Psalms in the Early Modern World 1409422828, 9781409422822

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Psalms in the Early Modern World

Edited by Linda Phyllis Austern Kari Boyd McBride and David L. Orvis

PSALMS IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

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Psalms in the Early Modern World

Edited by LINDA PHYLLIS AUSTERN Northwestern University, USA KARI BOYD MCBRIDE University of Arizona, USA and DAVID L. ORVIS Appalachian State University, USA

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2011 The editors and contributors. Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride and David L. Orvis have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Psalms in the early modern world. 1. Bible. O.T. Psalms – Criticism, interpretation, etc. – History – 16th century. 2. Bible. O.T. Psalms – Criticism, interpretation, etc. – History – 17th century. 3. Bible. O.T. Psalms – Criticism, interpretation, etc – History – Middle Ages, 600–1500. 4. Bible. O.T. Psalms – Influence – Western civilization. 5. Bible. O.T. Psalms – Translating. 6. Psalms (Music) – Europe – History and criticism. 7. Bible and sociology. I. Austern, Linda Phyllis, 1957- II. McBride, Kari Boyd. III. Orvis, David L. 223.2’0094’0903-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Psalms in the early modern world / edited by Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-2282-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4094-2283-9 (ebook) 1. Bible. O.T. Psalms—Use—History. 2. Bible. O.T. Psalms—Influence—Modern civilization. I. Austern, Linda Phyllis, 1957– II. McBride, Kari Boyd. III. Orvis, David L. BS1430.55.P73 2011 264’.15—dc23 2011021705 ISBN: 978-1-409-42282-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-60278-3 (ebk)

Contents List of Figures   List of Musical Examples   Notes on Contributors   Prefatory Note   Acknowledgments   Introduction   Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis Part 1

1

Communities of Worship

1 Listening to the Psalms among the Huguenots: Simon Goulart as Music Editor   Richard Freedman 2 William Byrd’s English Psalms   Roger Bray 3 “For Musicke is the Handmaid of the Lord”: Women, Psalms, and Domestic Music-Making in Early Modern England   Linda Phyllis Austern 4 “How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land?”: A Transatlantic Study of the Bay Psalm Book   Joanne van der Woude Part 2

vii xi xiii xvii xxiii

37 61

77

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Contested Grounds of Authority

5 Miles Coverdale and the Claims of Paraphrase   Jamie H. Ferguson

137

6 Rightful Penitence and the Publication of Wyatt’s Certayne Psalmes   155 Clare Costley King’oo 7 Psalm 44 (45) and Nuptial Spirituality in Juan de Avila’s Audi, filia  175 James F. Melvin 8 Spenser’s Equations of His Queen with Christ: Royal Supremacy and Royal Psalms   Carol V. Kaske

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Part 3

Psalmic Voice(s)

9 Re-revealing the Psalms: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and Her Early Modern Readers   Margaret P. Hannay

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10 Sibling Harps: The Sidneys and the Chérons Translate the Psalms   Anne Lake Prescott

235

11 David’s Lyre, Kabbalah, and the Power of Music   Don Harrán

257

Part 4

Generic Innovation

12 Reading her Psalter: The Virgin Mary in the N-Town Play   Penny Granger

299

13 The Pre-Hispanic Poetics of Sahagún’s Psalmodia christiana   John F. Schwaller

315

Bibliography   Index  

333 377

List of Figures 3.1

“Musica serva Dei” from George Wither, A Collection of Emblems, Ancient and Moderne (London: A.M. for Henry Taunton, 1635), p. 65. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Case folio W1025.98.

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3.2

English School, 1591 Portrait of Lady Henry Cavendish (née Lady Grace Talbot), Hardwick Hall, The Devonshire Collection (The National Trust).

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4.1 Bay Psalm Book (1640), Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. April 3, 2005. http://www.infoweb.newsbank.com.

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4.2

Henry Ainsworth, The Booke of Psalmes: Englished both in prose and metre with annotations (Amsterdam, 1612), Early English Books Online. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. April 3, 2005. http://eebo.chadwyck.com.

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4.3

Bay Psalm Book (1698), Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. April 3, 2005. http://www.infoweb.newsbank.com.

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6.1 Title page. Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid (London: T. Raynald and [i.e., for] J. Harryngton, 1549), STC 2726. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.54.156.

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6.2

From the dedication to Lord William Parr. Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid (London: T. Raynald and [i.e., for] J. Harryngton, 1549), STC 2726. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.54.156. Sig. A.i.v.

162

6.3.

Prologue to the second Penitential Psalm. Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid (London: T. Raynald and [i.e., for] J. Harryngton, 1549), STC 2726. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.54.156. Sig. B.iii.r.

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8.1

Circulation of Cultural Energy. By Carol Kaske.

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10.1 Illustration by Louis Chéron from Arcadia in Sir Philip Sidney’s Works (London, 1725), I (image 44). © The British Library Board.

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10.2

Psalm 8: A crowned David prays to God; from Pseaumes Nouvellement Mis en Vers François, Enrichis de Figures (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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10.3

Psalm 68/69: David harps with Christ behind him (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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10.4

Psalm 136/137: Israelites Refusing to Sing During the Babylonian Captivity (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

246

10.5

Psalm 120/121; An Unnamed Israelite Lifts his Eyes to the Hills (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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10.6

Psalm 41/42: An Israelite Prophet, Thirsty Like a Deer (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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10.7

Psalm 50/51: Nathan Rebuking David (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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11.1 “The strings of the Davidic lyre according to the kabbalists”: first chart of five in part 1, chapter 10 of Angelo Berardi, Miscellanea musicale (1689), 32.

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11.2 A compilation of the five charts in Berardi, Miscellanea musicale, part 1, chapter 10.

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11.3

Apollo and the Muses, the planets, and their musical associations in Franchinus Gaffurius, Practica musicae (1496), frontispiece.

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11.4

The ten sefirot arranged in an inverted triangle, with the highest (and widest, i.e., most embracing) on the top: Berardi, Miscellanea musicale, 34 (the fourth of five charts in part 1, chapter 10).

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11.5

The 12 signs of the Zodiac, the seven planets, and, in the middle, the serpent (tali), from Sefer yetsirah (1562), fol. 99a. Courtesy, The National Library of Israel, formerly the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem (under shelfmark R4 = 37 A 2115).

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List of Figures

11.6 Ten enneachords to illustrate “the symphony of stones, plants, and animals with the heavens”: Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis (1650), 2:393.

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11.7

The ten sefirot with their various correspondences: Kircher, Oedipus aegyptiacus (1654), 2:290.

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11.8

“Canon tres unum” (Berardi, Miscellanea, fol. a 3v), with two almost identical inscriptions. The upper one (“Altus prima [vox] vice in Diates.[saron]. Secunda [vox] vice in Diap.[ason] super.[ius]”) translates as “The first voice to be added [to the tenor] is the alto, at the fourth; the second one to be added [to it] is the superius at the octave”; the lower one (“A.[ltus] pri.[ma vox] vice secun.[da vox] vice C.[antus]”) omits “at the fourth” and “at the octave” and substitutes cantus for superius, both of which mean soprano.

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12.1

St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary (All Saints’ Church, North Street,York). Reproduced by kind permission of the Priest-in-Charge and PCC. © Allan B. Barton.

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12.2 The Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the Temple, from St. Anne Altarpiece. Copyright: Historisches Museum Frankfurt/Main.

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List of Musical Examples Example 3.1

Modern transcription of “Miserere Me, Deus” (Psalm 51), by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Music by James Harding[?]. British Library MS Add. 15117, fol. 4v-5.

103

Example 3.2

Modern transcription of “De Profundis” (Psalm 130), stanzas 1-2, by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Music anonymous. British Library MS Add. 15117, fol. 5v.

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Example 11.1

The canon as realized a 3. Text: “This resides in you, the highest beautiful splendor; you, as one, have what remains of heroes.”

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Notes on Contributors Linda Phyllis Austern is Associate Professor of Musicology at Northwestern University. She has written extensively on issues concerning music in western European culture, concentrating on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and her articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Modern Philology, Music and Letters, and Renaissance Quarterly as well as in a number of collections of essays. Her previous books include Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance; Music, Sensation and Sensuality (editor); and Music of the Sirens (co-edited with Inna Naroditskaya). Roger Bray is Emeritus Professor at Lancaster University, having been Professor of Music there from 1979 to 2006. He is editor of the second volume (The Sixteenth Century) of the Blackwell History of English Music and editor of the masses and antiphons of Robert Fayrfax for Early English Church Music (two volumes published so far). His published articles and chapters include manuscript studies, work on performance practice, and studies of structural approaches to composition and text-setting, ranging from Dunstable to Draghi and Dryden. He is currently developing his work on the structure of pre-Reformation music and on the problems of dating Byrd’s music. Jamie H. Ferguson is Assistant Professor of English and Honors at the University of Houston, where he teaches Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, and the Bible as literature. He is currently completing a book manuscript, “Faith in the Language: The Reformation and English Poetics.” He has recently published “Satan’s Supper: Language and Sacrament in Paradise Lost” and an article on Shakespeare’s sonnets in the Broadview Anthology of British Literature Instructor’s Guide. He is completing an annotated translation of Joachim du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549) and has published many translations of contemporary Polish poetry. In recent years, he has received research grants from the Folger, Huntington, and Newberry Libraries, Martha Gano Houstoun and New Faculty Research Grants from the University of Houston, and a fellowship to participate in the Banff International Literary Translation Center Residency Program. Richard Freedman is Professor of Music at Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia where he teaches a wide range of courses on music, history, and culture. His research on French and Italian music of the sixteenth century in its cultural contexts has appeared in The Journal of Musicology, Early Music History, The Musical Quarterly, Revue de musicologie, and in his recent book, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety,

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and Print in Sixteenth-Century France (Rochester, 2001). Freedman has been a visiting scholar at The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and at Wolfson College, Oxford. He is also a frequent pre-concert speaker for the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. From 2004 to 2007 he was Director of Haverford’s John B. Hurford ‘60 Humanities Center. Penny Granger has a PhD from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. She now works as an independent scholar in Cambridge. Her book The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia, was published in 2009 by D.S. Brewer. Margaret Hannay, Professor of English at Siena College, is the author of Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford University Press, 1990), and of Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Ashgate, 2010). She is the editor of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700. Vol. 2 (2009). She has edited, with Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan, The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1998); the modern-spelling paperback Selected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (ACMRS, 2005); and, with the addition of Hannibal Hamlin, The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney for the Oxford World Classics series (2009). Don Harrán is Artur Rubinstein Professor Emeritus of Musicology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous books and has published widely in musicological and interdisciplinary journals on sixteenthand seventeenth-century Italian and Italo-Jewish musical topics, in particular: word-tone relations in the Renaissance, as determined by historical, theoretical, and practical/performing considerations; rhetoric and music; instrumental music in the early Baroque; Jewish musicians (male and female composers, singers, instrumentalists, theorists) in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy; and the beginnings of Hebrew musical historiography. His most recent book is Sarra Copia Sulam, Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice, with Copia’s works “in verse and prose, along with writings of her contemporaries in her praise, condemnation, or defense,” in a complete edition and translation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). In 1999 he received the Michael Landau Prize for Scholarly Achievement in the Arts and in 2006 was named Knight (Cavaliere) of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity. Carol V. Kaske is Professor Emerita of English at Cornell University, where she has taught since 1964. She is the author of a critical edition with introduction, translation, and notes, in collaboration with John R. Clark, of Marsilio Ficino’s Three Books on Life (MRTS, 1989); Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Cornell, 1999); and a school edition of Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Hackett, 2006); and she is co-editor of Spenser Studies 24 (2009) subtitled Spenser and Platonism. She has published 26 scholarly articles, mostly on Spenser.

Notes on Contributors

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Clare Costley King’oo is Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Her research and teaching interests include medieval and Renaissance literature, the Bible as literature, the history of material texts, and professional development. She is currently completing her first book, which examines the numerous adaptations and appropriations of the Penitential Psalms in late-medieval and early modern England. Kari Boyd McBride is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona and Director of GEMS, the Group for Early Modern Studies. Her publications include Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy (Ashgate, 2001), the collection Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England (Duquesne, 2002), and Women’s Roles in the Renaissance, co-authored with Meg Lota Brown (Greenwood, 2005). She is currently working on a study of women and education in early modern England. James F. Melvin teaches in the History Department at John Carroll University in University Heights, OH. He received his PhD from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. His dissertation, “Fathers as Brothers in Early Modern Catholicism: Priestly Life in Avila, 1560–1636,” was written with the support of a Fulbright Fellowship for doctoral research in Spain and offers a social history of the Catholic priesthood in Old Castile in the decades following the Council of Trent. His broader research interests include the interaction of normative and lived religion in Christian culture from the medieval to contemporary period. David L. Orvis is Assistant Professor of English and Faculty Affiliate in Women’s Studies at Appalachian State University. His work has appeared in The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Mary A. Papazian (Delaware University Press, 2008); The Journal of Homosexuality; and Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England, ed. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (Ashgate, 2011). He is currently working on a book-length study of queer marriage in Shakespeare’s works. Anne Lake Prescott is Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor Emerita of English at Barnard College and also teaches at Columbia. She is past president of the Sixteenth Century Society and currently vice president of the John Donne Society. The author of French Poets and the English Renaissance (Yale, 1978) and Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (Yale 1998), she has also published (with Hugh Maclean) the Norton Critical Edition of Spenser (1993) and (with Betty Travitsky) Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England: A Renaissance Anthology (Columbia, 2000). She and Betty Travitsky co-edit a series of texts by and relevant to early modern Englishwomen (Ashgate). Recent essays on the Psalms and the image of David in the Renaissance include “‘Formes of Joy and Art’: Donne, David,

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and the Power of Music” (John Donne Journal, 2006); “Mary Sidney’s Ruins of Rome” (Sidney Journal, 2005); and “Two Annes, Two Davids: The Sonnets of Anne Locke and Anne de Marquets,” in Chanita Goodblatt and Howard Kreisel (eds), Tradition, Heterodoxy and Religious Culture: Judaism and Christianity in the Early Modern Period (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2007). John F. Schwaller is Professor of History and President of the State University of New York College at Potsdam. His teaching career includes appointments at Florida Atlantic University, the Regional Seminary of St. Vincent de Paul, the Franciscan School of Theology, The University of Montana, Missoula, and the University of Minnesota, Morris. He is the author of several books on the secular clergy in sixteenth-century Mexico and on the role of the Franciscans in evangelization. He is also a scholar of Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and author of a guide to Nahuatl documents in U.S. repositories. Joanne van der Woude is Assistant Professor in the English Department and the Program in History and Literature at Harvard University. She received her doctorate from the University of Virginia and has held doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, and Columbia University. Her research interests include transatlantic Reformation poetics, aesthetic theory, and colonial American literature. She is working on her first book, Becoming Colonial: Indians, Immigrants and Early American Aesthetics. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Representations of Death in NineteenthCentury U.S. Writing and Culture, ed. Lucy E. Frank (Ashgate, 2007); SeventeenthCentury News; American Quarterly; and Early American Literature and American Literature.

Prefatory Note Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis

Any study of early modern religion and religious culture must confront a host of potentially vexing matters. In this note we have endeavored to address two such matters—English Reformation terminology and psalm numbering—with an awareness that they are taken up more fully in other books and essays. While the discussion of psalm numbering is pertinent to all essays in the volume, the note on terms specific to the English Reformation may need some clarification, especially given the volume’s scope. As we discuss below, we have included this note because debates over English Reformation terminology are especially contentious, perhaps even uniquely so. It is not an attempt to privilege one debate over another, though of course we recognize that the need to provide such a note is partly the result of England’s being so well represented in the collection. On English Reformation Terminology The meanings of “Catholic,” “Protestant,” “Anglican,” “Puritan,” and other descriptors of English Reformation religious groups are hotly disputed among scholars, who are far from reaching any kind of consensus about their apt use in particular historical settings. In some quarters, a discussion of terminology (and the interpretation of early modernity those terms represent) is the requisite prolegomenon to any scholarship on early modern English religion. The topic engrosses the introduction or the afterword to monographs and collections, and a few authors have devoted entire articles and even books to the question of English Reformation nomenclature.1 Even the term “Reformation” itself has been judged

1 Peter Lake is probably the most vocal contributor to the discussion of nomenclature. See The Boxmaker’s Revenge: “Orthodoxy,” “Heterodoxy” and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) as well as his earlier Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought—Whitgift to Hooker (London: HarperCollins, 1988). His work with Michael Questier includes The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) and their recent co-edited collection, Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2000). See also Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

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and found wanting as a term for the early modern English phenomenon.2 The situation is unique to the study of England; nothing analogous exercises scholars of early modern Continental religious movements. Using the historical evidence of the Oxford English Dictionary as a guide, we have chosen to use such terms in the manner they are most commonly understood, aware of the continuing debate while attempting a kind of nominal neutrality. In most modern contexts, “Catholic” indicates the Western, Latin, Christian Church that accepts the authority of the Pope. But the context for understanding the meaning of “Catholic” has changed many times over the centuries. (Diarmaid MacCulloch calls it “the linguistic equivalent of a Russian doll.”3). As the editors of the OED note, After the separation of East and West “Catholic” was assumed as its descriptive epithet by the Western or Latin Church, as “Orthodox” was by the Eastern or Greek. At the Reformation the term “Catholic” was claimed as its exclusive right by the body remaining under the Roman obedience, in opposition to the “Protestant” or “Reformed” National Churches. These, however, also retained the term, giving it, for the most part, a wider and more ideal or absolute sense, as the attribute of no single community, but only of the whole communion of the saved and saintly in all churches and ages. In England, it was claimed that the Church [of England], even as Reformed, was the national branch of the “Catholic Church” in its proper historical sense. As a consequence, in order to distinguish the unreformed Latin Church, its chosen epithet of “Catholic” was further qualified by “Roman” . . . .4

In a similar vein, the Reformation English Church referred to the Pope as the Bishop of Rome,5 suggesting that the Pope’s authority was analogous to a local bishop’s and perhaps even less than that of the Archbishop of Canterbury or York. As this short history makes clear, the term has a political edge: as a claim to universality, it suggests the limitations and even the vacuity and pretence of its “others,” the religious groups against which and by which “Catholic” is defined. Christopher Haigh contends that “Reformation” inadequately represents the situation in England and prefers to think rather of “Reformations” happening disjointedly throughout the sixteenth century, in the highest levels of government and religion as well as in the smallest parish: “every parish had its own Reformation.” English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 18. 3 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), xix. 4 S.v., A.II, OED. 5 Indeed, “Roman” was among the more irenic epithets; it was much more common for English Reformers to call Catholics “papists” and to refer to their church as the Whore of Babylon (or worse). The first version of Thomas Cranmer’s Litany, an extended corporate prayer that was the first liturgical document of the Reformed English Church, prays God to deliver England from “the Bishop of Rome and his detestable enormities.” See Diarmaid MacCulloch’s discussion of the creation and significance of the Litany in his Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 328–30. 2

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In the early modern period in particular, it is confusing to use “Catholic” to refer to both the pre-Reformation Western Church and its post-Reformation manifestation, as the term took on a very different connotation after the break-up of the Western Church. It is a messy situation, and “Catholic” remains a messy term, but it also remains the term by which members of that church knew and know themselves and by which most people know and understand that ecclesiastical body. We therefore honor that branch of the Church and bow to common usage by using “Catholic” to indicate the post-Reformation Western, Latin Church under the leadership of the Pope in Rome. At the same time, we opt for clarity in borrowing Eamon Duffy’s term “Traditional Religion,” to indicate the pre-Reformation Church in England—and, indeed, throughout Europe.6 “Protestant” has the general meaning of “A member or adherent of any of the Christian churches or bodies which repudiated the papal authority, and separated or were severed from the Roman communion in the Reformation of the 16th cent.”7 For England specifically, “Protestant” indicated the post-Reformation (that is, post-1534) Church of England and its members, always allowing that many pew-sitters were “church papists,” Catholics who outwardly conformed to the Reformed English Church while remaining inwardly faithful to the Pope and to Traditional doctrine. We use “Puritan” to designate “A member of a group of English Protestants of the late 16th and 17th centuries, who regarded the reformation of the Church under Elizabeth I as incomplete and sought to remove any remaining elements of church practice (such as ceremonies, church ornaments, the use of musical instruments, and in some cases episcopal authority), which they considered corrupt, idolatrous, or unscriptural.”8 And we follow the OED editors in that, Originally the name applied chiefly to those within the Church of England who sought further reform, especially in the direction of Presbyterianism, and who gained ascendancy during the Commonwealth period. Subsequently (and especially after the Restoration of 1660) it was applied to those who separated from the established episcopal Church as Presbyterians, Independents (Congregationalists), or Baptists, including many who were prominent in the colonization of the North American seaboard (especially New England).9

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 7 S.v., A.2.a, OED. 8 S.v., A.1.a, OED. 9 For a definition at book length, see Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge. Lake prefers not to capitalize “puritan,” nor “protestant,” “lollard,” “catholic,” etc. Lake’s definition is based on his study of Stephen Denison, in whom “we have as clear cut a vindication as we are ever likely to get of the legitimacy, and even of the relative precision of puritanism as a term of art in the analysis of early Stuart religion.” Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge, 389. Lake provides a list of the half-dozen characteristics that define “puritanism” (loc. cit.). 6

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Finally to “Anglican,” which may be the most hotly contested term of all. Many suggest that it is misleading to imply by use of the term that an Anglican identity had developed in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The term was first used in Scotland to distinguish the Church of England from the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The earliest extant printed use of the term is 1598 by James VI of Scotland. He assured the Scots that he did not intend “to bring in Papisticall or Anglican bishopping” when he assumed the English throne.10 (He was lying, of course; later, he observed, “No bishop, no king.”11). Nicholas Tyacke notes that though “Anglicanism” was not used until the nineteenth century, “the thing has traditionally been held long to predate the concept,12 a Latinism for the assumed ethos of the Church of England or Ecclesia Anglicana. The ethos itself is usually described as, of the English Church as “a via media (middle way) between Roman Catholicism on the one hand and Swiss Protestantism on the other; hence also the frequent use of the Phrase “Catholic and Reformed” to characterize the distinctive position of the English Church.”13

He allows that “this makes some sense, because the retention of bishops and liturgy, along with tithes and church courts, does serve to differentiate the English Reformation” from other Reformed churches. But use of the term becomes a problem for Tyacke when “proponents of Anglicanism … includ[e] a whole additional body of religious teaching and practice under this rubric,”14 namely the notion of the church as via media embracing both Catholic and Protestant theology, ecclesiology, and liturgy. His study of the career of the Caroline divine and bishop Lancelot Andrewes, “someone traditionally regarded as [the] leading proponent” of the English Church as via media, leads Tyacke to conclude that “the idea of an Anglican via media is a myth, exposed as such particularly clearly by the wealth of documentation which survives for someone traditionally regarded as a leading representative.”15 But the very evidence Tyacke presents for the evolution of Andrewes’s career—his movement away from a Protestant focus on sola scriptura and sola fide in the early years of the Elizabethan settlement, his development of a more sacramental theology and practice, and his ultimate S.v., “Anglican” A.1., OED. Qtd. in David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (Oxford: Oxford University

10 11

Press, 1967), 207. 12 However, the first use noted in the OED, from 1836, implies not a neologism but a well-known term and concept with a history, referring to “the acknowledged principles of Anglicanism” (s.v. “Anglicanism” 2.), and one might comfortably push the term back to the late eighteenth century. 13 Nicholas Tyacke, “Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1550–1660, eds Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2000), 5–34. 14 Loc. cit. 15 Op. cit., 33.

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support for the “Laudian remodelling of the Church of England,”16—could also be used to argue the opposite claim, that the English church, as via media, was able to embrace the polarities represented over time in the career of a single person, as well as the range of perspectives held by multiple persons at any one time, and yet remain identifiably and distinctively the “Anglican” Church. We have opted to use “Anglican” to represent the Church of England from the late sixteenth century to the present, following the plain vanilla definition offered by the OED: “Of or relating to the Church of England as constituted by the Reformation or any Church in communion with this; belonging to or characteristic of the Church in England.”17 On Psalm Numbering Anyone who has studied the Psalms will know that the numbering of Psalms and their verses is a complicated matter. In very brief, the Psalms are numbered differently in the Hebrew (Masoretic) text and the Greek Septuagint text due to two instances of a single psalm in one version being divided in two in the other as well as two psalms in one version being combined into a single psalm in the other. As William L. Holladay notes in his supremely cogent explanation of the situation, “This problem of numeration would be of concern only to specialists except for the fact that the Septuagint numeration became that of the Latin Vulgate and therefore the numeration of Catholic translations until very recently, whereas Protestant Bibles have consistently used the traditional Hebrew numeration.”18 To further complicate things, the numbering of verses within each psalm can vary, depending on whether or not the superscriptions attached to Psalms are counted as the initial verse(s) or left unnumbered. The material in those superscriptions might include liturgical directions, ascription of authorship, and/or sitz im leben. Though the Hebrew Bible did not number verses per se, the Tanakh has been organized in a complex hierarchy of sections and subsections for at least a millennium. And the manuscripts make clear that the superscriptions are treated as part of the Psalms, Loc. cit. S.v., I.1.a., OED. 18 William L. Holladay, The Psalms Through Three Thousand Years (Minneapolis: 16 17

Augsburg Fortress, 1996), 4. Holladay’s book, aimed at a “non-specialist,” Christian audience interested in the Psalms in worship and prayer, provides a wealth of information about the history of individual psalms and the process of redaction and canonization. And though Holladay describes himself as an “amateur,” a “lover of the psalms,” he has an extensive knowledge of dozens of pertinent languages, including Hebrew and Ugaritic, and served as one of 30 members of the translation committee for the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, 1972–1990. His book ranges across many issues raised by the Psalms, providing a lucid history of the texts from the earliest compositions (probably borrowed from the Canaanite peoples whose songs of Ba’al survive in Ugaritic), to the canonization of the Masoretic and Septuagint texts from which contemporary versions of the Hebrew Bible are translated, to contemporary religious, cultural, and social concerns the Psalms invoke, including the use of gendered pronouns in contemporary redactions and translations.

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a practice continued by modern Jewish translations such as the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) version (1917) and the Tanakh (1985); so did the Vulgate, the Douai version (1610) based on the Vulgate, and the many revisions of the Douai-Rheims Bible.19 In such Bibles, the first two verses of Psalm 50/51 read (here in the JPS Version): 1 2

For the Leader. A psalm of David. when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bath-sheba.20

On the other hand, English Protestant Bibles, beginning with the Geneva Bible (1560) and continued by the King James Version (1610), begin numbering with the Psalm itself. That tradition is continued by bibles in the KJV lineage, including various revisions of the KJV, the Revised Standard Version (1952), and the new RSV (1989), as well as the New English Bible (1970) and the Revised English Bible (1989). Indeed, some Protestant bibles do not print the superscriptions at all. In addition, some modern Catholic Bibles, such as the Jerusalem Bible (English 1961) and the New Jerusalem Bible (English 1985) follow the same practice. In the Introduction and, unless otherwise noted, in the articles that follow, we have followed the Psalm and verse numbering of the bulk of modern English Bible translations, that of the Masoretic text for numbering Psalms themselves and that of the Protestant and Jerusalem Bibles in English for the verses. A notable exception is Jamie H. Ferguson, who uses the Septuagint and Hebrew numbering in his essay because this is what Juan de Avila follows in his Audi, filia.

The Catholic translation by Gregory Martin of the Vulgate Bible into English, the Douai-Reims or Douay-Rheims Bible, was published in three parts, all products of English College at Douai (in Flanders), established in 1568 to train Catholic priests for service in Elizabethan England. The New Testament was published first, in 1582, during a brief period when the English were driven out of Douai (then under the control of Spain) and took refuge in the French city of Reims (traditional site of the coronation of the kings of France and member of the Catholic League from 1585). The Old Testament was published in two parts, after the College had resumed residence in Douai: Genesis to Job in 1609, and Psalms to 2 Maccabees in 1610. 20 To make things even more confusing, some translations of the Psalms include the Latin incipit, the first word(s) of the Vulgate Psalm, and the title by which the Psalm had been known throughout the Middle Ages and well into the early modern period (and as it is still known in musical versions of the Latin Psalms inherited from the liturgical music of the Renaissance, the Baroque, and the Classical period). In such contexts, the incipit of Psalm 50/51 is either the full “Miserere mei, Deus” or simply “Miserere.” The incipit can either precede or replace the inscription, depending on the Bible version. Incipits have entitled the Psalms of the Anglican liturgy from the earliest translations by Miles Coverdale to those of the most recent (1979) version of the American Book of Common Prayer, where the Psalms continue to be translated in the lineage of Coverdale’s version. 19

Acknowledgments Since an edited collection is only as strong as its contributions, we wish to thank, first and foremost, our fabulous contributors, who remained with the project even in the face of several delays and who gave us such wonderful material with which to work. Our publisher Erika Gaffney has been a steadfast supporter of the project since its inception, and we are grateful for her unwavering commitment to seeing Psalms in the Early Modern World to print. Whitney Feininger and Seth F. Hibbert, also with Ashgate, were eminently helpful throughout the process of preparing the manuscript. Our anonymous reader offered thoughtful feedback and suggestions for revision and amplification, and the book is better for them. Faith Schaffner and Brian Oberlander were expeditious in tracking down errant references and assembling the bibliography. Amy Mounkes was integral in formatting the final manuscript. Finally, we are delighted to thank Tony Calamai, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Appalachian State University, for his generosity in providing a subvention to cover the cost of reproducing the image that appears on this book’s cover.

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Introduction Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orvis

In 1688 the Dutch Calvinist theologian and linguist John Leusden, Professor of the Hebrew Tongue at the University of Utrecht, published .*-%; 952 [Sefer tehilim]: The Book of Psalmes with the New English Translation. He dedicated the work to “the very Reverend and pious John Eliot,” The Indefatigable and faithfull Minister of the Church of Ripen, (being now in the Eighty fourth year of his age) and Venerable Apostle of the Indians in America . . . being the first who preached the word of God to the Americans in the Indian tongue. . . .1

Eliot had become fluent in the Massachusett dialect of Algonquin within a decade of his arrival in Massachusetts Bay in 1631. As his work with the Algonquins progressed, he gathered a group of native converts—including Cockenoe, John Sassomon, Job Nesutan, James Printer, and Monequasson, all skilled linguists who could read and write English—to translate a selection of psalms and other scriptural passages into Algonquin.2 At the same time, Eliot was working with his John Leusden, .*-%; 952 The Book of Psalmes With the New English Translation, Published by John Leusden, Professor of the Hebrew tongue in the University of Utrecht (London: Samuel Smith, 1688), [2]. The book was printed in dual language format, Hebrew and English on facing pages, and was published by John van de Water in Utrecht in the same year. The prefatory pages of both versions (which are identical in every way) follow an interleaved order wherein the text that begins on verso continues on verso, while the text that begins on recto continues on recto. Because extant page numbers in the version we consulted are eccentric, citations here use Arabic numerals, counting from the title page. John or Johannes Leusden (1624–1699) was a theologian, orientalist, linguist, and philologist and one of the most respected biblical experts of the period. He edited and provided copious marginal notes to the Biblia Hebraica produced by Joseph b. Abraham Athias (d. 1700), a Sephardic Jew who settled in Amsterdam and set up a print shop. Theirs was the first Hebrew Bible to be published with numbered verses. See Richard Gottheil, et al., “Joseph b. Abraham Athias.” Jewish Encyclopedia (2002), http://www. jewishencyclopedia.com/ view.jsp?letter=A&artid=2085#6386 (accessed March 4, 2008). 2 The same group later translated the entire Bible into Algonquin; it was the first Bible to be printed in America, with the New Testament published in 1661 and the Old Testament, two years later. Eliot ultimately acquired land for “Praying Indians,” establishing towns for Algonquin converts. Eliot’s Brief Narrative of the Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New-England (London, 1671), which discusses the Algonquin towns, was one of many such tracts about his missionary activity, written for publication in England. Biographical information on Eliot from the web site of Jesus College, Cambridge (where 1

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fellow English colonists John Cotton, Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, and many others on The Whole Book of Psalms Faithfully Translated into English Meter (1640), better known as the Bay Psalm Book. It was the first book to be published in the English colonies, a mere twenty years after the colonists arrived at Plymouth, and, as Joanne van der Woude argues in her essay for the present volume, it offered the Massachusetts Bay colony the occasion to declare a distinct if nascent colonial identity.3 Given the significance of Eliot’s work with the Psalms—in both English and Algonquin—it is not surprising that the Dutch linguist Leusden dedicated his celebrated translation to that devoted psalmist. Leusden also dedicated his book “To the Reverend and pious the twenty four [Native] American ministers,” Lately Gentiles, but now converted to the Christian Religion (by the Grace of God, and labour of the Reverend John Eliot and other ministers) and publishing the Word of God and the Gospel of Christ in the American tongue (with four English Ministers) in great fervour, among the Americans in twenty four American Churches.4

Leusden had learned about the American ministers through a letter he received from “the worthy and Reverend Increase Mather, Minister of the gospel and President of the Colledge or Illustrious School at Boston,” that is, Harvard. Mather’s letter celebrated the “Indian Ministers” who “exercise their publick worship on the Lords-day, in praying, preaching, reading of Gods word [and] singing of Psalms.”5 And while Leusden admitted that he published his own translation of the Psalms hoping that it would “excite the English nation to jealousy” (presumably to match the Dutch in the purity of their Reformation), it was his recent news of the “Indian ministers” that inspired him to publish his English translation “at this time, when there is a great door of the Gospel opened in New-England.”6 he took his B.A. in 1622), http://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/college/history/eliot.html (accessed March 4, 2008); Kathryn Napier Gray, “John Eliot,” The Literary Encyclopedia (16 Jan 2004), The Literary Dictionary Company, http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople. php?rec=true&UID=1409 (accessed March 4, 2008); and J. Frederick Fausz, “Eliot, John (1604–1690),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), Oxford University Press, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8631 (accessed March 4, 2008). 3 The VVhole Booke of Psalms Faithfully Translated into English Metre: Whereunto is prefixed a discourse, declaring not onely the lawfullnes, but also the necessity of the heavenly ordinance of singing Scripture psalmes in the churches of God (Cambridge, MA: Stephen Day, 1640). Stephen Day (or Daye) operated the first printing press in New England and had previously printed some smaller works, including the Freeman’s Oath— the first document to be printed in New England—and an almanac, before taking on the Bay Psalm Book. 4 Leusden, The Book of Psalmes, [4]. 5 Op. cit., [6]. The quoted words are Leusden’s, not Mather’s. 6 Loc. cit. Increase Mather’s letter to Leusden was a salient document in the English narrative of settlement, and it played a significant role in his son Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), that massive and triumphal history of the colonization and

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In Leusden’s preface, cultural, linguistic, and geographical distances collapse into a single “common place” defined by the Psalms. Nothing seems to separate the Dutch Calvinist Leusden, promoting a purer form of worship through his translation and publication of the Psalms in English; the English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic for whom Leusden published the Psalms, hoping to “excite [them] to jealousy”; the Congregationalist Increase Mather, publishing news of the psalm-singing Algonquins to Protestant Europe; John Eliot, translator of the Psalms into Algonquin and contributor to the Bay Psalm Book, who published the Psalms in “the American tongue”; and the new-minted Algonquin ministers, publishing forth the Word of God and singing psalms “in the Indian language.” The chronological, geographical, and cultural gulfs that separated these peoples are bridged by and in the Psalms, the scriptural locus these otherwise diverse peoples held in common. The virtual community assembled by Leusden’s preface represents only a small portion of the range of psalmic influence in the early modern period, a time when the Psalms were sung, translated, published, adopted, adapted, redacted, illustrated, set to music, and imitated anywhere in the world that Jews or Christians practiced their faith. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” asked the ancient psalmist in a phrase that became the rallying cry of early modern religious exiles and missionaries alike in that era of mass migrations—migrations of people as well as their sacred poetry and the music to which it was sung. As the Psalms were passed from person to person, place to place, and culture to culture, they made connections that nobody living at that time could have intended or begun to comprehend. Indeed, such configurations are visible sometimes only in hindsight, a perspective granted to those of us who study the past from the privileged vantage of a future unknowable and unimaginable to those who, with varying intent, set the Psalms on their peregrinations through time and space. Tracing the Psalms’ movement across national boundaries and confessional divides inscribes a map of early modern travel, commerce, and cultural exchange that does not necessarily coincide with the boundaries drawn by the religious and national leaders of the day. The Psalms tell a story slightly different from standard histories of Reformation Bible translations, a story of serendipitous events and often nearly incredible coincidences, one that sometimes frustrates our attempts to make coherent, even plausible, narratives of the past. Rather than charting a journey of cause and effect, we stumble on the Psalms where by our logic they should not be; chase them to places we would never expect to find them; and then, more often than not, careen into dead ends that force us to rethink any assumptions conversion of New England and its indigenous inhabitants. There Cotton Mather notes that the letter had been translated into four or five languages. He provides copious annotations to the text of the letter—ten lines of commentary for every single line his father wrote. Mather devotes 42 pages of the Magnalia Christi Americana to John Eliot, praising him as a Christian, minister, and evangelist. See Constance Post, “Old World Order in the New: John Eliot and ‘Praying Indians’ in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana,” The New England Quarterly 66.3 (1993): 416–33, esp. 416–17.

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we may have brought to the expedition. And perhaps this is not surprising, for the Psalms seem to have had the ability to force early modern peoples to rethink their own assumptions. As essays in this collection suggest, participation in the creation, translation, and performance of the Psalms could elevate the status of individuals and groups otherwise accounted inferior, including women, immigrants, and the colonized, and, as in Leusden’s preface, could put those separated by geography, social status, language, and culture into conversation with each other across those intimidating divides. Indeed, such mutability is a quality of the Psalms themselves. Early modern books in which the Psalms were preserved, with or without directions for their performance, were often united with competing and complementary traditions, both written and oral, to spark a multitude of hybrid texts and performance styles in distant lands. It was not just new Christians in the Americas who sang and recited the Psalms in their native languages or missionaries who reworked the texts. During the decades following their expulsion from Spain in the late fifteenth century, many Sephardic Jews adhered to the traditions of sacred music and poetry from their lost homeland, planting that heritage in the soil of the Levant. The late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Sephardic rabbi, mystic, and poetmusician Israel Najara, inheritor of that tradition, combined Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, and Turkish elements in a hybrid genre of para-liturgical song whose texts included lines from the Psalms.7 The eighteenth-century Mexican composer Manuel Arenzana set Latin psalms for the cathedral of his native Puebla in the highly dramatic, operatically influenced style of his Italian and Viennese contemporaries.8 And in a striking re-migration from the Americas back to Europe and beyond national and confessional traditions, tunes from the 1698 edition of the Bay Psalm Book reappeared years later in the work of German Lutheran composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who adapted those melodies to German words and to Lutheran-style music for a community of worshippers far beyond the borders of the originals’ time and place.9 The Psalms occasioned many such migrations of cultural materials and practices throughout the early modern world, sometimes far beyond the reach of European hegemony or influence. In Ethiopia, the Psalms were translated into Ge’ez (archaic Ethiopic, the language for scripture liturgy) as Mezmure Daweet, the Psalms of David, in the fourth century ce. Around 1500, Ethiopian Christian See Beeri Tova, “Music and Poetic Structure in XVI–XVII Century Oriential Piyyut,” in Jewish Studies in a New Europe: Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of Jewish Studies in Copenhagen under the Auspices of the European Association for Jewish Studies, eds Ulf Haxen, Hanne Trautner-Kromann, and Karen Lisa Goldschmidt Salamon (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel A/S International Publishers, Det Konegelige Bibliotek, 1998), 75–81. 8 Theresa Bowers, “The Vesper Psalms of Late Eighteenth-Century Mexico,” The Choral Journal 40 (2000): 25–31. 9 See Richard G. Appel, “J.S. Bach and the Bay Psalm Book,” Bach: Quarterly Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute 1 (1970): 22–4. 7

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priests produced a companion Christian psalter in Ge’ez, the Mezmure Kristos. A remarkable feat of linguistic contortion, it was composed in precise imitation of the Hebrew Psalms down to the number of lines in each poem and the number of letters in each line.10 In 1511, Johann Potken, a German typographer and priest serving in Rome, became interested in Ge’ez after hearing the liturgy of the Ethiopian monks at Santo Stefano degli Abissini (also known as Santo Stefano dei Mori) near St. Peter’s Basilica. One of the monks, Thomas Walda Samuel, taught Potken Ge’ez and showed him an Ethiopian psalter (containing the Mezmure Daweet, the Song of Songs, and a variety of non-scriptural texts) held in the Vatican Library. Potken, who had served as papal pronotary and Hebrew secretary, believed the popular legends that place Prester John in Ethiopia, and mistakenly believed that Ge’ez was archaic Chaldaic (Aramaic). He moved quickly to have the psalter published.11 Potken himself forged the Ge’ez type and had the psalter The Hebrew Psalms were first translated into Ge’ez in the fourth or fifth century. Ge’ez was the common spoken language when the earliest Jewish and Christian texts were translated for Ethiopians. Though it has not been spoken for centuries, it remains the language of scripture and liturgy for both religions, just as Latin was (p)reserved for religious purposes in the West. Jews had lived in Ethiopia since at least the ninth century BCE, and Christians since the fourth century ce. There are 151 Psalms in the Ge’ez version because the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) used in Ethiopia is derived from the Alexandrian Recension of the Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Bible produced in the last few centuries BCE that contained many works not in the Masoretic Text (MT), the standard canon of the Hebrew Bible, as well as a number of textual variations. The LXX includes one extra psalm: the 150 are common to both the LXX and the MT. 11 Misinformation on this episode abounds, and there is no recent scholarship on Potken’s publication. The Princeton University online catalog for the exhibit Century for the Millennium: One Hundred Treasures from the Collections of the Princeton University Library, which included the Library’s copy of the psalter, provides reliable if minimal information, http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/rhsc2/misc/Century_Millenium.pdf. The Potken Psalter is #27 in the list of items. See also Renato Lefevere, “Giovanni Potken e la sua edizione romana del Salterio in Etiopica, (1513),” La Bibliofilia 68 (1966): 298–308. Both the Ethiopian original and a copy of the 1513 Potken Psalterium are now held by the Vatican Library; see images and a brief discussion of their history at http://www.ibiblio.org/ expo/vatican.exhibit/exhibit/h-orient_to_rome/Eastern_lang.html. Anna Dorothea von den Brincken, “Johann Potken aus Schwerte, Propst von St. Georg in Köln, der erste Äthiopologe des Abendlandes,” in Aus Köln und rheinischer Geschichte (1969): 51–60; and Jack Pelman, “The Beginnings of African Linguistics,” African Studies 37, no. 2 (1978): 305–7, which opens with a paragraph on the Potken psalters. On the original Ge’ez psalter, see Rento Lefevere, “Su un codice etiopoico della ‘Vaticana,’” La bibliofila 42 (1940): 97–107. Potken’s Chaldaic was the Aramaic of Jewish and early Palestinian Christian communities. Its various dialects were widely used from the eighth century bce through the second century ce. Jesus and his followers spoke Aramaic as, presumably, would have the apocryphal Prester John, which was what got Potken excited about the Ge’ez psalter in the first place. Legends of Prester John (who was thought to have descended from one of the Magi), which circulated throughout Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, first placed him in “the three Indes,” where he ruled a Christian empire hidden within the Muslim 10

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printed at his own expense. The resulting book—Psalterium David et Cantica aliqua (1513)—provided parallel Ge’ez, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts as well as a Ge’ez syllabarium and an introduction in which Potken made his argument about the Ge’ez-Chaldaic connection. Like the Bay Psalm Book and John Eliot’s Algonquin Bible, it was a publishing first: the first book ever to be printed in Ge’ez, the first book to be printed in the West in an oriental language other than Hebrew, and the first psalter ever to be printed in a language other than Hebrew, Greek, or Latin. A few years after Potken’s publication in Rome of the Ethiopian Psalterium, a Florentine Protestant named Antonio Brucioli was working on his own biblical translations, with a particular focus on the Psalms. Brucioli had twice been exiled from Florence, in 1522 for plotting against the Medici and in 1529 for having publicly professed his allegiance to Lutheranism. On his return from exile in 1530, he moved to Venice where he became a leading member of the Spirituali.12 In his first year there, he published his own translation of the New Testament, followed by the Salmi in 1531 and the complete Bibbia in 1532. His work on the Psalms culminated in the publication of the Penitential Psalms as I Sacri Psalmi di David or pagan empires of the East. Portuguese explorers later identified Ethiopia as the site of his kingdom. It was Hiob Ludolf who showed the legend—and its links to Ethiopia—to be false. Hiob Ludolf [Job Ludolphus], A New History of Ethiopia, being a full an accurate description of the kingdom of Abessinia, vulgarly, though erroneously, called the empire of Prester John, trans. J.P. (London, 1684). Ludolf writes, “John Potken, a German of Cologne, now Ancient and Gray, was the first that divulg’d this Language [which Ludolf calls Gheez] in Europe; and then setting up a neat Ethopic Printing-House in Rome, there Imprinted the first Ethiopic Books, that is to say, the Psalter, with the Hymns of the Old Testament, and the Canticles” (76). Ludolf provides a list of all the works considered canonical by the Ethiopian Christians (263–70). 12 Italian Reformists were often identified as Spirituali, Valdesians, or Nicodemites. (Nicodemus was the Jew who sought out Jesus at night in order to learn from him in secret to avoid publicizing his association with Jesus and his followers.) The Spirituali, who accepted the Protestant doctrine of sola fide, justification by faith alone rather than by good works, sought to reform the Church from within and condemned the Protestants as schismatics. The Spirituali were active from the 1510s to the 1560s, inspired by the Spanish mystic Juan de Valdés, who had taught and preached in Italy in the 1530s. A number of cardinals and prominent clergy were among the Spirituali and sympathetic to their quest to reform from within. But Spirituali hopes were first dampened by the death of Valdés in 1541 and then dashed by Council of Trent, which reaffirmed traditional doctrine and condemned the Italian Reformists. From then on, those who opted to stay within the Church while retaining their Reformist beliefs identified with Nicodemus and adopted the label “Nicodemistes,” an identity that many Northern European Protestants found untenable. Much has been written about Michelangelo’s involvement with these Italian (covert) evangelists through his friendship and correspondence with the Reformist Vittoria Colonna and his identification with Nicodemus. On this point, see Moshe Arkin, “‘One of the Marys . . .’: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà,” Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 493–517.

