETS o.s. 20 (London: N. Trübner, 1866), p. 40. 20. The chapter tide in the Middle English translation is more expansive than in the original Latin, and emphasizes two aspects of psalmody: that it must be sincere, and that illiterate layfolk may come to compunction by hearing the devout psalmody of religious: "The .lij. exhortacioun sheweth howe J>at oure mynde & voyce when we synge in {se quere [choir] shuld agree togyder, and Jjat often tymes the laye peple herynge psalmodie & ojser seruice deuoutly songe, be compuncte for theyr synnes" (fol. 123'; in red). 21. SeeMinnis,Medieval Theory ofAuthorship, pp. 119-130. 22. The chapter headings in the Middle English translation point up its more earnest and admonishing tone: e.g., "The .xth. exhortacioun ys of ]>e vertue and profytte of compunccioun or contricioun, & how many wayes a persoun oujte to be compuncte or sorye" (fol. 30v; in red). In later Middle English, the terms "compunction" and "contrition" were often confused, although the first strictly denotes the sudden, piercing apprehension of one's sinfulness, and the second the subsequent rubbing or grinding together of the facts of one's moral situation (from Latin conterere), in careful self-examination. 23. The author probably puns on the two senses of the verb, a verbal effect not possible in the Latin text. See OED, lighten v.i and v.2. 24. Unless noted otherwise, Piers quotations are from George Kane and E. T. Donaldson, eds., Piers Plowman: The Β Version (London: Athlone Press, 1975). All references appear parenthetically in the text. 25. "What then are the waters of Babylon? and what is our sitting and weeping in remembrance of Sion? For if we be citizens of Sion, we not only chant this, but do it. If we are citizens of Jerusalem, that is Sion, and in this life, in the confusion of this world, in this Babylon, do not dwell as citizens but are detained as captives, it befits us not only to chant these things, but to do them, with affectionate regard, with religious longing for our everlasting city" (enarratio on Psalm 136). Augustine, typically, insists on the absolute literality of the Psalmist's statements, directing his audience away from patterns of behavior that might imply that David speaks merely metaphorically. 26. The division between biblical text and gloss was not firm in late medieval translation, in part because the gloss (ideally understood) was an exposition or clarification of the literal sense of the text. Many readings in the later Wycliffite version of the Bible, for instance, were colored by Nicholas of Lyra's Postilla on the Bible's literal sense. See E F. Bruce, The English Bible: A History of Translations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 18-20, for examples, derived from Henry Hargreaves, "The Latin Text of Purveys Psalter,"Medium Aemm 24 (1955), pp. 73

258

Notes to Pages 9 5 - 1 0 5

ff. For examples of gloss to text assimilation in the West Midlands prose Psalter, see David C. Fowler, The Bible in Early English Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), pp. 142-143. 27. The Abbey is quoted from Carl Horstman's edition, in Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle ofHampole, an English Father of the Church and His Followers ( London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895 ), vol. 1. The page reference appears parenthetically in the text. For a complete list oí Abbey manuscripts, see Jolliffe, Checklist, H.9 and H.16. Horstman's edition is from MS Lincoln Cathedral Library A.1.17, the so-called Thornton Manuscript, where tht Abbey is copied along with Walter Hilton's treatise on the mixed life and short works by Rolle relevant to the concerns of those outside the cloister. 28. Oxford, Latin Dictionary, vol. 5, ed. by P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). 29. Bramley, The Psalter, p. 23. 30. In Bodleian MS Douce 141, the text of the Abbey is followed immediately by Maidstone's paraphrase of the Miserere, suggesting that this copy of the Abbey may have been intended as a preparation for reading David's archetypal statement of contrition. The Miserere certainly fits with the end of the prose treatise, where its author prays that his readers "sail be delyuerde thurgh ]pe mercy of oure lord Ihesu Criste." Having read The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, the reader would be ready to turn within, and to express his sorrow at his own sinfulness to God. The scribe attempted to give Psalm 50 textual autonomy: the Abbey ends at the bottom of fol. 145', where the scribe had space for only two lines of the Miserere. He copies these, but then cancels them, rewriting them at the top of the verso and finishing the text of the psalm. His original impulse, however, or the impulse registered in his exemplar, was to keep the end of the Abbey and the beginning of Psalm 50 together. 31. On the significance of the Song of Songs in medieval spirituality, see E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), and Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 32. See, in this context, this passage from Thomas's chapter "De timore Dei," as translated in MS Laud Misc. 517: "He J>at hath perfite charité in hym, doeth not feere to be ponysshed in helle, but hopyth to ioye in heuen wit almyjty god. Therfor seyth the psalmiste, All they J>at loue the & thy name, shal be gloryous in the.' Then feer ys not in charité, but radere perfitte charité puttyth it aweye" (fol. 1 ι Γ ). 33. H. B. Workman,John Wyclif(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), vol. 2, p. 176. 34. Bramley, The Psalter, p. 4. 35. It is, however, worth noting that in another psalm in which David refers to taking refuge under the shadow of God's wings, he also calls Him his "tower of strength" in the face of his enemy ("turris fortitudinis a facie inimici"; Ps 60.4). In psalm discourse, there is no inconsistency between using martial and maternal imagery within the space of a few verses. 36. The translation is lacking in the University Library manuscript, and is provided here from the Trinity copy. 37. Cf. Walter Hilton's comment in his exposition of Psalm 90 (Qui Habitat) :

Notes to Pages 1 0 6 - 1 1 7

259

"jse schuldres of vr lord ar merci and so£>fastnes, vnder J>e wjuche he wol al byschadewe f)e. And jjat is mercifulliche forçiuynde f)e {>i synnes and so|?fastlich 3euynge f>e grace of vertues, kepynge f>e saueliche from J)in enemys as j>e hen kepejj hire briddes vnder schadewyng of hire whinges from takyng of £>e kuite" (An Exposition of "Qui Habitat" and "Bonum Est" in English, Lund Studies in English 23, ed. by Björn Wallner [Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1954], p. 10). In Cambridge University Library MS Dd.I.i, a devotional miscellany, Hilton's Qui Habitat follows immediately on a copy of Maidstone's paraphrase of the Miserere, suggesting the close relationship that existed in the later Middle Ages between the devotional reading of scriptural texts and the intellectual pursuit of their meanings. 38. See "The Sick Soul" in Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures 6 and 7, passim. 39. The references are Psalms 2.13, 7.2,13.6,15.1, 30.2, 31.7,45.2, 56.2, 60.4, 70.1 and 70.7, 72.28,90.2,118.8, and 141.4. 40. Cambridge University Library MS 11.6.39(1), fol. 129'. 41. "Ysope is a medicynall erbe, whos rote drawis nere the stone, & it purges the longes [lungs] of inflacioun, & clenses the breste fro stoppyng [congestion] of ill humores, & it betokyns mekenes. Whorwith who so is strenkild in penaunce, it purges him fro bolnynge [swelling up] of pride & makis him buxsum & lawe to god, & clens his hert of all synnes, that before stoppid grace fro the saule" ( Bramley, The Psalter, p. 18s). 42. See asperges in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. by Charles Herbermann, et al. (New York: Appleton, 1907), vol. 1. 43. The other two copies are in Harvard University, Houghton Library MS Richardson 22 (acaudal) and British Library MS Arundel 197. See Linda Ehrsam Voigts, comp., "A Handlist of Middle English in Harvard Manuscripts," Harvard Library Bulletin 33 (198$), p. 60. 44. For a list of manuscripts see JollifFe, Checklist, sec. C. 45. The reference to the triple vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience indicates that "The Remnant of My Thoughts" was originally conceived as a meditation for those in religion. However, a later exposition in the meditation of Isaiah 55.1 ("Omnes sitientes, venite ad aquas") possibly implies a more general audience, including layfolk: "Alle folkes f)at thirsten gostly comfort, come thay to the waters of preching of goddis worde. To somme thou yeuest f>e water of penaunce, as to thine aposdes, and manye other seintes; to somme the water of gret deuocyon, as many of thy pryue and tendre louers, that könne not here ne speke of the, by holy contemplacyon and desire" (fol. 159e). On David as a model for contemplative experience, see Allen, ed., English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988), pp. 121-129, and Geraldine E. Hodgson, English Mystics (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1922), p. 9. 46. For a long example of a Middle English meditation that uses the opening of the first verse of Psalm 50—"Miserere mei deus"—in this way, see Horstman, Yorkshire Writers, vol. 2, pp. 377-380. The meditation has the tide Meditado Sancii Augustini in MS Harley 1706, due to the heavy influence it shows from Augustine's enarratio on Psalm 50. It was once, probably because of its rhythmic prose, wrongly attributed to Rolle.

26ο

Notes to Pages 1 1 8 - 1 2 4

47. Carleton Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 85, no. 55.

Chapter 4. The Psalms as Modelsfor Middle English Poetry ι. The statement is cited in Speculum Christiania a highly popular Middle English compilation of authoritative statements by the Fathers and such respected pagan philosophers as Seneca; forty-seven manuscripts survive. It continues, "secularis sapiencie vanitas, rhetoricorum pompa verborum," and is translated as follows: "Mete of deuyle is songe and curiose dittys and derk makynge of poetes. Idem·. Pompe of rethorike wordes is vanite of worldly wysdam" ( Speculum Christiani: A Middle English Religious Treatise of the 14th Century, ed. by Gustaf Hohnstedt, EETS o.s. 182 [London: Oxford University Press, 1933], pp. 230-231). This judgment against poets and their rhetoric is effectively reversed in a comment on the Psalms once attributed to Augustine, and translated by Rolle at the start of his English Psalter prologue: "I>e sange of psalmes chaces fendes, excites aungels tille oure help, it dose oway synne, it qwemes [pleases] God, it enfourmes parfitnes, it dose oway and destroys noy and angere of saule and makes pees bytwix body and saule, it bringes desire of heuen and despite of erthly thinge" (Bramley, The Psalter, p. 6; the Latin text, In Librum Psalmorum Prologus, is in PL 36.63-64). 2. "Poets and the Poetics of Sin," The Morton W. Bloomfield Lectures on Medieval English Literature 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 3. De Genealogia Deorum, p. 76 (the title of the chapter is 'The Reading of Poets Conduces to Righteousness"). 4. Ethopoeia (from the Greek word meaning "a representation of manners" [OED] ) is the trope, known to the medievale from antique grammars, whereby a writer deliberately constructs afictivefirst-personvoice in a literary text. See E. G. Stanley, "Poetic Diction and the Interpretation of 'The Wanderer", The Seafarer,' and The Penitent's Prayer,' "Anglia 73 (1955) :4i 3-466. 5. English Metrical Psalms, p. 15. The practice of imitation, in other words, does not necessarily imply imaginative constraint, but simply a different kind of imaginative freedom in invention. 6. Ibid., p. 15. 7. On the representativefirst-personin medieval discourse, see Leo Spitzer, "Note on the Poetic and the Empirical 'Ρ in Medieval Authors," Traditio 4 ( 1943) : "the medieval public saw in the 'poetic I' a representative of mankind, . . . it was interested only in this representative role of the poet" (416). This, I argue, is especially true of the Psalms. 8. CCSL 38, pp. 8-9. 9. Trinity College Cambridge MS 0.1.74, fols. 57v-58r. The Middle English writer eliminates part of the original verse, in order to point up the contrast between the Psalmist's silence and crying out; in the Douai translation: "Because I was silent my bonesgrew old; whilst I cried out all the day long" ( my emphasis ). 10. For Middle English texts, and the scant biographical information on Maidstone, see Day, The WheatUy Manuscript, and Valerie Edden, Richard Maidstone's