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Distinti in cinque libri, Tradotti . . . in lingua toscana, & con nuovo commento dichiariati (1534).13 In this period David was understood by many to be the author of the Psalms, with the Penitential Psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 14314) representing his repentance for pursuing an adulterous affair with Bathsheba and ordering the death of her husband, Uriah—a connection made explicit in the Masoretic Text.15 Since late Antiquity the seven Psalms were thought to be particularly appropriate to Lenten devotions. Pope Gregory I recommended meditation on the Penitential Psalms as preparation for confession. In the Middle Ages, the Penitential Psalms were often connected to the seven deadly sins and became increasingly popular in a variety of private and public devotional contexts, showing up in medieval Books of Hours and the early modern English equivalent, the primer. The Penitential Psalms influenced a wide range of medieval literature. Francesco Petrarca’s Psalmi penitentiali, meditations on the Psalms rather than translations, circulated in pious manuscript collections before their first publication in 1475.16 13 The holy psalms of David in five separate books, translated . . . into the Tuscan language, & with a new explanatory commentary. On Brucioli, see Raymond B. Waddington, “Pietro Aretino, Religious Writer,” Renaissance Studies 20.3 (June 2006): 280–291, esp. 280–283. 14 Commentators working from the Vulgate (which was based on the Septuagint), would have numbered them 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, and 142. On the complex history of psalm numbering, see this volume’s prefatory note, xvii–xxii. 15 Regarding authorship of the Psalms, Hannibal Hamlin notes in Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), “Although more critical readers recognized that these texts might have been written at different times by different authors, . . . the popular idea persisted throughout the Renaissance that all of them had been composed by King David.” And even scholars who knew better might have been reluctant to undermine David’s claim to the Psalms. Hamlin cites George Wither’s Preparation to the Psalter (1619), where he concludes that “forasmuch also as the enemies of Christ thinke to make it an advantage on their parts, to deny [David] as much as may be of that sacred worke; I would not [despite evidence to the contrary] that hee should bee robbed of any honour, which I thought might appertaine unto him by those excellent Poems” (Hamlin 3–4). On the connection between David’s sin and Psalm 50, see Clare Costley (King’oo), “David, Bathsheba, and the Penitential Psalms,” Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004): 1235–77.  See also See Lynn Staley, “The Penitential Psalms: Conversion and the Limits of Lordship,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:2 (2007): 221– 69; Robert G. Twombly, “Thomas Wyatt’s Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms of David,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 12.3 (1970): 348–80; and Harry P. Nasuti, Defining the Sacred Songs: Genre, Tradition and the Post-Critical Interpretation of the Psalms (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), esp. “The Role of Genre in Biblical Interpretation: The Case of the Seven Penitential Psalms,” 30–56. 16 George Chapman translated them loosely into English in 1612. On the nature of Petrarch’s Psalmi, see E. Ann Matter, “Petrarch’s Personal Psalms: Psalmi penitentiales,” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Aramando Maggi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 219–28.

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In William Langland’s Piers Plowman, they are among the tools of Will’s trade in his labor of prayer.17 Christine de Pizan translated and allegorized the Psalms in her Sept Psaumes Allegorisés (1409–1410), a work produced at the behest of her patron, Charles V, King of Navarre, as part of a campaign to foster translations in the vernacular of works he considered essential to his rule. The elaborate structure of Pizan’s book provides a translation of a psalm verse followed by a meditation on the verse and a prayer. Through the meditations, the Psalms are grouped around major themes: the first three on the theme of forgiveness, while Psalm 51 moves from forgiveness to obedience, citing the ten commandments, the articles of faith, and the Athanasian Creed (whose verses themselves “serve as invocations to God and are paired with the seven deadly sins and their contrary virtues”). The three final psalms “are unified by a systematic recollection of the events of the life of Christ” as well as the seven monastic hours.18 Pizan’s allegorizing entailed “using each psalm as the basis for an extended moral commentary on the speaker’s vices and virtues,” the speaker being David the repentant sinner, who addresses Charles V—or, more accurately, Christine is the speaker/ventriloquist, with David the dummy that allows Pizan to address her patron on issues of importance to her.

17 In Langland’s Piers Plowman (C version, ca. 1580s), when the narrator Will is asked about his work in and for the community, Will responds: The lomes [tools] þat y labore with and lyflode deserue [earn a living] Is pater-noster and my prymer, placebo [Vespers] and dirige [Matins], And my sauter som tyme and my seuene p[s]almes. Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), Passus V.45–7 (99). These lines form the epigraph of Staley’s article on “The Penitential Psalms.” Staley traces the Penitential Psalms in religious literature from the ancient to the modern world. He shows how the various medieval and early modern English writers who had written on or translated the Penitential Psalms “all echo a core of Latin authors: Ambrose, Augustine, Cassiodorus, pseudo-Gregory the Great, Alcuin, and Peter Lombard” (222), who had first addressed those psalms. The medieval vernacular texts of his study include Richard Rolle’s learned English Psalter (which was folded into the Lollard Bible of the 1380s); Eleanor Hull’s translation of an Anglo-Norman commentary on the Penitential Psalms (from a source as yet unidentified; ca. 1420s); Richard Maidstone’s translation with commentary (based on Peter Lombard’s); and Thomas Brampton’s rhyming translation (1414). Staley also looks at sermon sequences on the Penitential Psalms by John Fisher, John Donne (whom Staley argues had read Maidstone’s translation), and Jonathan Edwards. Staley even riffs on the influence of the Penitential Psalms on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Staley’s most extensive discussion shows the influence of the Penitential Psalms on the theology of Julian of Norwich’s Showings. Primers always included the Penitential Psalms. On primers, see the Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v., http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12425a.htm (accessed June 20, 2010). 18 Maureen Boulton, ‘Nous deffens de feu, . . . de pestilence, de guerres’: Christine de Pizan’s Religious Works,” in Christine de Pizan: A Casebook, ed. Deborah L. McBrady and Barbara K. Altmann (New York: Routledge, 2003), 199.

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Indeed, the seven psalms were often used to cloak criticism of a prince or king, one whose foolish and arrogant actions deserved the rebuke of a present-day Nathan. By the sixteenth century, it was de rigueur for poets to experiment with translations of one or more psalms, particularly the Penitential Psalms. Brucioli thus joined a venerable lineage of poets and translators throughout Europe when he produced yet another iteration of the Penitential Psalms. Brucioli’s translation was probably meant as a condemnation of the religious hierarchy; it was certainly read as such and was listed on the 1557 Roman Index of Prohibited Books of Pope Paul IV. But that prohibition deterred neither Brucioli nor his readers, who continued to buy his various publications. According to Raymond B. Waddington, Brucioli’s Bibbia was “probably the most widely circulated and read of Italian Reformist books.”19 Among Brucioli’s readers was Pietro Aretino (1492–1556). Known as the “scourge of princes” for his effective and popular pasquinades satirizing court and church politics and author of the sonnets that accompanied the images in Giulio Romano’s infamous early modern sex manual, I Modi (The [Sexual] Postures, 1524), Aretino has long been considered far more secular than spiritual— at most a tepid supporter of the religious status quo in Italy rather than a Reformer. Waddington, however, makes a persuasive argument for Aretino’s connections with Italian Spirituali and Nicodemites. Whatever the nature of his religion, Aretino undertook his own translation of I sette Salmi della penitentia de David (1534).20 Aretino’s approach to those psalms was unique, with a narrative prologue preceding each psalm, which he translated into prose rather than attempting to recreate Hebrew poetic form in Italian. The prologues create “an ordered sequence of psychological revelation,” in the words of Waddington, encouraging the reader to empathize with the psalmist’s pain, regret, and shame. Like Brucioli’s, Aretino’s various biblical translations and religious works enjoyed great popularity despite the prohibition that made owning Aretino’s Protestant-flavored works increasingly dangerous in Italy. (All his publications were prohibited by the first papal Index.) Among his many published works, the Psalmi were by far the most popular, with eleven different printings in Italian plus two French and two English translations.21 One of those English translations was Thomas Wyatt’s Certayne psalms chosen out of the psalter of Dauid, commonlye called thee .vii. penytentiall psalms (1549).22 Like most of Wyatt’s poetry, the Penitential Psalms were published posthumously, but the work circulated in manuscript among the literati of England before his death. Scholars are divided as to when Wyatt composed his work—perhaps as early as 1536, which speaks to the speed with which Aretino’s work traveled to England, 21 22 19

Waddington, “Pietro Aretino,” 281. Waddington, “Pietro Aretino,” passim. Waddington, “Pietro Aretino,” 278, 279–80. Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid, commonlye called the .vii. penytentiall psalmes, drawen into englyshe meter by Sir Thomas Wyat knyght, wherunto is added a prolage of [the] auctore before euery psalme, very pleasau[n]t [and] profettable to the godly reader (London, 1549). 20

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and certainly by 1541, just a year before the outspoken but politically nimble Wyatt managed to die of natural causes rather than a stroke of the axe. Wyatt’s version of the Psalmi consistently replicates Aretino’s Italian vocabulary in English and retains the narrative prologues that were uniquely Aretino’s innovation. But Wyatt departed from Aretino’s text by restoring the Psalmi to poetic form, at the same time gesturing to Luigi Alamanni’s psalms through the use of Italian ottava and terza rima.23 The Penitential Psalms may have provided Wyatt the opportunity to comment on the sexual rapaciousness of Henry VIII, although whether this was the poet’s intent is impossible to know. Of course, as Beth Quitslund points out, this has not prevented scholars from speculating: “An enormous amount of literary study has been devoted to Wyatt’s psalms, examining his theological allegiances, their status as reflections of his personal circumstances (particularly his imprisonments in 1536 and 1541), and their potential commentary on late Henrican politics.”24 In his exploration of the subversion-containment dynamic of sixteenth-century English literature, Stephen Greenblatt has suggested that “Wyatt may complain about the abuses of the court, he may declare his independence from a corrupting sexual or political entanglement, but he does so from within a context governed by the essential values of domination and submission, the values of a system of power that has an absolute monarch as head of both church and state.”25 Elizabeth Heale has argued that his Penitential Psalms are not to be read solely as a Wyatt’s cloaked rebuke of the king’s courtship of Anne Boleyn, but rather as “articulating highly politicized issues of faith and salvation.” She further suggests that Wyatt’s version critiques Aretino’s reliance on “human artistry” rather than divine providence.26 And in this volume, Clare Costley King’oo demonstrates that, regardless of their author’s intent, Wyatt’s psalms were appropriated by Edwardian Reformists to further their own doctrinal aims. The Penitential Psalms influenced many English poets, writers, and composers on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide. John Donne’s extant sermons include three on the Penitential Psalms. They also show up in the sermons of the Catholic martyr Bishop John Fisher, executed by Henry VIII for refusing to acknowledge the king’s supremacy in religion, and in the sermons of the conformist Anglican Lancelot Andrewes, whose Seven Penitential Psalms Paraphrased functioned as a

23 Wyatt’s psalms represent the first use of terza rima in English, as Hamlin observes (Psalm Culture, 112). 24 Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603, 14. For a survey of the scholarship on Wyatt’s psalms in the context of the court of Henry, see Cummings, Literary Culture (223–31); Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme, 14n39; Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 112n4; and Zim, English Metrical Psalms, 44–6. 25 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 120. 26 Elizabeth Heale, “The Word of Truth,” in Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Heale (New York: Longman, 1998), 154–90.

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book of devotions around themes suggested by each of the seven psalms.27 Fisher’s Exposition of the Seven Penitential Psalms, which, in traditional manner, ties each of those psalms to the sacrament of penance, was the first of his works to be published. It was reprinted (most appropriately) seven times before his execution in 1529, when the king ordered his works to be suppressed. Nonetheless, Fisher’s book remained popular for the next two centuries, reprinted as late as 1714. In a rendition that illustrates the wide and often subtle cross-influence of these works, John Dowland’s famous set of seven pavans for five-part instrumental consort of 1604, titled Lachrimae, or Seaven teares, pays its own homage to the Penitential Psalms and particularly to the Franco-Flemish Catholic Orlando di Lasso’s earlier composition Psalmi Davidis poenitentiales.28 Dowland had already been one of ten contributing composers to the 1592 Whole Booke of Psalmes, harmonizing six simple English metrical psalms familiar from parish-church worship. These included a version of the Sternhold and Hopkins translation of the Penitential Psalm 130 De Profundis, for which Dowland created a four-part setting of a tune derived from a Calvinist psalter of 1539.29 Though the Penitential Psalms are perhaps the clearest example of psalmic influence across confessional divides, other psalms were likewise adapted by both Catholics and Protestants living in early modern England. According to Hamlin, Psalm 137 was “the quintessential psalm of the Renaissance and the Reformation,” resonating with any Christian, whether Protestant or Catholic, who knew the feeling of exile: “The experience of exile was conceived of in various ways, in the alienation felt by members of a religious minority (Protestant or Catholic, high Staley, “The Penitential Psalms,” 258, 257. See also Andrewes’s Holy Devotions and Directions to Pray: also a brief exposition upon the Lords prayer, the creed, the Ten Commandments, the 7 penitential psalms, the 7 psalms of thanksgiving: together with the letanie, which appeared first under the title Institutiones Piae or directions to pray . . . , with Henry Isaacson listed as the author (1630). But after the death of Andrewes, the publisher adopted the revised title and added a preface naming Andrewes as the author. Many versions are available on EEBO. 28 John Dowland, Lachrimae, or Seaven teares figured in seaven passionate pavans (London: Printed by John Windet, [1604]; and Orlando di Lasso, Psalmi Davids Poentitentiales (Munich, 1584), available in modern edition as The Seven Penitential Psalms and Laudate Dominum de Caelis, ed. Peter Bergquist, Recent Researches in Music of the Renaissance vol. LXXXVI–LXXXVII (Madison: A-R Editions, 1980). See David Pinto, “Dowland’s Tears: Aspects of Lachrimae,” The Lute: Journal of the Lute Society 37 (1997), 56–9. 29 The Whole Booke of Psalmes: With Their Wonted Tunes, as they are song in Churches, composed into foure partes (London: Thomas Est, the assigné of William Byrd, 1592). For further information about Dowland’s setting of Psalm 130 (129), including its musical derivation, see Diana Poulton, John Dowland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972; rev. 1982), 326–9. Dowland also used four of the Penitential Psalms among his seven compositions of 1596 to lament the passing of Elizabethan courtier and musical patron Henry Noell, but these remained in manuscript during his lifetime; see Poulton, John Dowland, 330–336. 27

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church or low, depending on time and place), or that of political exiles in foreign countries, or the most abstract exile of the Christian soul from its home in heaven, a notion derived from Augustine’s commentary on this psalm.”30 As the English monarchy shifted its affinities back and forth between Catholic and Protestant doctrines, exile was all but certain for church leaders, clerics, and exegetes for at least some period of time. As Hamlin writes, “Coverdale, Whittingham, and Crashaw were all for extended periods, living in exile on the continent, the first two as a result of their Protestant beliefs at times when England was officially Catholic, and the last, a Catholic among Protestants, for just the opposite reason.”31 Psalm 137 could also be used to meditate on a more spiritual exile within the borders of one’s own homeland. Noting the centrality of the psalm in “a wellknown exchange of motets between [William] Byrd and Philippe de Monte, Kapellmeister to the Holy Roman Emperor,” Alison Shell writes, “The analogy of English Catholicism—or other religious minorities—with Israel in Egypt is commonplace; and here, the reference to suppressed songs can be read as alluding to banned worship.”32 In Roger Bray’s essay in this volume, Byrd’s composition of metrical psalms following the public executions of several recusants marks a turning point in the composer’s devotional affiliations, serving as a forceful declaration of his recusancy. While the Psalms could cross and re-cross confessional boundaries, tying together Christians of every denomination, they could also define religious perspective and practice. At Nicholas Ferrar’s quasi-monastic community in Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire, the Psalms were central to both worship and religious education. The community of 40-plus persons, mostly women, including Nicholas’s sisters and other women who had taken vows of celibacy, followed a rule of life centered on the Daily Offices of the Book of Common Prayer. Central to Matins and Evensong (which Thomas Cranmer had distilled from the eight monastic hours33), as well as the shorter hourly devotions said by members of Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 219. See also Hamlin’s discussions of Psalms 23 and 51. Ibid., 240–241. 32 Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: 30 31

Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126–7. 33 For the first Book of Common Prayer (1549), Cranmer used parts of Matins, Lauds, and Prime to create the Prayer Book Matins, while Vespers and Compline provided the material for Evensong. Cranmer further broke with tradition in his expectation that both laity and clergy would recite or attend the offices daily. On Cranmer’s sources and process, see G.J. Cummings, “The Office in the Church of England,” in The Study of Liturgy, eds Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarnold, SJ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 390–395. The two offices were expanded in the 1552 Prayer Book, in part to fill the “devotional vacuum” created by lay antipathy to frequent communion, which left the churches empty on Sunday mornings, though a few families sent a servant to represent the household, fulfilling their obligation to commune three times a year, as stipulated in the 1549 Prayer Book (in the rubrics following the communion). Furthermore, priests were forbidden to celebrate communion unless there were “some” parishioners who

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the community, was the monthly recitation of the entire Psalter. Children from neighboring villages and farms came to the Little Gidding chapel for Sunday Matins and were invited to share the midday meal. These “Psalm children” would be asked to recite a psalm from memory following the Sunday service. For each psalm they could recite, they received a penny, no small reward in those times and a sign of the Ferrars’ generosity and commitment to children’s religious education and salvation as well as the family’s regard for and devotion to the Psalms. While the children were catechized each Sunday and also taught to recite the Lord’s Prayer by heart, it was only the Psalms for which they were immediately and financially rewarded.34 Learning to recite all 150 Psalms would not have been as difficult as it might seem, and not only for those who kept the monastic hours (whether the full Catholic complement of seven or Prayer Book Matins and Evensong), though such worshippers would probably learn the Psalms most easily and quickly. Indeed, it was the sixth-century Benedictine Rule, with its prescription for reciting all the Psalms in course as part of the monastic hours that ensured the centrality of the Psalms to Christian prayer in the West, especially as monasteries proliferated throughout Europe in the centuries that followed. Though few lay worshippers would have undertaken the entire Psalter, as did the Little Gidding community, people of all Christian confessions recited the Psalms in formal worship, family prayers, or individual meditations, and they too would have come to know a good number of the Psalms, and many individual verses, from memory. It is important, of course, to remember that even most Protestant worshippers would not have been reading the Psalms from a printed book (especially in the mid-sixteenth century), not only because few people were literate but because books were expensive. In many English parishes, the parish clerk (lay or ordained) recited or intoned the Psalms by single verse, which the congregation then repeated. Large wished to receive communion, according to the 1547 Book of Common Prayer, or, by the rubrics of the 1549 Book, “a good noumbre” in larger churches or “foure, or three at the least” in parishes “not aboue twentie persons”—and in all cases, the parishioners were to provide both bread and wine. All these circumstances combined to undermine Cranmer’s intent to make communion the central worship of the Reformed English Church and brought to greater prominence the offices, Matins, and Evensong. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 315. 34 Information about the religious practices at Little Gidding comes in part from a hostile pamphlet written by Edward Benton in 1641, The Arminian Nunnery: or, A Briefe Description and Relation of the late erected Monasticall Place, called the Arminian Nunnery at little Gidding in Huntington-Shire. See also Lynette R. Muir and John A. White, Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar . . . (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996); Joyce Ransome, “George Herbert, Nicholas Ferrar, and the ‘Pious Works’ of Little Gidding,” George Herbert Journal 31 (2007): 1–19; and the DNB entries on Nicholas Ferrar, John Ferrar, and Little Gidding. Though the commentary in these entries comes from a strongly Protestant perspective critical of the Little Gidding religious practice, the entries provide reliable information.

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pre-Reformation churches throughout Europe had used elaborate harmonized settings of the Psalms suitable for highly trained musicians with and without musical accompaniment. Such compositions were conducive to meditation on the ineffable divine, and their use continued in Catholic regions as well as in larger, urban Lutheran and Anglican parishes and foundations. The fact that Psalms were so often sung made them much easier to learn. Indeed, music and the sense of hearing were tied particularly closely to memory as well as to understanding, judgment, and emotion—all qualities that came into play wherever the Psalms were sung or said. “Hearing is the organ of understanding,” wrote the seventeenth-century poet and moralist Richard Brathwaite, By it we conceive, by the memorie we conserve, and by our judgment we revolve; as many rivers have their confluence by small streames so knowledge her essence by the accent of the eare. As the eare can best judge of sounds, so hath it a distinct power to sound into the center of the heart.35

And while music aided both memory and understanding, the prospect of learning the Psalms “by heart” was considered an incentive to learning to sing and even to read musical notation. In addition to justifying the singing of psalms, the editors of the Bay Psalm Book had provided “a short introduction to learne to syng the Psalmes,” with an abridged course on how to read musical notation. Early in the following century, in another publishing landmark, the first manual for singing and reading music printed in New England was advertised to be sold in Boston as A Very plain and easy Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm Tunes; With the Cantus or Trebles of Twenty eight Psalm Tunes, contrived in such a manner that the Learner may attain the Skill of Singing them, with the greatest ease and Speed imaginable (1721).36 The author, the Reverend Mr. John Tufts, noted in his prefatory poem “On the Divine Use of Musick” that the singing of psalms was not only believed to help turn the lips from wanton, secular words, but both echoed and anticipated participation in the eternal choir of heaven.37 Richard Brathwait[e], Essays Upon the Five Senses (London: n.p., 1625), 6. In Adoro te devote, a Eucharistic hymn typically attributed to Aquinas, hearing becomes the only reliable sense through which we can know God: “Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur, sed auditu solo tuto creditur; credo quidquid dixit Dei Filius: nil hoc verbo Veritatis verius”—in one familiar version, “Taste, and touch, and vision to discern thee fail; / Faith, that comes by hearing pierces through the veil.” 36 John Tufts, A Very plain and easy Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm Tunes (Boston, 1721). See Irving Lowens, “John Tufts’ ‘Introduction to the Singing of PsalmTunes’ (1721–1744): The First American Music Textbook,” Journal of Research in Music Education 2 (1954): 90–91. 37 John Tufts, An Introduction To the Singing of Psalm Tunes, In a plain & easy Method, 5th edn (Boston: Samuel Gerrish, 1726), sig. Av. We quote from the 1726 edition because the 1721 edition is no longer extant. See Allen P. Britton and Irving Lowens, “Unlocated Titles in Early American Sacred Music,” Music Library Association Notes 11 (December 1953): 33–48. 35

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Metrical psalms of various authorship had a wide and long popularity among Protestants. In England, they competed with the psalm translations of Miles Coverdale, a former Austin friar, who in 1535 finished the first complete Bible in English, augmenting the late William Tyndale’s translations of the New Testament, Pentateuch, and Jonah with his own, for which he consulted the Vulgate and other contemporary versions, especially Luther’s German Bible. Later, Coverdale produced the Psalter that would be used in Anglican liturgy up until 1979.38 In 1537, when readings in the vernacular were first officially proposed for English liturgies, Coverdale’s was the only English Bible, and thus his psalms were the first to be recited in English churches. Coverdale was not a biblical linguist like the translator William Tyndale, but as Jamie Ferguson notes in his contribution to this collection, it is misleading to suggest that this made him any less an exegete. As Ferguson explains, Coverdale’s psalters, produced with reference to the Vulgate and Luther’s German Bible, evince not a progression toward a single authoritative version but rather a pluralistic conception of biblical truth. Coverdale had become familiar with the Luther Bible during his sojourn in Germany, where he fled during the reign of Henry VIII. It was there that he received his doctorate (at Tübingen) during the latter years of Henry’s reign, when Reformers like Coverdale were in danger of execution for their radical views.39 It was also in Germany that he came to know Tyndale’s work and produced his own first translations of scripture. Coverdale had an ear for English speech rhythm and form, so that what he produced, though not as faithful to the Hebrew original as the translations of Tyndale, rolled off the tongues of early modern English worshippers in familiar

38 The Lollard Bible was translated from the Latin Vulgate by John Wyclif and his associates, in particular Nicholas of Hereford and John Purvey in the 1580s. They first attempted a literal translation and produced a text that was hard to read and harder to understand. A 1595 revision, produced over a decade after Wyclif’s death, was eminently readable. It circulated widely in manuscript, both as complete Bible and in units small enough to fit in the pockets of itinerant preachers. See Ann Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) and Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 39 Coverdale spent time in Germany from 1528 to 1535, when he earned his doctorate and published his first translation of the Bible (1535). He returned to England after Henry VIII had changed his mind about biblical translation. Indeed, the king ultimately ordered that Coverdale’s translation be chained in every English church. But at the 1540 execution of Thomas Cromwell in 1540, who had been Coverdale’s patron and friend, he again fled England. He returned at Henry’s death and was made Bishop of Exeter, serving also as almoner to Catherine Parr (now Catherine Seymour), Henry’s widow. He lost his bishopric at Mary I’s accession in 1553 when he again fled to the Continent, returning in 1559 after the accession of Elizabeth I. See Guido Latre, “The 1535 Coverdale Bible an its Antwerp Origins,” in The Bible as Book: The Reformation, ed. Orlaith O’Sullivan (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2000), 89–102.

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rhythms and phrases. His psalms in particular have proven to be every bit as memorable as metrical versions. With the promulgation of the Six Articles, English Reformers issued a renewed call for English Bible readings and liturgy in 1539. This time they had ready a much improved English translation of the Bible, again the work of Coverdale. Within two years of the publication of the Coverdale Bible, another English Bible had been published: Matthew’s Version, a revision of Coverdale’s Bible produced by Tyndale’s disciple John Rogers, under the pseudonym of Thomas Matthew. He had acquired further translations of the Old Testament (Joshua to 2 Chronicles) made by Tyndale before his execution. Rogers replaced Coverdale’s translations of these books with Tyndale’s, but otherwise relied on the text of the 1535 Coverdale Bible. In addition, the Matthew Bible included copious notes and parallel references of a decidedly Protestant cast that did not please more conservative leaders of the English Church. Within a year, Coverdale had been asked (either by Thomas Cromwell directly or at his behest) to revise the Matthew Bible with an eye to toning down the more polemical notes. The Great Bible that appeared in 1539 (of great size for use in public liturgy) was Coverdale’s revision of the Matthew Bible. A second edition appeared in 1540 with the phrase on the title page “This is the byble apoynted to the use of the churches,” referring to the 1538 royal injunction requiring a Bible to be available in every church. Thus when the first Book of Common Prayer appeared in 1549, the Great Bible was the official holy book of the Church of England and was used in all services. And although the Book of Common Prayer required that most of the Old Testament be read in course annually as the first lesson for Matins and Evensong and that most of the New Testament (except the Book of Revelation) be read three times a year as the second lesson, the entire Psalter was to be sung or said monthly. Hence, with the exception, perhaps, of Sternhold and Hopkins’s metrical versions, which were being used in public worship by 1567, it was the Coverdale Psalter read in course once a month that worshippers came to know best.40 And while the publication of the Geneva Bible in 1560 undermined the authority of the Great Bible for English Protestants, Coverdale’s psalms, by then engraved This is not to suggest that Coverdale’s psalms, or the Book of Common Prayer, were implemented without resistance. Sixteenth-century liturgical reform sparked rebellion in the reign of every Tudor monarch, and the Reformed liturgies were not used during Mary’s reign or the Interregnum. Charles I’s attempt to impose English liturgy on the Scots led to directly to his falling out with Parliament and eventually to his execution. James D. Tracy notes in Europe’s Reformations 1450–1650 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999) that “introduction of the Prayer-Book liturgy provoked a brief uprising in the west of England, where rebels demanded that every priest at mass pray for the souls of the dead by name” (190). On Scottish resistance, see Bryan Spinks, “From Elizabeth I to Charles II,” in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, ed. Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 44–55. On the popularity of Sternhold and Hopkins in early modern England, see Daniell, The Bible in English, 322–3, and Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 19–50. 40

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in public memory with more permanence than any words on a printed page, remained the psalms of English liturgy, poetry, and prayer. As Ramie Targoff points out, More than any other single book of Scripture, the Book of Psalms occupied a central position in the Reformed liturgy. Beginning in 1552, Miles Coverdale’s prose version of the Psalms from the Great Bible translation was appended to all of the smaller sized, domestic Prayer Books; by 1564 this translation was appended to the larger, folio editions that typically served as the church’s own liturgical texts. This decision on the part of the Reformers to include the Psalter within the Prayer Book reflects its frequent recitation in the service.41

The early history of music for the English Psalms is even more complicated than their translation and publication separately, as part of the Bible, or in notated psalters. It also reflects a dramatic influx of international musical styles into England during the Tudor era, and, from the beginning, emphasizes the location of psalms between public worship and domestic practice. The medieval church had encouraged the use of psalms, especially the Penitential Psalms, for private meditation, and had required the chanting of specific Latin psalms by priest and choir as part of the divine office and during the Mass throughout the year.42 For both practical and religious reasons, all liturgical tunes had to be simple and accessible to parish clerks and eventually, as more and more of the service was taken by the congregation rather than by clergy, to congregants without specialized musical training. However, the century or so before the Reformation witnessed a trend toward greater elaboration of liturgical music, culminating in an increase in the great choral foundations in England as well as on the Continent. During the period leading up to the Reformation, many English churches, even relatively small ones, were endowed by wealthy parishioners with organs and chantries, especially in more prosperous parts of the country such as London, Kent, and East Anglia. In addition to chantry priests and minor clergy who augmented their wages by singing, playing the organ, and teaching music to schoolboys, by about Targoff, Common Prayer, 66. In The Bible in English, Daniell observes, “Coverdale’s work of glory remains his Psalter. His translations of the Psalms, slightly modified in 1539 for the Great Bible, went from there into the first service-book of the new Church of England in 1549, the Book of Common Prayer—and stayed there in Anglican Churches worldwide, until the 1960s” (189). Even now, the psalter of the Book of Common Prayer continues in the lineage of Coverdale’s translation, retaining felicitous and familiar words and phrases when accurate and deviating from the original only to correct errors. The vocabulary of the 1979 American Prayer Book’s psalter, for instance, is restricted to words used in the sixteenth century, in the sense they carried then. 42 See James McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later-Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 280–283 and 356–60; and Nicholas Temperley, “‘If Any of You Be Mery, Let Hym Synge Psalmes’: The Culture of Psalms in Church and Home,” in Noyses, Sounds and Sweet Aires: Music in Early Modern England, ed. Jessie Ann Owens (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2006), 91. 41

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1500, wealthier parish churches were beginning to acquire entire staffs of fulltime musicians. Even clerks with less formal musical training were often able to improvise harmony for simple chants, especially psalm chants, according to wellknown rules.43 During the Henrician reformation, daily services continued to be said and sung in Latin, but with far-reaching steps taken to make them more accessible and intelligible to the laity.44 Even by mid-century, with the English service and new Book of Common Prayer in place, there was little agreement about the form to be taken by the liturgical music for Matins and Evensong or the derivation of its tunes. Initially, new English-language texts were sung to adaptations of late medieval plainchant; John Merbecke’s Booke of Common praier noted supplied simple plainchant-style music for all sections of Matins, Holy Communion, and Evensong.45 Indeed, the mid-century English proclivity for chanting liturgical texts was noted by the Zwinglian John Hooper in a 1549 letter to Heinrich Bullinger critical of the Anglican practice: In the churches [in London] they always chant the hours and other hymns relating to the Lord’s Supper, but in our own language. And that popery may not be lost, the mass-priests, although they are compelled to discontinue the use of the Latin language, yet most carefully observe the same tone and manner of chanting to which they were heretofore accustomed in the papacy.46

As English Reform practices became more firmly established and uniform under Edward VI and especially Elizabeth I, tunes for the Psalms came not only from the Latin liturgy, but also from German Lutheran, French Huguenot, and Swiss Calvinist collections, from longstanding popular and courtly traditions of secular song and dance, and from sources yet to be identified.47 When the Marian exiles 43 See Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), vol. 1, 7–10. 44 Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England 1549–1660 (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1967), 1–4; and Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, vol. 1, 10–12. 45 See Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England, 2–23; and Temperley, “’If Any of You Be Mery Let Hym Synge Psalmes,’” 91. 46 Qtd. in Robin A. Leaver, “Plainchant Adaptation in England,” in The Hymnal 1982 Companion, ed. Raymond F. Glover (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1990), 181. 47 By the accession of Elizabeth I, tunes from the Genevan congregation of English exiles were also adapted for use back at home, and of course Court composers set psalms for more elaborate services at the Chapel Royal; there may even have been a vogue for personal courtly singing of the psalms under Henry VIII and Edward VI. For summaries of the psalm tunes in the early Reformation era, see Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England, 370–402; and Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), vol. 1, 33–8. For succinct information about the relationship between psalms and [godly] ballads, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55–66.

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returned from Geneva, they brought with them an incomplete English psalter with psalms by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and William Whittingham. It included a variety of tunes suitable for the rhythms of the English language, most of which were rather bland in comparison to those of Calvin’s French psalter. Within a few years, the psalter had been completed and was published in 1562 as The Whole booke of Psalmes collected into Englysh metre by T. Starnhold, J. Hopkins, & others, conferred with the Ebrue, with apt notes to synge the[m] with al.48 The following year, a harmonized version appeared that emphasized that the contents could not only be sung in unaccompanied four-part harmony, but also “song to al musicall instruments, set forth for the increase of vertue.”49 The former was clearly intended for both public worship and private devotion, and the latter, with its notated harmony and suggestion of instruments, for domestic use. Metrical psalm-singing during worship was most popular in parishes without paid choirs and even perhaps without an organ, but Nicholas Temperley has shown that metrical psalms were also sung in English cathedrals.50 Further, Hannibal Hamlin notes that the Sternhold and Hopkins metrical psalter was sometimes bound together with the Book of Common Prayer. And he cites Temperley’s statement that “since most parish churches had to buy the prayerbook and prose psalter as well as the metrical psalms, these were frequently sold as a single volume.”51 Not all psalms translated or set to music in early modern England were metrical, nor intended for use in conforming churches, as essays in Part 1 of this collection show.52 By the end of Elizabeth’s reign and throughout the following century, the leading native composers were setting and arranging English and Latin psalms in a wide range of compositional styles for a plethora of performance practices in the home, parish church, private chapel, and cathedral, a few examples of which are shown in the essays by Linda Phyllis Austern and Roger Bray.53 From the Elizabethan era through the Restoration and beyond, the leading composers of the Chapel Royal and such wealthy cathedral foundations as St. Paul’s continued to set The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London: John Day, 1562), title page. The Whole [booke of] Psalmes in Foure Partes (London: John Day, 1563), title

48 49

page. Hamlin notes that this version was not particularly successful; see Psalm Culture, 37; and Temperly notes that the 1562 version was surpassed in the number of editions only by the Bible and prayer book (to which it was often bound), Temperley, “‘If Any of You Be Mery, Let Hym Synge Psalmes’,” 94. For further information on this history of the metrical psalms, see Robin A. Leaver, ‘Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songs’: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove, 1535–1566 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 70; and Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, vol. 1, 42–8. 50 Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, vol. 1, 42–4. 51 Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 33, 34. 52 See also Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 37–41 and 51–84. 53 For a succinct summary of musical styles used for psalms and other music with sacred text from the 1560s to the Restoration, see Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England, 375–401. See also Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 51–76.

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psalm texts as elaborate anthems for some of the most finely trained professional musicians in the land. For the parish church and the home, the simple tunes that appeared in the 1562 Whole Booke fell out of favor in less than two generations, supplanted by those of successive editions.54 However, metrical psalmody if anything more greatly influenced public Anglican liturgies after the Restoration, when the enormously popular Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter was supplanted by Tate and Brady in 1696.55 Of course, before the English had their Sternhold and Hopkins or their Tate and Brady, German Protestants had a metrical psalter produced by Luther, and the Calvinist churches of France and Geneva had the Marot-Bèze metrical psalter. Like their English analogues, the music of these German and French collections originated in a wide range of sources, including Latin plainsong, vernacular hymnody, popular tunes, and, later, the new psalters of other Reform practices. Similarly, they quickly inspired new compositions.56 Luther was the first to put the Psalms into verse and stanzas in German, adapting them to pre-existing melodies from both sacred and secular traditions and eventually helping to introduce new tunes in similarly simple styles.57 For Calvin, metrical psalms were an appealing compromise between age-old sacred musical tradition and the total dismissal of congregational song in worship generally ascribed to Zwingli.58 “Look where we may, we will never find songs better, nor more suited to the purpose [of congregational singing], than the Psalms of David; which the Holy Ghost himself composed,” Calvin wrote in 1542. “And so, when we sing them, we are certain that For a summary of successive metrical psalters with music from 1562 through 1696, see Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 41–84. 55 N[ahum] Tate and N[icholas] Brady, A New Version of the Psalms of David, fitted to the Tuns Used in Churches (London: Printed by M. Clark for the Company of Stationers, 1696). See Leaver, “English Metrical Psalmody,” and Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 83–4. 56 See Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, vol. 1, 19–22. 57 Luther was not, however, the first to translate the Bible into German, though his translations were, of course, profoundly more influential than earlier versions, contributing significantly to the development of the German language and through it German nationalism. On pre-Luther German translations, see Martin Brecht, Martin Luther 1521–1532: Shaping and Defining the Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 46–7, and Siegfried Raeder, “Translations of the Bible into German in the Time before Luther,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of its Interpretation, Vol. 2: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Magne Sæbø (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, 2008) 395–7. For a discussion of Luther’s innovations in verse and form, see Friedrich Blume, ed., Geschichte der evangelischen Kirchenmusik (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1965), 3–75; Edward Henry Lauer, “Luther’s Translations of the Psalms in 1523-24,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 14 (1915): 1–34; and Wilhelm Stapel, Luthers Lieder und Gedichte (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1950). 58 On Zwingli’s disapproval of congregational singing, see Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, vol. 1, 20; and Glenn Ehrstine, Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern, 1523–1555 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), 250–262. Cf. Gottfried Locher, Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981). 54

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God put the words in our mouth, as if he himself sang in us to magnify his praise.”59 As Bruce Gordon points out, it was Calvin who, in January 1537, “persuaded the council in Geneva to introduce the singing of psalms into worship.”60 He first heard congregational psalm-singing in German and encountered sung metrical psalms in Strasbourg when he attended services led by Martin Bucer.61 During the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Genevan minister and music publisher Simon Goulart published several versions of the Psalms and other sacred music, some commissioned by foreign booksellers. In his essay for this collection, Richard Freedman examines Goulart’s Cinquante pseaumes de David avec la musique a cinq partes d’Orlande de Lasso as a contrafactum created for Huguenots’ private worship in Catholic France. The Geneva Psalter was a collection 25 years in the making—the collaborative effort of an ardent Reformist and a vibrant court culture. When Calvin asked his council to introduce psalm-singing into church worship, metrical psalms were already in vogue at court, where poet Clément Marot’s compositions were especially popular. Gordon suggests that by the time Calvin had met him, Marot “was regarded as the most renowned and popular author in France.”62 Having encountered this psalm-singing culture when he arrived in Strasbourg in the 1530s, Calvin, who had tried his own hand at versification of psalms without much success, enlisted Marot to produce additional metrical psalms for church worship. The first collection, printed in 1539, included 18 psalms—6 by Calvin, 12 by Marot. Expanded versions in 1542 and 1543 contained 35 and 49 psalms respectively. Calvin wrote prefaces to both collections, availing himself of the opportunity to commend the practice of congregational singing.63 Marot died in 1544, and Calvin asked scholar Théodore de Bèze to complete the versification of the Psalms. The result was the Geneva Psalter of 1562, which, as David Daniell points out, “remains in use to this day in the Protestant Church of France, its 110 metres and 125 tunes using every device to avoid monotony.”64 As quoted in Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church, vol. 1, 20. Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 285. 61 On the connection between Calvin and Bucer, see Jaques Courvoisier, “Calvin et Bucer,” in Calvin à Strasbourg, 1538–1541, ed. Jean-Daniel Benoit et al. (Strasbourg, 59

60

1938), 37–66; Bruce Gordon, Calvin, 82–102 passim; Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Viking, 2003), 230–240p; and Wilhelm Pauck, “Calvin and Butzer,” The Journal of Religion 9.2 (Apr. 1929): 237–56. 62 Gordon, Calvin, 194. See also Daniell, The Bible in English, 321–2. 63 Joel R. Beeke, “Calvin on Piety,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 138. 64 Daniell, The Bible in English, 322. On Calvin’s work with Marot and Bèze, see Beeke, “Calvin on Piety,” 125–52; T. Hartley Hall, “The Shape of Reformed Piety,” in Spiritual Traditions for the Contemporary Church, ed. Robin Maas and Gabriel O’Donnell (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 202–21; Michel Jeanneret, Poesie et tradition biblique au XVIe siècle, recherches stylistiques sur les paraphrases des “Psaumes,” de Marot à Malherbe (Paris: J. Corti, 1969); W. Sanford Reid, “The Battle Hymns of the Lord:

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It has not always been clearly understood that Loys Bourgeois was responsible for composing and editing so much of the music for the Geneva Psalter. A previously unknown 1551 version of the psalter re-discovered some 40 years ago in the Rutgers University Library collection includes an Avertissement to the reader by Bourgeois. There he explains that he wrote new music for 34 of the Bèze Psalms, rewrote 12 other tunes, and revised 24 more, with only 15 of the inherited tunes left unchanged. Like others before him, Bourgeois took many of his tunes from Catholic plainchant and secular melodies.65 The fact that Bourgeois’s tunes were included in a psalter commissioned by Calvin meant that they were authorized for use in the Geneva churches, and they soon became intimately familiar to and beloved by worshippers. But when Bourgeois made changes to some of the melodies without official license, in the process prompting the ire of worshippers who could no longer sing the tunes from memory, he was briefly imprisoned and became persona non grata in Geneva.66 The work of Calvin, Marot, Bèze, Bourgeois, and dozens of nameless composers, living and dead, culminated in Les Pseaumes mis en rime françoise. It contained the all the Psalms, each with a prescribed melody, plus the Decalogue, the Song of Simeon, two forms of grace, the Lord’s Prayer, and the creed. The melodies of the Geneva Psalter, though singable and familiar, were not harmonized, but many composers moved quickly to correct that deficiency. Claude Goudimel provided simple harmonizations for the tunes, though because of Calvin’s fear that “les oreilles ne soient plus sensibles à la musique qu’aux paroles” (that the ears [of worshippers] not be more responsibe to the music than to the words), Goudimel prefaced his harmonizations with the caveat that, though “this little volume” included harmonizations for four voices, they were not intended for use in churches but rather “for rejoicing in God at home.” Such usage was not considered harmful as long as the chant used in the Church Calvinist Psalmody of the Sixteenth Century, in Sixteenth Century Journal 2 (1971): 36– 54; and John Witvliet, “The Spirituality of the Psalter: Metrical Psalms in Liturgy and Life in Calvin’s Geneva,” in Calvin Studies Society Papers, 1995–1997 (Grand Rapids: CRC, 1998), 93–117. 65 See Pierre Pidoux, “Loys Bourgeois’ Anteil am Hugenotten-Psalter,” Jahrbuch für Liturgik und Hymnologie 15 (1970): 123–32. For the history of the musical styles and influence of the Reformation-era French psalms, see Peter Ernst Bernouilli and Frieder Furler, eds, Der Genfer Psalter: Eine Entdeckungsreise (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2001); Maria Bützler, “Der Hugenottenpsalter,” Musica sacra (Hungary) 87 (1967): 273– 83; and Nicole Labelle, Les different styles de la musique religieuse en France: Le psaume de 1539 a 1572, Tome I: Commentaire (Henryville, Ottawa, et Minningen: Institute of Mediaeval Music, Ltd., Institut de Musique Médiévale, S.A., et Institut für Mittelalterliche Musikforschung, GmbH, 1981). 66 See Frank Dobbins, “Bourgeois, Loys,” in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed April 7, 2008), and Nicholas Temperly et al., “Psalms, metrical, II: The European Continent, http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed September 9, 2008).