Notes to Pages 1 2 5 - 1 2 8

261

Penitential Psalms, ed. from Bodleian MS Rawlinson A.}8ç, Middle English Texts 22, gen. ed. O. S. Pickering (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990). I quote from Day's EETS edition. On Brampton, see W. H. Black, "A Paraphrase of the Seven Penitential Psalms," Percy Society 7 (London 1842), for version A of the text, and James R. Kreuzer, "Thomas Brampton's Metrical Paraphrase of the Seven Penitential Psalms," Traditio7 (1949): 359-403, for version Β, which has possibly Lollard interpolations. it. Day, WheatleyManuscript, pp. xvi-xvii. The biographical details here are summarized from the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, rept. 1921-1922), vol. 12, pp. 783-784. DNB refers to Bale's Heliades, in British Library MS Harley 3838, fols. 82 and 189. 12. Kreuzer, "Brampton's Metrical Paraphrase," p. 365. 13. Of the nineteen complete copies of Maidstone's paraphrase that have been identified, six have an introductory stanza. All of the six copies of Brampton's paraphrase that have been identified have an introduction. See Laurence Muir, ed., "Translations and Paraphrases of the Bible, and Commentaries," in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, ioso-isoo, gen. ed. J. Burke Severs (Hamden, Conn.: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 540-541. 14. Day, Wheatley Manuscript, p. 19 (as supplied from Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Digby 18). 15. Quoted from Bodleian MS Rawlinson A.389. This is the only copy of either prologue attributing the work to Maidstone. In the shorter prologue version in Bodleian MS Digby 18, from which Day borrows in her edition of the Wheadey manuscript, the work is attributed to Rolle: "Here bigynnej) J)e prologe of jje seuene salmys in englysche by Richard Hampole heremyte" (fol. 38'). "Hampole" may be an unwitting scribal substitution for "Maidstone" in the Digby scribe's exemplar, given Rolle's prominent reputation at the time (early 15th c.). 16. The pathos of the infant Jesus's certain torture, and his loving mother's only vague intimation of it, is exploited in manyfifteenth-centuryMarian lyrics: A baby is borne us blis to bring; A maidden, I hard, 'Loullay' sing: 'Dere son, now leive thy wepping, Thy fadere is the King of Blis.' 'Nay! dere moder, for you weppe I noght, But for thinges that shall be wroght, Or that I have mankind iboght. Was ther never pain like it, iwis.' ( 1-8) ( Carlcton Brown, Lyrics ofthe Fifteenth Century, p. 1, no. 1. ) 17. See Black, "Paraphrase of the Seven Penitential Psalms," pp. 55-56, and Francis Procter and Christopher Wordsworth, eds., Brepiarium ad Usum Insignis Ecclesiae Sarum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1879). 18. Kreuzer, "Brampton's Metrical Paraphrase," p. 370. All stanza numbers from Kreuzers edition appear parenthetically in the text.

2Ó2

Notes to Pages 1 2 9 - 1 4 7

19. On the sacred text as mirror in the Middle Ages, see Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's [Hugh of St. Victor's] "THdascalicon" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 21-23 and 95-97. 20. I quote here from Kreuzer, stanza 22, but have adapted the spelling and punctuation. 21. "Then let wrath remove; / Love will do the deed: / For with love / Stonie hearts will bleed" ( The Poems of George Herbert, ed. by F. E. Hutchinson, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], p. 170.) 22. Quoted from Black's Percy Society edition. 23. H. N. MacCracken, ed., The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, Parti, EETS e.s. 107. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1911). 24.JohnLydgate (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 259-261. 25. Ibid., p. 259. It should be noted that Pearsall is concerned, correctly, to argue that the English psalm versions could not have been used liturgically, despite the interests of one of Lydgate's patrons, Henry V, in serious liturgical reform. Pearsall gives the manuscript rubrics to the psalm imitations on p. 31. 26. MacCracken, Minor Poems, pp. 9 1 - 9 3 , 1 0 - 1 2 , 1 - 7 , and 77-84, respectively. Unless otherwise indicated, all Lydgate quotations are from this edition. Line numbers appear parenthetically in the text. 27. On the fortunes of Alice Chaucer, see Derek A. Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 282-284. 28. MacCracken, Minor Poems, pp. 71-77. 29. Ibid., pp. 206-212. 30. From the Royal manuscript, fols. 86v-88v, as printed in Black, "Seven Penitential Psalms," p. 51. MS Lyell 30 contains several other meditative texts derived from the Psalms, including a prayer to Christ's wounds consisting of a series of five psalms (nos. 122,53,66,150, and 50). See Albinia de la Mare, comp., Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts Bequeated to the Bodleian Library, Oxford by James P. R. lyell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 ), p. 65, no. 9. 31. John Lydgate, p. 260. 32. See, for instance, no. 2, pp. 43-44, in The Poems of John Audelay, ed. by Ε. Κ. Whiting, EETS o.s. 184 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). 33. Lyrics ofthe Fifteenth Century, p. 216,poem no. 141, notes to lines 22 and 24. 34. On the relationship between royal patrons and religious poets, see V J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971) and R. F. Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). For the most recent thoughts on Lydgate and patronage, see Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 49 ff. 35. Gesta HenriciQuinti, p. 100. 36. CCSL 39, pp. 1203-1204. 37. See Chapter 5, below. 38. Quotations from A Defence of Holy Church are from John Norton-Smith, tà., John Lydgate: Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 30-34, whose text supersedes MacCracken's. Line references appear parenthetically in the text.

Notes to Pages 147-157

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39. See Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a ChristianEmpire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992),pp. 147-48. 40. The rubrics are quoted from MacCracken, Minor Poems, pp. 1 and 209. 41. The phrase is from Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981).