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remained unharmonized.67 Goudimel’s harmonies (and the Bourgeois melodies they embellished) were indeed popular and they traveled to every part of Europe that the Marot-Bèze metrical psalm translations went and beyond, not only to francophone Europe, but also to England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and, perhaps most notably, the Lutheran German states.68 Ambrosius Lobwasser’s translation of Der Psalter dess königlichen Propheten Davids, in deutsche reyme verstendiglich und deutlich gebracht (The Psalter of the royal prophet David [Leipzig, 1573]), included both Bourgeois’s tunes and Goudimel’s harmonies. In the kind of movement and metamorphosis that typify the use of psalms in the early modern era, these were later transferred to other texts, the best-known being the chorale “Freu dich sehr, O meine Seele” to the melody of Psalm 62. Still later, during the early eighteenth century, Johann Sebastian Bach most famously used a version of this work in two of his cantatas, BWV 19: Es erhub sich ein Streit (“There Uprose a Fierce Strife”), for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, and BWV 70: Wachet, betet, seid bereit allezeit (“Watch Ye, Pray Ye”) for the twenty-sixth Sunday after the Feast of the Holy Trinity. It was not only Reformist worshippers who participated in the creation, adaptation, and performance of musical psalms in every possible meditative or devotional space during the early modern era. The musical inheritance to which psalms belonged was built on a living blend of tradition and innovation whose roots stretched back thousands of years and across thousands of miles through layer upon layer of local and global religious change and liturgical reform. In theory it reached all the way to the ancient Judaic practice in which psalms had been meant to be sung with instrumental accompaniment both in and outside the ancient temple of Jerusalem.69 The same striking and perhaps unexpected collapse and reconfiguration of geographical, confessional, cultural, and linguistic distances that appear in the general transmission and adaptation of psalms during the early modern era apply equally to music. Older psalm-tunes, liturgical psalm-chants, 67 “Nous avons adiousté au chant des PSAUMES en ce petit volume, trois-parties [i.e., four parts, melody plus 3 voices harmonized], non pour induire à les chanter en l’Église, mais pour s’esjouir en Dieu particulièrement ès-maisons. Cela ne doit pas être mauvais, d’autant que le chant duquel on use en l’Église demeure comme s’il estoit seul.” For more on these psalm settings, and on French Protestant music in general, see Eleanor Lawry,  “Some Observations on Goudimel’s Psalm Settings,”  in Libraries, History, Diplomacy and the Performing Arts: Essays in Honor of Carleton Sprague Smith, ed. Israel Katz (Stuyvestant, NY : Pendragon Press, 1991), 337–47 ; Pierre Pidoux, Le psautier huguenot du XVIe siècle : melodies et documents, 2 vol. (Basle : Bärenreiter, 1962); and Édith Weber, La musique protestante en langue française (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1979).  68 For a summary of the international sixteenth-century diffusion of these French tunes, see Pratt, The Music of the French Psalter of 1562, 68–76. 69 For a succinct summary of the history of psalms and their music from ancient Judaism through the early modern era and beyond, see John Arthur Smith, et al., “Psalm,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, s.v. “Psalm,” http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed June 30, 2010).

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and new music in many styles that quickly became traditional were passed from generation to generation within and sometimes between specific denominations to the point that male and female musicians of every Jewish, Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic, and Protestant practice created works that often dissolved the boundaries between the past and present, the living and the dead, and even the sacred and the secular. From each side of the Atlantic to the other, from Latin tradition to vernacular even with the same tune in the same place, and re-adapting styles from theatre to chapel, church to domicile, or broadside to psalter, musical versions of the Psalms in the early modern world follow paths no less striking and perhaps unexpected as their text-only equivalents. However, where modern histories and studies of the Psalms have tended to be text based, parallel histories of Western music have been largely founded on musical style and compositional genre. This scholarly practice has left a vast gulf between the conventional objects of musical and literary- or text-based cultural inquiry except in the small percentage of cases in which Reform practitioners made use of psalm-books with musical notation, or specifically sang “psalms” as opposed to “anthems,” “ayres,” “chorales,” “[sacred] concerti,” or “motets,” among other genres. The place of the Psalms in the innovation and development of musical forms and styles has therefore not been apparent in histories of early modern music. In fact, most of the extant settings of the Psalms from the late fifteenth through eighteenth centuries have been classified by musical genre (such as anthem, cantata, lute-song, or motet), or considered with the full range of works to be performed at daily offices, to celebrate holidays, to usher in the Sabbath, or to mourn the dead. The sheer range of genres and styles to which psalms were set is astonishing, even in an era of rapid and radical changes in musical composition and transmission. As we re-examine musical settings and uses of the Psalms, we find the same sorts of serendipities and exceptions to simplified histories as we do with inquiries into their texts alone. As psalms pop up where we might not expect, we find Catholic metrical settings for laity to sing, Latin versions set by Reform composers, and musical traditions from one denomination applied to the textual heritage of another. Long before Bach borrowed an Anglo-Colonial psalm-tune with deep roots in Old England, the equally devout Lutheran composer Heinrich Schütz had adapted the magnificent and expressive style of Giovanni Gabrieli’s multi-choral Venetian motets to a set of Luther’s translations of select psalms, which he published in 1619.70 Around the same time, English composers were Heinrich Schütz, Psalmen Davids: sampt etlichen Motetten und Concerten mit acht und mehr Stimmen (Dressden [sic]: In Vorlegung des Authoris, 1619). For further information about this collection, and its adaptation of Venetian sacred musical style for German usage, see Denis Arnold, “Venetian and non-Venetian Elements in Schütz’s Psalms of David,” in Heinrich Schütz und die Musik in Dänemark zur Zeit Christians IV, eds Anne Ørbaek Jensen and Ole Kongsted (Copenhagen: Engstrøm and Sødring, 1989), 145–54; Janice Fain, “Text-Setting in the Music of Heinrich Schütz,” Choral Journal 27 (1987), 5–12; and Konrad Küster, “Gabrieli und Schütz: Die Frage des Instrumentalen in Schütz’ 70

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setting Latin psalms not only for native crypto-Catholic rites, but also for use in exclusive Angican services for a learned elite.71 Later in the same century, Henry Purcell, the compositional giant of Restoration England and master of all styles and genres associated with court, chamber, theater, tavern, and chapel, studied earlier Catholic music to sacred words before developing his own mature style for setting texts that included psalms.72 And a young German Lutheran George Frideric Handel, whose most famous settings of psalm texts appear in his later English oratorio Messiah, composed music for several Latin Vespers psalms for the Catholic liturgy during a stay in Italy in 1707.73 Even in the first century of religious reform, and countering a different assumption, simple harmonized settings of the Psalms circulated not only in Reform regions, but also in Catholic lands.74 In spite of the extremist Protestant prohibition of harmonized or accompanied tunes in church, many early modern musical settings of the Psalms were disseminated in harmonized parts, with or without the accompaniment of organ or other instruments. In English cathedrals of the period, and even in Dutch and German Reformed churches, psalms were accompanied by the organ and used as the basis of polyphonic settings.75 Psalm composer and musical editor Thomas Ravenscroft, whose four-part harmonized versions of tunes from the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter remained in use for well over a century, justified singing in parts on the basis of original practice. “[W]hatsoever the Tunes were in Davids time,” he wrote in the Preface to his Whole Booke of Psalmes, “there is no question but they were concordant and Harmonious, which could not be, had they not beene divided in parts.”76 Building on the same liturgical tradition of congregational singing of vernacular hymns at frühen Werken,” Schütz-Jahrbuch 19 (1997). The Psalms were unusually important for Schütz both personally and professionally throughout his career, during which he set words from 75 different ones from multiple textual sources in about 160 of his works; see Robin A. Leaver, “Schütz and the Psalms,” Bach 16 (1985): 34–49. 71 See Ross W. Duffin, ed., Cantiones sacrae: Madrigalian Motets from Jacobean England Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, vol. 142 (Midleton, WI: A-R Editions, inc., 2006), ix–x. 72 See Robert Shay, “Purcell as Collector of ‘Ancient’ Music: Fitzwilliam MS 88,” in Purcell Studies, ed. Curtis Price (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 73 See J. Merrill Knapp, “Handel’s Roman Church Music,” in Händel e gli Scarlatti a Roma, ed. Nino Pirrotta and Zino Agostino ( Firenze: Leo S. Slschki, 1987), 15–27; Paul Henry Lang, George Frideric Handel (New York: The Norton Library, 1966), 74; and Nicole A. Paiement, “Handel’s Dixit Dominus: History, Style, and Performance,” American Choral Review 33 (1991): 23–32. 74 See, for example, Anthony Ruff, “Metrical Psalmody of the Catholic Reformation,” GIA Quarterly 16 (2005): 16–19. 75 See Temperley, Music in the English Parish Church, vol. 1, 22. 76 Thomas Ravenscroft, The Whole Booke of Psalmes: With The Hynmes Evangelicall, and Songs Spirituall, newly corrected and enlarged (London: 1621), sig. A2v. On the

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pre-Tridentine liturgies (services that were well known to that former Catholic monk, Martin Luther), Reformation Catholics, especially in such denominationally contested lands as France, Germany, and Poland, set to music, sang, and published vernacular psalms in a variety of native poetic meters.77 Many of the notably spectacular, stylistically diverse, and dramatically expressive musical settings of psalm texts and paraphrases during the early modern era belong to the Italian innovations and the developing international style with Italian roots that came to define the most cutting-edge and widely adapted musical practices of the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries in both the Old World and the New. Praise [God] with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs,

says Psalm 149. Many Italian-influenced composers, and those who adapted originally Italian practice to what became their own distinct national styles (such as the French and Germans in particular), took these words to heart, some quite literally, others with greater subtlety. Both Catholic and Protestant music traveled readily, even to places where such devotions were officially banned; and composers on both sides of the Reformation divide studied each others’ music or traveled across borders to learn the art of composition or create works in the latest Old World style across the seas. Given the migration patterns of people and the materials of music and worship during the early modern era, what are often considered musical trends of one group were easily and readily adapted across religious and political lines. The truly cosmopolitan styles of composition in the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries nearly always paid homage to Italy. This magnificent music, a staple of today’s concert halls, commercial recordings, YouTube, and multimedia broadcasts, with its extraordinary sensitivity to textual expression and meaning, its subtle exploitation of instrumental tone color, its changing compositional textures, and often its exploitation of comparatively large performing forces, is not the music of the local parish church, convent, or monastery. It belongs instead to wealthy foundations that maintained large and specially trained musical staff, including performers as well as composers, and to places where such music was liturgically permissible, even when those were mere miles from those following more restrictive dicta for whatever reason. It is a mistake to assume that the very limited discussion of music at the Council of Trent (1545–1563, particularly in 1562) resulted in a simplification of musical expression longevity of this collection, including republication in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, vol. 1, 73. 77 See Anthony Ruff, “Metrical Psalmody of the Catholic Reformation,” GIA Quarterly 16 (2005): 16–19.

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parallel to even moderate Protestant practice. Nor is it true that Trent declared that polyphony was only permitted if the words remained easily comprehensible to all. It was left to local bishops to regulate music, and some, most notably in Rome and Milan, did impose limitations on the practice in convents or insist on complete verbal intelligibility in works for multiple vocal parts. But even in Rome, church choirs were never disbanded and organs were neither removed nor silenced,78 just as metrical psalmody was hardly the exclusive property of the Protestant churches. The inventiveness and attention to expressive detail of many early modern composers knew no bounds in the composition of music for the Psalms. As once-forgotten composers are being rediscovered and new connections uncovered between better-known works, it becomes clear that the same kinds of peregrinations, serendipitous events, and equalizing factors at work in the transmission of other versions of the Psalms in the early modern Atlantic world also apply to settings of their Vulgate versions. The lyrical setting of Psalm 109 (in the Vulgate numbering), the Vespers Psalm “Dixit Dominus” by Italianborn eighteenth-century Mexican composer Ignacio Jerúsalem, orchestrated for two horns, two violins, organ, continuo, and four-part chorus presents a clear, syllabic text ornamented not by the singers but by the imaginative combination of instruments. With its homophonic texture, dramatic sighing motives, and varied melodic rhythms, the work would have been equally at home in Spain or Italy as in Mexico City.79 The highly moving and texturally varied setting of the same psalm 78 And, contrary to popular accounts of the musical history of the era, polyphony was not singlehandedly rescued by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina―any more than the international siblinghood of Puritanism banned song from church or private prayer. For further information about the powerful and pervasive myth of Palestrina as the savior of sacred polyphony, which began in his own era and was particularly pervasive among Protestant as well as Roman Catholic thinkers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (during which period it inspired not only “scientific” accounts of musical history but also creative works), see Jacques Chailley, “Qu’y a-t’il de vrai dans le legend de la Messe du Pape Marcel?,” Ostinato rigore: Revue international d’études musicales 4 (1994): 179–83; Pierre Gaillard, “Histoire de la legend palestrinienne,” Revue de musicologie 57 (1971), 11–22; Lewis Lockwood, ed., Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Pope Marcellus Mass: An Authoritative Score, Backgrounds and Sources, History and Analysis, Views and Comments (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1975), 28–36; Gino Stefani, “Miti barocchi: Palestrina ‘princeps musicae,” Nuova rivista musicale italaiana 8 (1974), 347–55; Michael P. Steinberg, “Opera and Cultural Analysis: The Case of Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina,” The Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 53–62; and Peter Tenhaef, “‘Musica dell’altro mondo’: Entwicklung und Funktionen des Palestrina-Mythos,” in Zu Problemen der “Heroen’und der “Genie’- Musikgeschichtsschreibung, ed. Nico Schüler (Hambug: Bockel Verlag, 1998), 95–111. 79 For more about Jerúsalem and his music, see Craig Russell, “The Mexican Cathedral Music of Ignacio de Jerusalem: Lost Treasures, Royal Roads, and New Worlds,” Revista de musicologia 16 (1993): 99–111. For a modern transcription of the first movement of the “Dixit Dominus,” see ibid., 112–33. For a contrasting setting of the same psalm from Mexico City later in the same century, set antiphonally for two choirs, organ, and continuo

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composed in 1650 by the Milanese Benedictine nun Chiara Margarita Cozzolani is full of dynamic contrasts between florid solos, duets, and full passages for eightvoice double choir and continuo, linking the work to early modern notions of psalmody as a dialogue between the individual and God, associated specifically with nuns.80 Here were women, conventionally silenced in the church by Pauline dicta and often denied the same opportunities as men to sing sacred art-music or to compose at all, able to raise their voices behind convent walls in a new work written in the latest style.81 And in an era of at best strained relations between Christians and Jews, the Italian Catholic composer and writer Benedetto Marcello, roughly contemporary with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, discussed Hebrew music in the collection in which he published the first 50 psalms paraphrased in Italian verse. He also featured quotations from both German and Spanish Jewish melodies to show how Hebrew melos (melody or succession of pitches) could serve as the basis for sacred music for his people, reaching back to the same sort of origin that Leusden had in considering the unity of ancient and modern iterations of the Psalms.82 by Antonio Juanas, see Bowers, “The Vesper Psalms of Late Eighteenth-Century Mexico,” 32–3. For information about Antonio Vivaldi’s three Italian settings of the psalm, see Michael Talbot, “One Composer, One Psalm, One Key, Three Settings: Vivaldi and the Dixit dominus,” Studi Vivaldiani 6 (2006): 77–104. 80 See Robert Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 338–9 and 346; and Cozzolani, Motets. 81 Exceptional nuns had composed original music from at least the era of the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), but, as documentary histories show, they were indeed the exception. As still known and cited in the early modern era, the thirteenth-century Rule of St. Clare specifically states that “The Sisters who can read shall celebrate the Divine Office according to the custom of the Friars Minor; for this they may have breviaries, but they are to read it without singing,” Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady (New York, Ramsey and Toronto: Paulist Press, 1982), p. 214. For information about other post-Tridentine Italian nuns who composed psalms among other works, including controversies surrounding their musical activities, see Jonathan E. Glixon, “Images of Paradise or Worldly Theaters? Towards a Taxonomy of Musical Performances at Venetian Nunneries,” in Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman, ed. Barbara Haggh (Paris: Mineve, 2001), 423–51; Craig Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Kimberlyn Montford, “L’Anno santo and Female Monastic Churches: The Politics, Business, and Music of the Holy Year in Rome (1675),” Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 6 (2000), http://sscm-jscm.press.uiuc.edu.turing. library.northwestern.edu/v6/no1/montford.html (accessed September 2, 2009); and Colleen Reardon, Holy Concord Within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 82 See Don Harrán, “Hebrew Exemplum as a Force of Renewal in 18th-Century Musical Thought: The Case of Benedetto Marcello and his Collection of Psalms,” in Music in the Mirror: Reflections on the History of Music Theroy and Literature for the 21st Century, eds Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathiesen, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 143–94.

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During the seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries, the French composers Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Michel-Richard de Lalande, JeanPhillipe Rameau, and a succession of other court musicians were writing grands motets based on sacred texts, the Psalms in particular, for services in the chapelle royale of a succession of Kings Louis, les rois très-Chrétienne. Louis XIV in particular favored the motet as the form most appropriate to the daily round of public liturgies focused on the king’s royal body. Those liturgies culminated in the celebration of the 30-minute Low Mass preferred by Louis wherein the celebrant spoke the text while the king and his courtiers listened to the grands motets.83 With music filling the chapel, the congregation could not hear the words of the eucharistic text spoken by the celebrant, which they knew in any case, but they almost certainly heard the words of the equally familiar psalms carried on the wings of the music to the heights of the vaulting. O praise God in his holiness: praise him in the firmament of his power. Praise him in his noble acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness. Praise him in the sound of the trumpet: praise him upon the lute and harp. Praise him in the cymbals and dances: praise him upon the strings and pipe. Praise him upon the well-tuned cymbals: praise him upon the loud cymbals. Let every thing that hath breath: praise the Lord. (Psalm 150, 1662 Book of Common Prayer)

*** The essays collected here attest to the profound and far-reaching influence of the Psalms in the early modern world. While some essays examine ways in which psalms and psalters were used to cultivate communities of worship, others look at the important role psalms played in arbitrating salient religious and political debates of the day. Still other essays focus on the status of the Psalms themselves— the voice they use and the power they exert. And the final two chapters explore generic innovations inspired by the Psalms. Of course, the essays in this book touch on only a few of the uses to which the Psalms were put in the early modern world, only a few of the many coincidences and connections between peoples, nations, and practices. This is perhaps further evidence that one cannot overstate the importance of psalms, psalmists, and psalmodies in the early modern world. The collection begins with four contrasting considerations of the ways in which psalms were used to forge and sustain communities of worship—even, 83 Lalande alone produced over seventy grands motets for Louis. On the motets and the royal rituals, see Yves Terraton, “Doutes, tourments et ruptures dans le grand motet Versaillais,” in La musica e il sacro (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1997), 109–13; John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and Jean-Paul C. Montagnier, “French Grands Motets and their Use at the Chappelle Royale from Louis XIV to Louis XVI,” Musical Times 146.1891 (Summer 2005): 47–57.

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perhaps especially, in the face of religious intolerance and political oppression. Richard Freedman shows that French composer Simon Goulart designed his Cinquante pseaumes de David avec la musique a cinq partes d’Orlande de Lasso specifically for Huguenots’ private worship. Following Calvin’s proscriptions against secular music, Goulart’s psalmody follows the practice of contrafacta, reinscribing worldly songs with sacred texts. For Goulart, this meant supplanting the texts of numerous popular tunes—especially those of Orlando di Lasso, a musician of international renown—with French translations of the Psalms. With this psalmody, Goulart was able to carve out a devotional space for Protestant worship in Catholic France. Around the same time that Goulart was adapting the Psalms for Calvinists in France, William Byrd was reclaiming them for Catholics in England. According to Roger Bray, Byrd ceased writing anthems for the Reformed Church in 1581, the same year that a number of recusants, Edmund Campion among them, were executed for practicing their faith. In the wake of these executions, Byrd chose to proclaim his recusancy even more emphatically: he stopped attending Anglican services and began composing metrical psalms for private use by other English Catholics. While recognizing the complications that inhere in attempts to identify a work’s intended audience, Bray locates copies of Byrd’s metrical psalms in recusant households, where they were used primarily for domestic worship. Domestic worship was also important for Anglican Englishwomen, as Linda Phyllis Austern demonstrates in her contribution. Throughout the early modern period, women were expected not to sing or perform publicly, but this did not prevent them from finding ways to express their spirituality musically. Using the Psalms as their inspiration, women from all social strata and diverse religious and political affiliations engaged in domestic music-making. In so doing, these musical women were able to cultivate spiritual identities and communities away from the purview of men or the parish church. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Psalms helped shape different kinds of religious identities and communities. Joanne van ver Woude suggests that the Massachusetts Bay community’s production of the Bay Psalm Book was, among other things, an act of colonial self-fashioning. Refusing to adopt either the extremely popular Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter or the Ainsworth version printed in Amsterdam, the Puritan leaders responsible for commissioning the Bay Psalm Book sought to declare to the world, but especially to Britain, their own religious beliefs and a distinct colonial Puritan identity. The appearance of metrical psalms in the Bay Psalm Book indicates, moreover, that the Massachusetts Bay colony was interested in what van der Woude calls “artful intervention in liturgy,” though as Puritans they remained conflicted as to the relation between art and scripture. Essays in Part 2 of this collection are concerned with the crucial role Psalms played in arbitrating debates about authority. Throughout the early modern period, exegetes cited the Psalms as they pondered such things as scriptural truth, rightful penance, confessorial power, and, in the realm of politics, monarchical rule. Jamie H. Ferguson argues that Miles Coverdale’s use of a biblical paraphrase in lieu of a

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Latin translation of the Psalms for his first English psalter evinces not ignorance, as various scholars have claimed, but rather a commitment to a pluralistic conception of scriptural truth. At once a translation and a paraphrase, Coverdale’s first psalter ascribes authority to both. Psalms were also marshaled into doctrinal debates. Clare Costley King’oo suggests that during the mid-sixteenth century Sir Thomas Wyatt’s posthumously published renderings of the seven Penitential Psalms were appropriated by the Edwardian Reformists responsible for printing the Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of David. The printer, editor, and dedicatee of Wyatt’s collection were all evangelical Reformers, and the work was released at a time when it could support a campaign against traditional doctrines and practices. Further, the printed edition produced by the Edwardian Reformers makes careful distinctions between the “Auctor”/Narrator and the psalmist David: the former critiques and calls into question the latter’s initial attempts at customary penance. The Narrator’s rebukes continue until David recognizes the need for a new, Reformed approach to repentance. Though Spain opposed Reformist movements and preserved the Roman Catholic sacrament of reconciliation, not all Spanish Catholics thought of spiritual agency in hegemonic terms, where clerics wield absolute confessorial power over the laity. In this light, James Melvin examines Juan de Avila’s Audi, filia. Drawing upon the eleventh and twelfth verses of Psalm 44 (45), Avila constructs a nuptial spirituality that figures devout women and men as aspiring brides of Christ. While Melvin concedes that this portrayal of the laity leaves intact clerical authority, insofar as people are instructed in Audi, filia to seek a confessor as a spiritual director, there remains in the formulation of nuptial spirituality an acknowledgement of agency independent of the clergy. Indeed, Avila cautions his readers not to foster emotional bonds with their confessors, lest such feelings distract brides from their unions with Christ. Just as some psalms were being used to contest absolute authority, others were being deployed to reinforce it. Carol Kaske, for instance, cites the Royal and Sapiential Psalms as the scriptural foundations for Edmund Spenser’s portrayal of the Tudor line as a sacral monarchy. In both The Shepheardes Calendar and The Faerie Queene, Kaske argues, Spenser appropriates psalms about good kings in order to trace the Tudor dynasty all the way back to David, the archetypal good king of the Old Testament. With psalms about Sapience, a figure understood as a feminine type of Christ, Spenser rejoins the oft-invoked strictures against female sovereignty and equates his queen with the Savior. Essays in Part 3 attend to questions about psalmic voice and power. Throughout the early modern period, exegetes and composers continued to ask two kinds of questions. First, whose voice do we hear in the Psalms? Is it God’s? David’s? The poet’s? And second, what is the origin of their power? Is it the text itself? The music that accompanied it? The commingling of the two? In her study of the reception history of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s translations, Margaret Hannay demonstrates that new versions of the Psalms could be received simultaneously

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as meritorious literary texts and exemplary devotional works one might employ in public worship. What makes Sidney’s translations particularly illuminating is that while many of her contemporaries read her psalms as representing the actual words of David, many others interpreted them as the unmitigated Word of God. This effacement of the translator/poet brings Sidney’s psalmic text, which exploits 126 different verse forms, into the company of church-sanctioned psalters that profess fidelity to the original Hebrew. Anne Lake Prescott uses the translations of Mary and Philip Sidney as a point of comparison for those of Elisabeth Sophie and Louis Chéron. Whereas the Sidneys’ psalms have raised questions about divided authorship, the Chérons’ collaborative work, their Essay de pseaumes et cantiques mis en vers, et enrichis de figures, has a discernible division of labor: Elisabeth Sophie was responsible for the French and Latin translations, Louis the illustrations. The relationship between text and image is all the more striking considering that Elisabeth was a Catholic and Louis a Huguenot. In comparing the works of the two pairs of siblings, Prescott shows that whereas the Sidneys sought to create a more lyric, individual voice in their translations, the Chérons preferred a more public voice. The result is a more communal voice for the Psalms. While poets were using their art to re-imagine psalmic voice, theorists were deliberating the origins of psalmic power. Don Harrán suggests that the myriad references to David’s lyre in Baroque music theory indicate that the power of psalm performance was a popular topic of discussion and debate. The overarching question theorists sought to answer was, where does the power of the Psalms originate? That is, are auditors moved by the music being played on the instrument or the association of its sounds with external forces as prompted by the words of the Psalms? Harrán attends to this question by way of Angelo Bernardi, a seventeenthcentury composer who counterpoised a practical explanation of David’s lyre with a mystical one: on the one hand, Bernardi perceived the effect of metrical psalms on the auditor as residing in the construction of the instrument; on the other, he attributed its effect to the various emanations in theosophical Kabbalah. Emphasizing the simultaneity of these explanations, Harrán proposes that David’s lyre represents a bridge between different ideologies in Baroque music theory. The common focus of essays in Part 4 is generic innovation. These essays explore new, distinctly early modern forms in which the Psalms found expression and for which psalmodies served as models. As formative works of the early modern world, the Psalms found their way into new genres of literary and devotional works while becoming the model for others. Penny Granger locates the Psalms on the English stage, in the hands of the Virgin Mary. According to Granger, the N-Town Play dramatizes Mary with her psalter as a way of instructing spectators how to use the Psalms in public devotion, private prayer, and children’s education. First staged in the mid-fifteenth century but performed regularly well into the sixteenth century, the N-Town Play represents an innovation in both drama and psalm performance, as spectators would have encountered in the form of a dramatic entertainment both a translation of selected psalms and a demonstration of how one should use them as an aid to prayer.

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During the same period that psalms and psalters were appearing in new kinds of drama, they were also serving as the inspiration and the model for transatlantic hybrid texts. John Schwaller shows that Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún’s Psalmodia christiana represents a merging of psalmic form and Nahuatl poetics. Focusing on the Psalmodia’s hybridity, Schwaller delineates the methodologies Sahagún deployed to evangelize Nahua natives. Using psalmodies as his model, Sahagún created a hybrid text that enabled him to proselytize the indigenous peoples by means of their own conventions of artistic expression. Thus, while the Psalmodia exposed the Nahua natives to Christian precepts and psalmic forms, it also preserved many Nahuatl traditions. The essays in this collection exemplify the significance of the Psalms for diverse peoples and cultures. Arguably the most influential biblical book of the early modern period, the Psalms traveled throughout Europe and across the Atlantic, reappearing in religious and secular works by groups who derided or simply disregarded one another. That they were reinterpreted and rewritten to accommodate such vastly different worldviews suggests not only that the Psalms formed the heart of both public and private devotions for Jews and Christians of all denominations, but also that they played a central role in mediating cultural and political conflicts. Though the contributors to this volume address only a few of these conflicts, the essays in this book demonstrate that the Psalms touched nearly every person living in early modern Europe and any place in the world that Europeans took their cultural practices.

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PART 1 Communities of Worship

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Chapter 1

Listening to the Psalms among the Huguenots: Simon Goulart as Music Editor

1

Richard Freedman

In 1597, the Genevan preacher Simon Goulart issued a curious compilation of Psalms and spiritual songs, the Cinquante pseaumes de David avec la musique à cinq parties d’Orlande de Lasso, Vingt autres pseaumes à cinq et six parties, par divers excellents musiciens de nostre temps. In this collection Goulart replaced the original Italian, French, German, or Latin text of selected works by Orlando di Lasso and other Renaissance composers with French translations of the Psalms. The book was hardly the first to attempt a spiritual reformation of contemporary music, a process that can be traced in various forms and places throughout the sixteenth century. But Goulart’s print and a few others are remarkable for their explicit dependence on the language of Psalms as the vehicle for such spiritual transformations and for the eloquence of its preface, in which the editor gives voice to some compelling ideas about music and spiritual practice. Books like the Cinquante pseaumes, in brief, can teach us something about the Psalms and how they were imagined as texts and as sounding experiences by a particular group of believers during the sixteenth century. Taking books like Goulart’s as a point of entry into this acoustical-spiritual world, this essay will consider the idiosyncratic musical Psalmody found here in a series of related contexts: as part of a larger story of forms domestic devotion among the Calvinists, as a segment in the story of how sixteenth-century listeners heard the proper relation of text and tone, and finally as a measure of the power of printed books to shape the reception of the music they contained. But before we turn to each of these themes, we should first pause to learn more about the Cinquante pseaumes and their editor.

Portions of this article have previously appeared in my study of the French songs of Orlando di Lasso and their reception by Huguenot editors, the Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and Their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France, Eastman Studies in Music, 15 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001). They are included here by permission of the publisher. 1

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Simon Goulart—Calvinist Editor Originally from the town of Senlis (not far from the famous French cathedral town of Beauvais), by 1566 Goulart settled in Calvin’s Geneva as a preacher. He eventually rose to prominence as a member of the civic elites, serving also as a leading figure in the governance of the Calvinist church. But in addition to his official roles, Goulart also wrote on a wide range of spiritual topics and devoted considerable energy to the redaction of literature for pious Protestant readers. His tastes ranged far and wide, from the philosophical writings of Seneca to the Essays of Montaigne.2 Goulart’s expurgated version of the creation story, La Sepmaine, by the humanist Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, assimilates that great cyclic poem to the rhetoric of Calvinist piety.3 He prepared prose commentaries on Biblical quotations (in the Quarante tableaux de la morte of 1607) and even published some of his own spiritual sonnets (in Bernard de Montmeja’s Poèmes chrestiennes of 1574).4 In these and other ways, Goulart’s writings figure centrally in a movement (especially strong during the 1570s and 1580s) among Protestant authors who sought to appropriate the language of pulpit oratory and of the devotional tradition as a means of spiritual expression in their work. Simon Goulart was also keenly interested in music, both despite and on account of the adversity that surrounded him on all fronts. “Ten years ago,” he reports in the preface to the Cinquante pseaumes, in order to satisfy the worthy wish of some honorable men, I accommodated the text of the Psalms of David to some French, Italian, and German songs, as well as some Latin motets of Orlande de Lassus, prince of musicians of our century. Since that time, this entire project has remained hidden in the chaos of

2 On Goulart’s work as editor and author, see Leonard Chester Jones, Simon Goulart, sa vie et son oeuvre, 1543–1628 (Geneva: A. Kundig, 1916); idem., Simon Goulart, 1543– 1628: étude biographique et bibliographique (Geneva: Georg et Cie, 1917); Courtney S. Adams, “Simon Goulart (1543–1628), Editor of Music, Scholar and Moralist,” in Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht: A Collection of Essays by his Colleagues and Former Students at the University of Pennsylvania, ed. J. W. Hill (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1980), 125–41; and Jacques Pineaux, “Simon Goulart et les voies du sacré,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme française 135 (1989): 161–76. 3 For a modern edition of Du Bartas’s famous poem, see Guillaume Saluste Du Bartas, La Sepmaine, ed. Yvonne Bellenger (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981). 4 On the overall plan of Goulart’s Quarante tableaux of 1607 as well as the various editions of the Trente tableaux, see Terence Cave, Devotional Poetry in France, c. 1570– 1613 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 21–2, and idem., “The Protestant Devotional Tradition: Simon Goulart’s Trente tableaux de la mort,” French Studies 21/1 (1967): 1–15. On the Poèmes chrestiennes and the poetics of its contributors, see Cave, Devotional Poetry in France, 76–77. For Cave’s discussion of Goulart’s cyclic sonnets, see 149ff of the same study.

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sufferings that have extended far and wide [see transcription and translation as Document 1, below].5

Of course, Goulart’s Calvinist readers would have understood only too well the breadth and depth of the “sufferings” endured by French Protestants in the years following massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. Goulart does not dwell on the particulars of these events, no more than he identifies the “honorable men” who originally prompted him to undertake the project. Instead he draws us further into a private domain, even into the clutter of his study, where early in 1576 he “found” many of the pieces suddenly, “while moving certain papers:” Nevertheless it has come to pass, without my being able to say how, that at the beginning of this year, while moving certain papers, I found many pieces of the collection, which, upon review by some friend, it gave them the desire to see this first volume brought to light. Their entreaty gave me over promptly (and perhaps too soon) to promise them I would do so. I now report to them: the project is done.

As this passage suggestions, the Cinquante pseaumes were not only the product of long gestation, they also were the result some collaborative effort. First prompted by the “worthy wish” of “honorable men,” Goulart later presented his newly recovered Psalms for review by “some friend” before offering them to the Protestant public. But there is still more to the layered story of the Cinquante pseaumes, he continues, for in addition to 50 compositions by Lasso, Goulart has also acquired 20 other pieces, “some made expressly in conjunction with the music that sets them, and some accommodated to the harmonies of secular chansons by some other professors of music.” Apparently of these pieces were sent to Goulart by their composers, including one who preferred to remain anonymous (“who for Cinquante pseaumes is dedicated to “l’honorable compagnie des nourrissons, disciples, fauteurs, et amateurs de la douce et saincte musique, a Amsterdam en Holande,” by a certain “Louis Mongart.” But Louis Mongart is an anagram of Simon Goulart, and so we should not take too literally either the dedication (to an unnamed group of music lovers in Amsterdam) or the facts of publication (Heidelberg, by Jerome Commelin). The book was almost certainly printed in Geneva by Jean II de Tournes, who collaborated with Goulart on several others of his musical projects. For an inventory of the various musical editions produced in Geneva (including those undertaken with Goulart’s supervision) see Laurent Guillo, Les Éditions musicales de la Renaissance lyonnaise (1525–1615), Domaine musicologique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991), 443–62. For an inventory of the font used in the Cinquante pseaumes of 1597 and its appearance in publications of the de Tournes atelier, see Guillo, Les Éditions musicales, 392 (type 136). On the history of Genevan publishing and its efforts to evade French censorship during the late sixteenth century, see Francis Higman, “Genevan Printing and French Censorship,” in Cinq siècles d’imprimerie genevoise. Actes du Colloque international sur l’histoire de l’imprimerie et du livre à Genève. 27–30 avril 1978, ed. Jean-Daniel Candaux and Bernard Lescaze (Geneva: Société d’histoire et d’archéologie, 1980–1981), 31–54. 5

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good reason, I judge, did not wish to reveal himself—nor did I have the curiosity to inquire, even though I was not ignorant of the place of his residence”), and also some Psalm tune arrangements he received directly from the composer Alfonso Flores in the Calvinist city of Nîmes,6 ([and] who has started to put his hand to all of the Psalms of David, has bound himself to combine in each of these the ecclesiastical melody in one of the voices, and retain the tune almost plainly in all of the others), has generously sent me from Nîmes in Languedoc some pretty samples: [he has] decided to pursue this, if he finds a patron. In order to let these works be known I have included three pieces of his making in this first collection.

With the help of these and other musicians, he continues, Goulart hoped to edit two further volumes like the Cinquante pseaumes, thus completing a full cycle of 150 Psalms. As it happened, the two additional volumes of Lasso “Psalms” were never published, and so the Cinquante pseaumes stands as the last of their type prepared during Goulart’s long career as an editor of music books for pious readers. In many of these publications, as in the Cinquante pseaumes, secular music by leading composers of the day was reformed for use by Protestant musicians and their listeners. These books of contrafacta (as such re-inscribed works are called) included chanson albums by Toulouse composers Anthoine de Bertrand and Guillaume Boni,7 among others. But the music of Orlando di Lasso, a musician of international standing whose works enjoyed an especially wide and avid readership through the medium of print, was for Goulart and other Huguenot editors an object of intense interest. In 1576, for instance, the Genevan editor prepared the Thrésor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus, a collection of contrafacta that was itself based upon an important retrospective of Lasso’s French secular music recently issued in collaboration with the composer’s French partners, Adrian Le Roy and Robert Ballard. In 1582 and 1594 Goulart revised and expanded this massive set, which eventually encompassed over a hundred compositions for four, five, and six voices—with some Italian madrigals and Latin motets alongside the French chansons.8

It has been suggested that Flores was originally from Spain, and that he settled in the town of Nîmes after converting to Calvinism. Further on his life and works, see Geoffrey Chew, “Alfonso Flores,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols, ed. Stanley Sadie, (London and New York: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 9, 11–12. 7 For bibliographical descriptions of Goulart’s editions of music by Boni and Bertrand, see Guillo, Les Éditions musicales, 455–7. 8 On Lasso’s chansons as revised by Goulart and others, see Freedman, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety, and Print in SixteenthCentury France. 6

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Goulart’s Thrèsor d’Orlande de Lassus project of 1576 (with revised editions appearing in 1582 and 1594), as well as his sets of revisions based on chansons by Guillaume Boni and Antoine de Bertrand, took single imprints as their basis. In the Cinquante pseaumes, by contrast, Goulart brought together music by several composers (mainly Lasso, but joined by a range of Italian, Flemish, and even Spanish masters), and from a wide range of printed sources. His selections of music by Lasso stand as a measure of Lasso’s versatility as a composer, and of the long legacy of printed music books that brought his works before the musical public. Here we find Psalm contrafacta of 18 Italian madrigals, 15 German lieder, 12 French chansons, and 4 Latin motets, works that first appeared in a very wide range of printed books spanning three decades (1555 to 1584) and spanning, too, the geographical breadth of Lasso’s record of publication (from Venice, Rome, Louvain, Paris, and Munich). Inasmuch as Lasso’s music was frequently reprinted during his lifetime, it often is not possible to say with certainly exactly which books served as Goulart’s principle sources for his borrowings.9 Goulart’s hints about his work as having started “about a decade ago” nevertheless appear to be consistent with the range of dates known for the first appearance of the Lasso compositions (since the last of them appeared in 1584). The pattern of publication and borrowing for the remaining pieces in the Cinquante pseaumes is both more and less certain than that of the pieces by Lasso. On one hand, four of the five contrafacta based on madrigals (pieces Nos. 65, 67, 68, and 70) appeared close together in a single print, the Harmonia celeste, a collection of madrigals for four, five, six, and seven voices issued in 1589 by the Antwerp partnership of Pierre Phalèse and Jean Bellere. This book was edited by the Flemish composer Andreas Pevernage, a Catholic composer elsewhere represented in the Cinquante pseaumes by a setting of Psalm 103 in which the Genevan melody is used as the basis of the polyphony (see Table 1.1 for a listing of contents of the Cinquante pseaumes). There are other polyphonic pieces based on Genevan melodies, too, a number of them unique to this print.10 9 For a concordance of works from the Cinquante pseaumes and their earliest printed sources, see Orlando di Lasso, Seine Werke in zeitgenössischen Drucken, 1555–1687, vol. 2, ed. Horst Leuchtmann and Bernhold Schmid, Orlando di Lasso. Sämtliche Werke, Supplement (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), 251–5. The source tradition for Goulart’s collection is further detailed in Annie Coeurdevey, “Les Psaumes de David (15976). Contrafacta et unica dans la dernière publication musicale de Simon Goulart,” “La la la Maistre Henri . . .” Mélanges de musicologie offers à Henri Vanhulst, ed. Christine Ballman and Valérie Dufour, Collection Epitome Musical (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 187–212. 10 Pevernage’s popular and influential edition of the Harmonia celeste was based on an earlier version of the collection brought out in 1583. The 1589 edition was itself subsequently reprinted in 1593, 1605, 1614, and 1628. Coeurdevey has discovered one additional wrinkle in this story of appropriation from the Harmonia celeste, namely that the madrigal by Manenti, “Vientene Filii”) that Goulart adapted for the Cinquante pseaumes of 1597 was in fact included in the Harmonia celeste starting only with the 1593 edition. Goulart’s claim that he had only recently returned to complete his Psalm project seems to be

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In each of his contrafacta projects Goulart appropriated familiar (and worldly) sounds for special spiritual purposes: “In removing certain words and accommodating them (as well as it has been possible) to the Music,” he explained in the preface to the Thrésor de musique d’Orlande de Lassus of 1576, “I have rendered these chansons for the most part honest and Christian. . . .”11 This same moralizing tone, in which the persuasive effects of music upon its listeners are permitted only so long as they are tied to an appropriately devotional text, of course, enjoyed long circulation in Calvinist writings on music, language, and spirituality. We should also recall that the ascription to music of such metaphysical effects as the transport of the soul and the restoration of human society had long been a subtext of Calvinist thought on song and spirituality. Already in the first printed edition of the Genevan Psalter (in 1543), Calvin wrote of music “that it has a secret and almost incredible power to move our hearts in one way or another.”12 Yet along with this recognition of the spiritual potential of music came a simultaneous concern about its sensuous effects and how to control them. For Calvin, the solution was to be found not by discriminating the effects of one sound from another, but instead by making the potentially salutary effects of music upon the listener dependent on the kinds of verbal texts to which it was bound, for in this way he hoped “to moderate the use of music to make it serve all that is of good repute.”13 Goulart’s aims in crafting the Cinquante pseaumes of 1597 thus align neatly with the Protestant project to channel the profound effects of musical sounds in morally appropriate ways—above all by linking them with suitable verbal texts. confirmed by this aspect of the source tradition. See Coeurdevey, “Les Psaumes de David,” 193. Coeurdevey also explores the stylistic threads at work in the other Psalm settings by Maletty, Flores, and anonymous author (perhaps Claude Le Jeune, she speculates) that appear elsewhere in Goulart’s collection. For an inventory of the Harmonia celeste, see Lasso, Seine Werke in zeitgenössischen Drucken, vol. 2, 85–7 and 188–90. Further on Pevernage’s role in the Harmonia celeste, see Gerald R. Hoekstra, “The Reception and Cultivation of the Madrigal in Antwerp and the Low Countries, 1555–1620,” Musica disciplina 48 (1994): 125–87. 11 From Goulart, Thrésor de la musique d’Orlande de Lassus (Geneva, 1576): The original passages read, “En ostant quelques mots ou plusieurs et les accomodant (au moins mal qu’il m’a esté possible) à la musique, j’ai rendu ces chansons honnestes et chrestiennes pour la plupart.” 12 The translation is by Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History, ed. Leo Treitler, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1998), 366. The original text reads, “Et de fait, nous experimentons qu’elle ha une vertu secrete et quasi incredible à emouvoir les cueurs en une sorte, ou en l’autre.” Quoted from Calvin’s preface as it appears in a Genevan book issued in 1551, Thédore de Bèze and Clément Marot, Pseaumes octantetrois de David mis en rime Françoise (Geneva, 1551) (New Brunswick, NJ: Friends of the Rutgers University Libraries, 1973). For a survey of the sources and contexts of Calvinist thought on music, see H. Clive, “The Calvinist Attitude to Music, and its Literary Aspects and Sources.” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et de Renaissance 19 (1957): 80–102, 294–319, and 20 (1958): 79–107. 13 Translation from Strunk, ed., Source Readings, 366. The original text, cited in Bèze, Pseaumes octantetrois de David, reads, “Si nous doit elle bien emouvoir à moderer l’usage de la musique, pour la faire servir à toute honesté.”

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The Calvinist Psalter Goulart was by no means the first one to invest familiar sounds with new, religious sensibilities, nor was he the first to assimilate familiar texts or tunes to the language of the Psalter. Each of these genres enjoyed a long and distinct history during the sixteenth century. The creation of the Calvinist Psalter itself, for instance, can be traced back to the earliest period of the new Genevan church, when church elders encouraged the creation of a repertory of tunes suitable for domestic devotion among adherents of the new faith.14 Having arrived in Geneva in the middle years of the 1540s to succeed Guillaume Franc as maître de chant for the Huguenot refuge, the singer and pedagogue Loys Bourgeois began to play an active role in the compilation and publication of this corpus of melodies. By 1551 Bourgeois supervised the publication in Geneva of a monophonic Psalter (the Pseaumes Octantetrois) expanded to include French translations of Psalms newly versified by Theodore de Bèze at Calvin’s request. The monophonic Psalter was at last completed in 1562.15 But the use of contrapuntal music—even Psalm settings—in congregational worship was never fully embraced by the Calvinist theocracy in Geneva. Thus in 1565, when the Huguenot composer Claude Goudimel published the second of his three sets of polyphonic Psalm arrangements (all based upon the official Genevan melodies), he was careful to tell his readers that his aim was “not to induce you to sing them in Church, but that you may rejoice in God, particularly in your homes.”16 When Philibert Jambe de Fer (another Protestant musician of the period) dedicated his own cycle of Psalm harmonizations to For an excellent recent introduction to the contexts and development of the Genevan musical Psalter, see Robert Weeda, Le Psautier de Calvin: l’histoire d’un livre populaire au XVIe siècle (1551–1598) (Brepols: Turnout, 2002). 15 For the story of the first Genevan editions of the monophonic Psalter, see Pierre Pidoux, “Les Origines de l’impression de musique à Genève,” in Cinq siècles d’imprimerie genevoise. Actes du Colloque international sur l’histoire de l’imprimerie et du livre à Genève. 27–30 avril 1978, ed. Jean-Daniel Candaux and Bernard Lescaze (Geneva: Société d’histoire et d’archéologie, 1980–1981), 97–108. For a facsimile of the 1551 Psalter, see Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze, Pseaumes octantetrois de David. For a facsimile of the completed Psalter of 1562, see Marot and Bèze, Les Pseaumes en vers français. Further on Bourgeois, and music printing in Lyons, see Frank Dobbins, Music in Renaissance Lyons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 259–64, and Guillo, Les éditions musicales, 67– 73. Concerning Bourgeois’s career as a composer and teacher, see Pierre André Gaillard, Loys Bourgeois, sa vie, son oeuvre comme pédagogue et compositeur. Essai biographique et critique, suivi d’une bibliographie et d’un appendice (Lausanne: Imprimeries réunies, 1948). For a modern edition of some of Bourgeois’s polyphonic settings of the Psalms, see his Le Premier livre des pseaumes, ed. Pierre André Gaillard, Monuments de musique suisse, 3 (Basel: Bärenreiter, 1960). 16 Cited in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History. For modern editions of Goudimel’s three cycles of harmonizations, see his Premier, second, tiers fasicules des 150 Pseaumes, ed. Henry Expert. 3 vols, Maîtres musiciens de la renaissance française, 2, 4, and 6 (Paris; 1895–1897; reprint edn New York: Broude, 1963) and his Oeuvres completes, ed. Henry Gagnebin, et al., 14 vols (New York: Institute of Medieval Music, 1967). 14

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the Catholic King, Charles IX, he likewise pointed towards private spaces (and not church) as the proper context for this sort of elaborate music: “and for this there are many, who take pleasure to sing the Psalms, not only in simple tunes of the sort one uses normally in reformed churches, which is the most proper for public assemblies of the faithful, but also in melodious song according to the art of music, beyond public assemblies in private companies.”17 The domestic rather than congregational destination of polyphonic music based upon the Psalms is also echoed in Goulart’s preface for the Cinquante pseaumes. “But, as in public assemblies Christians have always magnified God all-powerful in his judgments and sufferings, by the singing of the Psalms of David,” he writes, “I have here offered to some members a legitimate and honorable means to celebrate before the Lord, allowing them to keep praises of him in their chambers . . .” In brief, books like the Cinquante pseaumes remind us that the Psalter, for Calvinists of the late sixteenth century, were not only a vehicle for communal worship, but could also be a means of collective devotion in private spaces. As we will soon discover, such attempts to invest inner, private spaces with spiritual meanings, holds an important key to other aspects of settings contained in books like the Cinquante pseaumes. Spiritual Contrafacta The tradition of the spiritual contrafactum, both monophonic and polyphonic, also stands behind Goulart’s Cinquante pseaumes. Already by the middle years of the sixteenth century, Protestant poets and printers were collaborating to produce books of chansons spirituelles, poems on religious themes crafted in expectation of being set to music, or at least sung to timbres (tunes) of well-known songs. Guillaume Guéroult was perhaps the most famous of these poets (his Susanne un jour, based on the biblical story of Susannah and the Elders, was widely set during the sixteenth century by composers, Protestant and Catholic alike).18 But much of this material was the product of authors (and even printers) who preferred to remain anonymous. One important collection of such verse, the Recueil de plusieurs chansons spirituelles tant vielles que nouvelles (Paris, 1555) includes a The original text reads: “Et pourautant qu’il y en a plusieurs, qui prennent plaisir à chanter les Pseaumes, non seulement en ce simple chant, du quel on use ordinairement es Eglises reformées selon l’evangile, qui est le plus propre pour les assemblées publiques des fideles, mais aussi en chant melodieux, selong l’art de Musique, hors des assemblées publiques en compagnies particulieres . . .”. From the dedication (to King Charles IX of France) of Les CL. Pseaumes de David (Lyon, 1564). For a complete transcription of the dedicatory preface, see Guillo, Les Éditions musicales, 427–30. 18 On the history of the chanson spirituelle, see Marc Honegger, “Les Chansons spirituelles de Didier Lupi” (dissertation, University of Paris, 1970). Further on the story of the appropriation of worldly texts for spiritual purposes, see Bruce W. Wardropper, “The Religious Conversion of Profane Poetry,” in Studies in the Continental Background of Renaissance English Literature: Essays Presented to John L. Lievsan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977), 203–21. 17

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rubric with each text indicating the name of the popular song to which it ought to be sung, “so that the Christian might rejoice in his God, and honor him, in place of those worldly and impudent songs by which the unfaithful dishonor him.”19 This collection was widely reprinted, first in Geneva (1558), and then in an expanded and revised adaptation, the Chansons spirituelles à l’honneur et louange de Dieu that first appeared in Lyons in 1569 (itself reissued in Geneva, La Rochelle, and Paris, well into the early years of the seventeenth century).20 Throughout this repertory, as Jacques Pineaux has amply demonstrated, Protestant editors reveal abiding concern to approach spiritual themes through the transformation familiar texts and tunes. Theirs was preeminently an enterprise of imitatio, as much at work here in the “reprise” of secular models as it was the central mode of countless emulations of sacred texts, especially the Psalms. At times the melodies of the Genevan Psalter were themselves used to anchor spiritual messages. In L’Uranie, an exhaustive cycle of poems in five volumes (Geneva, 1591; reprinted La Rochelle, 1597), texts by Odet de la Noue and others were apparently intended to be sung not to any secular tune, but instead to the melodies of the Calvinist Hymnal.21 The editor of a curious publication of a rhymed version of the Confession de la foy chrestienne (Lyons, 1562) similarly advocates that readers sing the catechism to the tune of Psalm 109, “Bienheurese est la personne,” “by means of which one might be edified simply by reading it, or by singing it spiritually in order to better retain it in memory.”22

19 The full title reads: Recueil de plusieurs chansons spirituelles tant vielles que nouvelles, avec la chant sur chascune, afin que le Chrestien se puisse esjouir en son Dieu et l’honorer: au lieu que les infideles les deshonorent par leurs chansons mondaines et impudiques. Further on this poetic anthology, see Henri-Léonard Bordier, Le Chansonnier Huguenot du xvie siècle, 2 vols (Paris: Tross, 1870), 442ff, and Jacques Pineaux, La poésie des protestants de langue françoise (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). 20 Further on the modes and mentalities of religious poetry among French Protestants of the sixteenth century, see Pineaux, “La Poésie religieuse,” in Précis de littérature française du XVI-ième siécle: La Renaissance, ed. Robert Aulotte (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), 214–28, and Michel Jeanneret, Poesie et tradition biblique au XVIe siècle, recherches stylistiques sur les paraphrases des “Psaumes”, de Marot à Malherbe (Paris: J. Corti, 1969). 21 Bordier, Le Chansonnier Huguenot, 472. 22 The full title reads: Confession de la foy chrestienne. Laquelle a este mise en rime françoise, à la grande consolation spirituelle de toute personne fidèle. Contenant en somme les principaux Articles de nostre Foy: et trés claire intelligence des sainct Sacremens. Et à celle fin qu’elle puisse apporter quelque fruit d’avantage au lecteur pour se rejouïr en Dieu, a esté proprement accommodée sur le chant du Psalme CXIX, Bienheureuse est la personne. De façon que par icelle, on peut estre édifié la lisant simplement, ou la chantant spirituellement, pour la mieux retenir en mémoire. Quoted in Bordier, Le Chansonnier Huguenot, 455ff.

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Spiritual Spaces Like Goulart’s Cinquante pseaumes of 1597, each of these projects shares a common concern to inscribe new meanings in familiar surroundings. As such, they align nicely with Catharine Randall’s recent observations on how the Calvinist appropriation of Catholic public and sacred places can be understood as an attempt to infuse preexisting external forms with new spiritual content. “The Calvinist ideology,” she writes of the great reformer’s encounter with the old Episcopal seat of Geneva, “was to redetermine space by occupying it.”23 Protestants gave new meaning to Catholic churches in part by altering the interiors of such ritual spaces—above all by removing what they took to be distracting ornaments and representational artworks. But no less important, in Randall’s view, was the role played by texts—maps, illustrations, and inscriptions on buildings themselves— that constitute “forms of verbal inhabiting” and give new meaning to existing structures. Calvinist theologians and architects linked the experience of faith and space by any of a number of verbal figures and visual images. Among the abiding conventions of this literature are descriptions or representations of grottos, hidden paths, and secret gardens. These figures serve as sites that mark out protected, private spaces for a religious minority threatened by persecution and isolated by dispersal. These interior places have a significance that goes beyond surface appearances. The Huguenot architect and gardener Bernard de Palissy, for instance, wrote in his Recepte véritable of 1562—a work published in La Rochelle at the outset of the first wave of religious strife in France—that “I would like to build my garden in order for it to serve me as a city of refuge, into which I might retire during perilous and bad days; and this, at last to flee the iniquities and malice of men in order to serve God.”24 As first step in this process, he relates, “I enter into myself, in order to discover the secrets of my heart and enter into my conscience.”25 Interior spaces, in short, can provide paths to inner, spiritual realms. Indeed, Palissy’s idealized garden is a space that encloses eight cabinets (four made of brick, another four constructed of wood) that are to be symmetrically arranged at the corners of the space and at the endpoints of a cruciform wall that partitions the landscape. Each of these monuments is surrounded by rocks, plants, water-driven devices that imitate the sounds of streams and birds. Each cabinet also is given a distinctive architecture, with columns, vaults, and hidden spaces. The eight sites, moreover, are each to be inscribed with a different biblical devise or motto that when encountered in order leads the viewer on a kind of spiritual 23 Catharine Randall, Building Codes: the Aesthetics of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe, New Cultural Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 31. 24 The original text reads, “Je voulois ériger mon jardin pour m’en servir, comme pour une cité de refuge, pour me retirer és jours périlleux et mauvais: et ce, à fin de fuyr les iniquitez et malices des hommes, pour servir à Dieu.” Bernard de Palissy, Recepte veritable, ed. Keith Cameron, Textes littéraires français, 359 (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1988), 160. 25 The original text reads, “J’entray en moy-mesme, pour fouiller les secrets de mon coeur et entrer en ma conscience.” Palissy, Recepte véritable, 46.

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pilgrimage from ignorance to wisdom. In all of this, Palissy tells us, his inspiration has been the vision of Psalm 104, which similarly discovers divine power in the abundance of the natural world: “this is why I want to build my garden upon Psalm 104, where the Prophet describes the excellent and marvelous works of God, and (in contemplating them), makes himself humble before Him and commands his soul to praise the Lord in all his wonders.”26 Music, and Music Books, as Spiritual Spaces How might we venture to understand the Cinquante pseaumes as a form of verbal inscription or inhabiting? I would like to suggest two possible interpretive frameworks: when texts serve to anchor sonic forms, and when books work to prepare readers for the sounds they are about to encounter. In his other projects, as I have argued elsewhere, Goulart often adjusted literary texts in ways that made their meanings spiritual but that nevertheless respected the prosody, syntax, and even imagery of those literary forms. This was especially important in the case of Lasso’s compositional idiom, which (as even Goulart himself recognized) was carefully crafted to enliven the patterns, meanings, and affective states proposed in his chosen literary texts. The approach of the Cinquante pseaumes was much more radical, since it substituted completely different texts for the ones chosen by Lasso. In only a few instances can we detect an echo of the original literary text in the subject matter or language of the new Psalm text. Such correspondences between original and Psalm text are of course most apparent among the contrafacta of French chansons (since the Psalm texts are of the rhymed French translations). Lasso’s “Chanter je veux,” (No. 30 from the Cinquante pseaumes) is joined to Psalm 96, which similarly “sings” of Divine sagacity. The pensive “Le departir” (No. 38) also finds a general correspondence in the penitential tones of Psalm 57 (“Ayes pitié”). Among some of the other genres, too, we might sense a play upon the subject matter of the source material: the combative sentiments of Psalm 35 (“Deba contra mes debateurs”) seems to recall the “lovely warrior” of the Italian original, “Bella guerriera” (No. 27 from the Cinquante pseaumes). Indeed, as Annie Coeurdevey has recently demonstrated, Goulart’s appropriations of Italian madrigals are surprisingly sophisticated in the ways they find new meanings for sounds already crafted to fit still other texts. The contrapuntal and especially the rhythmic variety of these pieces, she argues, reveal The original text reads, “Voilà pourqouy je veux ériger mon jardin sur le Pseaume cent quatre, là ou le Prophète descrit les oeuvres excellentes et merveilleuses de Dieu, et en les contemplant, il s’humile devant luy et commande à son âme de louer le Seigneur en toutes ses merveilles.” Palissy, Recepte véritable, 127–8. The contemplation of the Psalms was a frequent topic for Calvinist writers of the sixteenth century, as found in Théodore de Bèze, Chrestiennes méditations sur huict pseaumes (1582) and Philippe de Mornay, Méditations chrestiennes sur quatre Pseaumes du Prophete David (1591). See Mario Richter, Il “Discours de la vie et de la mort” di Philippe du Plessis-Mornay (Milan: Editrice vita et pensiero, 1964). 26

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an editor who was concerned with some of the very latest musical developments of the day.27 Yet in most cases Goulart’s adaptations are not (like his reworkings of the Lasso chansons) achieved through subtle substitution or transformations of literary rhetoric. To the contrary, Goulart’s choices often seem to exaggerate (and not minimize) the distance between the subject matter of source and Psalm. This, as Coeurdevey also points out, could be the significance behind Goulart’s suggestion that whether performed by voices or instruments, these pieces ought to be “taken with a slow measure” (“de tenir la mesure large“), offering a temporal opening into which performers might begin to recollect the true purpose of music. By the logic of Goulart’s claims, his contrafacta not attempts remember the original lyrics, but to forget them in favor of a more suitable text. At another level of detail, we should allow the possibility that Goulart intended his Psalm contrafacta to play upon the rhetorical possibilities latent in the musical material, namely the ways in which the fabric of contrapuntal lines and motives serve to repeat and emphasize certain passages. In his transformation of “Le Departir,” for instance, Goulart deftly joined Lasso’s melodic lines to the Psalm text in ways that allow for multiple repetitions of the opening words, and affirmations of faith, “Car, O mon Dieu, mon ame espere en toy.” Here, through the agency of Lasso’s music, the affective conditions of prayer as modeled in the Psalms are made audible in a collective but personal way through the performance of polyphony. Understood in this sense, Goulart’s radical intervention in Lasso’s works can be understood as corresponding precisely to personal, reflective inscription of the sort imagined by Bernard de Palissy. Among Goulart’s own spiritual sonnets (these published in the great Protestant spiritual literary anthology, Poèmes chrestiennes of 1574) is one in which just this sort of process is played out in words. Torn between the corporeal and spiritual effects of “sweet music,” Goulart’s poetic persona imagines a transcendent auditory moment when God at last resolves the discord between the two. The text, in brief, attempts a representation of the sort of Divinely attuned listening that Goulart’s listeners would need to apply to the Cinquante pseaumes:28 Quand mon esprit entend la douce musique, De tant de tons divers l’accord melodieux, Il s’escrie en soy mesme, or sus du Dieu des dieux Magnifie le nom par un nouveau cantique. Mais ma chair tout soudain, orgueilleuse replique Maugré l’esprit, chantant d’un ton mal gracieux: L’esprit veut s’eslever par dessus tous les cieux: La chair veut se plonger au fonds du monde inique. Si de toy ceste grace obtient l’homme mortel, Que d’ennuyeux discords il face un accord tel,

Coeurdevey, “Les Psaumes de David,” 194–5. Bernard de Montmeja, Poèmes chrestiennes de B. de Montmeja, et autres divers

27 28

auteurs. Recueillis et nouvellement mis en lumiere par Philippes de Pas (Geneva, 1574), 153.

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Et tant harmonieux, que toute angoisse il chasse: O Dieu, quand tu voudras accorder le discord De ces deux discordans, j’orray lors un accord Surpassant tous accords de ceste terre basse.

Translation: When my spirit hears the sweet music which accords melodiously from such diverse tones it cries to itself, and to the God of gods, magnifying the name by a new song. But my body then vaingloriously replies in spite of the spirit, singing with an ungracious tone. The spirit wants to raise itself above the heavens; the body wants to plunge itself into the depths of the iniquitous world. If from you grace can come to mortal man, who from tiring discords yet faces such a chord (and so harmonious) that all anxiety departs, O God, when you would like to resolve the tension of these two discords, I would then hear a harmony surpassing all of those from this low world.

Goulart’s sonnet, in brief, reveals an anxiety about ambivalent character of musical phenomena—are they sensory (bodily) forms, or a supra-sensual (and thus spiritual) reminders of the Divine? The answer proposed by the Cinquante pseaumes is that a correct poetic text holds the key to resolving the dual attractions at the heart of this poem, and that no more correct a text may be found than the Biblical model of spiritual expression in song—the Psalms. Another way in which books like the Cinquante pseaumes might be understood to carve out sacred spaces of the sort envisaged by co-religionists such as Palissy is through the careful organization of their musical contents. Depending on their audience and purpose, of course, printed music books might be organized according to any of a number of basic principles, such as liturgical purpose, language, or composer. The Cinquante pseaumes, for instance, divides its contents according to several priorities. At the largest level, the collection is organized by voice part (works for five voices, then works for six voices). Among the compositions for five voices, those by Lasso come first, followed by pieces a range of other masters. Within each of these sets Goulart uses the order of the Psalter itself as an organizing principle. But this scheme is not so simple as it might first appear. The fifty compositions by Lasso, for instance, are presented in four distinct groups, each of which is itself organized according to the numerical order of texts as they appear in the Psalter: compositions 1–22, 23–33, 34–43, and 44–50 (see Table 1.2 for a summary of the sequences and sections in the Cinquante pseaumes). What might the readers of the Cinquante pseaumes have made of this plan? Goulart’s preface offers a hint, acknowledging that “several Psalms among those of Orlande, such as numbers 95, 96, 85, and 12, are transposed with respect to their modes [‘tons’]—this has happened by accident, and does not matter much.” Upon closer

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inspection musical readers will notice that each of Goulart’s “accidents” slightly disturbs what is otherwise a neat pattern of shared musical resources among compositions in each short sequence of Psalms. In this case Goulart’s tons are not (strictly speaking) the “modes” of Renaissance polyphony, but instead a closely related scheme of classification based on the range (here represented by musical clefs, either “high” [Superius with G-clef on second line of the staff] or “low” [Superius with C-clef on first line of the staff]) and tonal resources (here indicated by the choice of background, either “with” or “without” a B-flat) of individual compositions. The composer was of course responsible for choosing a particular set of cleffing and background for an individual work. As it happens, Lasso was himself almost obsessively preoccupied with the modal orderings in his published collections of independent pieces (such as the famous Les Meslanges d’Orlande he undertook in collaboration with the Parisian printing firm of Le Roy et Ballard during the 1570s). He also crafted a number of important cyclic compositions (the Penitential Psalms and Laudate Dominum, most notably) in which the eight ecclesiastical modes are used as an organizing principle for the whole. But the work of organizing a diverse group of pieces such as those assembled in the Cinquante pseaumes into a coherent musical framework was in general left to editors like Goulart. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, Goulart’s approach in his contrafacta projects devoted to the music of individual composers (Lasso, Boni, and Bertrand) was to use musical mode as a fundamental organizing principle for his musical selections.29 Here, as in the case of the Cinquante pseaumes, we may venture to understand the scheme of organization by Psalm and “ton” as an attempt by Goulart to forge from the varied works assembled here a “place” of spiritual renovation. The idea of a cycle or ordered “set” seems also to have been an explicit element of the literatures of devotion that circulated in sixteenth-century France. Among Catholic readers, as Terence Cave has noted, penitential treatises modeled on the writings of men like the Spanish Dominican preacher Luis de Granada propose an orderly sequence of introspection and prayer, a kind of private, lisable liturgy that moves from the somber “Evening” meditations (with their contemplation of physical decay and moral transgression) to the joyous “Morning” ones (which turn instead to the cleansing power of Jesus and of Divine grace).30 Cyclic elements also 29 On the modal organization of the Lasso chansonniers, see my Chansons of Orlando di Lasso, chapter 7. We should also note the preface to La Fleur des chansons (Lyons, 1574), in which the Genevan poet Pierre Enoch (he was a colleague of Goulart’s) announced the modal organization of pieces here by Lasso and Goudimel: “Recevez donc, s’il vous plaist, pour me rafreschir en votre bonne souvenance, et pur premier gage de mon entière amitié, ceste Fleur de chansons, mises en tel ordre, qu’il ne s’en peut desirer en meilleur pour toutes sortes de tons.” Quoted from a transcription of the preface appearing in Guillo, Les Éditions musicales, 433–5. For an inventory of the musical contents of La fleur des chansons, see Guillo, Les Éditions musicales, 340–343. 30 Cave, Devotional Poetry, 38–57 provides the single best introduction to this aspect of devotional practices in sixteenth-century France.

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figure prominently in Protestant devotional literatures, in Protestant adaptations of humanistic writings, and in musical settings of them. Simon Goulart’s own poetry, and some of the literary texts he edited, work in similar ways. His spiritual sonnets, issued together in one of the central documents of the Protestant devotional movement, Bernard de Montmeja’s Poèmes chrestiennes (Geneva, 1574), are grouped according to the literary topoi they share. His Quarante tableaux de la morte of 1607 offers an ordered “set” of prose contemplations of biblical quotations on the themes of sin and its physical manifestation in illness and death.31 Anthoine de la Roche de Chandieu’s Octonaires sur le vanité du monde, too, proceeds as an orderly “set” of poems on related themes. Indeed, when the French Protestant composer Claude Le Jeune set three dozen eightline strophes from this cycle, he arranged them in groups of three: one set for each of the 12 musical modes formalized in sixteenth-century music-theoretical treatises.32 Le Jeune’s Dodecacorde (first published 1598) similarly uses the twelve musical modes as a stage for arrangements of 12 tunes drawn from the Genevan Psalter. In dedicating his book to the Protestant sympathizer Henri de Bouillon, Le Jeune explicitly addresses the ethical effects of the ancient Greek modalities as a balanced set with unique powers to produce religious and political harmony to a French nation wracked by division and warfare.33 Of course we have no easy way of learning whether Goulart’s readers might have understood the special musical plan of the Cinquante pseaumes as a platform for social or spiritual healing. But inasmuch as this print (like his other contrafacta projects) attempts a systematic spiritual renovation of music by Lasso (and others), it seems at least possible that casting these songs against a backdrop of a balanced musical “set” with yet another way of preparing the listener to attend to their devotional rather than worldly sensibilities. Like Palissy’s meditative garden, Goulart’s Cinquante pseaumes is an orderly site that readies those enter it to consider familiar items in new ways. One final piece of evidence from Goulart’s See Note 4, above, on the organizational aspects of these works. Concerning Chandieu’s cyclic poem and its place in literary representation of

31 32

the vanitas theme, see Cave, Devotional Poetry, 150–156. A modern edition of the poem appears in Antoine de Chandieu, Octonaires sur la vanité et inconstance du monde, ed Françoise Bonali-Fiquet (Geneva: Droz, 1979). For a modern edition of Le Jeune’s cycle, which was posthumously published in 1606, see his Octonaires de la vanité et inconstance du monde, ed Henry Expert, Maître musiciens française au temps de la Renaissance, 1 and 8 (New York: Broude, 1960). Pascal de L’Estocart also published settings of these poems in 1582. See his Premier livre des Octonnaires de la vanité du monde, ed. Henry Expert, Monuments de la musique française au temps de la Renaissance, 10 (New York: Broude, 1960). 33 See Claude Le Jeune, Dodecacorde. Comprising Twelve Psalms of David Set to Music According to the Twelve Modes, ed. Anne Harrington Heider, 3 vols, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance (Madison, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, 1988), vol. I, 74–6. See also my “Music Books as Sites of Spiritual Meaning: Claude Le Jeune’s Dodecacorde,” Revue de musicologie 89 (2003): 297–309.

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pen makes this aim abundantly clear. At the outset of each of the six partbooks of the Cinquante pseaumes Goulart featured a liminary sonnet, each on its own religious theme. The one from the Sexta pars (the partbook for the sixth voice of the ensemble, which is also the only book of the set to feature the prose preface), opens with a reprise of the Biblical story of the Exodus, when the departing Israelites were given “treasures” by their former captors, which they carried into the wilderness and eventually used to craft the portable Divine sanctuary: Israël, deslogeant du Memphien rivage, Emporte les thresors de ses fiers ennemis, Thresors dans le desert en bonne main commis, Pour dresser au Seigneur de sa tent l’ouvrage.

Translation: Israel departing from the banks of Memphis Took away the treasures of its fierce enemies, Treasures in the desert carried in good hand In order to present them to the Lord in his tent of service.

In the second quatrain of the poem, we learn that here in the Cinquante pseaumes sounds no less “precious” have been saved from the vanities of the world, and “put in order … in order to raise them to the heavens.” Ainsi, quittant du monde et l’erreur et la rage, A l’honneur du grand Dieu, j’ay par ordre remis Maints accords, precieux à vanité sousmis, Pour eslever es cieux tout fidele courage.

Translation: Thus, leaving the world of error and madness, To the honor of God great, I have put in order Many harmonies, precious, devoted to vanity, In order to raise them to the heavens, all faithful courage.

By Goulart’s own literary juxtaposition, then, books like the Cinquante pseaumes stage themselves as a kind of tabernacle in print, a sacred space where faithful listeners might encounter the Divine in familiar tones. All of this takes us back (at last) to the very condition that motivated the publication of the Lasso contrafacta in the first instance. Here was a community that faced persecution and exile during the 1560s and 1570s. Just as many of these believers were obligated to seek refuge in places like London, La Rochelle, or Geneva, and to inscribe spiritual meanings in their new physical surroundings, they also sought spiritual refuge in the metaphorical spaces of beloved secular music by Lasso and other masters of the day. These treasures, retrieved from captivity in their original printed forms, retained a remarkable power to touch the soul and to move the emotions

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in profound ways. And precisely because the Calvinists approached such effects with caution, they sought to reign them in, through the orderly spaces and ideas of the Psalter. Document 1. Simon Goulart’s Preface to the Cinquante Pseaumes of 1597 (p. 4–5 of the Sexta pars, unsigned.) Advertissement sur le contenu en ce Recueil de Pseaumes. Il y a dix ans passés, que pour satisfaire au louable desir de quelques gents d’honneur, j’accommoday le lettre des Pseaumes de David aux chansons Françoises, Italiennes, Allemandes, mesmes à aucuns mottets Latins d’Orlande de Lassus, prince des Musiciens de nostre siecle. Depuis, tout cest amas est demeuré caché dedans le Chaos des miseres qui se sont espandues pres et loing: ny ne faisois estat d’y toucher, attendu la continuation des confusions, et l’apparence de nouvelles temptestes, que le seul Toutpuissant peut destourner. Neantmoinsil est advenu, sans que je puisse bien dire comment, qu’au commencement de la presente annee, remuant certains papier, je trouvay maintes pieces de Recueil, qui, revevës par aucuns amis, il leur print envie d’en voir ce premier livre en lumiere. Leur instance me rendit prompt (et peut estre trop tost) à leur en faire promesse. Ie m’en rapporte à eux, puis que le coup es faict. Une chose me contente, c’est que la saincteté de la lettre, à quoy la Musique est accomodee selon qu’il m’a esté possible, excusera les defauts qui y peuvent estre de ma part, autorisera suffisamment ce labeur, et le couvrira contre les traicts de l’Envie. J’adjousteray, que l’Imprimeur y a travaillé fidelement, et avec beaucoup d’addresse. Quelques Pseaumes en ceux d’Orlande, comme le 95, 96, 85, et 12, sont transposés au regard de leur tons, ce qui est advenu par mesgarde, et n’importe pas beaucou Je suis marri qu’en la diversité, les pieces ne sont, ou ne se trouveront si aggreables les unes que les autres. Mais il est en la liberté de ceux qui chanteront, de choisir celles qui seront plus à leur goust, et s’en picquer l’ame plus souvent. Je me confie, qu’il y aura de quoy les contenter en plusiers endroits: et je suis trop neuf en ceste science pour dire, Ceste piece est plus exquise que l’autre. Nous n’avons pas tous l’oreille encline à mesme ton, ny le jugement uniforme. Ceste varieté reccomande d’avantage l’excellence de la Musique, nommément celle d’Orlande. Au reste, ayant trouvé quelques autres Pseaumes, partie faicts expres sur la Musique y adjointe, partie accommodés aux accords de chansons mondaines d’aucuns autres professeurs de Musique, j’en ay adjousté suffisant nombre à cinq et à six parties, pour rendre ce premier livre d’autant plus accompli. Le Pseaume dixieme à cinq parties, page 54, et le troisieme à six parties, page, 79, qui suyvent ceux d’Orlande, ne portent le nom de celuy qui les a mis en Musique, lequel pour bonne raison, comme j’estime, n’ayant voulu se monstrer, aussi n’ay-je osé curieusement m’en enquerir, encores que je n’ignore pas le lieu de sa demeure, et la louange qu’il a acquise à cause de sa suffisance en la Musique. L’esperance que j’ay de recevoir de luy, et d’autres excellents Musiciens, qui favoriseront ceste mienne

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enterprise, d’autres Pseaumes non encor imprimes, pour dresser avec le temps les deux autres livres, qui seront le parachevement des Pseaumes, me garde d’entrer plus avant en ce propos. Le seigneur Alfonse Flores, qui a commencé de mettre la main à tous les Pseaumes de David, s’adstreignant à joindre en chacun d’iceux le chant de l’Eglise à l’une des parties, et retenant l’air presque ordinarement en toutes les autres, m’en a liberalement envoyé de Nismes en Languedoc quelques beaux eschantillons: deliberé de poursuyvre, s’il rencontre un Mecenas. Pour le faire congnoistre j’ay enclos trois pieces de sa façon en ce premier Recueil. Je n’ay pas oublié ce que la Verité celeste nous commande de faire au temps des afflictions, ny ne veux allegner des raisons à mes amis, pour les induire à chanter, tandis que tant de peulples pleurent. Mais, comme és publiques assemblees Chrestiennes l’on magnifie tous les jours Dieu Toutpuissant en ses jugements et misericordes, par le chant des Pseaumes de David, j’ay offert ici à quelques particuliers un legitime et honorable moyen de s’esgayer au Seigneur, faisant retenir les louanges d’iceluy en leurs chambres, attendant le jour heureux auquel nous esperons le benir es demeurances eternelles que son fils nous a acquises sur les cieux. Tandis que les esprits sombres et desbauchés s’enfondrent en excercices vains et miserables, il ne sera pas defendu aux ames paisables de se disposer par les accords d’une saincte Musique à mediter plus affectueusement puis apres ce qui est de leur devoir, durant le cours de la vie presente. Si ce livre fait mal aux yeux ou aux oreilles de quelcun, je desire que tout à son aise il s’en tire arriere, et s’occupe à choses encor plus serieuses. Je ne suis pas Musicien, mais bien ami de la Musique, sur tout de celle qui est icy enclose. Cas advenant, que quelques autres en cueillent autant de plaisir et de consolation, que moy qui ay travaillé apres, tandis que ceux, qui secouent la teste contre tels Recueils, dormoyent, jouoyent, ou faisoyent pis, j’ay l’un de mes souhaicts. Pour conclusion, je prie ceux qui chanteront ces Pseaumes, ou de vive voix, ou sur les instruments, de tenir la mesure large, et, sur tout, de joindre au goust de la Musique une humble affection envers l’auteur de toute bonne donation, pour le reverer et remercier de ses faveurs: se souvenir finalement d’une sentence de l’Apostre, qui disoit, Je chanteray d’esprit, je chanteray aussi d’intelligence: en telle sorte, que tout se rapporte à la gloire du seul vray Dieu, Pere, Fils, et Sainct Espirt, auquel soit louange, sapience, action de graces, honneur, puissance, et force eternellement. AMEN. Translation: Notice on the contents of this Collection of Psalms Ten years ago, in order to satisfy the worthy wish of some honorable men, I accommodated the text of the Psalms of David to some French, Italian, and German songs, as well as some Latin motets of Orlande de Lassus, prince of musicians of our century. Since that time, this entire project has remained hidden in the chaos of sufferings that have extended far and wide. Nothing changing for the moment, awaiting the continuation of these confusions, and the appearance of new disturbances, that the Allmighty alone may prevent. Nevertheless it has

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come to pass, without my being able to say how, that at the beginning of this year, while moving certain papers, I found many pieces of the collection, which, upon review by some friend, it gave them the desire to see this first volume brought to light. Their entreaty gave me over promptly (and perhaps too soon) to promise them I would do so. I now report to them: the project is done. One thing gives me satisfaction: that is that the holiness of the text, to which the music has been accommodated according to what is possible, will excuse the faults which may be there on my account, and will sufficiently authorize this work, and protect it against the darts of envy. I judge that the printer has worked faithfully, and with much tact. Several Psalms among those of Orlande, such as numbers 95, 96, 85, and 12, are transposed with respect to their modes—this has happened by accident, and does not matter much. I am sad that in the diversity, some pieces are, or will not be found as agreeable as others. But it is the liberty of those who sing to choose those that are to their taste, and which serve to touch the soul most frequently. I trust that there will be among these something that will satisfy in several passages—and I am too new to this science to claim “this piece is more exquisite than the other.” We do not at all have an ear inclined to the same tone, nor do a uniform judgment. This variety recommends even more the excellence of the music, especially that of Orlande. For the rest, having found some other Psalms, some make expressly in conjunction with the music that sets them, and some accommodated to the harmonies of secular chansons by some other professors of music, I added a sufficient number for five and for six voices, in order to render this first book as much as complete. The tenth Psalm for five voices, page 54, and the third for six voices, page 79, which follow those of Orlande, do not carry the name of he who set them to music, who for good reason, I judge, did not wish to reveal himself-nor did I have the curiosity to inquire, even though I was not ignorant of the place of his residence, and the praise that he acquired on account of his adequacy in music. I hope to receive from him, and from other excellent musicians who favor this my enterprise, other Psalms not previously printer, in order to prepare in time two other books which will mark the completion of the Psalms, I wish soon to begin this undertaking. The noble Alfonse Flores, who has started to put his hand to all of the Psalms of David, has bound himself to combine in each of these the ecclesiastical melody in one of the voices, and retain the tune almost plainly in all of the others, has generously send me from Nîmes in Languedoc some pretty samples: [he has] decided to pursue this, if he finds a patron. In order to let these works be known I have included three pieces of his making in this first collection. I have not forgotten that which the heavenly Truth has commanded us to do during times of suffering, nor want to give reasons to my friends that would induce them to sing while so many people wee But, as in public assemblies Christians have always magnified God all-powerful in his judgments and sufferings, by the singing of the Psalms of David, I have here offered to some members a legitimate and honorable means to celebrate before the Lord, allowing them to keep praises of him in their chambers, waiting the happy day on which we hope to bless in

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eternal resting places that his son has acquired for us in the heavens. Whereas only somber and profligate spirits plunge themselves into vain and miserable exercises, it will not be forbidden to peaceable souls to comport themselves according to the harmonies of a holy music to meditate more affectionately than after that which is their duty, during the course of the present life. If this book appears evil in the eyes or in the ears of someone, I wish that all to his ease he will withdraw, and occupy himself with more serious things. I am not a musician, but am a good friend of music, above all that which is enclosed here. In case it should happen, that some others, in gathering enough pleasure and consolation as have I in working on this, whereas that they, who shake their heads at such collections, sleep, play, or work worse, then I have one of my wishes. In conclusion, I beg those who sing these Psalms, whether in full voice or upon instruments, to take a sedate tempo, and (above all) to join to the taste of the music a humble affection towards the author of all good gifts, in order to revere and to thank him for his favors. Remember lastly a saying of the apostle, who said: I will sing of spirit; I will also sing of understanding—in such kind that all will return to the glory of the only true God (Father, Song, and Holy Spirit), to which is eternally due praise, wisdom, acts of grace, honor, power and might. AMEN. Table 1.1 The Contents of the Cinquante pseaumes Cinquante Psalm incipit pseaumes No. [à 5] 1 Qui au conseil des malins 2 Aux paroles que je veuil dire 3 Mon Dieu j’ay en toy 4 O nostre Dieu et Seigneur 5 De tout mon coeur t’exalteray 6 Veu que du tout en Dieu 7 Sois moy, Seigneur, ma garde 8 Seigneur, enten à mon bon droit 9 Seigneur, le Roy s’esjouira 10 Vous tous, Princes et Seigneurs 11

Ne sois fasché

Psalm Original number incipit

Composer Tonal Type

1

Cosi aspettando Lasso

C1/Flat/G

5

Beati quorum remissae sunt Che fai? Che pensi Fiera stella

Lasso

C1/Flat/G

Lasso

C1/Flat/C

Lasso

C1/Flat/D

Quanta invidi’a Lasso quelle Quel chiaro sol Lasso

C1/Flat/G

7 8 9 11 16 17 21 29 37

Non ha tante Lasso serene stelle Am abend spat Lasso Talhor parmi la Lasso luce Oh Lasso d’amarissime onde Quanta invidia Lasso ti porto

C1/Flat/D C1/Flat/G C1/Flat/F C1/Flat/G C1/Flat/F C1/Flat/G

Listening to the Psalms among the Huguenots 12

Las! En ta fureur aiguë

38

13

Le Dieu, le fort, l’Eternel Dieu, pour fonder

50

14

87

15 16

Tu as esté, Seigneur 90 Qui en la garde du 91 haut Dieu

17

Dieu est regnant

93

18

Sus, esgayon nous au Seigneur

95

19

L’omnipotent à mon 110 Seigneur Des ma jeunesse 129 Estans assis 137

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Louëz Dieu, car c’est chose bonne D’ou vient celà, Seigneur Seigneur, Seigneur, garde mon droit Le Seigneur est la clarté Resveillez vous, chacun fidele Deba contre mes debateurs Du malin le meschant vouloir Dieu nous soit doux et favorable

147 10

Lasso

C1/Flat/D

Lasso

C1/Flat/G

Lasso Lasso

C1/Flat/D C1/Flat/G

Lasso

C1/Flat/G

Lasso

G2/Flat/G

Lasso

C1/Flat/G

Lasso Lasso

C1/Flat/F C1/Flat/G

Lasso

C1/Flat/G

Lasso

G2/Flat/G G2/Flat/D

27

Lasso

G2/Flat/G

33

Ist keiner hie

Lasso

G2/Flat/G

35

Bella guerriera Lasso

G2/Flat/D

36

Es sind doch selig alle die Der wein der schmeckt mir also wol Chanter je veux Die zeit so jetz vorhanden ist C’estoit en ton jeune age Frau ich bin euch von hertzen hold Las! me faut il Domine, ne in furore tuo Parens sans amis

Lasso

G2/Flat/F

Lasso

G2/Flat/G

Lasso Lasso

C1/Flat/G G2/Flat/G

Lasso

G2/Flat/G

Lasso

G2/Flat/F

Lasso Lasso

C1/Natural/E C1/Natural/E

Lasso

C1/Natural/A

57

32

Donnez au Seigneur 107 gloire Orsus sus, serviteurs 134 du Seigneur

36

C1/Flat/D

Lasso

26

Chantez à Dieu Sus, sus, mon ame

34 35

Lasso

Que gaignes vous Signor da d’alto trono Vive sera

30 31

33

Da das der Herr des weins ersach O invidia nemica J’attendz le tems L’alto Signor Vor zeiten was ich lieb und wert Multa flagella peccatoris Mon coeur se recommande à vous Amor mi strugge’l cor Est il possible De tout mon coeur Vostro fui

57

96 104

Pourquot font bruit 2 Ne veuilles pas o 6 Sire Orsus tous 47 humaines

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37

Peuples oyez

49

38 39

Ayes pitié Enten à ce que je veuil dire D’ou vient, Seigneur Vous tous qui la terre habitez Incontinent que j’eus oui

57 64

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

74 100 122

Veuillez, Seigneur, 132 estre records Avec les tiens, 85 Seigneur Louez Dieu, car il 106 est benin Saluum me fac, Domine Bienheureuse est la personne Beinheureux est quiconques Sert à Dieu volontiers Du fond de ma pensee Mon Dieu, mon Roy D’ou vient celà, Seigneur Resvveillez vous chascun fidele

12 119

Wer frisch will sein Le departir Domine, ne in furore tuo Laboravi in gemitu tuo Ein guter wein ist lobens werd Frölich zu sein ist mein manier

Lasso

C1/Natural/A

Lasso Lasso

C1/Natural/G C1/Natural/D

Lasso

C1/Natural/D

Lasso

C1/Natural/G

Lasso

C1/Natural/G

Wie lang o Gott Lasso

C1/Natural/E

Veux tu ton mal Lasso

G2/Natural/D

Ich weiss Lasso ein hübsches fräulein Scorgo tant’alto Lasso il lume Volgi cor mio Lasso

G2/Natural/A C1/Natural/E G2/Natural/D

128

Ich sprich wann Lasso ich nit leuge

G2/Natural/G

130

Erzürn dich nicht Euro gentil

Lasso

G2/Natural/C

Lasso

G2/Natural/D

145 10 33

D’ou vient celà, Anon. Seigneur Pevernage

G2/Flat/G G2/Flat/G

Maletty

G2/Flat/F

54

Que Dieu se 68 monstre seulement L’eternel est regnant 97

Flores

G2/Flat/F

55

Mon Dieu me paist 23

Flores

C1/Flat/G

56

O Dieu, qui es ma forteres D’ou vient, Seigneur

28

Flores

C1/Flat/G

74

Maletty

G2/Natural/G

57

[à 6]

Listening to the Psalms among the Huguenots 58

Qui au conseil

59

Maletty

G2/Flat/C

Anon.

G2/Flat/F

Maletty

G2/Flat/A

61

O Seigneur que de 3 gents O Eternel, Dieu des 94 vengeances A toy, o Dieu 123

Goudimel

G2/Natural/C

62

Avec les tiens

Maletty

G2/Natural/C

63

O Dieu donne moy 140 delivrance

Maletty

G2/Natural/D

64

On a beau sa maison

Faigneint

G2/Natural/C

65

Tu as esté, Seigneur 90

Manenti

C1/Flat/C

66

Revenge moy

43

Maletty

C1/Flat/F

67

Sus louez, Dieu

103

Felis

C1/Flat/G

68

Donnez au Seigneur 107

Macque

C1/Flat/G

69

Estans assis

137

Sabino

C1/Flat/G

70

J’ay de ma voix à Dieu crié

142

Baccusi

C1/Flat/F

60

1

59

84

127

Vientene Fili

Nova belta somma virtu Amor io sento un respirar Et secca o gran pieta Poi ch’el mio largo pianto

Note: Identification of original incipits and composers based on Orlando di Lasso, Seine Werke in zeitgenössischen Drucken, 1555–1687, vol. 2, ed Horst Leuchtmann and Bernhold Schmid, Orlando di Lasso. Sämtliche Werke, Supplement (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), 251–5.

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Table 1.2 Organization of the Cinquante Pseaumes Pieces by Lasso/a5 Psalm Sequence I

Piece Nos. 1–22

Tonal Type C1/Flat

II

23–33

G2/Flat

III IV

34–43 44-50

C1/Natural G2/Natural

51–4 55–6 57

G2/Flat C1/Flat G2/Natural

58–60 61–4

G2/Flat G2/Natural

Pieces by others/a5 V VI VII Pieces by others/a6 VIII IX

Comments Goulart mentions No. 18 as out of place in the collection. The tonal type for this composition is G2/ Flat. It thus belongs with Psalm Sequence II. Goulart mentions No. 30 as out of place in the collection. The tonal type for this composition is C1/ Flat. It thus belongs with Psalm Sequence I. Goulart mentions No. 46 as out of place in the collection. The tonal type fits, but to judge from its place in the sequence of Psalm texts (it is Psalm 12), it belongs between compositions Nos. 35 and 36 in this book. Goulart also notes No. 44 as misplaced, although it is not apparently out of order relate to tonal type or Psalm sequence.

Ordering by Psalm text not consistent. X 65–70 C1/Flat Ordering by Psalm text not consistent. Note: Goulart organized his Cinquante pseaumes according to several overlapping hierarchies: • By number of voices (five-voice, then six-voice); • By composer (all of the Lasso compositions, then all of the pieces by other composers); • By tonal type (as represented by choice of clef combination and backdrop of pitches); • By Psalm number. The same basic premise applies to the second part of the project, although among the sixvoice pieces, the order of the Psalms is not always correct. In any case Goulart’s preface observes that (among the works by Lasso) are a small number of works misplaced according to their “tons” (modes).

Chapter 2

William Byrd’s English Psalms Roger Bray

The discussion of music reception history is more complicated than that of some other creative fields because we do not have a single word for the “receiver,” who may be reader, purchaser, performer, anthologist, listener, etc., but it has the advantage of potentially throwing up a diverse range of results. This discussion of the various receivers of William Byrd’s settings of English Psalms will lead to a proposed re-dating of Byrd’s anthems and other music for the Reformed Church, a clarification of the texts of his last (1611) collection, and a brief insight into a small part of the domestic habits of three recusant households. Byrd relied heavily on the Book of Psalms in choosing texts for his compositions whether in Latin or in English; he used 45 different psalms and returned to some, especially the Penitential Psalms 6, 51, 130, and 143, more than once.1 His motives in writing his penitential Latin motets have been thoroughly discussed:2 the prevailing opinion is that he selected texts from the Office and the Bible (including the Psalms), perhaps using Primers as his immediate source, to express in these motets the feelings of the recusant Catholic community in England in the years following 1581, and in so doing left no doubt of his own recusancy. His use of Latin for this purpose was in line with the Catholics’ use of Latin in their private devotions and clandestine celebrations of the Mass, etc., for which Byrd eventually published music (the three masses sometime in the 1590s, and the Gradualia of 1605 and 1607). Byrd’s use of the complex contrapuntal style that was used also by Continental composers allowed him to demonstrate his prowess while at the same time providing support for the Catholic community and allowing them to feel that their music was in the same style as that of their continental coreligionists, and his expertise seems also to have protected him from the penalties 1 See Appendix and John Morehen, “The English Anthem Text,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 117 (1992), 64 etc. 2 Joseph Kerman, “The Elizabethan Motet: A Study of Texts for Music,” Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1961), 273–305; idem., The Elizabethan Madrigal: A Comparative Study (New York: AMS, 1962); idem., The Masses and Motets of William Byrd (London: Faber, 1981); Craig Monson “Byrd, the Catholics, and the Motet: the hearing reopened,” in Hearing the Motet, ed. Dolores Pesce (New York: Oxford University Press 1997), 348–74; idem., ed., William Byrd: The English Anthems, The Byrd Edition, 11 (London: Stainer and Bell, 1983); and Owen Rees, “The English Background to Byrd’s Motets: Textual and Stylistic Models for Infelix ego,” in Byrd Studies, ed. Alan Brown and Richard Turbet, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 24–50.