Chapters. Two Versions of Captivity

ι . Lilian M. Swinburn, ed., The Lanterne ofLijt, edited from MS Harley 2324, EETS o.s. 151 (London: Trübner, 1917), p. 17. Subsequent page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 2. For a definition of the term, which is the Middle English equivalent of Latin res publica, see O E D common a., 5.b., which lists examples from Chaucer and Gower, among others. 3. The name, which is derived from Middle Dutch lollaerd ("mumbler"), is a term of contempt for those associated with the opinions of the late-fourteenthcentury heretic, John Wyclif. It may also be related to the Middle English word for idler, toiler. On the etymology, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 2-4. For a good general introduction to Wyclif's life and works, see Anthony Kenny, Wyclif ( Past Masters ) ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 4. On the Arthurian materials, see especially Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 118-120. For additional historical examples, see J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History ofMedieval Political Thought ca. 3soca. I4S0 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 70,136,142,215, and 219. 5. R. A. Shoaf, "The Alliterative Morte Arthure : The Story of Britain's David," Journal ofEnglish and Germanic Philology 81 ( 1982) : 206-207. "Dere" as an epithet might also have an ironic edge in the Morte, since what initially made David beloved of Yahweh is not necessarily what makes him useful as a model of flawed virtue. 6. Shoaf gives a table of seven key parallels between the careers of Arthur and David on pp. 207-209. The parallels, Shoaf persuasively argues, are "a structure that grounds and traditionalizes the shape of Arthur's career," by reading it through the biblical exemplum of David's successes and failures (207; 204). 7. Summarized from E. F. Jacob, The Fifteenth Century, 1399-1485 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 129-134. 8. See, for example, Psalms 3.1-3.5 and 10.1-10.3. ç.JohnLydgate: A Study in the Culture ofthe Fifteenth Century, trans, by Ann E. Keep (London: Methuen, 1961), p. 54. 10. Ibid., p. 134. See Norton-Smith, Lydgate: Poems, pp. 150-151 for the competing and more convincing arguments. 11. Norton-Smith also notes the likelihood that the fragment manuscript of the Defence, British Library MS Sloane 1212, predates 1431, thereby arguing for an earlier date. See. Lydgate: Poems, p. 151. 12. Norton-Smith notes M E D bitraishen 2a, "deceive," but then observes that

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Notes to Pages 16 3 - 1 7 0

"the unusualfigurativeextension of the verb in this context makes the ordinary sense of the verb inappropriate. 'Disgrace' is perhaps a better rendering." Lydgate: Poems, p. 153· 13. CCSL40, p. 1978. 14. "Debueram quidem de omni Scriptura tuae insaniae respondere, et diuinis uocibus, in modum Dauid citharizans, lenire furorem pectoris tui; sed contentus ero unius libri paucis testimoniis et opponam sapientiam stultitiae, ut, si humana contemnis, saltim diuina non neglegas." (Contra Rufinum, ed. P. Lardet, CCSL 79 [Turnholt: Brepols, 1982], p. 113). 15. See Pierre Hadot, ed., Apologie de David, trans, by Marius Cordier (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1917). 16. On Ambrose's encounter with Theodosius, and its psalmic context, see Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. 1 1 0 - 1 1 2 . 17. The importance of the Psalms to Lollard ideology is suggested, tersely, by a pointing hand and admonition next to the start of the Book of Psalms in one of the larger surviving Wycliffite Bibles, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 2: "Mark wel this boc." 18. English Writings, p. 3. 19. For a survey of the evidence from the wills, with some specific examples, see Margaret Deanesly, "Vernacular Books in England in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," Modern Language Review 15 (1920): 351-358. 20. Writings Ascribed to Riebard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materialsfor His Biography, Modern Language Association Monographs Series 3 (New York: D. C. Heath, 1927), p. 192. 2 1 . 1 quote the prologue from Bramle/s edition of the English Psalter, where it appears as prefatory matter on pp. 1-6. Line references are given parenthetically in the text. 22. The author of these remarks was Daniel Waterland (1683-1740; he initialled his comments "D. W?'), a conservative theologian and master of Magdalen College, Cambridge. He surveyed Rolle manuscripts for research on a critical history of the Athanasian Creed, and because of his interest in the development of the English language at the time of Wyclif. 23. "Or Friers" is also an afterthought on Waterland's part, added above the line, and perhaps suggestive of his having at first responded personally to the Lollard interpolations, as attacks on the secular clergy in particular. 24. In a minute scribal note in the upper righthand corner of fol. i r , which has been almost completely rubbed away, the work is identified as Rolle on the Psalms ("Ricardus hampull super psalterium}"; cropped). Such attributions, however, are always suspect: several copies of interpolated Rolle, such as British Library MS Arundel 158 and Harvard University MS Richardson 36, are identified as "John Wicklyfe vppon the Psalmes." 25. "The Middle English Prose Psalter of Richard Rolle of Hampole: III. Manuscripts of Rolle's Psalter containing Lollard Interpolations in the Commentary" Modern Language Review 18 (i923):38i-393. Page references to this essay appear parenthetically in my text.