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for recusancy, thanks to his reputation in the eyes of the English court (including, it seems, even the Queen). However, less attention has been paid to his psalm-based sacred works in English: his anthems for the Reformed Church, and the relevant contents of three of his publications, Psalmes, Sonets, & songs of sadnes and pietie (1588), Songs of sundrie natures (1589) and Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets … fit for Voyces or Viols (1611).3 His anthems must be considered first because they pre-date the published works. There are 18 works that are found in liturgical manuscripts and generally agreed to be true anthems for liturgical use in the Reformed Church.4 These 18 are listed below with broadly agreed dates; two anthems (“Arise O Lord” and “Help us O God”) appear to have become attached to each other as two partes of a single work by an early date (about 1580) and so may be regarded as a single work. (Throughout this essay spelling has been modernized.) Table 2.1 Byrd’s Anthems 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8a 8b 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Save me O God Out of the deep a6 How long shall mine enemies O Lord make thy servant Alack when I look back Let us be glad Thou God that guid’st Arise O Lord Help us O God Prevent us O Lord O God whom our offences Christ rising Behold O God the sad O Lord rebuke me not Hear my prayer O Lord O God the proud Exalt thyself Sing joyfully

Voices MMATB MMAATB MAATB MAATTB MAATB music lost MAATB MAATB MAATTB MAATB MAATB MMATTB MAATB MAATTB MAATB MMAATB MMAATB MMAATB

Probable date and text 1560s Ps 54, 1–4 BCP 1560s Ps 130, 1–4, 7–8 BCP c.1570 Ps 13, 2–5 BCP c.1570 Ps 21, 2, and 4 adapted BCP c.1570 Hunnis adapted c.1570 Hunnis c.1570 Hunnis c.1570 Ps 44, 23–4 BCP c.1575 Ps 79, 9 BCP c.1580 collect c.1580 collect c.1575 Easter anthem BCP c.1570 special prayer c.1580 Ps 6, 1, 2, 4 BCP c.1580 Ps 143, 1–2 BCP after 1584? Ps 86, 14–15 Geneva after 1584? Ps 57, 6 & 9–12 Geneva after 1584? Ps 81, 1–4 Geneva

Here the choice of texts is unsurprising for a composer writing within the Reformed Church: psalms (mostly from the Book of Common Prayer (BCP)) and collects, with a few based on William Hunnis’s collection of poems that included prayers Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, 100–118; Monson, Byrd Edition, 11, Introduction. Craig Monson, “Authenticity and Chronology in Byrd’s Church Anthems,” Journal

3 4

of the American Musicological Society 35 (1982), 280–305; John Morehen, “English Church Music,” in The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, II: The Sixteenth Century, ed. Roger Bray (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 112; and David Wulstan, “Birdus tantum natus decorare magistrum,” in Byrd Studies, 69–70.

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for the Queen.5 It is, however, immediately noticeable that the three works that have been tentatively offered a date after 1584 because of their similar scoring (‘MMAATB’ indicates six parts, two boys’ voices (means), two altos, tenor and bass, Nos. 15–17) take their text from the Geneva Bible (1560) translation of the Psalms rather than Miles Coverdale’s translation in the Great Bible (1536) that was used for the Book of Common Prayer (1552). In order to assess whether or not it is likely that Byrd would have chosen the Geneva Bible for his texts in the mid-1580s we need to discuss his actions during that decade. It was during the 1580s that Byrd started writing his great penitential Latin motets, some of which he published in his two books of Cantiones Sacrae (1589 and 1591), and there is little doubt that the event which set him on this path and led to his increasing preparedness to be seen as a recusant was the execution of Edmund Campion and two others in 1581, an event that seems to have been a catalyst for some crypto-Catholics, causing them to conclude that conditions were not going to improve while Elizabeth was on the throne and forcing them either to declare their hand or to conform. It seems that Byrd was in the former group, for he set a version of the poem by Henry Walpole (“Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?”) written to commemorate this event; even to possess a copy of this poem was sufficient to place the owner in danger, and so the composition (and in 1588 publication, in Psalmes, Sonets, & songs of Sadnes and pietie) of his setting of a version, even rather watered-down, of this poem was a statement of pro-Catholic sympathy.6 There are several further indications that Byrd was allowing his sympathies to become public: a list of around 1581, of “The places where certaine Recusantes remaine in and about the city of London: or are to be com by uppon warning” includes “Wyllm Byrde of the Chapell At his house in the parish of Harlington in com. Midd. [viz. the county of Middlesex].”7 A document dated 17 February 1583/4 appears to be an attempt to control Byrd’s movements, for it binds him over in the sum of £200 “to be forthcominge at his house at harlington in the Countie of Midd. within anie reasonable warning.”8 Harlington is about 14 miles from London (close to where Heathrow Airport now stands), which suggests that between 1581 and 1583 Byrd ceased to be regarded as being based in the city. From this date he became one of the usual suspects whenever recusant plots were uncovered, appearing on another list of about the same time, of “The names of certain parsons who be great frendes and ayderes of those beyond the seaes”; this includes “Mr Byrde at mr Listers his howse over against St dunstons or at the Ld Hunnis (Seven Sobs of a Sorrowful Soul for Sin, 1583 and reprints). Byrd’s setting does not include the more seditious recusant portions of Walpole’s

5 6

text, but the title identifies the piece, and the original text could, of course, be used. 7 PRO SP 12/167/47. John Harley, William Byrd, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 73. I discussed this question in my chapter “England: 1485– 1600” in James Haar, ed., European Music 1520–1640 (Woodbridge; Boydell, 2006), 499. 8 David Mateer, “William Byrd’s Middlesex Recusancy,” Music & Letters 78 (1997): 13.

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Padgetts howse in draighton.”9 The fact that between them these lists give three addresses for Byrd tends to confirm the necessity for the Harlington order. Lord Paget was his principal patron at this time (“draighton” is West Drayton, less than two miles from Harlington). Byrd is known to have visited another Paget house, Burton Abbey, at Burton-on-Trent, from 7 to 15 August 1580, on which occasion his visit overlapped with one by Anthony Babington, the Catholic conspirator.10 Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, is about 125 miles from London, and so it was not a case of simply popping in while passing. He was regarded as being in need of investigation at other times too, for he was questioned by the Lords of the Council on two occasions. A letter from William Parry of 22 February 1583/4 to Charles Paget states “Mr Byrd is at liberty and hath bene very honorably intreated by my LL. of the Councell”11; the closeness of date between the Harlington order (17 February) and this account of a meeting at which Byrd helped the authorities with their enquiries (22 February), suggests a direct connection. While Northumberland was being investigated in May 1585, in connection with this same plot, Thomas Wylkes, Clerk of the Privy Council, made a note “Too send for byrd of the chapell and that his howse be diligentlye searchyd.”12 Suspicion of Byrd was not confined to his possible connection with the Throckmorton plot, however, for a week after the discovery of the Babington plot, in August 1586, “Birdes house at Harmonsworth or Craneford” (viz. Harlington) was listed to be searched again.13 Two final references provide final detail: one of November 1585 to Byrd as “somtyme of her Mates Chappell,”14 and the well-known comment by Father William Weston that, on 14 July 1586 (Old Style), he met Byrd “the most celebrated musician and organist of the English nation, who had been formerly in the Queen’s Chapel, and was held in the highest estimation; but for his religion he sacrificed every thing, both his office and the Court and all those hopes which are nurtured by such persons as pretend to similar places in the dwellings of princes, as steps towards the increasing of their fortune.”15

PRO SP 12/146/137. David Mateer, “William Byrd, John Petre and Oxford, Bodleian MS Mus. Sch. e 423,” Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 29 (1996): 39n75; Harley, Byrd, 59. 10 Staffordshire Record Office, 1734/3/3/280; Harley, Byrd, 59; Christopher Harrison, “William Byrd and the Pagets of Beaudesert: a musical connection,” Staffordshire Studies 3 (1990–1991): 51–63; Mateer, “John Petre,” 39. 11 PRO SP 12/168/23; Harley, Byrd, 74; Mateer, “John Petre,” 39n78. 12 London, British Library, MS Egerton 2074, ff.50–1v, doc 3; see Harley, Byrd, 74. 13 PRO SP 12/192/47–8; Harley, Byrd, 74. 14 PRO SP 12/184, f.15, reported by David Mateer in a book review in Music & Letters, 79 (1998), 105. 15 Mateer, “Byrd’s Middlesex Recusancy,” 13–14, quoting John Morris, The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, Vol. II (London: Burns and Oates, 1875), 145; Adrian Morey, The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978), 180. 9

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The recent publication by Mateer16 of recusancy references highlights two particularly puzzling features of Byrd’s recusancy: first, that he was registered as a recusant at all, for one would have thought that a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal could hardly be accused, as long as he was fulfilling his duties, for he could not avoid attending services in the chapel (surely his “Chapel accustomed,” in the words of the Act of Uniformity); and second, that when he was finally cited it was at his home in Harlington, for one would have thought that the last place to expect to find a member of the Chapel on a Sunday morning would be his home village. The only explanation for these puzzling comments is that by 1584 Byrd had ceased to attend the Chapel Royal (and so “somtyme” and “formerly” are accurate), and was correctly identified in the recusancy records (he was actually cited for at least forty months in a period of eight years (1584–1592)). There is no evidence whatsoever that Byrd actually attended the Chapel after October 1581 in normal circumstances, though he retained his membership and presumably employed substitutes, appearing only on state occasions, such as Elizabeth’s funeral and James’s coronation. He never signed any of the documents in their record-book, the Old Cheque Book, nor did he find himself on their committees or otherwise involved in their activities. This, then, is the context for his anthems and later psalm-settings. If he were already tending to recusancy in 1580 (his visit to Burton-on-Trent) and 1581 (when he appeared on the list of “certaine Recusantes”), and if he determined to declare his recusancy after Campion’s execution in 1581, it is impossible to believe that he was still writing anthems for the Reformed Church at all, still less that he was using the Calvinist Geneva Bible as his source, which is why all such music, including these last three anthems and also his service-settings, must date from earlier than 1580. Turning now to the evidence of the three published collections in which he includes psalm-settings, we find a more complex picture. Metrical psalms are given pride of place in his first secular printed collection, Psalmes, Sonets, & songs of sadnes and pietie (1588), both in the title and in the order of contents, comprising the first ten works there, nearly one-third of the total of 35 works, the remainder (the sonnets and songs of sadness and piety) being rather serious in nature, though the well-known “Though Amaryllis dance in green” is one of the lighter pieces. Metrical psalm settings are also prominent in his Songs of sundrie natures (1589), though here the layout is different. Whereas in the 1588 print all the psalms (and indeed all the works) are for five voices, here in 1589 Byrd lays out his works in ascending order of the size of group required to sing them, starting with threevoice music, of which the first seven works are metrical psalms; there are three more metrical psalms for six voices later in the collection. Psalms are again given prominence in the title of his final secular collection Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets ... fit for Voyces or Viols (1611), where Byrd again orders his collection according to the number of voice parts, starting with three voices and rising to six voices, but now he places the Psalms within groups, not in any great prominence, and, more important, he no longer sets metrical versions of the Psalms. Mateer, “Byrd’s Middlesex Recusancy,” passim.

16

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Many of the 1588 collection are as penitential in nature as the Latin works, and indeed the last two of them are two of the seven Penitential Psalms. One text is by Thomas Sternhold, and one by John Hopkins, but otherwise the authorship of the metrical texts is unknown. They were originally composed as consort songs (one sung part accompanied by viols):17 No. 1 O God give ear and do apply 2 Mine eyes with fervency of sprite 3 My soul oppressed with care and grief 4 How shall a young man 5 O Lord how long wilt thou forget 6 O Lord who in thy sacred tent 7 Help Lord for wasted are those men 8 Blessed is he that fears the Lord 9 Lord in thy wrath reprove me not 10 Even from the depth unto thee O Lord

Ps. 55 123 119d 119b 13 15 12 112 6 130

The mood changes little in the 1589 set; indeed, Byrd now provides a complete and thorough treatment of the seven Penitential Psalms in their correct order, which is clearly no coincidence, as Kerman noted:18 1 Lord in thy rage rebuke me not 2 Right blest are they whose wicked sins 3 Lord in thy wrath correct me not 4 O God which art most merciful 5 Lord hear my prayer instantly 6 From depth of sin O Lord to thee 7 Attend mine humble prayer Lord 38/9 Behold how good a thing it is 45 Unto the hills mine eyes I lift

6 32 38 51 102 130 143 133 121

The mood and choice of text (both in content and in source) has changed considerably by 1611: 6 Sing ye to the Lord 7 I have been young 16 Come let us rejoyce 18 Arise Lord into the rest 20 Sing we merrily 21 Blow up the trumpet 24 Make ye joy

149, 1–2 37, 25 95, 1–2 132, 8–9 81, 1–2 81, 3–4 100, 1–2

Jeremy Smith, ed., William Byrd: Psalmes, Sonets, & songs (1588), Byrd Edition, 12 (London: Stainer and Bell, 2004), 12. 18 Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, 109. 17

William Byrd’s English Psalms

25 Have mercy upon me 29 Praise our Lord all ye Gentiles 30 Turn our captivity

67

51, 1–2 117 126, 5–7

Here Byrd is selecting short extracts of non-metrical text from his chosen psalm. Most of these works are of a cheerfulness not found in the 1588 or 1589 sets. Meanwhile, No 7 (“I have been young, but now am old”) reminds us that Byrd was about 71 by this date and may introduce a personal dimension. Kerman noted that these texts were not from the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) but “most of Byrd’s prose versions are very close to the Douai Bible, though a few are more similar to the Anglican translations.”19 Closer inspection is more revealing, however, as this collation of some of the texts between Byrd, Douai and the Book of Common Prayer shows.20 In five works (“Sing ye to our Lord,” “Come let us rejoice,” “Make ye joy to God all the earth,” “Have mercy upon me O God,” and “Praise our Lord all ye Gentiles”) Byrd’s setting is not particularly close to either BCP or Douai. For example, No.6, “Sing ye to our Lord”: 6 (Byrd) Sing ye to our Lord a new song, his praise in the Church of Saints. Let Israel be joyful in him, that made him, and let the daughters of Sion, rejoice in their King. Ps. 149, 1–2 (Douai) Sing ye to the Lord a new canticle: let his praise be in the church of the saints. Let Israel rejoice in him that made him: and let the children of Sion be joyful in their king. (BCP) O sing unto the Lord a new song: let the congregation of saints praise him. Let Israel rejoice in him that made him.

In three (“I have been young, but now am old,” “Sing we merrily unto God our strength,” and its secunda pars “Blow up the Trumpet”) Byrd is nearer to BCP than Douai: 7 (Byrd) I have been young, but now am old, yet did I never see the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread. Ps 37, 25 (Douai) I have been young, and now am old; and I have not seen the just forsaken, nor his seed seeking bread. (BCP) I have been young and now am old: and yet saw I never the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread.

Here Byrd is nearer to BCP than to Douai (“yet,” and “never see,” the “righteous forsaken,” “begging their bread”). Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, 109-110. The Holy Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate … (Rheims, 1582 [Old Testament]

19 20

and Douai, 1609 [New Testament]).

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Psalms in the Early Modern World / Bray 20 (Byrd) Sing we merrily unto God our strength; make a cheerful noise unto the God of Jacob. Take the shalm, bring hither the tabret, the merry harp with the lute. Ps. 81, 1–2 21 Blow up the Trumpet in the new moon, even in the time appointed, and upon our solemn feast day: for this was made a statute for Israel, and a Law of the God of Jacob. Ps. 81, 3–4 (Douai) Rejoice to God our helper: sing aloud to the God of Jacob. Take a psalm, and bring hither the timbrel: the pleasant psaltery with the harp. Blow up the trumpet on the new moon, on the noted day of your solemnity. For it is a commandment in Israel, and a judgment to the God of Jacob. (BCP) Sing we merrily unto God our strength: make a cheerful noise unto the God of Jacob. Take the psalm bring hither the tabret: the merry harp with the lute. Blow up the trumpet in the new moon: even in the time appointed, and upon our solemn feast-day. For this was made a statute for Israel: and a law of the God of Jacob.

Here Byrd is much closer to BCP than to Douai. In only two is Byrd nearer to Douai than to BCP (“Arise Lord into thy rest” and “Turn our captivity O Lord”): 18 (Byrd) Arise Lord into thy rest, thou, and the ark of thy sanctification; let the priests be clothed with justice and let the saints rejoice. Ps. 132, 8–9 (Douai) Arise, O Lord, into thy resting place: thou and the ark, which thou hast sanctified. Let thy priests be clothed with justice: and let thy saints rejoice. (BCP) Arise O Lord into thy resting-place: thou and the ark of thy strength. Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness: and let thy saints sing with joyfulness.

Here Byrd is nearer to Douai (“sanctification/sanctified,” “justice,” “rejoice”). 30 (Byrd) Turn our captivity O Lord, as a brook in the south. They that sow in tears, shall reap in joyfulness. Going they went and wept, casting their seeds, but coming they shall come with jollity, carrying their sheaves with them. Ps. 126, 5–7 (Douai) Turn again our captivity, O Lord, as a stream in the south. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. Going they went and wept, casting their seeds. But coming they shall come with joyfulness, carrying their sheaves. (BCP) Turn our captivity O Lord: as the rivers in the south. They that sow in tears: shall reap in joy. He that now goeth on his way weeping, and beareth forth good seed: shall doubtless come again with joy and bring his sheaves with him.

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Here too Byrd is slightly nearer to Douai (“going they went and wept etc.,” “coming they shall come”). Since none of these works is written on precisely the Book of Common Prayer or Douai translation, it must mean that somebody (Byrd himself, or a patron?) has produced a paraphrase. Personal translations were common, and Butterworth gives 11 versions of Psalm 51, none of which is identical to Byrd’s.21 One can understand why a precise rendition of the Book of Common Prayer might have been unpopular with Catholics, but the same would not have been true of the Douai version. Yet the combined facts that some of the texts are very close to the Common Prayer version, and that the general tone is much more positive than in the 1588 or 1589 set reflects the fact that by 1611 Catholics felt under less pressure. While we can be confident that the anthems written before 1581 are for the Reformed Church and the Latin motets are for the recusant community, the question needs to be asked: for whom were the psalms of the printed collections of 1588, 1589, and 1611 written, and why are they so different from each other? Their very limited use in a true Anglican liturgical context is shown by the fact that only three of the 1588 set, one of the 1589 set, and one of the 1611 set are found in indisputably liturgical Anglican manuscript sources. The three collections appear also to reflect Byrd’s fading appeal in their patrons. The 1588 and 1589 sets were dedicated to prominent courtiers: the 1588 set to Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor, rumoured to be a Catholic (though a loyal subject) and a lover of Queen Elizabeth; the 1589 set to Sir Henry Carye, later Lord Hunsdon and Lord Chamberlain, illegitimate son of Henry VIII by Mary Boleyn (sister of Queen Anne Boleyn), and therefore a cousin of Queen Elizabeth (not to mention patron of the Lord Chancellor’s Men, Shakespeare’s company). The 1611 set was dedicated to Francis Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, senior in precedence as an earl but a more peripheral, provincial figure, though a distant relation of Byrd’s after Byrd’s

Charles C. Butterworth, The English Primers (1525–1545) (New York: Octagon, 1971), 291–300; Helen C. White, The Tudor Books of Private Devotion (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), 49–51. For completeness’s sake, it should be noted that Byrd’s texts for “I have been young” and “Sing we merrily” are close to those of the “Bishops’ Bible” of 1568 (Matthew Parker et al., The holie Bible, conteynyng the Olde Testament and the newe (London: Richard Jugge, 1568, rev. 1572 etc.)), which in turn are close to BCP for these psalms. However, the BCP translation of the psalms had been printed in the “Bishops’ Bible” alongside the “Bishops’” translation from the time of its revised edition of 1572, and the ”Bishops’” translation was withdrawn entirely in favour of BCP in the 1577 revision, apparently at least partly because it was not found to be easy to sing. Byrd’s texts of “I have been young” and the second part of “Sing we merrily” are also similar to those found in the Authorized Version (The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament and the New newly translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised … (London, Robert Barker, 1611), for which the “Bishops’ Bible” was one of the “former translations”, indicating a gradual congruence of translations of at least some psalms. 21

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dynastic achievement in marrying his son Christopher to Sir Thomas More’s great granddaughter Catherine More in c.1589. The English-texted metrical psalm was a genre strongly associated with the Reformed Church, and with domestic performance, but if these works were primarily for adherents to the reformed religion, why did this community feel as embattled as their Catholic counterparts, and equally in need of penitential texts (a trend already noticeable in works such as Hunnis’s Seven Sobs …, mentioned earlier)? Or was there simply an atmosphere of penitence in society as a whole (in which case, has the penitential nature of the Latin motets been linked too strongly to the trials and tribulations of Catholics in particular)? Or are these metrical psalms in English aimed also at Catholics? Did Catholics comfort themselves in English at the hearth while using Latin at the altar? Latin Books of Hours and English Primers were extremely popular, and many of the psalms Byrd selected and set in English tally with the psalms listed in Catholic primers for various offices. For example, Byrd set five of the seven psalms listed as appropriate to the Trinity in a Salisbury Book of Hours.22 Or was Byrd simply trying to maximize his sales? The popularity of primers is shown by the fact that Butterworth lists about 50 publications, of which 180 editions were published between 1525 and 1560 alone, while Rees lists 44 primers produced between 1555 and 1580.23 Sternhold and Hopkins’s (S&H) metrical psalters went through “at least 452 editions.”24 But Byrd’s three sets seem to reflect his fading commercial appeal as well as the fading ability to recruit patronage that we noticed earlier. Although Byrd’s 1588 set was extremely successful, going through five reprints or new editions by 1607, which compares favourably with another of the most popular collections of the period, Dowland’s First Booke of Songs or Ayres (1597, reprinted three times by 1613), the 1589 set was reprinted only twice, and that over a period of 21 years, while the 1611 set was never reprinted. His musical style was much more complex than that of the simple hymn-like metrical psalm of S&H—indeed, East, his printer (who also printed S&H) commented on this—which raises the possibility that he never intended them for the protestant households with their taste for the drab S&H metrical psalm, and in so doing began a trend towards the more complex metrical psalm settings of, for example, John Dowland (1592) and Richard Allison (1599).25 Of particular interest here are the manuscript collections formed by Edward Paston of Appleton Hall, near Norwich, an avowed Catholic with apparent close links with Byrd, who caused a large number of these metrical psalms, and even some of the psalm-text anthems, to be copied into his manuscripts. What use Rees, “The English Background,” 31. Butterworth, English Primers, 1, and Bibliography; Rees, “The English

22 23

Background,” 34 24 Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 2001), s.v. “Psalms, metrical: the Church of England: texts.” 25 Smith, Byrd Edition, 12, viin 8.

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for them did he anticipate? Paston was an avid collector of Latin sacred music, whether for liturgical use in the chapel, or devotional use in the chamber, and Continental (especially Italian) secular music, such as madrigals and chansons. Households like Paston’s were presumably trying to preserve Catholic culture and practices, including ritual (and therefore including Latin). Therefore one would not particularly associate them with sacred music in English, even if it were only for private devotional purposes and not liturgical. Paston’s choral manuscripts do not carry a particularly wide selection of Byrd anthems and devotional music, but it is quite surprising that they carry any at all. The texts of the few real English anthems that appear in his sources are predominantly penitential; Paston selected “Arise/ Help,” “How long shall mine enemies,” “O God whom our offences,” and “Christ rising,” the first three of which are almost as mournful as the more obviously recusant Latin texts, and the fourth of which has a liturgical text (Romans 6:9–10) familiar to Catholics as Christus resurgens, but already set as an English anthem by the first generation of composers for the reformed church, notably John Sheppard and Christopher Tye. Might this appearance of true anthems in Paston’s collection support our speculation that even English anthem texts contain a hidden recusant message, such as the reference to the “assemblies of violent men” mentioned in “O God the proud”? There are about 40 identifiable Paston sets of books (not all of which survive complete), of which only five contain English liturgical anthems in choral form.26 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Tenbury 354-8 and London, British Library, MSS Additional 29401-5 contain only one anthem, not by Byrd, in their anthologies. The main section of Tenbury 341–4 consists of 109 works, of which only four are anthems (the two parts of “Christ rising again” and “Arise O Lord/Help us O God”). London, British Library, MSS Egerton 2009–12 contains only one true anthem, the two parts of “Arise/Help,” in a large collection of consort songs etc. Tenbury 1469–71 contains 14 English-texted works probably all by Byrd, of which only one (“Help us O God”) is a true anthem. So, even within these five manuscripts, anthems form only a tiny part of the contents, though devotional songs by Byrd make up a more substantial portion. However, all those which carry a Byrd anthem at all have “Arise/Help.” Paston’s lute sources are more adventurous, especially London, British Library, MS Additional 31992, which contains the four true anthems mentioned above (“Arise/Help,” “How long shall mine enemies,” “O God whom our offences,” and “Christ rising”). So, although the psalms in the three printed collections must be assumed to be primarily for domestic performance, the fact that the Catholic Paston took some true anthems and all of the “psalms” and “songs of sadnes and pietie” from Edmund H. Fellowes, The Catalogue of MSS in the Library of St. Michael’s College Tenbury (Paris: Oiseau Lyre, 1934); Augustus Hughes-Hughes, Catalogue of Manuscript Music in the British Museum, 3 vols (London: British Museum, 1906); Philip Brett, “Edward Paston (1550–1630): A Norfolk Gentleman and his Musical Collection,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 4 (1964): 51–69. 26

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the 1588 set into his household’s repertoire (viz. all ten psalms, together with “Prostrate O Lord,” “If that a sinner’s sighs,” and “Lullaby”) means that this is not exclusively domestic protestant performance. Paston’s Essex acquaintances, the Petres, also used English-texted devotional music.27 Sir John Petre’s links with Byrd are well documented. Now that Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mus. Sch. e. 423 has been shown to be a Petre manuscript, copied by John Bentley, Petre’s steward, indicating that Byrd’s devotional songs to English texts were used in a second recusant household in the 1580s, its contents are of interest in any assessment of recusant music28. Bentley copied seven early anthems (by Heath, Parsons, Sheppard, and Tallis), two genuine Byrd anthems (“Help us O God” in a section of the manuscript dating from c.1577–1582, and “Christ rising” in a section of the manuscript dating from c.1582), and several devotional works by Byrd which were later printed in 1588 or 1589, but are given here in their consort song version, which suggests, as with 31992 (though for different reasons), that the manuscript was compiled before 1588. Byrd may also have helped to supply the remainder of this collection; we know that rather later (1608) he was paid by Petre for “riflinge for songe bookes.”29 The Petre inventory of 1608 includes: Item 2 Setts of Mr Birds intitled Gradualia, the first and Second Sett Item one other Sett of Mr Birds bookes contayninge Songs of 3, 4, 5, and 6, pts Item one other Sett of Mr Birds books of 5 pts

This therefore also includes devotional music both Latin and English, that is, the 1589 Songs of sundrie natures … of 3. 4. 5. and 6. parts, together with (the “books of 5 pts”) either the 1588 Psalmes, sonets, & songs of sadness and pietie or the 1589 Cantiones, in addition to the two books of Gradualia (1605 and 1607). Paget’s household, meanwhile, used the only Byrd print so far issued, the Tallis/ Byrd 1575 Cantiones, prior to his flight abroad in 1584, as implied by Henry Edyall when he juxtaposed their names in describing how he “did use himself to singe in his lordships howse songes of mr byrdes and mr Tallys, and no other unlawfull songe,” while being questioned following the 1586 Babington plot.30 Intriguingly, Edyall’s remark could be taken to mean that by 1586 the 1575 Tallis/Byrd Cantiones were “unlawfull,” depending on one‘s interpretation of the ambiguous word “other.” 27 We do not know the precise relationship between the Pastons and the Petres, but Petre’s manuscript, Essex, County Record Office, MS D/DP Z6/1, emanated from Paston. 28 Mateer, ‘John Petre,’ 21–46. 29 Mateer, ‘John Petre,’ 29. 30 Essex Record Office D/DP/E2/1, Harley, Byrd, 142, for the Petre inventory; PRO SDP 12/193/63, Harley, Byrd, 49, for Edyall’s statement.

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The Kytsons of Hengrave, Suffolk, were related to the Paget family. The fact that they were Catholics as staunch as the Pagets, Pastons, or Petres reminds us that Catholic households cultivated music in an even broader variety of ways than we have identified so far, for the Kytsons favoured the English consort song and madrigal through their resident musicians, notably John Wilbye. However, the inventory made for estate valuation of their belongings in 1602, after Sir Thomas’s death, shows clearly that they possessed a good deal of Latin music, notably a “great booke which came from Cadis covered wth redd lether, and gylt,”31 which was valued at the very considerable sum of 10 shillings and is surely a plainsong book. The books listed “in ye chamber where ye musicyons playe” include “vj bookes covered with parchment, containing vj setts in a book, with songs of iiij, v, vj, vij, and viij partes, ijs.,” that is to say, a set of six books each bound to contain one of the vocal partbooks (e.g., the Tenor) of six printed collections (“sets”), and containing music for up to eight voices (and valued at two shillings for the sixbook set, compared with the ten shillings of the “great booke … from Cadis”).32 It is possible to deduce what some of these books were. I do not believe that any of Kytson’s books are foreign, because although Continental printed music was available in England, its importing was controlled by the Tallis/Byrd monopoly and its availability limited mainly to professionals, notably those connected personally with Byrd, such as the lay-clerks Nicholas Yonge and John Baldwin. Only the most enthusiastic of amateurs seem to have managed to get hold of them, and then only if they travelled abroad themselves (like the Earl of Arundel) or were prepared for a time-lag (like the Cavendishes, buying Phalèse printed anthologies some fifteen years after publication).33 It can be deduced that the Kytsons must have owned both Latin and English printed devotional books by Byrd, giving them a repertoire not unlike that of the Pastons. This compilation must have included the Tallis/Byrd Cantiones … Sacrae of 1575 because this collection was still, in 1602, the only six-book set with music in seven and eight parts to have been published (the seventh and eighth voice-parts of pieces which required them were printed in two of the six books, e.g., the second tenor’s music printed on the page facing the first tenor’s music, necessitating a certain amount of squinting by the singers). It can be shown, by eliminating other sets listed in the inventory and five-part music (printed therefore in five part-books and not part of this book), and by comparing the results with the eleven such sets available in 1602, that this collection must almost certainly also have included Byrd’s Songs of sundrie natures … of 3. 4. 5. Fellowes, English Madrigal, 12–13. Ibid.; that this is the 1602 inventory see Walter Woodfill, Musicians in English

31 32

Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 278. 33 On Continental prints in England see Kerman, Elizabethan Madrigal, 40–72; Roger Bray, “British Library, RM 24 d 2 (John Baldwin’s Commonplace Book),” Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 12 (1974): 137–51; and Woodfill, Musicians in English Society, 252–71.

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and 6. parts, 1589 and his Liber secundus sacrarum cantionum, 1591. So here we have a third recusant household possessing at least one of Byrd’s English printed sources. Not only is it doubtful for whom Byrd intended these printed metrical psalms, but it is sometimes surprising to discover who actually used them, and in what performance or social context. Exploring this subject has necessitated a discussion of Byrd’s frame of mind, his religious conviction, and his career, the source of the texts of these works, and the manuscript collections of recusant households. It has led to a re-dating of Byrd’s anthems and anthems (concluding that all were written before 1581 because of his use of the Geneva Bible), a reconsideration of the texts of his last collection (concluding that they are less close to the Douai Bible than has been suggested), and some further insight into the musical tastes of three recusant households. Yet it affirms his, and his receivers’, affinity with the Psalms. Appendix: Byrd’s Psalm usage Psalm 4 6 6 6 12 13 13 13 15* 15* 23 32 37 38 44* 51* 51* 54 55 57 67 79* 81 81 81 86

O God that guidest Lord in thy wrath O Lord, rebuke me not Lord in thy rage Help Lord for wasted O Lord how long How long shall mine enemies O Lord how long wilt thou Lord within thy tabernacle O Lord who in thy sacred tent The Lord is only my support Right blest are they I have been young Lord in thy wrath Arise, O Lord O God which art most merciful Have mercy upon me Save me O God O God give ear Exalt thyself O God Have mercy on us Help us, O God Sing joyfully Sing we merrily Blow up the trumpet O God the proud are risen

(1611/28) (1588/9) (vv. 1–2, 4, anthem) (1589/1) (1588/7) unpublished (vv. 2–5, anthem) (1588/5) unpublished (1588/6) unpublished (1589/2) (v. 25, 1611/7) (1589/3) (vv. 23–4, anthem) (1589/4) (vv. 1–2, 1611/25) (vv. 1–4, anthem) (1588/1) (vv. 1–2, anthem) consort song v. 9, anthem (vv. 1–4, anthem) (vv. 1–2, 1611/20) (vv. 3–4, 1611/21) (vv. 14–15, anthem)

William Byrd’s English Psalms

95 100 102 112 112 117 119b 119d 121* 123 126 130 130 130 130 132 133 143 143 149

Come let us rejoice Make ye joy Lord hear my prayer The man is blest Blessed is he that fears Praise our Lord all ye Gentiles How shall a young man My soul oppressed Unto the hills Mine eyes with fervency Turn our captivity Lord to thee I make my moan Even from the depth From depth of sin Out of the deep have I called Arise Lord into the rest Behold how good and joyful Hear my prayer, O Lord Attend mine humble prayer Sing ye to the Lord

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(vv. 1–2 1611/16) (vv. 1–2 1611/24) (1589/5) (unpublished) (1588/8) (1611/29) (1588/4) (1588/3) (1589/45) (1588/2) (vv. 5–7 1611/30) (unpublished) (1588/10) (1589/6) (vv. 1–4, 7–8, anthem) (vv. 8–9, 1611/18) (1589/38–9) (vv. 1–2, anthem) (1589/7) (vv. 1–2, 1611/6)

* also set in Latin (at least in part); Byrd also set portions of the following psalms in Latin (BCP numbers used for comparison): 24, 27, 31, 34, 39, 44, 70, 94, 108, 113, 119, 122, 125, 137, 150.

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Chapter 3

“For Musicke is the Handmaid of the Lord”: Women, Psalms, and Domestic Music-Making in Early Modern England Linda Phyllis Austern

“A Psalme is the quietnesse of souls,” writes the unknown author of the 1586 treatise The Praise of Musicke with homage to St. Augustine. It is, he continues, the sta[n]dardbearer of peace, a restrainer of the perturbations and rage of our cogitatio[n]s, repressing wrath, bridling wantonnesse, inciting to sobriety, making friendship, bringing those to co[n]cord which were at variance, and a reconciler of utter enimies[…]1

No early modern English subject, male or female, rich or poor, young or old, was denied these extraordinary benefits. The accessible language and simple tunes of the vernacular metrical psalters were not merely available, but, at least in theory, familiar to all members of the reformed Church of England from the midsixteenth century onward. For women, as evidence is beginning to indicate, the psalms further inspired forms of musical expression that did not revolve around their relationships with men or with children. They served as a means through which women gave harmonious utterance to the meditations of their hearts, according to their class and educational backgrounds. These practices belonged to the continuity of women’s private devotion from the time of Elizabeth I to the Restoration that also included contemplation and the paraphrase and translation of psalms into English. They remind us that the highly personalized performance of psalms made use of women’s varied musical skills beyond the parish church and offered an alternative to the morally contested genres of balladry and dancemusic. Domestic psalm-performance provided a socially sanctioned and hitherto unexamined outlet for the considerable musical and spiritual impulses of many sorts of women, from humble dairy-maids through the daughters of the nobility. Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English women’s music for private meditation or spiritual refreshment has largely remained hidden from scholarly inquiry as much because of the era’s gendered attitudes toward music as the lack of church vocations for women in an officially Protestant nation. From the early days of the English reformation, women who would participate fully in the sublime and healing music of their faith were confronted with numerous The Praise of Musicke (Oxenford: Joseph Barnes, 1586), 121.

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obstacles—and one significant benefit. Firstly, the very church and sacred service of which congregational singing was often part were masculine preserves in which men gave, and women received, instruction. Man, made in God’s holy image, figured his Creator’s voice and power, whereas Woman embodied earthly corruptibility and fallen flesh.2 The sound of the female voice had long been associated with deception, seduction, and the half-formed gibberish of gossip; the male voice alone preached the word of God. However, with the Reformation emphasis on the “priesthood of all believers,” all voices lay and clerical, female and male, and of all ages, were raised communally in vernacular psalms and hymns, especially in such Calvinist-influenced regions as England.3 Extant records are strangely silent about the wider resonance of communal church-singing on women’s lives, especially for an era in which musical learning and practice were predominantly oral.4 Outside of the walls of the conforming parish church, musical Englishwomen, especially those considered erotically desirable, were subject to extreme strictures governing performance style and venue. Only private performances by and for the self or in the presence of female intimates or male family members were generally held acceptable; before the Restoration, even the musical actresses of the public-access theaters were female impersonators.5 Unlike their continental Catholic counterparts, English women See Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 14; Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980; reprint eds. 1985, 1988, 1990, 1992), 10–11 and 16–17; and Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 5–6. 3 See Robin A. Leaver, “Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes”: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 17; Percy A. Scholes, The Puritans and Music in England and New England (New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1962), 270–274; and Micheline White, “Protestant Women’s Writing and Congregational Psalm Singing: from the Song of the Exiled ‘Handmaid’ (1555) to the Countess of Pembroke’s Psalmes (1599),” Sidney Journal 23 (2005), 63–6. 4 For a study of the likely influence of this experience on Englishwomen’s religious writing during the Tudor era, see White, “Protestant Women’s Writing and Congregational Psalm Singing,” 61–82. Parallel musical research has yet to be undertaken. 5 For further information about the social and cultural conventions informing late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English women’s musical practices, see Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘Sing Againe Siren’: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989), 420–448; Julia CraigMcFeely, “The Signifying Serpent: Seduction by Cultural Stereotype in SeventeenthCentury England,“ in Music, Sensation and Sensuality, ed. by Linda Phyllis Austern (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 302–7 and 313-16; Leslie C. Dunn, “Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. by Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 51–8; and Janet Pollack, “Princess Elizabeth Stuart as Musician and Muse,” in Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies, ed. by Thomasin LaMay (Aldershot, UK, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 399–424. 2

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Fig. 3.1

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“Musica serva Dei” from George Wither, A Collection of Emblems, Ancient and Moderne (London: A.M. for Henry Taunton, 1635), 65. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Case folio W1025.98.

were completely excluded from church-related musical training and professions, discouraged from composing or otherwise creating original music (at least in notated form), and did not publish music. Finally, the divine psalmist David, whose words were still sung in England’s churches and in the private chambers of the pious, was unambiguously male. He was iconographically figured with a beard, signifier of mature masculinity, as in George Wither’s famous emblematic defense of devotional music.6 6 George Wither, A Collection of Emblems, Ancient and Moderne (London: A.M. for Henry Taunton, 1635), 65. For a succinct summary of beards as signifiers of masculinity

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Such images of the gendering of sacred song and its performers were further reinforced by the stock iconographic embodiment of sexual sin and seduction as a female musician, and the devout soul as a woman who spurns audible music as worldly vanity.7 Surviving depictions of early modern English women’s musical practices have mostly been inscribed in masculine voices, and in images made by and for men. From such perspectives, the female musician often served as a literary or visual projection of manly vanity, heterosexual desire, or misogynist fear. With her performing body displayed to the viewer or her mouth open in song, the musical woman most often emblematized vice to a culture for whom the chief womanly virtues were chastity and its adjuncts modesty, humility, and silence.8 Except for such theatrical representations as Desdemona’s performance of the willow song in Othello, there was little public attention paid to how women may have actually practiced music in domestic settings. If we believe commentators across the intellectual and religious spectrum, women used whatever musical skills they acquired largely to attract husbands or paramours. These tasks complete, their lutes, viols, and virginals lay silent and neglected, their mouths chastely closed from song as they became busy wives and mothers.9 However, scattered evidence begins to suggest that, in spite of such limited accounts, in spite of moral sanctions against women’s public performance and a strong association between women’s music and the unholy arts of lust, women’s domestic exercise of psalms and other sacred song flourished beyond the reaches of male critics as an aspect of personal devotion. The context of the in early modern England, see Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 83–128. 7 See Linda Phyllis Austern, “The Siren, the Muse, and the God of Love: Music and Gender in Seventeenth-Century English Emblem Books,” Journal of Musicological Research 18 (1999), 108–125; and Craig-McFeely, “The Signifying Serpent,” 310–16. 8 See Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman (New York and Houston: Elsevier Press, 1952), 40–41; and Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 24–6. The female musician as a figuration of vice is clearly an extension of the metaphorical and allegorical traditions that associated womanly beauty with sin, since musical performance conveys beauty through contrasting senses. For more information on this tradition, see Maclean, Renaissance Notion of Woman, 16–17; and Veronique Nahoum-Grappe, “The Beautiful Woman,” in A History of Women in the West, ed. by Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge, vol. 3: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 94–5. 9 See, for example, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1st edn (Oxford 1621) 586 (this edition only); and 4th edn, corrected and augmented (Oxford, 1632), 448, 489–90, and 540; Richard Mulcaster, Positions wherein those primitive circumstances be examined, which are necessary for the training up of children (London, 1581), 178; Thomas Salter, A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie (London, [1579]), sigs. C6–C6v; and Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: Richard Jones, 1583), sigs. D5–D5v.

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virtuous Englishwoman’s life was founded on the values of her Christian faith and its teachings, and on industrious confinement to whatever domestic sphere was appropriate to her station. From the Reformation onward, and especially throughout the seventeenth century, Christian devotion in England became increasingly associated with the private domestic space of the prayer closet,10 granting women equality with men in personal communion with the divine. “When thou prayest, enter into thy chamber; & when thou hast shut thy dore, pray unto thy Father which is in secret,” instructs Christ in the Bible without reference to gender.11 The era’s conduct manuals for women, and critical accounts of the dangers of music for “the second sex,” largely overlook musical prayer performed “in secret” behind the doors of the home or in its chambers. If theological tradition often emphasized Woman’s inferiority to Man by nature, exegetics found her his equal in divine grace. Religion stood at the center of her life and whatever education she received, and many were cognizant of the tradition which held that women’s instinctive religious piety exceeded men’s.12 As St. Jerome reminded Reformation-era readers of his epistle on the education of a Christian girl, her soul should have no understanding of unclean words or secular song, but her tongue “must be steeped while still tender in the sweetness of the psalms.”13 It was the public woman, the intemperate gadabout with roving eyes and feet who carried tales and spoke (or sang) idle words, whose reputation was at risk. It was she whose specter inspired warnings against vain pastimes and empty forms of self-expression, including music.14 The godly woman lived a blameless life dominated by prayer, charity, good works, and domestic duty to parents and husband. It was she who was responsible for the smooth operation of her household, and the health, welfare, and Christian education of young children and any servants in her home.15 None were denied “the sweetness of the psalms” domestically any more than in the parish church. In spite of the potential for moral See Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 103–4. 11 The Newe Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ (Geneva: Rouland Hall, 1560), Matthew 6.6, fol. 4–4v. 12 Camden, Elizabethan Woman, 40–44; Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982), 103; Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 26; Maclean, Renaissance Notion of Woman, 20–21 and 27. 13 St. Jerome, Letter CVII “To Laeta,” in Letters and Select Works, trans. W.H. Fremantle (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), 190–91. 14 Camden, Elizabethan Woman, 124–36; Suzanne W. Hull, Women According to Men: The World of Tudor-Stuart Women (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), 135; and Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), 104–7. 15 Camden, Elizabethan Woman, 40–44 and 124–36; Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient, 103; and Linda A. Pollock, “’Teach Her to Live Under Obedience’: The Making of Women in the Upper Ranks of Early Modern England,” Continuity and Change 4 (1989), 237 and 246–50. 10

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ambiguity, many also received further class-appropriate musical training with their fathers’ encouragement. With the post-Reformation lifting of legal limits on women’s reading of the Bible, and with the increasing emphasis on basic vernacular literacy and on bibles as household possessions well into the seventeenth century, more and more women were expected to read Holy Scripture on their own. Not surprisingly, devotional books were prominent in the libraries of the era’s wealthy female readers.16 The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also witnessed an increase in the publication of self-contained psalm books with or without music, of prayer books and explanations of sermons. All of these were available to literate women, and some were dedicated to them.17 For early modern Protestants male and female, the Bible served not only as a source of spiritual inspiration, but as a collection of models for self-examination and self-expression in word and music. The psalms in particular had long been regarded not only as a microcosm of the entire Bible or even its primary inspiration to the healing power of song, but as prototypes for a personal Christian poetics.18 The Forme of Prayers and Ministration of the Sacramentes, &c. used in the Englishe Congregation at Geneva of 1561, which includes tunes to be used for the psalms in one extant copy, draws these ideas together in a gender-inclusive address to its English readers: And there are no songs more meete, then the psalmes of the Prophete David, which the holy ghoste hath framed to the same use, and comme[n]ded to the churche, as conteining the effect of the whole scriptures, that hereby our heartes might be more lyvelie touched, as appereth by Moses, Ezechias, Judith, Debora, Marie, Zacharie and others, who by songes and metre, rather than in their co[m] mune speache, and prose, gave thankes to god, for such comfort as he sent them.19

Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient, 102–3. Ibid., 101–2 and 103–4. 18 See Beth Wynne Fisken, “Mary Sidney’s Psalmes: Education and Wisdom,” in 16 17

Silent but for the Word, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985), 168–9; Margaret P. Hannay, “‘So May I with the Psalmist Truly Say’: Early Modern Englishwomen’s Psalm Discourse,” in Write or be Written, ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 107–8; Leaver, “Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes,” 272–5; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 6–16 and 234–7; and Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 2–10 and 27–34. 19 The Forme of Prayers and Ministration of the Sacraments, &c. used in the English Congregation at Geneva (Geneva: John Crespin, 1561), fol. 7–7v; the Psalmes are listed in the Table of Contents, but are only given (as monophonic tunes) in the Paris copy. See also the dedication “To the right Honorable and most vertuous lady, the Lady Anne Countesse Of Warwicke” in Richard Allison, The Psalmes of David in Meter (London: William Barley, 1599), sig. A2.

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Certainly early modern English Judiths, Deborahs, and Maries gave thanks to God in the songs and meters of the psalms alongside their men in the parish church and sometimes in the home. Indeed, radical reformer John Cotton, minister in both Old and New England, specifically exempted women’s participation in congregational psalm-singing from the strict rule against their speaking in church.20 The Book of Psalms was a mirror for all Christians for every moment of their lives, “set forthe … by the holie God to be estemed as a moste precious treasure, wherein all things are conteined that apperteine to true felicitie: aswel in this life present as in the life to come,” says the summary argument that introduces the Psalmes of David in the Geneva Bible of 1560.21 The metrical psalmody that dominated English parish worship beginning in the mid-sixteenth century was an outgrowth of the Reformation emphasis on scripture as the controlling principle of the Christian life, for the individual and for the church as a whole. With it came increased focus on basic musical literacy for congregational singing of English metrical psalms set to an astonishing range of simple tunes, as well as the steady publication of newcomposed and harmonized versions of the same, presumably for use in private chapels and households.22 While women of all social classes were encouraged to sing the metrical psalms of the Church of England, an educated elite had access to the poetically more sophisticated French Psaumes of Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze.23 Others 20 John Cotton, Singing of Psalmes [:] A Gospel-Ordinance (London: J.R. and H.A. 1650), 43. The only other case in which “a woman is allowed to speake in the Churche” according to Cotton is “in way of subjection, when shee is to give account of her offence,” ibid., 42. 21 The Bible and Holy Scriptures (Geneva: Roland Hall, 1560), fol. 235r. 22 See Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37–9 and 51–76; Leaver, “Goostly Psalmes,” 246 and 272; Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England 1549– 1660, 370-79; Diana Poulton, John Dowland (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972; new and revised edn, 1982), 321–7; David C. Price, Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 59–65; Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 53–66 and 71–6; and Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 33–34. 23 Margaret P. Hannay, “‘Doo what Men May Sing’: Mary Sidney and the Tradition of Admonitory Dedication,” in Silent but for the Word, 149 and 156–63; Idem., Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 85–6; and idem., “‘So May I’,” 107–9. Early in her reign, Queen Elizabeth had used a French psalter, Hannay, “‘Doo what Men May Sing’” 163. Interestingly, many of the tunes used in the first English psalters were devised from French models, as well as German ones and the older Sarum chants to which Latin biblical text had been set; see Poulton, John Dowland, 322–6; Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England, 370–375; Temperly, Music of the English Parish Church, 57–8 and 69–70; and Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 55–7.

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of the same class created new English translations and paraphrases of the psalms from the Latin through which, in some cases, they transcended their gender to become identified with David himself.24 Those whose fathers had provided them with musical instruments and notational literacy also had available the more musically challenging and inventive settings of the greatest court-composers of the era, from William Byrd through the brothers Lawes. It is not known whether such trained musicians among England’s literary women psalm-translators as the youthful Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Sidney Herbert, or Lady Anne Halkett, set or sang their own sacred poetic works.25 However, psalm poetry was often linked to musical performance on biblical authority as well as early modern practice. “As we do utter … and deliver our inward thoughtes by our words,“ says The Praise of Musicke, so God willing to have the melody of our words to be a signe of the spiritual co[n]sent which is in our minds … ordained that Psalms shold be song with Musick & would have the[m] recited with such harmony[ … ]26

Poet and psalm-translator Phillip Sidney goes even further by explaining that “even the name Psalmes … is nothing but songes,” for which holy David’s musical instruments had been awakened.27 In a bridge between the biblical metaphor evoked by Sidney and Elizabethan musical practice, composer Richard Allison points out in the dedication of his settings of the psalms to the Countess of Warwick, that “because the whole Booke of God to idle schollers may seem too tedious, we have the Psalms of David more compendiously teaching doctrine fit for us.” He continues by explaining

See Fisken, “Mary Sidney’s Psalmes,” 169; Hannay, “‘Doo what Men May Sing’,” 149 and 156–63; idem., “‘So May I’,” 107–9; Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient, 101; and Zim, English Metrical Psalms, 34. 25 On the musical training of these ladies, see Anne Halkett, Autobiography, ed. John Gough Nichols (Westminster: Camden Society, 1875) 2; Margaret P. Hannay, “‘O Daughter Heare’: Reconstructing the Lives of Aristocratic Englishwomen,” in Attending to Women in Early Modern England, ed. Betty S. Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press; and London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 46; Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 115–16; Joel Hurstfield and Alan G.R. Smith, Elizabethan People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 15; John Loftis, ed., The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 10–11; and Price, Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance, 171. White suggests that the experience of congregational singing was a likely influence on Sidney Herbert’s translations, if not the others; see White, “Protestant Women’s Writing and Congregational Psalm Singing,” 73–8. 26 The Praise of Musicke, 119. 27 Sir Phillip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (London: [James Roberts] for Henry Olney, 1595), sig. B5v. The classic article on music in the Sidney family and its immediately circles is Bruce Pattison, “Sir Philip Sidney and Music,” Music and Letters 15 (1934), 75–81; see also Price, Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance, 169–72. 24

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… that our meditations in the Psalmes may not want their delight, we have that excelle[n]t gift of God, the Art of Musick, to accompany them: that our eyes beholding the words of David, our fingers handling the Instruments of Musicke, our eares delighting in the sweetnesse of the melody, and the heart observing the harmony of them: all these do joyne in an heavenly Consort, and God may bee glorified and our selves refreshed therewith. But I leave this Argument to David himselfe[ … ]28

Allison’s reference to the words of the Psalmist not only legitimates his advocacy of the performance of sacred music. It also speaks to the considerable unease with which many of his contemporaries considered the art, especially, but not exclusively, those influenced by Calvin and Zwingli.29 At the basis of the era’s aesthetic and cultural judgments of music lay the fundamental principle that such external agents could control and direct the very seat of human consciousness and govern actions of the body. “The scie[n]ce [of music] it selfe hath naturally a verie forcible strength to trie and tuche the inclination of the minde, to this or that affection,” summarizes the great Elizabethan educator, Richard Mulcaster.30 To a culture for whom the mundane and transcendent, or literal and metaphorical, were not entirely separable, music was a force of incomparable power, paradox, and mystery. It was harmony made audible, suggesting all unheard concord of heaven and earth. It lacked material substance, but was produced and perceived only by physical means. It entangled performer and auditor in an intimate physical relationship, though they never touched. Music was of the same airy essence as the soul or other spiritual entities, but clearly affected material bodies. Music decayed in an instant, but was linked to memory and imagination. It was a sensual art, yet it required intellectual skill to master and to comprehend. Perhaps most importantly, music was the principal object of one of the two senses judged most pure by learned philosophers, but led to dangerous “harmonicall fantasies” and uncontrollable auditory delight if the base pleasures of sensation overcame the intellect.31 It could literally sever mind from body through violent rapture, leading

28 Richard Allison, The Psalmes of David in Meter (London: Printed by William Barley, the Assigne of Thomas Morley, 1599), sigs. A2–A2v. 29 See H.P. Clive, “The Calvinist Attitude to Music and its Literary Aspects and Sources,” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance, Travaux et documents 20 (1958), 302–7; Edmund Horace Fellowes, English Cathedral Music from Edward VI to Edward VII, 2nd edn, revised (London: Methuen, 1945), 1–12; Elise Bickford Jorgens, “The Singer’s Voice in Elizabethan Drama,” in Renaissance Reredings: Intertext and Context, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Anne J. Cruz, and Wendy A. Furman (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 33–47 on 34–5; LeHuray, Music and the Reformation in England, 22–9 and 34–43; and Temperly, Music of the English Parish Church, 37–49. 30 Richard Mulcaster, Positions (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1581), 38. 31 Ibid., 38. See also David Summers, The Judgment of Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 32–41.

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to divine ecstasy or unspeakable sensory pleasure. “For which cause,” continues Mulcaster, Musicke moveth great misliking in men, as to[o] great a provoker of vain delites, still laying baite, to drawe on pleasure. . . bycause it carrieth away the eare with the sweetnesse of the melodie, and bewitcheth the minde, with a Syrenes sounde[ … ]32

The composer of a 1585 set of harmonizations for the “common tunes” from the metrical psalter is among the many who carefully except the psalms from this sort of danger. “Howsoever the abuse of Musicke may be great, when it is made an instrument to feede vain delightes, or to nourish and entertaine superstitious devotion,” says he, “yet the rigth use thereof is commaunded in singing Psalmes, and making melodie to God in our harts.”33 In the right context, music was truly the “Earthly Solace of Man’s Soule,” as the compiler of the 1621 Whole Book of Psalmes puns.34 Richard Hooker perhaps most succinctly summarizes these ageold if paradoxical attitudes as part of his defense of the use of psalms in the late sixteenth-century Church of England: Touching musicall harmonie whether by instrument or by voice … so pleasing effects it hath in that very part of man which is most divine, that some have bene thereby induced to think the soule it selfe by nature is, or hath in it harmonie … . In harmonie the very image and character even of virtue and vice is perceived, the minde delighted with their resemblances, and brought by having them so often iterated into a love of the things themselves[ … ]35

Given that music was considered such a powerful vehicle for both the affect and display of morality, many commentators and those who prescribed the art for its healing properties held, largely on Classical authority, that its specific influence varied by genre, style, and performance practice. “It hath been anciently held, and observed,” summarizes Francis Bacon, “that the Sense of Hearing, and the Kindes of Musicke, have most Operation upon Manners; as to Incourage Men, and make them warlike, To make them Soft and Effeminate, To make them Grave, To make them Light, To make them Gentle and inclined to Pity, &c.”36 It was Ibid. John Cosyn, Musicke of Six, and Five Partes. Made upon the common tunes used

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in singing of the psalmes (London: John Wolfe, 1585), Dedication to the Right Honorable Francis Walsingham, Knight, sig. A2. 34 Thomas Ravenscroft, A Briefe Discourse of the True (But Neglected) Use of Charact’ring the Degrees (London: Edward Allde for Thomas Adams, 1614), The Epistle Dedicatorie To the Right Worshipfull, most worthy Grave Senators, Guardians of Gresham College in London. 35 Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (London: John Windet, n.d.), Book 5, chapter 38, 75. 36 Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, 2nd edn (London: J.H. for William Lee, 1629), 31–2.

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frequently noted that individuals tended to be drawn to the kinds of music that would reinforce (and broadcast) their own innate temperament. In the words of psalm-composer, madrigalist, and music theorist Thomas Morley, “As there be divers kinds of musick, so will som mens humors be more inclined to one kind then to another.”37 Others, however, claimed in contrast that “music feedeth that disposition of the spirits which it findeth,” no matter its style or genre.38 “Let a good and a Godly man hear musicke,” says the Jesuit priest Thomas Wright, “and hee will lift his heart to heaven; let a bad man heare the same, and hee will convert it to lust.”39 Not only was the musician thus placed in a position between healer and inflamer of the passions, but the choice of performing and listening material advertised the individual’s ethos, temperament, physical condition, and moral tendencies, whether innate or musically affected. For those whose lives revolved around meditation, prayer, and good works, the only music acceptable to self and to community was therefore that which stemmed from, and further reinforced, the faith at the center for their lives. “I graunt Musick is a good gift of GOD, and that it delighteth bothe man and beaste, reviveth the spirits, comforteth ye hart, and maketh it redyer to serve GOD,” writes Phillip Stubbes in his famous condemnation of the vices of Elizabethan England, and therefore did David bothe use musick him self, & also commend the use of it to his posteritie (and beeing used to that end, for mans private recreation musick is very laudable.) But being used in publique assemblies and private conventicles as directories to filthie dauncing, thorow the sweet harmonie & smoothe melodie therof, it estrangeth ye mind [,] stirreth up filthie lust, ravisheth the hart, enflameth concupiscence, and bringeth in uncleannes. But if musick openly were used (as I have said) to ye praise and glory of God as our Fathers used it, and as was intended by it of the first, or privately in a mans secret Chamber or house for his own solace or comfort to drive away the fantasies of idle thoughts, solicitude, care, sorowe, and such other perturbations and molestations of the minde, the only ends whereto Musick tends, it were very commendable and tolerable. If Musick were thus used it would comfort man wunderfully, and moove his hart to serve God the better[ … ]40 37 Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (London: Peter Short, 1597), 181. Even within the limited genre of merical psalm tunes it was acknowledged that each individual heart would be drawn “to that psalme which it shall most affect,” Ravenscroft, Whole Booke of Psalmes, sig. A4. 38 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum: or a Naturall Historie, vol. 1 (London: J.H. for William Lee, 1627), 38. 39 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, corrected and enlarged (London: Valentine Simmes for Walter Burre, 1604), 171 40 Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London: Richard Jones, 1583), sigs. O4–O4v.

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Most English moral philosophers and conduct writers, building on centuries of misogynist commentary, considered women more susceptible than men to the negative effects of secular music described by Stubbes. Furthermore, women’s innate temperament and fluctuating passions were tied more closely to their bodily appetites and desires, additionally perceived within normative heterosexuality as potential catalysts to lust, concupiscence, and uncleanness. As a range of thinkers from diverse religious and professional perspectives remind us repeatedly, it was the overwhelming combination of feminine sensual graces in a woman’s performance of music that could potentially negate strength, rationality, selfcontrol, and manly virtue in listener and performer alike.41 William Austin explains in his 1637 defense of women that female beauty is both “corporall and vocall,” from which men receive great pleasure.42 He adds that “man hath no use of his voyce that woman hath not,” but that the voice of women is aesthetically and affectively superior to men’s, retaining for life the purity and innocence lost when men’s bodies grow hard and inclined to immodesty with puberty.43 Austin does not regard the female voice as an exclusively seductive tool, but one which embodies gentleness, tenderness, and delicacy, and expresses the natural modesty inherent the sex.44 Therefore, he advises that “women (who are so angel-like voyced) [should] learne by musicks rules, to order it.”45 Such exquisite gifts, trained and used to carnal ends in virtuostic performance before men, led to what many courtesy writers referred to as grave danger, through which women’s unbridled sensuality triggered uncontrollable lust in the masculine hearer. For this reason, many manuals for young women completely forbid musical education, since women’s tender, innocent morality required firm manly guidance that would be negated by the twin attractions of sight and sound.46 But yet, as modern critic Roland Barthes points out, there are two musics, the music to which one listens and the music one plays. Each retains its own sociology, its own aesthetic, and its own erotic. “It is the music which you or I can play, alone or among friends, with no other audience than its participants … with all risk of theatre, all temptation of hysteria removed,” he says, as if responding to early modern mistrust of the art. This, he tells us, is “a muscular 41 See, for example, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1st edn, 586; Mulcaster, Positions, 178; Wiliam Prynne, Histrio-Mastix. The Players Scourge or, Actors Tragaedie (London: E.A. and W.J. for Michael Sparke, 1633), 275 and 277; Thomas Salter, The Mirrhor of Modestie (London: Edward White, [1579]), sigs. C6–C6v; and Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, sigs. D5–D5v. 42 William Austin, Haec homo (London: Richard Olton for Ralph Mabb, 1637), 129 and 132. 43 See ibid. 126–8. 44 Ibid., 126. 45 Ibid., 127–8. It is worth noting that even Austin cannot resist adding Ovid to the ancient authorities on whose work he bases this conclusion in this passage, ibid. 46 See Austern, “‘Sing Againe Syren’,” 429–34.

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music in which the part taken by the sense of hearing is one only of ratification, … [a music] which the body trancribe[s] what it reads, making sound and meaning, the body as inscriber, and not just transmitter.”47 Such active, involved music of private performance, in which entire body re-articulates the text, was recommended and practiced by men and by women in early modern England for its healing, uplifting benefits to the entire somatic system. For women, the private performance of music set to sacred text, the received Word of highest masculine authority, additionally overcame questions of the validity of women’s language and allowed them a unique embodied participation in scriptural authority with their “angel-like” voices. Already in the early years of the English reformation and its developing psalmody, Myles Coverdale held that “yf women syttynge at theyr rockes, or spynnynge at the wheles, had none other songes to passe tehyr tyme withall, then soch as Moses sister, Elchanas wife, Debora, and Mary the mother of Christ have song before them, they shulde be better occupied, then with hey nony nony, hey troly loly, & such lyke fantasies.”48 In this context, the Geneva psalter’s presentation of its six exemplary psalm-singers, three male and three female, of the Old and New Testaments, is all the more striking.49 Even the era’s most virulent attack on women’s musical performance, part of William Prynne’s massive anti-theatrical diatribe of 1633, does not criticize the singer-lutenist for exercising her musical skills. She is condemned for the public performance of “songs enticing unto lust” instead of “sing[ing] a psalm of confession” as part of her own private supplication to God.50 The lives of lettered Englishwomen resound with psalms sung and played domestically, a means to order their voices not in the questionable service of Ovid, but in the heartfelt tradition of the Biblical David, Miriam, and Deborah. One of the earliest extant works that contextualizes a woman’s musical practices within the richly resonant tradition of the psalms is an anonymous portrait presenting the date of 1591. The painting shows a demure lady posed beside a finely wrought virginals and a French part-book for medium voice open to a simple syllabic of Psalm 16. Alone in a richly paneled room overlooking a castle gatehouse that stands sentinel outside, the young woman neither touches nor looks at the instrument. Its exquisitely decorated case is within her reach and open for performance, and, along with the texted music that is positioned for the viewer’s eyes, becomes central to the message that waits to be decoded. Clad in a black gown and gazing at the viewer Barthes, “Musica Practica,” in Idem., Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 149. 48 “‘Myles Coverdale unto the Christian Reader’,” Preface to Goostly psalmes ([London], c. 1535), reprinted as Appendix II of Robin A. Leaver, “Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes”: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove 1535– 1566, 288. 49 The Forme of Prayers … used in the English Congregation at Geneva, 20. 50 William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix, 277. 47

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English School, 1591 Portrait of Lady Henry Cavendish (née Lady Grace Talbot), Hardwick Hall, The Devonshire Collection (The National Trust).

with slightly turned head, the woman’s right hand holds a rose to her heart, and her left a feather fan. Her lips remain chastely closed, and her eyes face away from the music that lies on a table beneath her right arm. To the woman’s other side hangs a lozenge displaying the ancient arms of the Earldom of Shrewsbury, the powerful

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Talbot family of early modern England. Although the portrait has been subject to enough restoration over the years that all of its inscriptions and conventional identification as Lady Grace Talbot (Mrs. Henry Cavendish, 1562–after 1625) have been questioned, its subject is nonetheless connected to one of England’s pre-eminent groups of musical patrons.51 The Talbot women’s courtly humanist education included at least appreciation of the art, as well as considerable training in languages and literature.52 Among the props and within the frame of the painting, the young woman clearly upholds the modesty becoming to her gender and her family under the gaze of the viewer. Though literally and metaphorically distanced from the local parish church and its congregational singing by her castle walls, her French psalter, and her costly keyboard, the demure lady remains identified with the divine psalmist through the tradition of all who use his words to express their inward prayers. Unifying the proprietary conventions that dictated passivity for women in late Elizabethan portraiture as well as in public musical behavior, the image relies on the viewer’s agency to recognize “the melody of our words to be a signe of the spiritual co[n]sent which is in our minds.”53 Here has “holy David’s musical instrument” been transfigured from the venerable harp into the pluckedstring keyboard of the English upper classes, an instrument favored by the Queen herself for solitary performance in times of melancholy.54 Here too has David’s text mutated into the French poetic form well-loved by Elizabethan sophisticates, set syllabically to music to emphasize its meaning and acoustic contour. It is the viewer, and not the central figure, who is invited to read the words and notes of 51 The painting still resides at Hardwick Hall and is catalogued as London, National Trust number HHE.P.8. On its provenance and the sitter’s identification, see Mark Girouard, Hardwick Hall (London: National Trust, 1979, revised edition 1987), 52; idem. Hardwick Hall (London: National Trust, 1999), 60 and 62; Lord Hawkesbury, “Catalogue of the Pictures at Hardwick Hall, in the possession of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire,” Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, vol. 25 (June 1903), 125; and National Trust, Hardwick Hall. Biographical Notes on the Portraits (London: The National Trust, 1977; revised edn, 1979), 5. On the considerable musical activities of the Talbot family, see David C. Price, “Gilbert Talbot, Seventh Earl of Shrewsbury: An Elizabethan Courtier and His Music,” Music and Letters 57 (1976), 144–51; and idem., Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance, 99–109. 52 See Sara Jayne Steen, “The Cavendish-Talbot Women: Playing a High-Stakes Game,” in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2004), 149–55. The Talbot (Shrewsbury) family had marital links to several of the most powerful Elizabethan and Jacobean families, including such others involved in musical and psalm-poetic production as the Cavendishes and the Herberts (Pembroke); see Hannay, “‘O Daughter Heare’,” 49; and Price, Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance, 102, 109–18, and 171. 53 Maurice Howard, The Tudor Image (London: Tate Publishing, Ltd., 1995), 40–42 and 46. See also Hearn, Dynasties, 10. 54 See Hurstfield and Smith, Elizabethan People, 15.

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Psalm 16, and thereby call with David and with the woman portrayed for divine succor. “[Music] driveth away those wicked cogitations which our invisible enimies put into our mindes, it watereth the mind, and causeth it to bring forth fruite of heavenly things,” says The Praise of Musicke, as if in reference to this psalm and the cry expressed from the silenced woman’s heart.55 Diaries, memoirs, and other first-person accounts of women’s own domestic lives resound even more strongly and immediately with psalms sung and played. Lady Margaret (Dakins Devereux Sidney) Hoby, whose deep-seated faith was strongly informed by the doctrines usually accounted Puritan, clearly used her music as an adjunct to other forms of meditation and prayer. Born in 1570–1571, she was educated among the children of the nobility in the household of the Earl of Huntington, where she learned music along with the other skills considered fitting to her station.56 She kept a diary from 1599 to 1605, beginning three years after marriage to her third husband. The work recounts a life of introspection and religious self-examination, punctuated by the singing of psalms alone and with friends and members of her household.57 She “song a psalme with divers that were with [her]” following public prayer after supper on 6 December 1599; and sang psalms alone before private prayer on 5 August 1601.58 Taking seriously her duties to set an example for her household staff and instruct her servants in the Christian faith, she notes that she “sung a psalme with some of the sarvants” on the evening of 15 August 1600, before her own reading of the Bible, final prayers, and retirement.59 The most specific of her many references to these practices is also the only one to mention instrumental accompaniment. It contextualizes her performance in the most private space and tradition of the prayer closet, which she, like many, evidently “dressed up” with fragments of text as aids to meditation. “After privat praers I went about the house and then I reed of the bible tell dinner time,” she explains in her diary entry for 26 January 1599 (1600). “After dinner I dressed up my clositte and read, and to refresh my selfe being dull, I plaide and sung to the Alperion.”60 In this place of private devotion, the boundaries between self and the sacred dissolved, even as did lines between the otherwise proprietary and the transgressive.61 Here was Lady Hoby free to express herself to her God in voice and with her orpharion. Lady Grace (Sharrington) Mildmay, a young bride when Hoby was born, was an equally devout adherent to the tenets most often considered Puritan. In a set of The Praise of Musicke, 118. Hannay, “‘O Daughter Heare’,” 47–8; and Joanna Moody, ed., The Private Life

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of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605 (Thrupp, Stroud, Glocestershire: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998), Introduction, xv–xvix. 57 Camden, Elizabethan Woman, 153–4; and Hannay, “‘O Daughter Heare’,” 42. 58 Moody, ed. The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady, 42 and 158. 59 Ibid., 106. 60 Ibid., 55–6. 61 See Rambuss, Closet Devotions, 104–8.

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memoirs written later in life for her successors, she recounts that her governess, niece to her father and raised by her mother, set her to singing psalms, and sometimes doing needlework, “when she did see me idly disposed” in childhood.62 She adds that, as a teen-aged bride whose husband was often away, she shunned the worldly pleasures of secular entertainment at Court in favor of divinity. “Also every day I spent some time playing on my lute,” she reminisces, “and setting songs of five parts thereunto, and practicing my voice in singing of psalms and prayers and confessing my sinnes.”63 The first printed collection of poetry written by an Englishwoman, Aemilia Bassano Lanyer’s Salve Rex Judaeorum of 1611, features contemplative works and includes a striking reference to psalm-singing as part of a woman’s domestic devotion. Herself born to one dynastic family of musicians and married into another, Bassano Lanyer (1569–1645) describes Margaret (Russell) Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, as one who tuned her own singing voice to that of the biblical Psalmist as part of her meditative practice. In the concluding poem of her anthology, Bassano Lanyer reminisces of her time spent with the Countess at the latter’s country home: With Moyses did you mount his holy Hill, To know his pleasure, and perform his Will. With lovely David you did often sing, His holy Hymnes to Heavens Eternall King. And in sweet musicke did your soule delight, To sound his prayses, morning, noone, and night.64

Such literate women joined sacred text to musical harmony for private recreation. Thereby they fashioned musical selves that were not only unreproachable by worldly male authority, but entirely beyond it. At the other end of the social spectrum, where oral voices have long succumbed to silence, faint written traces suggest that laboring women were encouraged to sing psalms outside the parish church or such household exercises as Lady Hoby conducted. The Elizabethan physician John Jones prescribed psalm-singing for wet-nurses in order to repress troublesome affections “for all immoderate

Linda Pollack, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman Lady Grace Mildmay 1552–1620 (London: Collins and Brown, Ltd., 1993), 26. 63 Ibid., 34–5. 64 Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems, ed. Susanne Woods (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), “The Description of Cooke-Ham,” lines 85–90, 133. For biographical information concerning the poet and her involvement with both music and religion, see David Lasocki with Roger Prior, The Bassanos (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1995), 101–6; Kari Boyd McBride, “Gender and Judaism in Meditations on the Passion,” in Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, ed. Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 31–2; and Suzanne Woods, Introduction to Lanyer, The Poems, xv–xviii. 62

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passions whylest [they] giveth suck, must utterly be avoided.”65 Similarly, Thomas Overbury characterizes the “faire and happy milkmaide” as one who was always furnished with a psalm, hymn, or old song as she worked.66 The connection between spiritually wholesome music and physically wholesome nutrition in both instances is striking. As to repertory, Jones commends the simple “Sternhold and Hopkins” tunes to his nurse, which she presumably would have learned by ear in church if not from such a devout mistress as Lady Hoby.67 We can assume that dairy-maids and other industrious manual laborers would have most readily learned and sung the same, simply and without accompaniment. There were more varied options for Hoby, Clifford, Mildmay, Talbot, and others who possessed instrumental skills and formal training in music. In addition to the French Psaumes available to women like Grace Talbot and the young Mary Sidney, successive editions of The Whole Book of Psalms were issued from the 1560s onward.68 At the other end of the artistic spectrum, many printed musical miscellanies include original settings of a variety of English translations of the psalms. There were also continuous publications of novel arrangements of the familiar tunes and standard “Sternhold and Hopkins” texts from the Elizabethan era well into the seventeenth century. What has gone completely unremarked is the fact that one of these, Richard Allison’s Psalmes of David in Meter of 1599, is not only dedicated to a woman, “the right Honorable and most virtuous Lady, the Lady Anne [(Russell) Dudley], Countess of Warwick,” sister of Margaret Clifford and kinswoman by marriage to Margaret Hoby.69 More importantly, the composer uniquely places the “common tunne” not in the tenor part as was conventional in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century harmonized imprints of English metrical psalms, but in the treble. Therefore the melody was presented as suitable for high voice at its given pitch. And accompanied solo singing of the sort practiced by Margaret Hoby, and perhaps by Grace Mildmay, was further enabled. In his John Jones, The Arte and Science of preserving Bodie and Soule in Healthe (London: Henrie Bynneman, 1579), 14. 66 Sir Thomas Overbury, New and Choise Characters, 6th impression (London: T. Creede for L. L’Isle, 1615), [351–2]. 67 Jones, The Arte and Science of preserving Bodie and Soule, 13. 68 See Charles Burney, A General History of Music, vol. 3 (London: Printed for the Author, 1789), 57; Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 85–6; Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England 1549–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 157–71; Andrew Robinson, “‘Choice Psalmes’: A Brother’s Memorial,” in William Lawes (1602– 1645), ed. Andrew Ashbee (Aldershot, UK, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1998), 177–81; and Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church, 66–70 and 76. 69 Richard Allison, The Psalmes of David in Meter (London: Printed by William Barley, the Assigne of Thomas Morley, 1599), sig. A2; and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com, s.v. “Dudley (née Russell), Anne, countess of Warwick,” accessed 12 August 2009. On the relationship between Hoby and the Countess of Warwick, see Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 39 65

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dedication, Allison emphasizes not only the doctrinal pedagogical possibilities of the psalms and the ways in which the multi-sensory experience of performing them with instruments glorifies God and refreshes the participant, as we have seen. He also points to the intense piety of the dedicatee and his own religious inspiration for making the works public, rendering them particularly suitable for others of similar temperament: … My honorable good Lady, as zeale to Gods glory hath caused me to publish this worke, do suite to your H[onor] hath moved me to present it to your Ladyship: whose love of piety and care of Religion have been always such, that your owne happinesse is sealed up in your possessing them … 70

The composer’s settings of the 69 psalms plus associated hymns, canticles, and sacred songs in the collection range from utterly simple to moderately challenging, and are sometimes quite inventive in spite of the clear presentation of the familiar melodies.71 Allison provides numerous choices for potential performers, stating that the works may “be sung and plaide upon the Lute, Orpharyon, Cittern or Base Violl, severally or altogether, the singing part to be either Tenor or Treble to the Instrument, according to the nature of the voyce, or for fowre voyces.”72 This potential richness of performing forces led the great eighteenth-century music historian and critic Charles Burney to remark that the Italians would have referred to this extraordinary collection as salmi concertati.73 The vocal parts emphasize “the words of David” beheld by the performer through their speechlike rhythms and their predominantly homophonic arrangements. However, they are considerably enlivened by the untexted parts in tablature for lute or orpharion, and for cittern, truly enabling the performers’ or auditors’ “ears delighting” through “fingers handling the Instruments of Musicke.”74 These parts are not simply literal intabulations of the vocal lines, but include some runs, ornaments, and other idiomatic writing for the fretted plucked-string instruments for which they are written. The parts are laid out in “table-top” format, enabling four or more performers to share a single book. For such lutenist-singers as Mildmay and orpharion-singers as Hoby, the intabulated part for lute or orpharion is most conveniently presented Allison, The Psalmes of David in Meter, sig. A2v. Alison does not include a unique setting for each text from the Book of Psalms, but

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enables the performance of those he omits by matching them by number to his music in “‘a Table containing what notes are to be sung to these particular Psalmes following,’” The Psalmes of David in Meter, sig. A4. Like many metrical psalters, the collection includes not only psalms proper, but also such associated repertory as “‘Veni creator,’” “‘Nunc dimittis,’” and the versions of the Lord’s Prayer from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke; see, for example, sigs. A45–A5, C5v–C7, and R2v–R3. 72 Allison, The Psalmes of David in Meter, title page. 73 Burney, General History of Music, 57. 74 Allison, Psalmes of David in Meter, sig. A2v.

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for the treble singer to play. Interestingly, and in keeping with sixteenth-century usage of such terms, the “tenor” parts mostly fall into what is today considered alto vocal range. Therefore women could comfortably sing three of the four voice parts, including the choice to make “the singing part … either Tenor or Treble to the Instrument.” The texted bass lines not only fit the range of the bass viol, but some suit a low contralto voice, especially for a singer with the skill to change octaves for certain notes or phrases. In addition, according to the arrangement of parts, only the bass would sit alone. Thus a viol player could move her bow unhindered in one of the many possible distributions of parts. Although the bass viol, like its higher counterparts, was most often associated with male performers, some women were certainly taught to play it, including the Countess of Warwick’s niece and god-daughter (and Lady Margaret Clifford’s daughter), Lady Anne Clifford.75 Might these more creative versions of the psalms familiar from every church in the land be the sort of music which the Countess of Warwick’s kinswoman, Lady Hoby, sang with “diverse that were with her” the year of their publication? Are they perhaps the kind of music performed by household women while their men sang and/or played elsewhere from other collections of psalms or sacred songs, as did Samuel Pepys over a half-century later? If the sort of domestic practice of musical psalms described repeatedly by Pepys was typical and derived from before the Restoration (as certainly did some of his music, as he and his companions still enjoyed Thomas Ravenscroft’s Whole Booke of Psalmes), there was a tradition of crossing class and professional boundaries to bring together master and servant, titled nobility and private gentleman—but not men and women, at least beyond the immediate family of which he does not speak.76 Hannay, “‘O Daughter Heare’,” 40. Susanna Perwich, exemplary Puritan maiden and biographical subject of John Batchiler’s 1661 Virgin’s Pattern, was also a notable (treble) viol player; see Percy Scholes, The Puritans and Music in England and New England (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 160–162. 76 Pepys was much impressed with his serving-boy’s musical ability, especially his sight-reading, and sang psalms at domestic gatherings on both weekdays and Sundays with the young lad and a variety of friends and acquaintances from the Earl of Sandwich to the latter’s music-tutor. On 7 November 1660, Pepys notes in his diary that “After dinner … he [Pepys’s patron and first cousin once removed, the first Earl of Sandwich] called for the Fidles and books, and we two and W. Howe and Mr. Childe [William Child, music-tutor to Sandwich] did sing and play some psalms of Will[iam] Lawes and some songs,” The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, Volume 1: 1660 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), 285. On Sunday 4 September 1664, he notes that, after he and his wife had dined and taken care of some domestic tasks, “‘then the boy and I [went] to singing of psalms, and then came in Mr. Hill and sang with us a while; and he being gone, the boy and I again to the singing of Mr. [Walter] Porter’s mottets [Mottets of two voices for treble or tenor and bass (1657)], and it is a great joy to me that I am come to this condition, to maintain a person in the house able to give me such pleasure as this boy doth by his thorough understanding of music, as he sing[s] anything at first sight,” The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume V: 1664 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 261. On 75

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Mildmay tells us that she devised her own lute intabulations if not new works, and numerous of the era’s musical writers provide clues as to how she may have proceeded if those five-part songs she set had sacred text, or if she accompanied herself as she sang her psalms and prayers. In his essay “Of the Praise, Vertue, and Efficacie of the Psalms,” Ravenscroft explains in the prefatory material to the 1621 Whole Booke of Psalmes that a performer must first consider the nature of the text of each psalm, and then match it to suitably expressive music.77 Charles Butler, composer, music theorist, and defender of sacred music, agrees completely. He further explains that Plain and slow Musik is fit for grave and sad matter; quik Notes or Triple time, for mirth and rejoicing. A manly, hard, angry, or cruel matter is to be exprest by hard and harsh short notes, quik bindings, and concording Cadences, and that with the ordinari or unaltered Notes of the Scale: but woords of effeminate lamentations, sorrowful passions, and complaints, ar fitly exprest by the inordinate half-notes (such as ar the smal keys of the Virginals) which change the direct order of the scale[.]78

Butler tells us specifically that in “a Psalm or other pious Canticle,” “the notes [must] answer the number of the syllables [since] this mooveth sobrieti, prudence, modesti, and godlines.”79 We certainly see this in virtually all English collections of the psalms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as in Talbot’s French exemplar. Thomas Morley, the era’s best-selling English music theorist, adds that the composer of “grave and sober” music should create majestic harmonies by using frequent “discordes and bindings” on long notes, and avoid short notes and quick motions, since they “denoate a kind of wantonnes”—again, we see this in extant exemplars.80 Furthermore, he tells the would-be composer, “you must have a care that when your matter signifieth ascending, high heaven, Sunday 27 November of the same year, he notes that “‘In the evening came Mr. Andrews and Hill, and we sang with my boy Ravenscrofts four-part psalms, most admirable music,’” The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume V: 1664 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 332. And on Sunday 11 December of that year, he mentions that at home he “there found Mr. Andrews and his lady, a well-bred and a tolerable pretty woman, and by and by Mr. Hill; and to singing and then to supper. Then to sing again, and so good night. To prayers and to bed. It is a little strange how these psalms of Ravenscroft, after two or three times singing, prove but the same again, though good—no diversity appearing at all almost,” The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume V: 1664 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 342. All but the latter of these are clearly homosocial, as was Pepys’s involvement with catches and instrumental performance. Since Pepys’s boy[-servant] is not mentioned in the 11 December entry, it is possible that Mrs. Andrews sang the treble line, which is definitely too high at its indicated pitch for nearly all adult men. 77 Ravenscroft, Whole Booke of Psalmes, [sigs. A3v–A4]. 78 Butler, Principles, 96. 79 Ibid., 9 80 Morley, Plaine and Easie, 179.

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and such like, you must make your musicke ascend: and by the contrarie where your dittie speaketh of descending lownes, depth, hell, and other such, you must make your musicke descend[ … ]”81 What of the style of performance and the choice of instruments, if used? In an era of active audition, in which the listener and performer were linked by a strong affective bond as well as carefully trained attention to notes and associated language, clear communication of these universal and healing texts was paramount. Ravenscroft admonishes the would-be performer of psalms to begin with “a pure and serious attention of the heart,” the sort that Hoby and Mildmay clearly display in their descriptions. He adds that “all that have skill, or will unto Sacred Musicke” should begin by opening the self to God and meditating on his holy texts, again the sort of frame that Hoby, Mildmay, and Lanyer present.82 “Let the word of God dwell plenteously in you, in all wisedome” says Ravenscroft, paraphrasing 3 Collosians 16, “teaching and admonishing your owne selves in Psalmes, Hymnes and Spritual songs, singing with a Grace to the Lord in your hearts.”83 Morley concurs, and further considers the potential for semi-ecstatic affect on the listener. As he says of all works on sacred text, “hymne or Antheme or such like,” “This kind of al others … requireth most art, and moveth and causeth most strange effects in the hearer, being aptlie framed to the dittie and well expressed by the singer, for it will draw the auditor (and speciallie the skillful auditor) into a devout and reverent kind of consideration of him for whose praise it was made.”84 The singer, adds Butler, should “sit with a decent erect posture,” refrain from unnecessary bodily motion, and “sing as plainly as [he] woolde speak: pronouncing every Syllable and letter … distinctly and treatably.”85 One should select one’s psalm according to one’s mood and the sacred desire of one’s heart, says Ravenscroft, choosing to repent one’s sins, praise the majesty of God, give thanks, call for divine mercy, seek deliverance from temptation, ask redress for earthly tribulation, rest the soul, or merely exercise oneself “in the divine praises and precepts of the Lord” according to text and music.86 The composer further explains that the psalms of tribulation should be sung with a low voice; the psalms of thanksgiving should be sung with a voice that is neither too loud, too soft, too quick, or too slow. The psalms of rejoicing should be “sung with a loud voice, [and] a swift and jocund measure.”87 Both Butler and Ravenscroft specify that singers could add instruments if they desire a richer, fuller sound.88 With particular reference to women’s performance, no English work supplanted Baldessare 83 84 85 86 87 88 81

Ibid., 178. Ravenscroft, Whole Booke of Psalmes, sig. ii. Ibid., sigs. iii–iiiv. Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction, 179. Butler, Principles of Musik, 97–8. Ravenscroft, Whole Booke of Psalmes, sigs. A4–A4v. Ravenscroft, Whole Booke of Psalmes, sig. A4v. Butler, Principles of Musik, 5; and Ravenscroft, Whole Booke of Psalmes, sig. A4v. 82

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Castiglione’s influential manual for courtly conduct, first translated into English by Margaret Hoby’s father-in-law. The work advises that these tender creatures should avoid “those hard and often divisions that declare more counning then sweetnesse,” which made the English psalm repertoire particularly appropriate. A woman’s choice of instrument should likewise reflect this sweet simplicity, should display her body to greatest advantage, and not require unfeminine energy or contortions.89 The keyboard and plucked stringed instruments with which early modern women are so often portrayed fulfill these conditions magnificently. The lute, like the flat-backed, wire-strung orpharion that was tuned in the same manner, was associated symbolically with nobility, industry, aesthetic clarity, virtuostic performance, and with both genders. The Apollonian lyre and Biblical harp were not infrequently transformed into lutes in the era’s verbal and visual imagery. “The lute is a modest interpreter of our thoughts & passions,” says the mid-seventeenth century manuscript Burwell lute tutor, compiled by or for a young gentlewoman. “[T]o those that understand the language one may tell another by the helpe of it what he hath in his heart,” it adds with language richly resonant of the Pauline and Athanasian dicta to use sounding music to express the holy songs of the heart to God.90 “And to those that have the grace to lift upp there mind to the contemplation of heavenly things,” continues the tutorial, “this celestiall harmony [of the lute] contributes much to raise our soules and make them melt in the Love of God.”91 Butler reminds us that the voice, the work of Nature, far exceeds even such noble instruments. He adds that the “moste pouerful Musicians … such as was that Divine Psalmist were also Poets. And such shoolde our musicians bee, if they will bee complete,” for only then can they perfectly match text and music.92 We do not know whether Hoby or Mildmay used the simple “Sternhold and Hopkins” metrical psalms, or made richer and more complex translations for their music. Even less information survives about Clifford’s or Talbot’s presumed practices. However, at least two settings of a woman’s poetic translations of psalms have survived in arrangement for treble voice and lute: Mary Sidney Herbert’s psalms 51 and 130. Sidney Herbert (1561–1621), the Countess of Pembroke, was reputedly a fine singer and lutenist, and was linked by birth and marriage to multiple families of musical patrons.93 Even more important to the present context were her exquisite and highly literary translations of the psalms, written to complete the set begun

Baldessare Castiglione, The Courtyer, trans. Thomas Hoby (London: Wyllyam Seres, 1561), sig. Cciv. 90 The Burwell Lute Tutor, with an introductory study by Robert Spencer (Leeds: Boethius Press, 1974), 43. 91 Burwell Lute Tutor, 43. 92 Butler, Principles of Musick, 95. 93 See Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 115–16; and Price, Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance, 171. 89

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by her brother Philip Sidney, for which the pair were praised by John Donne as “Davids successors.”94 The only two settings of the Countess’s psalms to so far come to light survive on successive folios of British Library MS Add. 15117. The composer or composers remain anonymous, as does the individual for whom the manuscript was compiled. The scribal hand in which these two works are written has been identified with Richard Allison and his professional circle. In addition to being the composer of the 1599 Psalmes of David in Meter and a contributor to the 1592 four-voice Whole Booke of Psalmes, Allison may have been a well-known luteteacher to whom many Londoners were drawn. Add. 15117 is the only manuscript to include psalms in what appears to be his hand.95 This small folio-sized musicbook was probably compiled sometime between 1614 and 1616, belonged to one John Swarland sometime after its completion, and later to a Hugh Floyd. It contains a wide range of music from the 1560s until the mid-sixteen teens, including solo songs, mostly presented in what would be considered modern mezzo-soprano range with lute accompaniment; two vocal dialogues for high and low voice, and lute-arrangements of several instrumental pieces. It has been copied in two hands, of which the one identified with Allison is only used for the two Pembroke psalms and a solo arrangement of an anthem by William Byrd to a text by William Hunnis.96 The manuscript is best known for its settings of songs from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, most famously a slight textual variant of the famous “willow song” from Shakespeare’s Othello. On this basis, the rather miscellaneous manuscript has been considered to have been organized around an interest in the popular theater, and conjectured to have belonged to a professional musician associated at least part-time with London’s public theaters.97 However, a careful re-examination of the manuscript and early modern performance practices make this supposition highly unlikely. The contents are 94 John Donne, Poems (London: M.F. for John Marriot, 1635), 367. See also Fisken, “Mary Sidney’s Psalmes,” 166–7; Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 84–105; Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 241 and 245; and Zim, English Metrical Psalter, 152–202. 95 See Julia Craig-McFeely, “English Lute Manuscripts and Scribes 1530–1630” (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1993; revised version, 2000, posted at http://www. ramsescats.co.uk/thesis/), Chapter Seven “Case Studies: Board and Hirsch,” section “Richard Allison,” unpaginated, accessed 7 February 2008; and The Whole Booke of Psalmes (London: Thomas Est the assigné of William Byrd, 1592). 96 See Craig-McFeely, “English Lute Manuscripts and Scribes 1530–1630,” Chapter Seven “Case Studies: Board and Hirsch,” section “Richard Allison,” unpaginated, accessed 7 February 2008. 97 See Mary Joiner, “British Museum Add. MS 15117: An Index, Commentary, and Bibliography,” RMA Research Chronicle 7 (1969), 51–109; and Frederick W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 35. The manuscript is available in facsimile in Elise Bickford Jorgens, ed., English Song, 1600– 1675, British Library Manuscripts Part I (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1986).