Notes to Pages 1 7 0 - 1 7 9

265

26. In fart, Rolle's original version has not been satisfactorily edited since Bramley ( 1884), who knew only fourteen of the thirty-nine manuscripts now identified. In 1976-1980, the text of the original version was team-edited, as a series of Fordham University dissertations (unpublished), but the work is highly uneven. 27. Everett's comment also implies, probably unintentionally, that the copy is an autograph, the record of a particular reviser's thoughts as they came to him. This could never be proven, and is unlikely given the formal production values of the manuscript. The patterns of interpolation in the text suggest that more than one reviser worked on it, and that it was probably expanded through several stages, by accretion. 28. Bramley, The Psalter, p. 270. 29. PL 191.705. 30. Hope Emily Allen, in fact, prefers Rolle's mystic readings of certain psalms in her influential anthology of his work, English Writings of Richard Rolle (1988), noting that these are illustrative of his distinctive contribution to the commentary tradition. The assumption of Rolle's strict orthodoxy is itself questionable, and may be as much a product of the efforts to win him canonization as the result of a systematic study of the doctrinal content of his work. That, in his time, Rolle was attacked as unorthodox, both in his behavior and in his opinions, is evident from many of his own remarks. See Nicholas Watson, Richard. Rolle and the Invention of Authority, Chapter 1, passim. 31. See her "Langland and the Ideology of Dissent," Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, 16 October 1980, Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (London, 1982): 179-205. 32. Everett does sometimes credit certain of Rolle's Lollard revisers with "sound common-sense" ( 392). Most of her praise, however, quickly slips over into censure: e.g., "In all the interpolated Psalters the revisers show facility in expressing their ideas. They can write clear, fluent English, though they tend to be longwinded" (ibid.). 33. The English Works ofWyclif, Hitherto Unprinted, EETS o.s. 74 (London: Trübner, 1880 ), p. 281. The subsequent reference appears parenthetically in the text. The treatises are now commonly not ascribed to Wyclif, although Conrad Lindberg has, unconvincingly, resurrected the argument. See English Wyclif Tracts 1-3, Studia Anglistica Norvegica 5 (Oslo: Novus Forlag, 1991 ). 34. Premature Reformation, p. 263. 35. Ibid, (quoted by Hudson from the Royal manuscript). 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. The entire text, in fact, is developed around Rolle's comment on the opening verse of Psalm 37 (in the transcript I italicize Rolle's original): "Domine ne in furore tuo arguas etcetera. In lingua matera sic: 'Lord in f>i woodnesse vndirnym not me, ne in J)i ire amende me.' Woodnesse or wrajjJje is a stiryng of a mannes wil, exitynge to veniaunce, J?e wheche steryng is neuermore in god. But J)e woodnesse of hym stan di J) for gret wraj^e: Jjat is, rÌ3twis dome, whanne he schal be seen to yuel men as wraj^ed & as wood. For men seyn of a man Jsat sparija not, he farif) as a wood man, as who seif>, 'lord in {31 doom vndirnyme me not.' ¿at is, set not suche

266

Notes to Pages 1 7 9 - 1 8 8

skelis agayn me Jjat I be ouercome, and ννοφί dampnacioun, for vndirnymyng is to ouercome anojjer wifj skelis. 'Ne in J>i wrajsjx: amende or chastyse me,' but heel me heere wij> peyne & penaunce, Jjat I be not |>ere vndirnome ne chastysed. 3if I be maad holy or hool heere, me dar not diede deij> ne J>e honde of jje leche brennyng ne cuttyng. Also, 'in |ji woodnesse reproue me not.' Pat is, Ipraye pepati be not amounge po to whom pu schal sete in pi doom, 'Go 3s waryed in fier endeles.' 'Ne chastyse me in pin Lre/patis, be I not amoungpopat schal bepurgid inpefier ofpurgatory, but heere amende me" (fols. I 9 2 R v ). Shailor lists the note and transcribes its incipit in her Yale catalogue, but does not connect the item with Rolle's Psalter. Other texts in the book include the Wycliffite Psalter (later version; fols. i R - I 3 9 R ) and the Jerome abbreviated Psalter, in Middle English (fols. I 7 6 V - I 8 S V ) . 39. The word "unblif>elnesse" can also carry the sense of "unmercifulness" (OED). 40. Rolle's revisers tended to read each psalm as continuous discourse, rather than verse-by-verse, introducing transitional words and phrase such as "ίοφί" and "thus he seif)" between the end of a comment and the next Latin verse. In MS Bodley 288, these transitional words and phrases are brushed in yellow ochre, so that they stand out on the page. 4 1 . See Premature Reformation, pp. 1 6 7 and 2 1 1 - 2 1 4 , esp. 42. On Arundel's Constitutions of 1408, see Margaret Deanesly, The Lollard Bible, pp. 2 3 8 - 2 4 0 and 3 1 9 - 3 2 1 , and Premature Reformation, pp. 1 2 - 1 5 et passim. 43. P L 191.138.

44. This special treatment of the injunction by the scribe is not peculiar to this copy of the interpolated English Psalter. Compare MS Lambeth Palace 34, where "Ite et predicate," in the text hand, is underlined in red, and signalled in the margin by a nota and the biblical citation M'ulti", presumably referring the reader to the final chapter of Matthew ( 2 8 . 2 0 ) , and Christ's injunction that the disciples should teach all nations His commandments ("docentes eos servare omnia quaecumque mandavi vobis"). The citation is in a red box, and connected to the "Ite et predicate" formula itself (actually from Mark 16.15) by a red line. 45. See, by analogy, Ian Doyle's comment on the ruling in the Vernon Manuscript: "In the outside margin [of each page] there is a pair of verticle rules (4-5 mm apart) at 2 7 - 2 8 mm from the outer column rule, almost never utilized, although presumably designed for sidenotes . . . or for chapter or other numeration" (The Vernon Manuscript: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Eng. Poet. a.i. [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1 9 8 7 ] , Introduction, p. 2 ) . 46. There are two other noting hands evident in the Harvard MS: one makes his notes in Latin, e.g., "nota de ventate" and "nota de milite christi," the other is responsible for a note across the top of the recto of the back flyleaf: "singulare preuelegium (i)nnodat legem communem" ("individual [or special] privilege binds the common law"). This last note is written on the topmost ruled line on the leaf, centered on the page, as if intended as the title of a treatise that never got copied. All of these notes testify to the Lollard awareness of the political implications of the Psalter. 47. For examples of similar notas from Piers Plowman manuscripts, see Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anti-Clericalism, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 9 8 9 ) , pp. 1 - 2 .