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extremely diverse, and include many genres from over half a century; identifiable composers include William Byrd, John Dowland, Alfonso Ferrabosco, and Tobias Hume. Quite a number of pieces are taken from earlier publications, and several include lute reductions of pre-existing ensemble parts. Not only does the theatrical music comprise only a small fraction, but all evidence indicates that professional theater musicians belonged to the oral tradition and thus kept no manuscripts. Perhaps most importantly, settings of sacred texts in this collection far outnumber the few theatrical songs, although no single genre constitutes a majority; the person for whom the manuscript was compiled clearly possessed, among many moods, that “skill, or will unto Sacred Musicke” mentioned by Ravenscroft. In addition to several psalms “and other such like” sacred works (including an uncredited version of Giulio Caccini’s popular import “Amarilli mia bella” with the original text replaced by “Miserere my maker”), the collection presents a table of contents for all of Allison’s Psalmes of David in Meeter in the order in which they appear in the printed collection.98 What is likely the original binding for the manuscript, still preserved with the entirety, labels the contents as “Psalmes Musicall by Allison.” The collection probably once included all of these in soprano-lute arrangement.99 Why Mary Sidney Herbert’s psalms with soprano melody, why the complete psalms from the only available printed collection with treble melody, and why such a miscellaneous compilation of sacred and secular music from such a wide range of literary and musical sources? Could we perhaps be looking at an anthology for household use, compiled at least in part for the skill and taste of a woman amateur lutenist and singer, for whom one or more tutors copied, transcribed, and perhaps arranged music for all of her moods and musical abilities in her own private usage? Neither setting of Sidney Herbert’s psalms includes extended effeminate artifice to seduce the ear, nor florid ornamentation, nor “hard and fast divisions” for voice or lute. Both pieces let the text dictate musical rhythm, melodic contour, and harmonic support, as is proper and expected for setting such sacred text. Both adhere to the precepts of sacred composition as set forth by such as Butler, Morley, and Ravenscroft, and both are stylistically similar to other psalm-settings of the era, especially those with plucked-string accompaniment by Allison. Both render music an expressive adjunct to the text. These notes indeed “answer the number of the syllables,” and thus presumably move “sobrieti, prudence, modesti, and godlines.” Both compositions additionally follow Morley’s advice to let the music reinforce textual meaning as much as is possible in strophic settings, and See Mary Joiner, “Caccini’s Amarilli mia bella: Its Influence on Miserere my maker,” Lute Society Journal (1968), 6–14; and idem., “British Museum Add. MS 15117,” 63 and 90. 99 See Craig-McFeely, “English Lute Manuscripts and Scribes 1530–1630,” Chapter Seven “Case Studies: Board and Hirsch,” section “Richard Allison,” unpaginated, accessed 7 February 2008; and Joiner, “British Museum Add. MS 15117,” 52. David Greer suggests that an annotated copy of Allison’s work, now housed at the New York Public Library, may have originally been bound with the manuscript; see “Manuscript Additions in ‘Parthenia’ and Other Early English Printed Music in America,” Music and Letters 77 (1996), 176. 98

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both emphasize the “long notes” proper to their grave subject matter. Both have the limited vocal range and independent but relatively uncomplicated lute-parts associated with other psalm-settings, leaving the performer remains free to express the meditations of her(?) heart through the words. Neither is especially inventive musically, but both are technically fine exemplars of what is ultimately a simple, direct genre. Psalm 51, “Miserere me, Deus,” is characterized by Butler as “a Prayer, Confession, comfort, Profession of Repentance, and Amendment of Life,” which Ravenscroft says is “to be sung with low voice and long measure.”100 The arrangement of Sidney Herbert’s version, on fol. 4v–5 of the manuscript, is presented in strophic form with the first stanza carefully underlaid for the singer beneath the treble staff. The text of the additional ones written are out on the remaining part of the blank musical staff-paper on folio 5, enabling the singer-lutenist to read and sing directly from the words once the tune and its accompaniment have been memorized. At the end of the music, the scribe has written “Jam: Ha: Miserere: Da: psalme 5i,” perhaps a reference to its composer.101 At the conclusion of the work, the scribe clearly credits the “poeme” as being “Mayde by the Coun[tess] of Pemb[roke],” immediately granting the text supremacy over its setting.102 The singer’s range remains within an octave. Lute and voice enter and conclude together, giving the words the dominant role and enabling even an untrained singer and amateur lutenist to “pronounce every Syllable and letter … distinctly and treatably.” The notes of the vocal part are not only syllabic, but are “aptlie framed to the dittie” by following the natural rhythms of the Countess of Pembroke’s poem. The lute part is clearly not a simple intabulation of a four-part vocal model, but a true and sometimes lively counterpart to the solo voice. It includes some idiomatic writing for the instrument, particularly to enliven inner parts of the work on the singer’s longer notes or between phrases. As presented, it offers only modest challenge for any performer with basic skill on the instrument, and comfortably supports the voice with its all-important text. However, the scribe (Allison?) has not always aligned it carefully with the vocal part, and it is plagued with what may be slight errors of transcription, violating the conventional rules of harmonic partwriting. Nonetheless, the “sorrowful passions” of the poem are indeed expressed, as Butler would have them, by just a few well-placed chromaticisms and changes Butler, Principles of Musik, 114; and Ravenscroft, Whole Booke of Psalmes, sig. A4v. 101 Craig-McFeely suggests that this may be James Harding (ca. 1550–1626), a court flautist by whom only a few compositions survive, “English Lute Manuscripts and Scribes 1530–1630,” Chapter Seven “Case Studies: Board and Hirsch,” section “Richard Allison,” unpaginated, accessed 7 February 2008. For a brief biography of Harding, see the The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians/Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, s.v. “Harding, James [Harden, Jeames]” by Andrew Ashbee, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com. turing.library.northwestern.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/12366 (accessed August 14, 2009. 102 British Library MS Add. 15117, fol. 4v–5. 100

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Example 3.1 “Modern transcription of “Miserere Me, Deus” (Psalm 51), by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Music by James Harding[?]. British Library MS Add. 15117, fol. 4v-5.

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in harmonic and melodic direction as the singer-supplicant calls on divine grace to cleanse her of sin. The setting of Sidney Herbert’s Psalm 130, “De profundis,” follows immediately in the manuscript, and is musically more interesting. In fact, there is little to distinguish it from the lute-song or -ayre repertory that was all the vogue at the time of the manuscript’s compilation.103 Shorter than its predecessor in the collection, it, too, presents only one strophe of music, to be re-used for each stanza of text, and enables the words to be paramount. Following the unique rhythmic contours of Herbert’s poem, this setting is also syllabic and metrically free. This “psalm of tribulation” is similarly “to be sung with low voice and long measure,” and its music is indeed as “plain and slow” and expressive of lamentation and sorrow as Butler would have it within its simple limits. However, instead of beginning immediately with the text, this piece opens with a phrase of lute music to set the tone literally and metaphorically. This style is more common not only to lute-ayres but also the kinds of sacred art-music Morley discusses under the general category of “motets” than to most published psalms of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here it lets the wordless cry of heart and hand reach the ear of God before the articulate voice. The instrumental introduction begins with an initial melodic ascent, followed by darker chords built from a lower bass and a descent that breaks into syncopated motives before the voice enters. The singer begins on one of the highest pitches in the vocal part, and immediately plummets to an unstable depth that rocks briefly upward before lying drowned. The voice fragments into a syncopated cry to the Lord that British Library MS Add. 15117, fol. 5v. Although settings of secular text dominate the early seventeenth-century English lute-song repertory, psalms and other devotional poetry was also included in the printed collections of “songs or ayres”. See, for example, John Bartlet, A Booke of Ayres (London: John Windet, 1606), which opens appropriately with a setting of verses 22 and 23 of Psalm 71 to a variant of the text given in the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter. The classic edition of this work in modern notation (with lute tablature as well) is Bartlet, A Booke of Ayres, transcribed, edited, and scored by Edmund H. Fellowes, The English School of Lutenist Song Writers, Second Series, vol. 3 (London: Stainer and Bell, 1925). For a comparison of the text set by Bartlet and the same verses from The Whole Booke of Davids Psalmes Collected into English Metre, by T. Sternhold, J. Hopk[ins][,] W. Whittingham and Others of 1582, see Edward Doughtie, ed., Lyrics from English Airs 1596–1622 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 238 and 541. See also Thomas Campion, Two Bookes of Ayres: The First Contayning Divine and Morall Songs: the Second, Light Conceites of Lovers (London: Tho[mas] Snodham for Mathew Lownes and J. Browne, [1613?], which is dedicated to Francis Clifford, fourth Earl of Cumberland and brother-in-law to Margaret Clifford and which includes several settings of the composer-poet’s own translations of psalms. For modern editions of these, see Thomas Campian [sic], First Book of Airs, Circa 1613, transcribed, edited, and scored by Edmund H. Fellowes, The English School of Lutenist Song Writers, Second Series, vol. 3 (London: Stainer and Bell, 1925), 6, 19, and 20. For a succinct history of the ayre during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, including the kind of borrowing of Italian material evident in using the Caccini tune for new English words, see Ian Spink, English Song Dowland to Purcell (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 15–43. 103

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Example 3.2 “Modern transcription of “De Profundis” (Psalm 130), stanzas 1-2, by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Music anonymous. British Library MS Add. 15117, fol. 5v.”

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can no more remain at heavenly height than maintain a steady pulse or stay in one tonal area. Rather than the simple stepwise motion that predominates in balladry and metrical psalms, this work features unexpected melodic leaps to express the inward despair and instability of its singer-narrator. The lute-part, still idiomatic to the instrument and easy for the performer, is more carefully and musically written than that of the other Pembroke psalm-setting in the same manuscript. Two extant English keyboard manuscripts from before the Restoration also include settings of psalms, both designated as “virginal books” in keeping with the English-language term for all such instruments.104 Both are known to have belonged to, and been compiled for, women. They are, in fact, the only English examplars of this sort and from this period to devote space to the native psalm repertory.105 Both are available in modern editions, and, like British Library MS Add. 15117, mingle a wide range of musical genres. The first is dated 1638 and belonged to Anne Cromwell of Huntingtonshire, first cousin to the man who later became Lord Protector. She was twenty years old at the time and evidently still unmarried.106 Her music tutor may have been the singer, string-player, and composer Simon Ives (1600–1662); he is certainly the only person to whom The term “virginal” or “virginals” was used in England until the mid-seventeenth century to designate all jack-action keyboard instruments (i.e., all of the era’s keyboard instruments other than the organ); see Frank Hubbard, Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 359. 105 Another keyboard manuscript of this era, British Library MS Add. 29485, may have originated in England, although the compiler was certainly of Dutch origin. Its original owner was one Susanne van Soldt, the young daughter of a wealthy Dutch merchant, a Protestant refugee who had settled in London. The manuscript, whose music has been described as “dilettante level,” includes 11 settings of four-part Dutch metrical psalms, about which see Alan Curtis, ed., Dutch Keyboard Music of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. III, Monumenta Musica Neerlandica (Amsterdam: Verenigiing voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1961), x–xii. There is also a Scottish manuscript virginal book, National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh) MS 9447 from about 1615, originally owned by one Duncan Burnett and which includes 44 settings of psalms for four voices by Scotting psalm-composer Andrew Kemp (fl. 1560–1570); see Alastair Cherry, Roger Duce, Murray Simpson, and Iain Maciver, “The National Library of Scotland: Music Manuscripts and Special Collections of Printed Music,” Fontis artis musicae 47 (2000), 4; and the The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians/Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, s.v. “Kemp, Andrew” by Kenneth Elliot, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.turing.library. northwestern.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/14867 (accessed August 14, 2009). A modern edition of this manuscript is available in Lisa Navach, I virginal books della Collezione Panmure: Edizione critica di En 9447, En 9448, and En 9449 (DM dissertation, Scuola di Paleografia e Filologia Musicale di Cremona, Università di Pavia, 1999). 106 See Anne Cromwell’s Virginal Book, 1638, transcribed and edited by Howard Ferguson (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), iv; and Mark Noble, Memoirs of the Protectoral-House of Cromwell, 2nd edn, with improvements, vol. II (Birmingham: Pearson and Rollason, 1787), 33, where her first name is (erroneously?) given as “Anna.” Her father was Henry Cromwell of Upwood, Huntingtonshire, brother of Oliver’s father, Anne Cromwell’s Virginal Book, 1638, transcribed and edited by Howard Ferguson, iv. 104

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multiple works are attributed in Cromwell’s book.107 The manuscript, London Museum MS 46.78/748, includes two psalm settings among its 50 pieces. With its requirement of modest technical skill and its mingling of compositions to a variety of textual sources, its ballad tunes, its dances, and its arrangement of pieces from musical-dramatic works, it has been considered a typical seventeenth-century English household virginal manuscript.108 Only three pieces present text, curiously only one of the two psalms. The first of these follows the book’s opening Prelude by John Bull, and is presented in such a manner that it is intended to be played immediately afterwards.109 Entitled “A Psalm: York,” it is an anonymous and rather pedantic four-part arrangement of the “York” tune given as the tenor line of three different harmonizations in Ravenscroft’s 1621 Whole Booke of Psalmes, where it is indicated for singing Psalms 27, 66, 115, and 138.110 In Cromwell’s book, the untexted melody has been moved to the top part, harmonized very simply, and given a few idiomatic keyboard ornaments for the right hand to play. Unlike some of the other arrangements of simple melodies in Cromwell’s book, this psalm does not turn into a set of instrumental variations that make use of a wider range of finger techniques and compositional idioms specifically for the keyboard. Instead, it retains its lyrical quality throughout. With its more quickly moving and instrumentally idiomatic Prelude in the same key, the piece thus becomes a possible frame for the meditations of the performer’s heart or a familiar melody on which to practice the most basic keyboard technique. Its lack of given text does not preclude the possibility that the performer may have accompanied herself or other singers on a choice of the four psalms associated with the tune. The other psalm in Cromwell’s virginal book appears later in the collection, headed simply “A Psalm: ‘St. David’s.’” Again, its melodic top voice is taken from a line tenor given in Ravenscroft’s 1621 printed collection. In this case, its bass line is also closely modeled on that from the same source.111 Similarly to “York” in Cromwell’s book, this piece retains a simple, lyrical quality that would enable 107 See Anne Cromwell’s Virginal Book, 1638, transcribed and edited by Howard Ferguson, iv; and The New Grove Dictionary of Music/Grove Music Online, s.v. “Ives [Ive, Ivy], Simon,” http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/ subscriber/article/grove/music/14001 (accessed July 23, 2009). 108 See Candace Bailey, “Blurring the Lines: ‘Elizabeth Rogers hir Virginall Book’ in Context,” Music and Letters 89 (2008), 510. The contents of the manuscript are available in modern edition as Anne Cromwell’s Virginal Book, 1638, transcribed and edited by Howard Ferguson (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 109 See Anne Cromwell’s Virginal Book, 1638, transcribed and edited by Howard Ferguson, 2. 110 Ravenscroft, Whole Booke of Psalmes, 62 (Psalm 27), 120 (Psalm 66), 100 (Psalm 115), and 242 (Psalm 138). The Cromwell manuscript version is given in modern transcription in Anne Cromwell’s Virginal Book, 1638, transcribed and edited by Howard Ferguson, 3, following the opening Prelude on 2. 111 Ravenscroft, Whole Booke of Psalmes, 84 where its given text is that of Psalm 43; and 166, where it is given the text of Psalm 95. The later keyboard-vocal piece is given in modern transcription in Anne Cromwell’s Virginal Book, 1638, transcribed and edited by Howard Ferguson, 12.

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easy performance on keyboard with or without voice(s)—but it is presented with the opening two lines of Psalm 46 underlaid beneath the right-hand part. What Samuel Pepys observed some years later after singing with male companions from the 1621 Whole Booke of Psalmes is equally applicable to these two keyboard arrangements: “It is a little strange how these psalms of Ravenscroft, after two or three times singing, prove but the same again, though good—no diversity appearing at all almost.”112 They may have been the kind of adaptation that Pepys taught his wife’s waiting-woman, Mary Ashwell, to play on the “harpsicon” nearly 30 years later when he went “to make her take out a Psalm very well, she having a good ear and hand.”113 On keyboard alone, or with added voice(s), the settings in Cromwell’s book would have been familiar, comforting music, truly enabling, as Allison had put it for an earlier generation, the conjunction through music of eyes, finger, ears, and heart to “joyne in an heavenly Consort, and God may bee glorified and our selves refreshed therewith.” The other pre-Restoration virginal manuscript to include psalm settings dates from nearly two decades later. Except for some overlap in included genres it could hardly contrast more with Anne Cromwell’s. British Library MS Add. 10337, known as Elizabeth Rogers hir virginall booke presents a date of “Ffebruary ye 27th, 1656” (1657 by modern reckoning). It is a miscellaneous collection of 94 pieces for keyboard, English and foreign, with 18 appended “Voycall Lessons” for high voice and thoroughbass. It was complied for, and probably partially in the hand of, a young woman with evident Royalist sympathies and both considerable and unusually diverse musical skill for her era.114 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Latham and Matthews, Volume V: 1664 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 342. The same comment could easily be made about any of Allison’s psalms in voice-only arrangement. 113 Ibid., Volume IV: 1663 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971). See also Alice Anderson Hufstader, “Samuel Pepys, Inquisitive Amateur,” The Musical Quarterly 54 (1968), 452. 114 Of the original owner, Elizabeth (Fayre) Rogers, nothing is known, but the repertory of her book suggests Royalist sympathies and a connection to London and/or Oxford. Her manuscript raises new questions about the distinction between “amateur” and “professional” levels of musical training and performance in seventeenth-century England, and shows that at least some young women probably learned musical composition, transposition, and ornamentation, skills most often taught to musically literate men; see Bailey, “Blurring the Lines,” 510–543. Two modern transcriptions and editions of selections from the manuscript are available as Elizabeth Rogers Hir Virginall Booke, ed. Charles J.F. Cofone (New York: Dover Publications, 1975; revised ed., 1982); and Elizabeth Rogers’ Virginal Book, 1656, ed. George Sargent, Corpus of Early Keyboard Music vol. 19 ([Dallas?]: American Institute of Musicology, 1971), which omits one of the keyboard pieces and all of the texted songs or “Vocall Lessons.” Bailey points out that neither of these editions “adequately represents the manuscript,” “Blurring the Lines,” 516, note 28. The texted songs from the manuscript are available in facsimile in Elise Bickford Jorgens, ed., English Song, 1600– 1675: Facsimiles of Twenty-Six Manuscripts and an Edition of the Texts, Volume 2: British Library Manuscripts Part II (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1986), fol. 20v–23, 26v–27, 35v–37, 41v, and 46v–60. 112

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In contrast to Cromwell’s book, Rogers’s separates the psalms from the keyboard pieces, and, through its sectional heading, directly encourages its owner to steep her developing musical tongue “in the sweetness of the psalms” along with a variety of more worldly texts and one non-biblical sacred meditation.115 Where Cromwell’s collection includes two anonymous and technically undemanding settings of simple and widely available metrical psalms from Ravenscroft’s collection, Rogers’s presents four more musically challenging works by former court-composer William Lawes (1602–1645). Three are solo versions of threepart settings printed in Henry Lawes and Williams Lawes’s Choice Psalmes put into musick, for 3 Voices of 1648; their texts come from George Sandys’s elegant and eloquent Paraphrase upon the Psalmes of David, first published in 1636.116 Written in a more expressive and more challenging style than the metrical psalms from Ravenscroft which Pepys later condemned for their lack of diversity, the three that appear in variant versions in Choice Psalmes are far closer to music intended for performance at court or in private chapels than for the parish church. They are characterized by the inclusion of more experimental harmonies and text-painting; for example, in “Lett god the god of Battaile Rize,” the first two verses of Psalm 68, the enemies scattered by God’s rising quickly “flee before his face” in rapid notes, and “driving tempests” do indeed chase away the smoke that appears acoustically with an unconventional and unprepared tonal modulation.117 In fact, these works of Lawes stand among those categorized by modern scholars as anthems or motet-psalms to contrast them further with the metrical psalms 115 “O Jesu Savior Mine” in British Library Add. MS 10337, fol. 23, facsimile edition Jorgens, ed., English Song, 1600–1675, Volume 2: British Library Manuscripts Part II. 116 The settings in Rogers’s book of Psalm 42, verses 1–2; Psalm 68, verses 1–2; and Psalm 98, verse 1 were printed in slight variant form during the same era (nine years before the date on her manuscript) in Henry Lawes and William Lawes, Choice Psalmes put into musick, for 3 Voices (London: Printed by James Young for Humphrey Moseley and for Richard Wodenothe, 1648); their texts come from G[eorge] S[andys], A Paraphrase upon the Psalmes of David: And upon the hymnes dispersed throughout the Old and New Testament (London: At the Bell in St. Paul’s Church-yard, 1636). These printed settings are available in modern edition in William Lawes, Collected Vocal Music, Part 3: Sacred Music, ed. by Gordon J. Callon (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2002), The settings from the Rogers manuscript are printed in modern notation in Elizabeth Rogers Hir Virginall Booke, ed. Charles J.F. Cofone (New York: Dover Publications, 1975; revised edn, 1982), 93 and 108–9. For further information about the 1648 collection, which serves as both an offering to the persecuted King Charles I and as a memorial to William Lawes,who had died fighting for the Royalist cause three years earlier at the siege of Chester, see Andrew Robinson, “‘Choice Psalmes’: A Brother’s Memorial,” in Andrew Ashbee, ed., William Lawes (1602– 1645): Essays on His Life, Times and Work (Aldershot, UK, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited/Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998), 175–195. 117 See the modern transcription in Elizabeth Rogers Hir Virginall Booke, ed. Cofone, 108. For the facsimile edition, see Jorgens, ed., English Song, 1600–1675, Volume 2: British Library Manuscripts Part II, fol. 51v, 52, and 59v. A modern transcription of the three-part version from Choice Psalmes is available in Lawes, Collected Vocal Music, Part 3: Sacred Music, ed. Callon, 101.

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familiar from every conforming church in the land.118 Yet, as Pepys reminds us from his own practice, this repertory was not too demanding for skilled amateurs to enjoy in the home. He certainly did with the printed three-part versions in the all-male company of the Earl of Sandwich, the latter’s music-tutor William Child, and a Mr. Howe only a few years after Rogers’s virginal book was dated.119 The final psalm setting in Rogers’s book is a highly embellished, virtuosic setting of verses 11 and 12 of Psalm 39, unique to her manuscript. Its elegant English poetry remains anonymous even as its music is credited to W[illiam] L[awes]. Composed in the latest Italian-influenced vocal style used in England at mid-century, the piece emphasizes the rhythmically free declamation of the words. It is full of dramatic and expressive vocal leaps, ornamentation, and chromaticism that not only emphasize the meaning and contour of the text but challenge the singer’s ear and sense of pitch. Musically, it is indistinguishable from other English declamatory airs from the mid-seventeenth century.120 Yet the text makes all the difference. Especially imagined in the trained voice of Mistress Rogers, accompanied by the thoroughbass support of keyboard, theorbo, and/or bass viol, it becomes an exquisite and personal cry to the Lord by a vulnerable and very mortal being living through especially turbulent times: When man for sin thy judgment feels Just as a moth Consumes a cloth, His beauty fades; in strength he reels. Man is all vanity, and full of ills. Oh, spare me Lord awhile That I may gain some strength before I die. But Lord, unto my prayers draw near, Lend gracious ears and see my tears On earth I am a sojourner As all my fathers were. Oh, spare me Lord awhile That I may gain some strength before I die.121

See Elizabeth Rogers Hir Virginall Booke, ed. Cofone, 122–3; and Lawes, Collected Vocal Music, Part 3: Sacred Music, ed. Callon, Introduction, xiii–xiv. For a modern edition of the three that also appear in variant version in Choice Psalmes, see Elizabeth Rogers Hir Virginall Booke, ed. Cofone, 93 and 108–9. 119 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham and Matthews, Volume I: 1660, 285. 120 For succinct information about this style and some of its leading practitioners, including both brothers Lawes, see Spink, English Song Dowland to Purcell, 75–127. 121 Modern transcriptions of the text are given in Elise Bickford Jorgens, ed., English Song, 1600–1675: Facsimiles of Twenty-Six Manuscripts and an Edition of the Texts (New York: Garland, 1989), vol. 12: The Texts of the Songs, 280; and Lawes, Collected Vocal Music, Part 3: Sacred Music, ed. Callon, xxiv–xxv. As recently as 1986, Jorgens considered the composer as well as the poet to be anonymous; see Jorgens, ed., English Song, vol. 12, 540. The most accurate modern setting of this “sacred song” is available in Lawes, 118

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The only extant copy of this extraordinary little piece, evidently intended for private domestic use and not as part of the liturgy, survives in this manuscript, whose contents have challenged notions of a clear distinction between amateur and professional levels of musicianship and that broadens our interpretation of English women’s musical education before the Restoration. It is unfortunate that any musical manuscripts that may have been in the possession of Lady Grace Mildmay, Lady Margaret Hoby, the Countess of Cumberland, the Countess of Pembroke, or Lady Anne Clifford have yet to be discovered. Women from all social strata and a range of religious and political affiliations from the late sixteenth century to the Restoration clearly had access to a variety of musical settings of psalms, as well as to a range of instruments and training with which to enhance them. Further investigation is needed to determine whether the psalm repertory tended to be performed more often by single-sex groups in the home or in private gatherings, or had a more distinct and predictable place in the musical education and practice of women than of men. Initial research indicates that this diverse repertoire, ranging from the simple unaccompanied melodies of parish church and Calvinist laity to more challenging and aesthetically complex pieces in styles associated with court and chapel, was unequivocally considered suitable for women from humble laborers to the nobility. It enabled many sorts to engage directly with the Book of Psalms and its sacred messages while exercising the skills of song and sometimes instrumental music in socially sanctioned venues. “These fair Beawties of bodie and minde, these outward and inward graces [of devout singers],” wrote Butler in his 1636 theoretical tract on the Principles of Musik, “ar your chief Chyrch-ornaments,” through whose music one could ascend “to sing, with the Saints and Angels in heaven … whose Song no man can learn, but they that are redeemed from the earth.”122 We must now recognize how often the catalyst to this heavenly harmony was the high, angelic voice of a woman singing psalms alone or with others in her own domestic sphere, as she meditated or went about her work, free to express the devotion of her heart through the divine gift of music.

Collected Vocal Music, Part 3: Sacred Music, ed. Callon, 19. See also ibid., xviii. For the facsimile edition, see Jorgens, ed., English Song, 1600–1675, Volume 2: British Library Manuscripts Part II, fol. 50v. 122 Butler, Principles of Musik, 119

Chapter 4

“How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land?”: A Transatlantic Study of the Bay Psalm Book1 Joanne van der Woude

As the study of literature in English becomes increasingly transnationally focused, and colonial New England writing is resituated in the context of a larger, transcultural Protestant ideology within British imperialism, the literature of immigration becomes particularly relevant. A process in which national identity is simultaneously disavowed and reclaimed, immigration appears as the seminal event in many early American writings. Many colonial cultural productions straddle the line between colonial and British self-definition. The publication of the Bay Psalm Book poses a clear example of this phenomenon: while the Massachusetts Bay Colony professed to be non-dissenting from the Anglican Church, it insisted on producing its own Psalter, newly translated from Hebrew, as the first book printed in America. The Bay Psalm Book quickly gained international ascendancy: published in 1640, it was received and reviewed in London by 1644, and locally defended by an American preacher two years later.2 Several European reprintings would soon follow, marking the sudden and singular success of this translation in the latter half of the seventeenth century.3 In commissioning the Bay Psalm Book, I would like to thank Profs. Marion Rust, Stephen Cushman, and David Vander Meulen. My gratitude also goes out to all the members of Elizabeth Dillon’s seminar at the Outside American Studies Institute 2002, Dartmouth College, for their comments and suggestions. 2 Nathaneal Homes, Gospel musick, or, the singing of David’s Psalms & c. ... unto which is added the judgement of our worthy brethren of New England touching singing of Psalms (London, 1644); John Cotton, Singing of the Psalmes: A Gospel-Ordinance (London, 1647). 3 There would ultimately be seventy editions, nearly 30 in the first decades after its initial appearance. For a detailed investigation of when and where (London, Scotland, and Amsterdam) these editions were published, see Hugh Amory, “‘God’s Altar Needs Not our Pollishings’: Revisiting the Bay Psalm Book,” Printing History 12 (1990): 2–14 and “Printing and Bookselling in New England,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 1 of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, eds Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 106. B.J. McMullin provides an important addendum 1

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the Puritan leaders of New England consciously chose to assert their particular theological beliefs to the world, and especially to Britain. The Bay Psalm Book should therefore be seen as an exemplary text of immigration: an instance of transatlantic self-fashioning, articulating a new, colonial identity within AngloAmerican Protestantism. The Bay Psalm Book not only embodies the reformation emphasis on congregational psalm-singing, it also features a response to Sidney’s famous classification of “the holy King David’s Psalms [as] a divine poem.”4 Renaissance poets employed the Psalms in ways similar to Petrarch’s Rime sparse: as a source for endless translation and imitation. The Book of Psalms was thought to be the most varied of poetic models, encompassing all metrical forms, genres, and modes. More importantly, Sidney’s insistence on the translation of the Psalms as a spiritual exercise explicitly linked literary beauty to liturgical efficacy.5 The authors of the Bay Psalm Book also note the special status of the Psalms: “The Psalms are penned in such verses as are sutable to the poetry of the Hebrew language, and not in the common style of such other bookes of the Old Testament as are not poeticall.”6 In fact, one of the main reasons given for the new translation is that not all ministers, whose primary responsibility it is to interpret Scripture for the congregation, are equally poetically gifted and therefore able to aptly render the Psalms. “Poetry is not every good scholar’s faculty,” notes the Puritan preacher John Cotton: “nor the penning of holy Psalms the skill of every good minister.”7 The Bay Psalm Book justifies its standardization of prayer by claiming that it might compensate for to Amory’s conclusions in “The Undated Editions of the Revised Bay Psalm Book,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 95 (2001): 335–61. 4 Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1904), 154. 5 Ramie Targoff claims: “English metrical Psalters were regarded as texts of devotion and not also as poems throughout most of the sixteenth century.” Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 72. 6 Bay Psalm Book (Boston, 1640) **3v. The identity of the authors of the Bay Psalm Book has long been a subject for debate. Cotton Mather, in Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702) notes: “the chief Divines in the Country, took each of them a Portion to be Translated: Among whom were Mr. Welds and Mr. Eliot of Roxbury, and Mr. Mather of Dorcester.” Reprinted in George Parker Winship, The Cambridge Press, 1638–1692: A Reëxamination concerning the Bay Psalm Book and the Eliot Indian Bible as well as other contemporary books and people (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945), 24. See also Zoltán Haraszti, The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), chapter 2. For the fraught issue of whether there is poetry in Scripture, see James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and its History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1981; 1996), 69–85. 7 John Cotton, A Modest and Cleare Answer to Mr. Balls Discourse Of Set Fromes of Prayer (London, 1642), 31. Similarly, the Preface to the Bay Psalm Book notes: “because every good minister hath not a gift of spiritual poetry to compose extemporary psalmes as he hath of prayer” (*3v).

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a lacking extemporaneous attempt at translation, and so ensure a proper, poetic performance of the Psalms. Thus, it appears that the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony sought to incorporate art, in the shape of metrical Psalm translations, into their rituals of worship. Overcoming their strong aversion to the use of printed matter other than the Bible in church, the congregants made allowances for the Bay Psalm Book so that the “singing of Psalms [might be] accompanied and blessed of God (by his grace) with many gracious effects, above nature or art.”8 Yet this move towards beautification is ambiguous at best, as the Preface to the Bay Psalm Book indicates its translators strove for “fidelity rather than poetry” (italics added). The compilers conspicuously refrain from calling their own productions poetry and claimed that they were occupied with “translating the Hebrew words into English language, and Davids poetry into English meetre.”9 Focusing exclusively on the verbal content of the Psalms, the Bay Psalm Book constitutes a mere partial translation of the Psalms: consciously settling for “meetre” instead of “poetry.” Therefore, despite recent arguments to the contrary, most notably by Ramie Targoff, the Puritans’ attitude towards to artful intervention in liturgy remains fundamentally conflicted.10 I wish to suggest that the colonists’ notions of devotional propriety bear little relation to the standards of beauty that are implicit in Reformation poetics, especially the formal experiments of Donne and Herbert. With its steady stream of monotonous poems, the Bay Psalm Book seems to offer an inadvertent, if not subversive, aesthetic statement. Aesthetics, in this sense, does not refer to any kind of conscious ornamentation, but rather designates the social construction of identity that takes place through performance or material expressions of culture.11 Here, the Puritans’ system of representational techniques—including choices of form, emphasis, style, and structure in early colonial texts—creates and makes 8 Cotton, Singing of the Psalmes, 4. In A Modest and Cleare Answer, Cotton declares: “We conceive it ... to be unlawful to bring in ordinarily any other Books, into the public worship of God, in the Church” (5). 9 Bay Psalm Book, **3v. 10 Targoff, Common Prayer, Conclusion. A.M.E. Morris has diagnosed an “aesthetic resistance” in Puritan poetry “as a means of warding off some of the associations of poetry that their theological context would have made particularly unwelcome to colonial New England readers.” The relevant debates about proper Protestant poetics are discussed in more length and detail in her book Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 20. I thank Prof. Morris for sharing her manuscript with me. 11 For performance studies see Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds, Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). One of the most insightful studies of material culture in early America is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Object and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001).

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explicit social and cultural difference. The analysis of formal, poetic change thus reveals a more fundamental transformation. The very acceptance and replication of stylistic innovation, in this case the formal similarity of the Psalms, creates a new kind of collectivity, an imagined community if you will, which defines itself by its use of aesthetics. In this way, colonial aesthetics extend above and beyond superficial variations of form to render the emergence of a new cultural consciousness in the contact zone of colonial North America. This essay focuses on the internal function of the psalter in the North American colonies, examining issues of Scriptural translation and musical performance respectively. The Puritans’ formal strategies conspicuously counter European theories of translation, which will be discussed in the first section. Through comparisons to other English psalters, I describe the formal decisions, both metrical and melodic, made during the development of the Bay Psalm Book, and how those decisions, initially imposed from above, but rapidly internalized by the community, pose an instance of a collectivizing aesthetic in early colonial America. Translation During the Renaissance, translation was conceived of as an activity not simply striving towards complete synonymity of source and target product, but rather as a creative act of cultural appropriation: claiming a text or resource as one’s own. The Age of Exploration therefore witnessed an explosion of the technique of translatio imperii, which equated colonists with classical heroes, thereby canonically and historically justifying the seizure of territory and humans.12 It is not surprising, then, that some of the earliest treatises on textual translation concern antique, rather than Scriptural, sources. Chapman, for example, in the Preface to his 1611 translation of the Iliad, argues that not just the verbal meaning, but also the rhetorical style of the original should be represented in a ‘worthy’ translation.13 “Generally,” he writes: Custome hath made even th’ablest Agents erre In these translations: all so much apply Their paines and cunnings, word for word to render

See Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Luise von Flotow, and Daniel Russell, eds, The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press, 2001), Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds, The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), and T.R. Steiner, English Translation Theory, 1650–1800 (Assen/Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1975). 13 On seventeenth-century translation theory, see Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 12

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Their patient authors; when they may as well, Make fish with fowle, Camels with Whales engender.14

Biologically illustrating the unnatural quality of literal translation, Chapman compares its aims to achieving reproduction (or by extension perhaps, synonymity) between wholly different species of animals. The Puritans, however, were largely uninterested in classical defenses of empire and turned, perhaps predictably, to Scripture instead. Biblical translation presented a proverbial can of worms, but even in that area, the artistic leeway of translators was generally acknowledged.15 “Is the kingdom of God,” the preface to the King James Version (1611) rhetorically asks, “words or syllables?” Regardless of denominational affiliation, translators did not regard their craft to be limited to providing a mere literal rendition of a source text in another language. As Thomas Norton, who translated Calvin’s Institutes, concluded, a fit translation shows “a certaine resembling and shadowing out of the forme of … style and the maner of … speaking in the imitation” of the original author.16 Renaissance translators also recognized that their labors served to (re)create a textual artifact in a different cultural context. Translators took pains to construct a product that fulfilled the same function as its source in a different signifying system by, for example, using contemporary idiom and style.17 Such an attempt at timeliness went famously awry in Isaac Watts’s Psalmes and Hymns (1718). With perhaps overzealous attention to the geo-temporal markers of contemporaneity, Watts chose to translate the names of biblical plants and animals into native British flora and fauna, as well as consistently substituting “Britain” for “Canaan.” In the American colonies, his efforts were met with outrage.18 The fact that Cotton Mather immediately undertook a counter-translation illustrates the irritation at 14 George Chapman, “To the Reader,” The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, Neuer before in any languag truely translated, with a coment uppon some of his chiefe places (London, 1611), Ar. 15 Accusations of deliberate and harmful mistranslations of the Bible were most commonly made by the Puritans themselves. David Norton claims that the prevailing view in Renaissance England was that “biblical truth did not lie in any particular form of English words.” A History of the English Bible as Literature (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 38. For the opposing view see Bay Psalm Book, **2v. 16 Thomas Norton, The Institution of Christian Religion, written in Latine by M. John Calvine, and translated into English according to the authors last editions (London, 1578), *2v. 17 For examples of this in the work of Wyatt and North, see F.O. Matthiessen, Translation, an Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931). Despite, or perhaps because of, a translator’s best attempts at synonymity with his model, translations were genarally regarded as new texts in the late sixteenth century. Zim, English Metrical Psalms, 12. 18 See Maxine Turner, “Three Eighteenth-Century Revisions of the Bay Psalm Book,” The New England Quarterly 45 (1974): 270–277.

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the perceived endeavor by the Church of England to assert ownership of the book of Psalms. Translations were often seen as “means of acquiring private rights over the common legacy of the past,”19 a strategy of which the Puritans were neither ignorant nor innocent, as the Bay Psalm Book itself similarly constitutes an overt effort at the appropriation of a text for the ideological purposes of a specific group. In other areas, however, the Puritans’ views of translation are radically different from contemporary theories. Whereas Luther, in his Circular Letter on Translation (1530), described the purpose of translation as creating an accessible and aesthetically satisfying vernacular style, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay seem to employ their texts as a vehicle for classifying and correcting errors in previous translations, as well as for the articulation of dogmatic tenets.20 In reference to other translators, particularly those of the Ainsworth version that was used by the Pilgrims in neighboring Plymouth Colony, the compilers of the Bay Psalm Book argue: “their additions to the words, detractions from the words are not seldome and rare, but very frequent and many times needles, … their variations of the sense, and alterations of the sacred text too frequently, may iustly minister matter of offence to them that are able to compare the translation with the text.”21 The Preface to the Bay Psalm Book, written in a question and answer format common to legal and theological tracts, expounds on why, in what format, and by whom David’s psalms are to be sung and whether they should be sung “in their [the psalms’] owne words, or in such meter as english poetry is wont to run in?”22 The inherent tension between the poetical source text and the product in the target language leads the translators to favor a prosaic literal-mindedness, discarding Chapman’s injunction to avoid word for word renderings: “wee have therefore done our indeavour to make a plaine and famliar translation of the psalmes and words of David into english metre, … shunning all additions, except such as even the best translators of them in prose supply, avoiding all materiall detractions from words or sense” (italics added).23 Paradoxically, the colonists justify the disjunction between the highly wrought Hebrew poetics of the Psalms and their own repeated ballad stanzas by claiming complete faithfulness to the original text. The Bay Psalm Book thus consciously rejects the metropolitan (or national) discourse of translation by asserting a colonial paradigm of literal correspondence. The Puritans choose not to avail themselves of Sidney’s sophistication or any other metrical models, stating ideological objections to the practice of paraphrase and focusing on “fidelity rather than poetry.” In fact, the text of the Bay Psalm Book

Zim, English Metrical Psalms, 20. Susan Bassnett-McGuire, Translation Studies, New Accents (London and New

19 20

York: Methuen, 1980), 49. 21 Bay Psalm Book, **2v. 22 Ibid., *2r. 23 Ibid., **2v - **3v.

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most resembles the prose translation of the King James Version.24 The colonists thus self-consciously acknowledge that poetry is not their ultimate goal. It is their choice for “fidelity” that sets them apart even from other avowedly unadorned versions, such as Sternhold-Hopkins and Ainsworth, and that creates their unfashionable aesthetic. The Puritan penchant for literality may be ascribed to their logocentric view of the universe, in which the relationship between the signifier and the signified was not arbitrary, but rather an integral part of God’s meticulous design. Poets such as Edward Taylor delighted in puns and developed a real fondness for anagrams, through which the divine intentions might be deciphered or decoded.25 Although figures like anagrams call attention to the materiality and complexity of textuality, the Bay Psalm Book glosses over the intricacies involved in translation, insisting on simple faithfulness to the original as resolving such issues. A.M.E. Morris has observed that the stark presentation of the Psalms on the page, rendered in Figure 4.1, without the annotations of Ainsworth or the concordance of the King James Version, also seems intended to invoke an “impression of purity and transparency.”26 This method of printing, which leaves room for annotations, perhaps encouraging personal meditation and study, publicizes the policy of noninterference in scriptural translation, while creating the idea of an easy, pure text that is above reproach or debate. Lastly, translation becomes relevant to this study because it is etymologically (a ‘carrying across’) a metaphor for immigration, as a carrying across or crossing over the ocean, and was used in this way by the first generations of transatlantic immigrants.27 Theoretically, if the process of translation is taken to correspond to the colonists’ plight, then America as a place, a geographical location, must be conceptualized as a medium of signification akin to language. A spatial removal of the human body is thus imagined as similar to a linguistic transformation: 24 Haraszti, The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book, 41-43 and Louise Russel Stallings, “The Unpolished Altar: The Place of the Bay Psalm Book in American Culture” (Diss., Texas A&M University, 1977), 157–8. 25 For this Puritan tradition, see Ivy Schweitzer, The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England, Gender and American Culture (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 50–53. These remarks go along with Jeffrey Hammond’s claim that the “Puritan faith in the Word constitutes a neardeification of the symbolic and the verbal.” Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan Experience of Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 9. 26 Popular Measures, 106. 27 Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 11 See, for example, various accounts in George Selement and Bruce T. Woolley, eds, Thomas Shepard’s Confessions (Boston: Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts v. 58, 1981). According to the OED Online (stable URL accessed 4 April 2005), the meaning of translation as a “  transference; removal or conveyance from one person, place, or condition to another” is at least as old as the now more usual linguistic sense. The Puritans also used translation to signify spiritual transformation, as well as the passage from life into death.

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Bay Psalm Book (1640), Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. 3 April 2005. http:// www.infoweb.newsbank.com.