Notes to Pages 189-190

267

Chapter 6. William Lanciami, Radical Psalmist ι. The best estimates concerning the dates of the three versions are George Kane's: the terminus a quo for the Α-text is 1367-1368, the terminus ad quern 1377; the terminus ad quem for the B-text is 1379 or 1381, and for the C-text is 1387 (Langland was dead by 1387). See John A. Alford, ed., A Companion to "Piers Plowman" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), "The Text," pp. 184186. O n the influence of Wyclifs ideas on Langland, see Pamela Gradon, "Langland and the Ideology of Dissent," Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1982): 179-205, and Anne Hudson, "Epilogue: The Legacy of Piers Plowman," in Alford, ed., Companion, pp. 251-266. Note especially Hudson's remark (following Gradon) : "Dating of Wycliffite texts is notoriously difficult, but it seems hard to see such texts as in any way the source of Piers Plomnan... since few if any could have been written by the usual date given to the A or Β versions or even, unless the latest dating is accepted for it, the C text" (254). Both Gradon and Hudson conclude that Langland and the Wycliffites were drawing on a "common tradition," one that in many respects, I would argue, goes back to the Psalter itself. 2. Allen, for instance, speculates that some of the de luxe copies of interpolated Rolle might have belonged to Lord Cobham or John of Gaunt, and that a psalter taken in 1407 by Archbishop Arundel from William Thorpe ("a Lollard who preached in the North early enough to be a contemporary of the interpolator of Rolle's Psalter*) might have been a copy of Rolle on which he'd been at work. See Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, pp. 189-90. Hudson, however, has demonstrated that this is unlikely. See Premature Reformation, p. 260. Allen also notes, following Everett, that Bale's Index ascribes "glosses on the Psalter" to Thorpe. These one would assume, however, to be more like the marginal glosses in M S Bodley 554, translated out of the Latin commentaries, than the freer running commentary of the Rolle interpolations. 3. The C-text is quoted from Walter W. Skeat, ed., The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, Vol. ι (Text) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1886). "Som tyme" in this passage ought to be glossed "on occasion," but should not therefore be read as deemphasizing the place of the Psalter in Langland's work. A "sauter" is simply a book of psalms — either all 150 poems, or selections from these. A primer, for instance, is a "sauter" in the sense that it would contain at least the seven penitential and fifteen gradual psalms, as well as the paternoster and other simple prayers. "And my sauter som tyme, and my seuene psalmes" means one of two things: either that Langland is describing two kinds of books, one a complete psalter and the other a copy of the seven penitential psalms alone; or that Langland gives special emphasis, in reading the psalms aloud, to David's seven penitential poems. 4. See especially E. T. Donaldson, Piers Plowman: The C-Text and Its Poet, Yale Studies in English 113 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 210-216. Note, however, the cautions expressed by George Kane in "The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies," Chambers Memorial Lecture (London: H. K. Lewis, 1965). 5. Piers Plowman, p. 219. 6. O n Langland's habitual quotation from the Bible in Piers Plowman, see

268

Notes to Pages 190-192

Morton Bloomfield, "Piers Plowman" as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961),p. 37: "It has been said of Bernard of Clairvaux that he speaks Bible as one might speak French or English. Langland speaks Bible too; phrases, echoes, and paraphrases crop everywhere. His whole mind is steeped in the Bible; it is a real language to him." 7. By "extending" I do not mean to imply that Langland regarded the Latin psalm quotations as secondary to his own vernacular matter, but strictly continuous with it. John Alford has argued that the Middle English in Piers Plowman grew out of the Latin ("The Role of the Quotations in Piers PlowmanSpeculum 52 [ 1977] : 80-99). I think he overstates the case somewhat. The Α-text, which has considerably fewer Latin quotations than Β or C, may indeed have been generated by Langland's mental concordance of certain biblical themes, many of them traceable ultimately to the Psalms; only afterward, in revising for B, would he then seek out the actual quotations, and formally inscribe them in his poem. Alford has recendy softened his position; cf. his comments on Conscience's speech in B.III.231-245 concerning the difficulty of determining whether the English serves as "gloss" to the Latin or the Latin to the English ("Piers Plowman": A Guide to the Quotations, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 77 [Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1992], p. 6). On Langland's range of psalm reference, Donaldson notes that Langland quotes from fifty-four of the 150 Psalms, far more than are included in texts like the primer or booklets containing only David's penitential poems. He goes on, however, to point out that "as an artist [Langland] was not, of course, bound to repeat what he knew best, unless he considered that it was appropriate to the sense of his poem" (p. 211 ). Many more of Langland's psalm quotations are incorporated into the syntax of his English than those quotations drawn from other scriptures and Latin authorities. 8. "Piers Plowman" and Prophecy: An Approach to the C-Text, Garland Studies in Medieval Literature 5 (New York: Garland Inc., 1991), p. 69. Steinberg does point out that Langland's idea of prophetic poetry might be related to Nicholas of Lyra's concern with the mens prophetae of David—the human vehicle of divine inspiration (36-37). Like Minnis, however, Steinberg locates David's preeminence as a prophet in his Christological significance, rather than in his ethical teachings. 9. The figures are derived from the tables in John A. Alford, "Piers Plowman" : A Guide to the Quotations, pp. 121 if. Note Alford's warnings concerning "more precise" counts of quotations, given ongoing editorial uncertainties regarding their textual status (pp. 1 - 2 , n. 2). 10. See Α. V C. Schmidt's suggestive footnote in The Clerkly Maker: Langland's Poetic Art (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), p. 1 1 , n. 21. 11. Piers Plowman, pp. 205-206, and n. 5. 12. More recendy, John Burrow has commented on how the Psalms, "the book of the Bible [Langland] knew best," could stimulate the heavily associative imagination of the poet to create complex visual images, particular in the Four Daughters of God scene (Passus XVIII). See Langland's Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 30-31· 13. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 51.

Notes to Pages 192-199

269

14. Guide to Quotations, p. 46. 15. The question of Langland's scholastic sources is vexed, and as yet not fully addressed by Piers Plowman scholarship. Even a casual reading of Piers convinces one that Langland is no anti-intellectual. On the other hand, he distrusts the niceties of learning, and the "carping" they tend to encourage. In Imaginatifs address to Will, "Clergie" or learning based in sacred reading gives the soul a decided advantage in its struggle against temptation ("Ac yet is Clergie to comende [be commended] and kynde wit [native intelligence] bo{>e / And namely [especially] Clergie for cristes loue, {>at of Clergie is roote"; XII.70-71 ). When the skill of clerks is not tied to Scripture, however, it threatens to become self-indulgent. Too much learning, or learning pursued for its own sake, is conducive to the sin of pride. In Passus Χ\ζ Anima urges Will to leave off his "couetise to könne and to knowe science" (61 ), and instead to pursue charity. Regarding biblical commentary specifically, Langland seems to feel that it is useful, but only adjunct to the text: in Passus IX, when Grace gives Piers his plow, it is pulled by "foure grete Oxen" named the Evangelists; but Piers also gets four "stottes" (working horses) to help break up the clods once his field has been plowed—Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and Jerome (262-273). A useful lesson against assuming Langland's direct access to exegetical texts is offered by Siegfried Wenzel, who demonstrates that the poet may have derived a quotation in Passus V traceable to Augustine's Enarmtiones ("Omnis iniquitas quatum ad misericordiam dei est quasi sintilla in medio maris"; 283a) from a sermon commonplace influenced by Augustine's text. See Wenzel, "Medieval Sermons," in Alford, ed., Companion to "Piers Plowman," p. 156. 16. For Jerome's image of the Psalter as a great house with many rooms, each requiring the proper key for entrance, see the preface to his Tractatus in Librum Psalmorum, edited by Germanus Morin, CCSL 78 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1958), p. 3. 17. The association between sloth (acedia) and despair is conventional in medieval sin taxonomies. See, for instance, in Chaucer's Parson's Tale, under Sequitur de Accidia: "Now comth wanhope, that is despair of the mercy of God, that comth somtyme of to muche outrageous sorwe, and somtyme of to muche drede, ymaginynge that he hath doon so muche synne that it wol nat availlen him, though he wolde repenten hym and forsake synne; thurgh which despeir or drede he abaundoneth al his herte to every maner synne, as seith Seint Augustine. / . . . Certes, the mercy of God is evere redy to the penitent, and is aboven alle his Werkes" (X.I.695). Langland also represents what George Kane calls "thefineborder between hope and despair" ("Poetics of Sin," p. 25 n. 66) in the character of Hawkyn the Active Man, who laments, "Synne sewejj vs euere" ("We can never escape sin"; B.XIV36). See also Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 82-88. 18. Christ goes on to point out that purgatory is a place where sinners must cleanse and wash their souls before entering heaven, thus reconciling God's mercy and justice ("I may do mercy {>01113 m Y rÌ3twisnesse and alle my wordes trewe"; B.XVIII.389). In the C-text, the point is further stressed by a double quotation from the penitential psalms, emphasizing human culpability: "Domine, ne in furore tuo arguas me, ñeque in ira tua corripias me" (435a; Pss 6.2 and 37.2). 19. Cf. B.XIX.63-68: "Ac J>e cause {>at he come{> {JUS wi{> eros of his passion / Is

270

Notes to Pages 199-205

to wissen us Jjerwijj, jsat when we ben tempted, / TherwiJ) to fi3te and fenden vs fro fallynge into synne, / And se bi his sorwe J^at whoso louej? ioye / To penaunce and to pouerte he moste putten hymseluen, / And muche wo in J>is world willen and suffren." 20. For the argument that Langland's audience was mainly clerical, see John Burrow, "The Audience of Piers Plowman," Anglia 75 ( 1957) : 373-384. 21. Guide to the Quotations, p. 113. 22. For additional evidence of the relationship between the Psalms and ideas about meed, note the following comment at the start of an interpolated copy of Rolle's English Psalter, MS Worcester Cathedral Library F. 172, fol. 1 r : "Here bigynnith the psautier, the whiche is comunely used to be rad in holichurche service. For it is a booke of grete devocioun and of high gosdy conceivyng, in which booke holy men fynden ful moche swetnesse and parfite undirstondyng of gosdy comfort. Also, Jjis booke shewith the meedis of iust men and the meedis of uniust men: the Reward of every man aftir his travaile." 23. CCSL 38, p. 89. 24. Cf. John Yunck's remark on Augustine's broad interpretation of bribery in Psalm 14: "Anyone, it appears, who allows his judgment to be swayed from the path of truth by personal considerations is accepting some sort of illicit meed. The idea becomes a commonplace of medieval commentary" {The Lineage ofLady Meed: The Development ofMedieval Venality Satire, Publications in Medieval Studies 17 [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963]), pp. 30-31. Yunck quotes and translates Augustine's enarmtio on Psalm 14: "For the sake of meed to praise or fawn on a man, to wheedle him with flattery; for the sake of meed to judge counter to the truth. What meed? Not only gold or silver or anything of that sort; but even he who judges badly for the sake of praise accepts meed, than which there is nothing emptier. For he has opened his hand to accept the judgment of another person, and lost the judgment of his own conscience" (p. 30). 25. Ralph Hanna has identified "an unpublished, abbreviated Psalter, composed of verses chosen to exhibit God as a just king demanding righteous behavior from his people"; it appears in a Wycliffite manuscript, MS Huntington Library 501, that contains several psalmic texts. The psalm verses are all quoted from the later Wycliffite version. See Middle English Prose Manuscripts in the Henry E. Huntington Library, Index of Middle English Prose 1 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984), p. 28, item 12. Note also in the Vernon Manuscript, fol. 306', how an extract from the Psalms begins the text "Proverbes of diuerse profetes and of poetes and of oJ)ur seyntes," and David is referred to as "J>e wise man." Likewise, note the lyric in British Library MS Addit. 2283, also in the Vernon series, that refers to David's "sawe" or saying against lying, which is set out "in {se sauter book openly" (fol. 134"). Compare with this William Herebert's translation of these lines from the hymn Vexilla Regis: "Impleta sunt quae coneinit / David fideli carmine; / Yvoluuld ys Dauid J>es sawe, / f>at soth was prophete of J>e olde lawe." I am indebted for this last instance to Domenico Pezzini's "Versions of Latin Hymns in Medieval England: William Herebert and the English Hymnal,"Mediaevistik 4 ( 1991 ) : 301. 26. Riformisi Apocalypticism and 'Tiers Plowman," p. 52. 27. Ibid., p. 179.

Notes to Pages 206-216

271

28. For the sources, Traaatus de Ordine Vitae and Sermo IV in Ascensione Domini respectively, see A. V C. Schmidt, ed., The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition oftheB-Text (London: J. M. Dent, 1978), p. 178. 29. Guide to the Quotations, p. 92. 30. Gloss on Matt. 2i:i2ff., Homily 38, PG 56, col. 839 (ibid., p. 93). 31. For the text of the breviary, see Breviarittm ad Usum Insignii Ecclesiae Sarum, ed. by Francis Procter and Christopher Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1879). 32. T. P. Dunning makes the valuable point that Piers does not give up physical labor entirely, but "merely says he will not work so hard, nor be so busy about providing himself with means of sustenance, because man must work for his bread" ("Piers Plowman": An Interpretation of the A Text, 2d ed., rev. and ed. by T. P. Dolan [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980], p. 116). That is, Piers's penitential resolve is not incompatible with life in the world, the vita activa. 33. Guide to the Quotations, pp. 56-57. 34. A Critical History ofthe Athanasian Creed, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1728), pp. 26-27. In many copies of Rolle's English Psalter, the Athanasian Creed appears with the Canticles, accompanied by a Wycliffite translation and commentary on each of its verses. 35. R. W. Chambers, Man's Unconquerable Mind: Studies of English Writers, fromBedetoA.E.HousmanandW.P.Ker (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), p. 119. 36. See James Thompson, "Literary Associations of an Anonymous Middle English Paraphrase of Vulgate Psalm 50;" Medium Aevum 57.1 (1990): 38-55. 37. "The Plowshare of the Tongue: the Progress of a Symbol from the Bible to 'Piers Plowman,' "Mediaeval Studies 35 (1973): 288. Barney is writing mainly about the C-text at this point in his essay, but what he says here applies equally to B. 38. Cf. ι Corinthians 3.5-3.9: "Quid igitur est Apollo? quid vero Paulus? Ministri eius, cui credidistis, et unicuique sicut Dominus dedit. Ego piantavi, Apollo rigavit: sed Deus incrementum dedit. Itaque neque qui plantat est aliquid, neque qui rigat: sed, qui incrementum dat, Deus. Qui autem plantat, et qui rigat, unum sunt. Unusquisque autem propriam mercedem accipiet secundum suum laborem." 39. Barney, "Plowshare of the Tongue," pp. 269-270. 40. Ibid., p. 267. 41. "Haue" in Conscience's plea to "kynde" at the close of Passus XX ("sende me hap and heele til I haue Piers £>e Plowman"; 385 ) can also mean "to possess as an attribute" (OED have I.4). Afterword ι. The Idea ofa University (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 280. 2. Quoted from Ronald Waldron, "Trevisa's Original Prefaces on Translation: A Critical Edition," in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. by Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), p. 293. I have not reproduced Waldron's footnotes to his textual apparatus or his square brackets marking emendations.

272

Notes to Pages 2 1 9 - 2 2 3

3. R. A. Rebholz, ed., Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems (The English Poets) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 201, lines 217-224. 4. The best discussion of Wyatt's paraphrase appears in Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms, Chapters 1 and 2, passim. 5. The standard guide is Zim, English Metrical Psalms, op. cit. 6. "Home," lines 1 -8, The Poems of George Herbert, ed. Hutchinson, p. 97. 7. See Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). 8. Marcus Walsh and Karina Williamson, eds., The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, II: Religious Poetry, 1763-1771 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 129155-

9. The Psalms in Human Life (London: J. M. Dent, 1903), pp. 247-248. The book contains an exhaustive index of psalm references and proper names. 10. Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses (London: Macmillan, 1922), pp. viii and xvi-xvii. 11. R. L. Purdy and Michael Millgate, eds., Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-1988), vol. 6, p. 162. 12. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 88 and 388. 13. Late Lyrics and Earlier, p. xv. 14. On the "churchiness" of Hardy's poetry, including several of the poems in Late Lyrics, see James Granville Southworth, The Poetry ofThomas Hardy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), p. 145.

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MANUSCRIPTS

An asterisk marks those manuscripts I have examined only on microfilm or by way of photographs. Cambridge, England Cambridge University Library MS Ff.6.33 MS 11.6.39(1) Corpus Christi College MS 290* Fitzwilliam Museum MS 300 Magdalene College MS Pepys 1584* Trinity College MS B.5.25 MS 0.1.74 MS 0.7.47 MS R.320 MSR.17.1 London British Library MS Add. 2283 MS Add. 10036 MS Add. 39574 (Wheadey) MS Cotton Vespasian D.6 MS Cotton Vespasian A. 1 MS Harley 1245 MS Harley 1706 MS Harley 2255 MS Harley 6041 MS Royal 17.A.27 MS Royal 18.C.26 MS Royal 18.D.1 MS Sloane 1212 MS Sloane 1853 Lambeth Palace Library MS 34 Oxford All Souls College MS 24

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