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just as a translated text is divested of its meaning in one cultural context in order to gain currency in another, so an immigrant is stripped of national and personal history in order to assimilate into his or her new environment. To put it differently: similar to the Hebrew and classical texts that were “English’d,” the colonists are, to a certain extent “un-English’d” by their relocation.28 In this sense, the Renaissance awareness of the geographical and temporal specificity of translations also applies to human subjects, for whom such parameters are primary constituents of identity.29 Underlying these comparisons is the notion of the self or the body as a mutable text, which was common in colonial America. Benjamin Woodbridge’s elegy on Cotton, for example, propounds this image by figuring the latter’s corpse as a perfected Bible now that he has been ‘translated’ into heaven.30 In light of their unique understanding of the relation between textuality and corporeality, it is plausible the Puritans conceived of the enterprise of printing the psalter as self-representative on multiple levels. The unadorned, straight columns of the Bay Psalm Book (Figure 4.1) might symbolize the colonists’ textual and spiritual ideologies as well as painting a wishful portrait of unencumbered, legible physicality. Extending the metaphorical correspondence between self and text even further, the immigrants’ bodily translation over the ocean, which was often paired with a loss of property, can be seen as figurally rendered in the strippeddown printing of the Psalms. Texts and Tunes The two most relevant reference points for assessing the Bay Psalm Book’s lyrical choices are the British Sternhold-Hopkins psalter (1562) and the Ainsworth Hamlin notes that “Englishing” was used interchangeably with other idioms to describe the process of translation or paraphrase. Psalm Culture, 8. 29 See, for example, Michael Warner’s definition of colonial culture as “a set of spatial and temporal hierarchies.” “What’s Colonial about Colonial America?” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 63. 30 Benjamin Woodbridge “Upon the Tomb of the most Reverend Mr. John Cotton,” in New Englands Memoriall, ed. Nathaniel Morton (Cambridge, 1669). Woodbridge compares Cotton’s “beautifi’d” (l. 28) body to A living breathing Bible: Tables where Both Covenants at large engraven were; 30 Gospel and Law in’s Heart had each its Colume His Head an Index to the Sacred Volume. His very Name a Title Page; and next, His Life a Commentary on the Text. O what a Monument of glorious worth, 35 When in a New Edition he comes forth Without Errata’s, may we think hee’ll be, In Leaves and Covers of Eternitie! 28

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version (Amsterdam, 1612). Viewed as a text of colonial self-definition, the Bay Psalm Book articulated its identity over and against a national or metropolitan paradigm, embodied in the Sternhold Hopkins version, while at the same time disavowing the provincial Separatist attitudes that were evident in the Ainsworth translation. The Bay Psalm Book might be seen as an idiosyncratic or unrepresentative container of colonial culture in light of the Calvinist uneasiness with performance. Yet, contrary to common belief, the Calvinist church did not prohibit music: “In truth,” wrote Calvin in the preface to his own metrical translation of the Psalms, “we know by experience that song has great force and vigor to move and inflame the hearts of men and praise God with more vehement and ardent zeal.”31 This statement of condonement already reveals the dual purpose of the psalter in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, serving not just as an expression of devotion, but also as a tool for conversion. It is difficult to overstate the popularity and presence of the Sternhold and Hopkins version in early modern England. Printed in over 700 editions, “SternholdHopkins” as it came to be known, was, according to Hannibal Hamlin, “the most widely known volume of verse in English and made its way into the hands of English men and women of all social classes.”32 Its poetic reputation, however, fared poorly, causing John Donne to wonder why the English Church should “more hoarse, more harsh than any other, sing.”33 Like Coverdale and most other early Psalm translators, Sternhold and Hopkins probably used a combination of other English and Latin translations as their source text. The Ainsworth psalter, on the other hand, was translated directly from Hebrew, had a much smaller audience, and a more scholarly appearance: presenting a prose and metrical translation of each Psalm side by side, followed by copious annotations as can be seen in Figure 4.2.34 The Bay Psalm Book bears the same complete title as “Sternhold-Hopkins,” and also figures the same scriptural epigraphs from Colossians and James, making it appear, at first sight, as simply an American reprinting.35 It seems to take its 31 The Geneva Psalter (Geneva, 1542), translation by Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History: the Renaissance, ed. Gary Tomlinson (New York: Norton, 1998), 87. 32 Psalm Culture, 38. 33 “Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sidney and the Countesse of Penbroke his Sister” in The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson. (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 1:349. 34 Aside from Plymouth Colony, the psalter was also used by the church in Salem until 1667. See J.H. Dorenkamp, “The Bay Psalm Book and the Ainsworth Psalter,” Early American Literature 7 (1972): 3–16. Two copies were present in the library of the Massachusetts Bay Company according to Herbert Tuttle, “The Libraries of the Mathers,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 20 (1910), 273. The Ainsworth version was reprinted at least two more times: in 1632 and 1644 in Amsterdam. 35 Respectively The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre and Coll. 3 “Let the word of God dwell pleasantly in you, in all wisdome, teaching and exhorting one another in Psalmes, Himnes, and spirituall Songs, singing to the Lord with

Fig 4.2

Henry Ainsworth, The Booke of Psalmes: Englished both in prose and metre with annotations (Amsterdam, 1612), Early English Books Online. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. 3 April 2005. http://eebo.chadwyck.com.

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textual cues from the Ainsworth version, however, which also presents concerns with textual synonymity as outweighing those of aesthetic beauty: “yet rather than I would stray from the text,” writes Ainsworth: “I streyn now and then, with the rules of our English poesie in the just ending alike of both verses, & sometime in the quatitie [sic] of a syllable.”36 Despite their similar ethos of translation, the Ainsworth version and the Bay Psalm Book present significant differences. An overview of the psalters’ metrics illustrates their divergent poetical and political strategies. The appeal of “Sternhold-Hopkins” is evident in its use of the simple metrical scheme of the ballad stanza, which came to be known as common meter.37 This design renders every verse as a quatrain with alternating iambic tetra- and trimeter lines rhymed /abab/. The “Sternhold-Hopkins” psalter employs this scheme ad nauseum, casting a vast majority (app. 140) of 150 Psalms in common meter. The Ainsworth version presents a more varied and balanced selection, using common meter 48 times, long meter (4 x tetrameter) in 34 cases, and short meter (6.6.8.6. syllables/line) for three Psalms. Ainsworth chose to translate the remaining 56 Psalms in unconventional ten-syllable lines or pentameter, which he claimed “fell out better.”38 In comparison, the Bay Psalm Book seems to regress to old monotonous ways. Initially, it cast 115 Psalms in common meter, offering three other possibilities for 41 Psalms (including metrical variants). The third edition of 1651, revised by Harvard president Henry Dunster and Richard Lyon, made matters worse. An astonishing 125 Psalms were now in common meter, while a mere 15 in short meter allowed no escape from metrical drudgery.39 grace in your hearts;” James 4 “If any be afflicted, let him pray, and if any be merry let him sing psalmes.” Observation in Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 80. 36 Henry Ainsworth, The booke of Psalmes: Englished both in Prose and Metre (Amsterdam, 1612), **2r. Dorenkamp states confidently: “whatever the reason was for not adopting the Ainsworth psalms, it is clear that this version exerted a discernible influence upon those who set out to prepare a new translation.” “The Bay Psalm Book and the Ainsworth Psalter,” 8. Conversely, Hamlin claims the Bay Psalm Book’s “roots were firmly in the ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’ tradition.” Psalm Culture, 80. 37 The debate on which came first, common meter or the ballad stanza, is of the chicken or egg category. Hamlin notes: “Some assume Sternhold borrowed the ballad stanza from secular songs as part of their attempt to supplant ‘love ditties and wanton songs.’ Yet relatively few ballad texts predate the sixteenth century, and the ballad meter was also known as ‘Sternhold’s Meter,’ leading some scholars to suggest that ‘ballad meter’ was first popularized by metrical psalms.” Ibid., 24. 38 Ainsworth, The booke of Psalmes, **2r. Waldo Selden Pratt speculates: “Ainsworth’s notably abundant use of these long pentameter forms is plainly due to his desire to avail himself of the many fine French melodies at hand.” The Music of the Pilgrims: A Description of the Psalm-book brought to Plymouth in 1620 (Boston: Oliver Ditson Company, 1921), 15. 39 Compiled from Dorenkamp, “The Bay Psalm Book and the Ainsworth Psalter,” Richard G. Appel, The Music of the Bay Psalm Book 9th edition (1698), Institute for Studies in American Music Monographs, nr. 5. (Brooklyn, New York: I.S.A.M., 1975), 3;

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What is the significance of such statistics? Morris has claimed the Bay Psalm Book evinces a “conscious simplification”40 of the existing psalters: a striving obvious in appearance as well as text. Because most Psalms (125 out of 150) are poured into the same metrical mold, the oppressive formal similarity no longer allows for a full rendering of the diverse Hebrew originals. It is as if the compilers feared that stylistic change would distract and perhaps detract from textual content. Besides radically reducing the number of tunes to which the Psalm could be sung, the Bay Psalm Book also puts forth a notion of Biblical poetics that appears to value normative regularity over Scriptural fidelity. A brief glance at Psalm 23 in the various versions immediately shows the colonists’ choice for simplicity and mnemonics. The first edition of “SternholdHopkins” features a translation by Thomas Sternhold himself (indicated by the marker TS) and titled in Latin. 1. 2.

My shepherd is the living Lorde, Nothing therefore I nead: In pastors fayre, with waters calme He let me for to fead. He did convert and glad my soule, And brought my minde in frame: To walke in pathes of righteousness, For his most holy name.

This classic ballad stanza form requires the extension of every verse to an entire quatrain, which causes a misnumbering: verse 2 should start at the third line, instead of the fifth. The governing metaphor of the Psalm is simply stated, with an apparent preference for alliteration leading to the unscriptural adjective “living.” Two inversions in line 3 avoid the trochaic rhythm of ‘in fayre pastors, with calme waters,’ while the nonstandard spelling in line 4 (“let” instead of “led”) occasions the ambiguity of allowing as well as leading. The second verse juxtaposes “soule” and “minde,” with a line that must have sprung entirely from the translator’s imagination, “And broughte my mind in frame,” (l. 6) figuring a process of intellectual convincing in this Psalm of unquestioning faith and reassurance. The repetitive rhythm is reinforced by emphatic monosyllabic stresses. In comparison, Ainsworth’s pentameter line appears almost intricately Elizabethan: 1. 2. 3.

Jehovah feedeth me, I shal not lack. In grassy folds He down dooth make me lye; he gently-leads me quiet waters by. He dooth return my soule: for his name sake in paths of justice leads-me-quietly.

and Morris, Popular Measures, chapter 2. Ironically, the revisions by Dunster and Lyon were apparently prompted by the opinion “that a little more of Art was to be employ’d upon them [the Psalms],” which confirms the Puritan’s peculiar sense of regularization and standardization as ‘Art’. Mather, Magnalia, III, 100. 40 Morris, Popular Measures, 98.

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The unusual rhyme scheme, /abbab/, and unnatural word order collaborate to make this stanza feel convoluted. Faithfulness to the Hebrew is exceptionally strict, particularly in the attempts to render the verbs. Ainsworth annotates “gentlyleads” as “easily-leadeth or comfortably-guideth me; it noteth a soft and gentle leading, with susteyning of infirmity.” Unlike Sternhold, he distinguishes between lying in the grass and walking by the water, and leaves out feeding entirely (which does not appear in the original Hebrew). The abnormally translated “return” (l. 4) is glossed “or, will return or restore it.”41 Compared to Sternhold’s thumping, Ainsworth’s longer line features fewer instances of alliteration but allows for more gradations in stress, especially on endings like “leads-me-quietly” (l. 5). Presenting correct contents in a well-crafted form, Ainsworth’s translation linguistically and stylistically approximates the Hebrew original. The Bay Psalm Book pales in comparison. Identified as “A Psalm of David” (as in the King James Version), the 1651 revision gives: 2. 3.

The Lord to mee a shepheard is, Want therefore shall not I. Hee in the folds of tendergrass, doth make me down to ly: To waters calme me gently leads Restore my soul doth hee : In paths of righteousness, he will for his names sake lead mee.

Oddly, the psalter’s favorite metrical scheme is truncated here, with each verse receiving only three lines or less. The rhyme scheme works against the scriptural divisions, permitting a satisfactory simultaneous resolution of stanza and verse only once every eight lines. Enjambment between lines 5 and 6 obscures the originally separate sentences, as well as postponing the subject almost indefinitely. Rhythmically, the Psalm espouses the same binary quality as Sternhold’s version, forcing even trochees “hee in” (l. 3) into an iambic march. Syntactic inversions are multiple, and at times, exceptionally awkward (l. 2, 4). Also, what was past tense in “Sternhold-Hopkins” and present tense to Ainsworth takes on the quality of a promise in the Bay Psalm Book: “in paths of righteousness, he will / for his names sake lead mee” (l. 7-8).42 Besides its unfortunate formal execution, the verbal laxity of the Psalm Book is surprising, not only in the case of tense, but also in the “folds of tendergrasse” (l. 3), which cannot be found in the Hebrew and has been attributed to George Herbert’s version in common meter.43 Ultimately, the rigid rhythm and rhyme scheme contribute to an undeniably mnemonic effect. The booke of Psalmes, 66. Hebrew verbs have no tense and these shifts therefore simply represent translators’

41 42

preferences. 43 Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 151 referring to The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 172.

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The fragment above evinces the Bay Psalm Book’s categorical choice for metrical regularity, to which textual correspondence between the source and target language, and, one might argue, verbal elegance, have been sacrificed. The compilers’ focus on “fidelity rather than poetry” appears to result in not much of either. Although the simplicity and similarity of the Psalms in this version could be seen to guarantee their accessibility, the tortured syntax and unnatural rhythms distance the reader from the text and hamper comprehension. The fact that these elements recur in all the poems (there are no happy exceptions), suggests that they are part of an overarching aesthetic paradigm rather than instances of haphazard clumsiness. Precisely by forcing all the Psalms into the same formal scheme and by repeatedly violating English grammar, the Bay Psalm Book articulates its own conception of what constitutes devotional poetics. That this idea was recognized and repeated in contemporary spiritual poetry shows the community’s acceptance of and identification with the aesthetic model put forth in the psalter.44 It is important to note that aesthetics do not just express attitudes and beliefs; they are also capable of shaping subjects and producing collectivity within fractured immigrant communities. The Bay Psalm Book became a text of colonial selfdefinition not just because of its material presence in the Atlantic public sphere, but mainly through the replication and internalization of its aesthetic. To get a sense of how these texts would have functioned in early colonial culture, I will briefly consider performance practices in Massachusetts Bay. In America, the Bay Psalm Book was not printed with tunes until the ninth edition in 1698.45 Earlier editions refer to Thomas Ravenscroft’s Psalmes (1621) for musical settings, though it is highly unlikely that his “very neere fourty common tunes” were all actually used, as most did not fit the metrical format of the Psalms.46 The 9th edition reduced Ravenscroft’s 40 to a mere 13 tunes, which are provided on unmarked pages in the back of the book in addition to an appendix offering guidelines on how the Psalms were to be sung. The 13 tunes, named after their town of origin, were all drawn from Playford’s Brief Introduction to the Skill of Music (1654), as was the notation of sol-fa letters, which will be illustrated For example, the use of common meter for devotional texts was replicated and reinforced by Michael Wigglesworth’s tremendously successful Day of Doom (Cambridge, 1662). Composed in double ballad stanzas, this often-maligned poem sold eighteen hundred copies in a single year and was assigned for memorization along with the catechism. Roger Williams’s verse in A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643) criticizes the colonists’ ideology and intentions, while formally mocking the community’s aesthetic. See American Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Harrison T. Meserole (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985). 45 Irving Lowens claims editions of the Bay Psalm Book were published with tunes in England “between the years 1689 and 1691.” Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1964), 36. 46 Bay Psalm Book, Ll3v. Lowens casts the citations of Ravenscroft as “a bibliographical footnote, rather than a factual report of just what common-meter psalm tunes were being sung by Massachusetts Puritans in 1640.” Music and Musicians, 28. 44

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shortly. The music appears to be carelessly copied from Playford’s volume. For example, the Bay Psalm Book assigns the Litchfield tune to Psalm 69 (when it should be 96), perpetuating an obvious misprint in Playford, which partially corrects itself by printing the first verse of Psalm 96 alongside the score. Due to the repeated performance of Psalm 69 to the Litchfield tune, however, the two came to be inextricably associated with another in the New England tradition. The erratum of appointing the tune of Psalm 113 to Psalm 115, which was actually more metrically successful than the originally intended text, caused a similar connection in the public mind (or mouth).47 Evidently, the Puritans sung what was printed, not what felt right, displaying an unquestioning acceptance of authority as embodied by the printed text and chanting community. Contradicting British traditions and instituting misprints as standard practice, the above cases prove the power of the psalter and its imperfections in shaping ideas of propriety with regards to Psalm performance in colonial America. Unlike “Sternhold-Hopkins” and the Ainsworth version, the Bay Psalm Book chose not to pioneer any tunes. Only proven successful strains were selected and implemented, presumably to ensure longevity of the version, but also in keeping with Protestant practice of using popular English ballad tunes to get the congregations singing heartily at difficult times.48 The reduction from 40 tunes to a mere 13, as opposed to 48 in the Ainsworth translation, is in keeping with the trend towards simplification and homogenization discussed above.49 Although music seems to have been an afterthought, and, literally, an appendix, to the text for the Puritans, J.C. Dorenkamp suggests the translations were actually shaped “to fit tunes familiar to the users of the book,” suggesting another possible explanation for the metrical monotony.50 The tunes in the Bay Psalm Book appear roughly hewn and on a miniscule scale, which indeed seems to presuppose familiarity. In comparison to the finely engraved music in the Ainsworth version in Figure 4.2, the Massachusetts psalter (Figure 4.3) is considerably harder to read. Whereas Ainsworth supplies the tune above the first verse of the metrical translation and even takes care to vertically line out notes and syllables, the Bay Psalm Book provides tunes approximately 300 pages after the text, forcing the singer to flip back in order to read words and music simultaneously.51 Thus, the psalter hardly allows for singing while reading and seems to have included

Appel, The Music of the Bay Psalm Book, 5. New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, s.v. “Psalms, metrical, §III,

47 48

1: The Church of England.” http://www.grovemusic.com/data/articles/music/ (accessed November 30, 2001). 49 Ibid., and Pratt, The Music of the Pilgrims, 14. 50 “The Bay Psalm Book and the Ainsworth Psalter,” 9. 51 This effort is more obvious in the 1632 printing of the Ainsworth, durable URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_ id=xri:eebo:image:24944.

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Fig. 4.3

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Bay Psalm Book (1698), Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. 3 April 2005. http:// www.infoweb. newsbank.com.

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tunes more out of a desire for completeness.52 The diamond-shaped notes, a contemporary convention, are faded and difficult to make out, which is in part caused by the printing from the raised surfaces of woodblocks. The sol-fa letters indicate the placement of the notes on the traditional singing scale of do-re-mi to aid those less schooled in musical notation. For this edition, however, the printer appears to have had access only to the letters f, l, s, and m, which largely negates their usefulness as there is no perceivable correspondence between the letters and the tune printed above.53 These letters were meant to facilitate the practice of “lining out” the Psalm, whereby the minister or an appointed lay person sings it slowly verse by verse with the congregation repeating every “line” (verse) after him. This custom constitutes a shift in psalmodic practice from singing to hearing: the initial confrontation with the Psalm is now no longer governed by a script, as it was in the British and Separatist churches, but relies on orality instead. By parroting the clergyman or authorized congregants, the churchgoers double (or underline) his utterance while replacing his voice and stance of authority with their own. The system of repetition also ensures the doctrinal correctness of the congregation’s speech, enabling a vocal osmosis of ideology in the disguise of a singing lesson. Lastly, “lining out” poses a perfect example of how formal change could be imposed upon and internalized by the colonial community. Regulating devotional performance thus leads not only to religious homogeneity, but also succeeds in bringing about a normative spiritual identity that is culturally separate from Britain and Plymouth, embodied in the collective ritual of belting out ballad stanzas. The model set by “lining out” the Psalm was in turn controlled by the stern directions in the Appendix: “First, Observe of how many Notes compass the Tune is. Next, the place of your first Note; and how many Notes above & below that: so as you may begin the Tune of your first Note as the rest may be Sung in the compass of your and the peoples Voices, without Squeaking above, or Grumbling below.”54 There were no musical instruments available for accompaniment in American churches until the mid-eighteenth century. Nor were there tuning forks, apparently, and things could get very out of hand. Cotton Mather noted in his diary: “The Psalmody is but poorly carried on in my Flock, and in a Variety and Regularity inferior to some other; I would see about it … I must of Necessity do D.W. Krummel speculates that “Its [the Bay Psalm Book’s] inclusion of music may not have been meant as a guide for the congregation in which the majority was not expected to be able to read notes much less sight sing them. The musical notes may have been put in to give the book an air of authority and guide congregation leaders.” “The Bay Psalm Book tercentenary, 1698–1998,” Notes 55 (1998), 281–2. 53 Krummel adds: “Whoever took care of the imposition probably used makeshift furniture and was likely musically illiterate.” Ibid., 282. 54 Bay Psalm Book, first page in unnumbered Appendix. Although these lines have often been cited as evidence of the Puritans’ poor singing, they are in fact “quoted, verbatim and literatim, from either the 1666 … of Playford’s Brief Introduction, a work written with no reference to the American practice of psalmody.” Lowens, Music and Musicians, 34. 52

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something, that the Exercise of Singing the scared Psalms in the Flock, may be made more beautiful, and especially have the Beauties of Holiness more upon it.”55 Dejected, Samuel Sewall observed: “Mr Willard … spoke to me to set the Tune; I intended Windsor and fell into High-Dutch, and then essaying the set another Tune went into a key much too high … In the morning I set York Tune [but] the Gallery carried irresistibly to St David’s which discouraged me very much.”56 Although the voiced dissatisfaction and striving toward an unattainable ideal might be seen as a permanent Puritan predicament, these complaints nevertheless illustrate the importance of Psalmody and the grief and anxiety that accompanied improper performance. Ultimately, such concerns culminated in the large-scale musical reform of the 1720s. Inspired by a booklet called An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm-Tunes, proponents of the New Way of singing advocated systematic methodologies of musical notation and performance that resembled the traditions of the Anglican Church.57 Unsurprisingly, the acrimony surrounding these innovations was intense. Mather, an early supporter, notes: “Tho’ in the more polite City of Boston, this Design [singing reform] mett with a General Acceptance, in the Countrey … some Numbers of Elder and Angry people, bore zealous Testimonies against these wicked Innivations, and this bringing in of Popery. Their zeal transported them so far … that they would not only … call the Singing of these Christians, a Worshipping of the Devil, but they would also run out of the Meetinghouse at the Beginning of the Exercise.”58 Clearly, supporters of the Old Way perceived the reforms as an attack on their religious identity, initially accusing their more progressive congregants of Roman Catholicism and later, bringing up that old New England favorite, witchcraft. What is perhaps most striking about this passage is not the constitutive relationship between psalmody and spiritual selfhood, but rather the threat of dissolution of the community made by the scorned conservatives. The same rhetoric surfaces in the following entry from Mather’s diary: “Very Lately, a Little Crue at a Town Ten miles from the City of Boston, were so sett upon their old Howling in the public Psalmody, that being rebuked for the Disturbance they made, by the more Numerous Regular Singers, they declared They would be for the Ch. Of E. [Church of England] and would form a Little Assembly for that purpose.”58 Here, the debate seems to have become unmoored from its original religious reference-points, as Anglicanism (apparently unbeknownst to the little crew) would entail practices far more similar to the new singing style than to Diary of Cotton Mather, ed. Dr. W.C. Ford (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1911–1912), 2:373, 2:624. 56 The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1973), 1:538; 2:881. 57 John Tufts, An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm-Tunes (Boston, 1721). See Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill, 1630-1783 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), chapter 10. 58 Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:693. 55

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“their old howling.” Being denied their customary conventions of worship, the followers of the old school are aggravated to the extent that they blindly select another denomination, preferring difference by default over improvements at home. Although these cases convincingly illustrate the tremendous success of the standardization of worship in Massachusetts Bay, they also indicate the more serious threat of social strife over religious ritual.59 A change of protocol imperils the cultural cohesion of the community, which proves again that performance practices made up the heart of the colony’s conception of self. In conclusion, the international importance of the publication of the Bay Psalm Book, which countered English liturgy by instituting colonial practices of worship, is easily recognizable. As a text of immigration, the psalter constitutes the Puritans’ first conscious self-articulation within the transcultural structure of British imperialism. This essay has also shown how the Bay Psalm Book, by controlling the outward, public forms of prayer, shaped the form of inward faith and the collective aesthetic of the colony. Thus, this publicized devotional deviation served to create and make explicit devotional difference between Britain and the American colonies.

Ibid., 2:797.

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PART 2 Contested Grounds of Authority

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Chapter 5

Miles Coverdale and the Claims of Paraphrase Jamie H. Ferguson

Scholars of the English Bible often damn Miles Coverdale with faint praise as a man who knew his place. Coverdale, one says, produced useful placeholders, biblical translations that supplied a pressing need until more competent scholarship should supersede them. Lacking this man’s Greek and that man’s Hebrew, Coverdale confesses disarmingly that “lowly and faythfully have I folowed myne interpreters [i.e., other translators], and that under correccyion.”1 The succession of English Bibles (beginning with Coverdale’s 1535 Bible) published after Henry VIII’s break with Rome would seem to illustrate this deferential mood. In 1537 the pseudonymous editor of the Matthew Bible2 gathered together William Tyndale’s New Testament and those books of the Old Testament that Tyndale had completed before his capture and execution in 1536 (including Joshua through 2 Chronicles, left in manuscript), filled out with versions from Coverdale’s 1535 translation. Commissioned by the king to prepare the text of the Great Bible (1539) on the basis of the Matthew Bible, Coverdale, it is supposed, had no compunction about using Tyndale’s versions of Genesis through 2 Chronicles and the New Testament instead of his own.3 Coverdale had relied on the “helpe” of “sondrye translacions, not onely in latyn, but also of the Douche interpreters” (38), while Tyndale had translated from the Hebrew and Greek directly. Coverdale was not the scholar Tyndale was, and he knew it: naturally Coverdale would treat Tyndale’s version as more authoritative than his own. These estimations of Coverdale depend on a commonsensical preference for translations made from the original words of Scripture over second-hand versions. Even as Protestant exegetes valorized sola scriptura, Reformation conceptions of biblical paraphrase challenged such Miles Coverdale, trans., The Coverdale Bible 1535, intro. by S.L. Greenslade (Folkestone: Dawson, 1975), 39. 2 Preparation of the Matthew Bible is usually attributed to John Rogers. See T.H. Darlow and H.F. Moule, Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525–1961, revised and expanded by A.S. Herbert (London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1968), 18; David Daniell, The Bible in English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 190–97. 3 See, e.g., John Eadie, The English Bible: An External and Critical History of the Various English Translations of Scripture, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1876), 253–4; J.F. Mozley, Coverdale and His Bibles (London: Lutterworth Press, 1953), 201. 1

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hierarchical distinctions between the very words of Scripture and the meanings abstracted therefrom. Versions such as Coverdale’s put into practice a kind of biblical imitation contradicted by mainstream Protestant exegetical theory; these versions make stronger claims on biblical authority—and on our attention—than might at first appear. The English Psalter incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer, and so into the mainstream of English liturgy, has assumed a special status among Coverdale’s biblical translations.4 This version, however, is one of four complete Psalters that Coverdale produced, three of which are translated from quite distinct sources.5 In 1534 or 1535 Coverdale published, anonymously, a version of Johannes Campensis’s Latin paraphrase of the Psalter6; in 1535 he translated, from “Douche and Latyn” versions, a Psalter in English prose for his complete Bible; in 1539, he revised, for the Great Bible, the Psalter of the Matthew Bible (and thus of his own 1535 Bible) in line with the new Latin version by Sebastian Münster (1534– 1535); in 1540, he published a close translation of the Vulgate Psalter. In this series of English Psalters, Coverdale does not move towards a nearer and nearer approximation of a single authoritative original but multiplies “originals” with seeming disregard for any final textual authority. In political terms, Coverdale is navigating between the latest scholarship of Reform-minded humanists on the one hand and conservative reaction on the other; in hermeneutic terms, he translates according to what Judith H. Anderson has called, in another context, a “cumulative” theory of linguistic truth7: each of his versions provides a discrete approximation of the “truth” of Scripture, without any of them excluding the veracity of any other. His well-known deferentiality notwithstanding, Coverdale does not seem to share the modern prejudice in favor of philological finality. In the aggregate, this series of Psalters manifests a pluralistic conception of scriptural truth; taken severally, Coverdale’s Psalters suggest various notions of biblical authority. For his first English Psalter, Coverdale chose what might seem an odd intermediary: a paraphrase, the Psalmorum omnium iuxta Hebraicum The version used for the Book of Common Prayer was that published initially in the Great Bible. In the sixteenth century, subsequent English Bibles often included this text in addition to revised versions. For the influence of the Prayer Book Psalter on the language of the KJV, see Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible (New York: Carcanet Press, 1983), 86–8. 5 The following list does not include the selection of 13 Psalms included among other versified biblical and religious passages by Coverdale in the volume “Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes” (1535). For an acute account of the origin and literary quality of these versions, see David Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature, Volume One: From antiquity to 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 111–13. 6 Mozley provides internal and external evidence for the attribution of the Campensisprose versions to Coverdale, an attribution made initially by John Bale (60–62). 7 Judith H. Anderson, Words that Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 15. See also the cogent account of Coverdale’s translation-principles in Norton, History, 107–11. 4

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veritatem paraphrastica interpretatio (1532) of Johannes Campensis (1491–1538), professor of Hebrew at the University of Louvain.8 Coverdale’s short prologue distinguishes paraphrase from translation on the one hand and from commentary on the other: Coverdale confesses that he has forgone translation for lack of “soche understandynge in the three tongues … needfull for hym that shulde wel and truly translate any texte of scripture”; on the other hand, he extols paraphrase as of “more profyte” than “many greate longe commentaries,” ostensibly because it is shorter.9 It seems a strange way for a Protestant to begin the promulgation of the Psalter in English: even if paraphrase is “not moch exceadyng the quantyte of the texte,” it does represent a removal from Scripture itself.10 Ignorance of the biblical languages explains Coverdale’s use of a Latin intermediary, but what does it have to do with his use of a paraphrase rather than a translation? Coverdale probably had access to a number of translated Psalters: in Latin (the Vulgate version, the version iuxta Hebraicum attributed to Jerome, Sanctes Pagninus [1527], Martin Bucer [1529], Zwingli [1532], possibly others), German (Luther [1523–1524], Zurich [1525]), French (Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples [1524]), not to mention English (Joye).11 Why would Coverdale choose Campensis’s paraphrase instead of one or more of these translations? It is not likely to have been for confessional reasons, as Bucer, Zwingli, and all the vernacular translators shared Coverdale’s sympathies with the Protestant cause, while Campensis remained loyal to the Roman church.12 Paraphrase tends to avoid the For biographical accounts of Campensis, see Henry de Vocht, History of the Foundation and the Rise of the Collegium Trilingue Lovaniense 1517–1550 (Louvain: Kraus Reprint Ltd, 1951), 1:503–5, 3:154–208, and Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, eds, Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 1:255–6. 9 Miles Coverdale, trans., A paraphrasis upon all the Psalmes of David, made by Iohannes Campensis, reader of the Hebrue lecture in the universite of Louvane, and translated out of Latine into Englisshe (London, 1539). Microfilm. Early English Books 1475–1640. STC I. Reel 55, item 2. 10 Of the three English Psalters published independently in the 1530s—the other two by George Joye (1530 and 1534, the first from the Latin of Martin Bucer, the second from Zwingli)—all three are based on Latin versions, but Coverdale’s is the only one to identify itself as a paraphrase. On Joye’s Psalters, see Charles C. Butterworth and Allan G. Chester, George Joye 1495?–1553: A Chapter in the History of the English Bible and the English Reformation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 54–60, 127–34. 11 Mozley, 82–4. Coverdale was of course very familiar with the Vulgate and the version iuxta Hebraicum; he used Pagninus, Luther, and Zurich for his 1535 Bible. In addition to Mozley, see S.L. Greenslade, “Introduction,” in The Coverdale Bible 1535, 14–15. Lefèvre d’Etaples’s Psalter (2nd edn, 1525) and first complete French Bible (1530) were both published by Martin de Keyser (Lempereur) in Antwerp (Chambers 72), as were Joye’s translations of the Psalters of Bucer and Zwingli (Butterworth and Chester 55, 129; Mozley 47, 49). Coverdale seems to have worked as a “corrector” for Keyser ca. 1534– 1535 (Mozley 6). 12 Vocht, 1:504, 3:157–8. 8

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verbal proprieties of the original: it might suggest a prudent choice for a humble translator who lacks “understandynge in the three tongues.” This renouncing of any claim to independent authority on the part of the English paraphrase would seem testimony to the avowedly secondary nature of Coverdale’s translationwork. Coverdale explains that he has not been “so folyshe hardye as to put forth any texte” of Scripture, aspiring only that with the help of his English paraphrase the reader should “both understonde the texte more easely … and for the textes sake love it the better.” This concession disguises a deeper ambivalence—evident, for example, in the way Coverdale uses the word “texte” in his prologue. The “texte” is at once the original that one should “wel and truly translate” and for whose sake one should love Coverdale’s version the better, and the translation that Coverdale has not dared “put forth.” In Coverdale’s usage, the “texte” may be either the biblical original or its translation, a terminological ambiguity that corresponds to a broader interpretive problem.13 Where does one locate the Bible’s authority: in the translated or in the original “texte”? And if the distinction between translation and original is unclear, what precisely is the status of paraphrase? The sixteenth-century biblical interpreter negotiated between two widely accepted but conflicting emphases concerning linguistic representation: on the one hand, the notion that meaning or sense persists independently of words, so that a restatement of the original’s meaning in other words might bear authority comparable with that of the original text; on the other, the notion that meaning is inextricable from language, so that authority inheres ultimately in the very words of the original. The dictum on translation most widely cited in the Renaissance, Cicero’s prohibition against rendering “pro verbo verbum,”14 is directed, on the face of it, against the literalistic imitator’s substitution of a single word in translation for each word in the original. It implies, at a more fundamental or philosophical level, that the translator’s object is the original’s meaning and not its words—that meaning and words are functionally separate. For example, George Chapman, in his “Preface to Homer,” cites these “lawgivers to translators” in their instructions “not to follow the number and order of words,” the verbal features of the text, but to consider rather “the materiall things themselues, and sentences [from Lat. sententia, “thought” or “meaning”],” the text’s non-verbal referents, which are to be “cloth[ed] and adorn[ed …] with words.”15 George Joye, trans., The Psalter of David. Aretius Felinus, intro. G.E. Duffield, Martin Bucer. Courtenay Facsimile 1 (Appleford, 1971), uses the word in a similarly ambiguous way in the title of his 1530 Psalter: “translated aftir the texte of Feline [i.e., Bucer]” (21). 14 “[N]ec converti ut interpres, sed ut orator … verbis ad nostram consuetudinem aptis. In quibus non pro uerbo uerbum necesse habui reddere” [I have not translated but written orations … with words fitting our usage. In doing so, I have not considered it necessary to render word for word]. De optimo genere oratorum, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 364. 15 “The Preface to the Reader,” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Joel Elias Springarn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 1:72. 13

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In support of the opposite view, emphasizing meaning’s inalienability from verbal form, many discussions of biblical translation cite Jerome’s assertion, in De optimo genere interpretandi (=Letter 57 [396]), that in the inspired language of Scripture, as opposed to profane writings, even “verborum ordo mysterium est” (the order of words is a mystery).16 The notion that, in the special case of Scripture, word and meaning are inextricably bound together—that Scripture must be rendered word for word—remained a latent possibility through the period, although the cited source for this view, Jerome, often also suggested, in his theoretical statements and in his practice as translator, that literal translation was not always necessary for the full conveyance of biblical meaning.17 These opposed ideas took on new associations in Reformation treatments of the Bible. Reform-minded humanists used the original Hebrew and Greek words at the fontes of Scripture as a touchstone for evaluating both the language of the received Latin Vulgate and the accumulated theology of the Roman ecclesiastical tradition. At the same time, “evangelical” reformers had a stake in upholding the transferability of biblical meaning from one language to another as they promoted more popularly accessible versions of the Bible (translations and paraphrases, in Latin and particularly in the vernaculars). Erasmus’s edition and translation of the New Testament, for example, combined the return ad fontes with an evangelical defense of the vernacular: he challenged the Latin Vulgate with an edition and fresh translation of the Greek New Testament, while also calling, in his Paraclesis preceding this edition, for the Gospel to be translated into all the common tongues.18 Already in response to Erasmus’s work, and more vehemently as the century progressed, conservative adherents of the Roman church upheld a translated text of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, as formally normative—against the return to the Hebrew and Greek texts, on the one hand, and against the generation of new, vernacular versions, on the other. In failing to distinguish clearly the 16 Jerome, Lettres, ed. and trans. Jérôme Labourt (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1949–1963), 57.5 (5:59). References to Jerome’s letters are by letter and section number, followed parenthetically by volume and page in Labourt’s edition. 17 In Letter 57.11, for example, Jerome criticizes the Hellenized Jew, Aquila, who, in a Greek version of the Old Testament intended to replace the “Christian” Septuagint, “non solum uerba, sed etymologias uerborum transferre conatus est” [set out to translate not only words, but the etymologies of words]; in the same passage, Jerome mocks those who translate “et syllabas … et litteras” (3:71). Jerome argues instead that the specific idioms of the various languages must be respected in any translation: “Quanta … apud Graecos bene dicuntur quae, si ad uerbum transferamus, in Latino non resonant …?” [How many things are well said among the Greeks which, if we translate them verbally, would not sound well in Latin …?] (Ibid.; cf. also Letter 112.19 [6:39], 106.3 [5:106–7]). 18 Erasmus recommends that the Gospels “in omnes omnium linguas essent transfusa” [be translated into all the languages of all the peoples] so that even “ad stivam aliquid [Evangelii] decantet agricola” [the farmer would sing the Gospels at his plow]. Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, vol. 6/1, ed. Joannes Clericus, 1705, rpt. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1962), *3v). Clericus’s edition is hereafter abbreviated LB.

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translated from the original “texte” of Scripture, Coverdale was ambiguous at precisely the point where one of the main battle-lines of Reformation polemics had been drawn. Was the paramount source of biblical authority in the very words of the original, in a restatement of the original’s meaning, in both, in neither? How did one define the status of translation relative to the original and of paraphrase relative to translation? Despite Jerome’s ambivalence regarding word-for-word translation of Scripture, his emphasis on the linguistic proprieties of Scripture remained influential for sixteenth-century translators. The form taken by this influence is typified by the “interpretandi regula” (rule for translating), described by Jerome with regard to his translations of the Psalms: “ibi non sit damnum in sensu linguae, in quam tranferimus, euphonia et proprietas conseruetur” (106.55 [5:131]).19 This might be translated: “where there is no harm to the sense, the euphony and propriety of the language into which we are translating should be preserved.” It might be paraphrased: sometimes the euphonia and proprietas of Latin must be sacrificed in order to render adequately the sense of the Hebrew, because of the differences between Hebrew and Latin. Following this rule, the biblical translator will render according to the target language’s manner of speaking wherever possible and more literally as the sense demands it. Coverdale’s exemplar (and possibly his mentor), William Tyndale, published in 1528 a provocative defense of English Bible translation, which extends Jerome’s assumptions to a perceived difference between Latin and English vis-à-vis Hebrew: the proprieties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin. The manner of speaking is both one, so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English word for word when thou must seek a compass in the Latin, and yet shalt have much work to translate it well favouredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin, as it hath in the Hebrew.20

The superiority of English derives from its formal similarity with Hebrew: the two languages share a common “manner of speaking.” Although a Latin translation of the Bible might preserve both the “sense and pure understanding” of the Hebrew and the “propriety” (proprietas) and “grace and sweetness” (approximating euphonia) of Latin, it can only do so via a “compass,” a tortuous adaptation to a different manner of speaking. The sixteenth-century translator strikes a compromise between the properties of the two languages, adapting his original to a new manner of speaking even as he also respects the specific weight of the original words.

19 Jerome uses here the Greek euphonia and not a properly Latin word, presumably because the coining of a Latin equivalent would injure the sense. 20 William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 19.

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Coverdale’s translation of Campensis’s paraphrase is typical of this approach. In the opening lines of Psalm 137, for example, Coverdale thoroughly naturalizes his Latin original, while remaining within immediate lexical range of the Latin—at times, indeed, reproducing quite closely the particular features of Latin grammar: 1 2

Iuxta flumina Babylonis quum olim sederemus et fleremus amare, propterea quod in mentem venisset nobis tui o Sion. Et ad salices, quae erant illic in media Babylonis, suspendissemus citharas nostras.21

Translation: 1 2

As we sat somtym by the ryvers of Babylon, and wepte bytterly, because we thought upon the O Syon. And as we had hanged up oure harpes upon the salowe trees, that were in the myddest of Babylon.22

Coverdale provides equivalents for every Latin word, changing the word-order to suit English norms and adding English words to compensate for the differences between a highly inflected and a relatively uninflected language and for that between a language that does not use articles and a language that does. Notably, Coverdale also reproduces Campensis’s subjunctive mood and varying verb tenses: “as we sat … and wepte … and as we had hanged up” for “quum [=cum] sederemus … et fleremus … et suspendissemus.” Such use of the subjunctive in Latin suggests that the Israelites’ pathetic state does not merely precede but conditions the cruel entreaties that follow; Coverdale’s use of as is an economical way of creating the same effect in English. In the second half of first line, Coverdale changes the words entirely in order to render a Latin idiom in English: “in mentem venisset nobis tui” becomes “we thought upon the.” Here, Coverdale does not render the subjunctive mood, presumably because there is no convenient English means to do so; nor does he render the pluperfect tense, perhaps because the Latin verbal phrase venire in mentem (“to come to mind”) is more conducive to completed action than the English verb to think. Coverdale’s translation of these lines, representative of his practice throughout the Psalm, exhibits precisely the range of modes typically used by the Renaissance translator: he abstracts meaning from the peculiarities of the original’s verbal form and expresses it according to the target language’s manner of speaking, though the peculiarities of the Latin remain potentially significant as objects of translation.

Johannes Campensis, Psalmorum omnium iuxta Hebraicum veritatem paraphrastica interpretatio (Paris, 1534). Early English Books Online. Cambridge University Library, http://gateway.proquest.com /openurl?ctx_ver =Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo &rft_ id=xri:eebo:im age:20217 (accessed January 24, 2004). 22 Coverdale, Paraphrasis. 21

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Sixteenth-century biblical paraphrase functions according to entirely different principles. The word paraphrase has two main senses. It can refer to any nonliteral kind of translation: Coverdale’s rendering of in mentem venisset nobis tui as we thought upon the, for example, can be described as paraphrase. In the biblical sphere, the word can also refer more technically to an exegetical genre with procedures and purposes distinct from those of translation. Erasmus defines paraphrase as “non translatio, sed liberius quoddam commentarii perpetui genus, non commutatis personis” (not translation, but a more free genre of uninterrupted commentary with no change of persona).23 One of Erasmus’s most prolific English translators, Nicholas Udall, provides a related definition in his preface to a volume of Erasmus’s New Testament paraphrases translated into English: a paraphrase is a plain setting forth of a text or sentence more at large, with suche circumstaunce of mo and other woordes, as maie make the sentence open, cleare, plain, and familiar, whiche otherwyse should perchaunce seme bare, unfruictefull, hard, straunge, rough, obscure, and derke to bee understanded of any that wer either unlearned or but meanely entreed.24

A paraphrast, such as Campensis, who is also transferring his original from one language to another, nevertheless exceeds the bounds normally set the translator. Whenever a freer version would do “harm to the sense,” the translator renders his original word for word; the paraphrast’s object, however, is consistently something outside the original words. Campensis in his Dedication, for example, refuses categorically to render so that “word should follow word,” despite anticipated criticism from those with an “excessively scrupulous faith” in this kind of version (Aiiv). Unlike the many translators who also defend their work against such overscrupulous critics, however, Campensis does not renounce word-for-word interpretation because of the difference between Hebrew and Latin, but because his aim is to provide a clearer, fuller exposition of the text’s meaning than do the original words themselves. Campensis claims “obscuros locos … explicuisse aliis verbis apertioribus” (to have explained obscure places … in other, clearer words). That which is implicit (obscurus, “hidden,” or “derke to bee understanded”) in the original, and would normally remain implicit in a translation, is made explicit (apertus, “open,” or “cleare, plain, and familiar”) in the paraphrase. As a result, the paraphrast normally renders his original, as Udall puts it, “more at large.” Coverdale’s use, in the prologue to his paraphrasis, of three terms (“plain declaration, exposicion or glose”) to explain the single Latin word represents Qtd. by John J. Bateman, “From Soul to Soul: Persuasion in Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament,” Erasmus in English 15 (1987–1988): 15n48. Translation slightly modified. 24 Erasmus, The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the Newe Testamente, trans. Nicholas Udall et al., 1548, intro. John N. Wall, Jr. (Delmar, NY: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), Biiii***. 23

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both a definition and an example of paraphrase, as does Udall’s flood of nearsynonyms in the passage quoted above. Campensis’s version is twice the length of the Psalm in the Vulgate, eschewing formal identity by its very bulk: 217 words to the Vulgate’s 109—while Coverdale’s English expands to 346 words. But what is it that prevents the original words from providing the “unlearned or but meanly entreed” reader a full exposition of the intended meaning? The translator accommodates his original to a different manner of speaking; Coverdale translates “venire in mentem” as “to think” likely because to think is more familiar in the English of the period than to come to mind. The paraphrast meanwhile is expected to accommodate his author’s words to a new time and circumstance, whether or not he is also accommodating those words to another language. The paraphrast assumes that historical usage complicates interpretation and thus that the very words of the original impede the conveyance of meaning for all but the expert. Through adaptation and amplification of the verbal surface (Udall’s “suche circumstaunce of mo and other woordes”), the paraphrast restores the meaning that historical and cultural distance has taken away. The beautifully reflexive fifth line of Psalm 137, for example, includes a phrase normally rendered in Latin as “terra aliena.” English translators through the King James Version found various way to render the phrase (“strange land,” “foreign land,” “another land besides our own”); the paraphrast does something more. Campensis renders the phrase “terra, que statuas et nihili deos pro vero colit” (Coverdale: “soche a lande as worshyppeth ymages & vayne goddes in steade of god him selfe”), making explicit the post-exilic Jew’s identification of gentiles with idolatry, an association that the sixteenth-century European might fail to make. Paraphrase here claims a restorative function, changing or supplementing words in order to return to the original text the connotations properly belonging to it, connotations which changes in linguistic usage have taken away. Recovering the sense of words as they were used in the author’s time, the paraphrast redeems the vulnerability of language to time. The paraphrast’s freedom from the verbal form of the original and his determination to recreate the meanings assumed by the author invite a more expansive exposition of the sense. But how is this sense to be defined? If paraphrase merely returns to the original that which is proper to it, how does one arrive at the proper meaning of the original? These questions involve the central exegetical issue of the Reformation: does Scripture articulate its own meaning, or must the scriptural text be accompanied by an external, authoritative interpretation? Sixteenth-century “evangelicals” and their more radical successors, the Protestant Reformers, decry the Roman Church’s overlay of interpretive tradition onto the bare text of Scripture (as in the “many greate longe commentaries” Coverdale mentions in his prologue). Moderates and radicals alike seek to reduce the fourfold model of exegesis (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical) to a simpler opposition between literal and allegorical models of reading, and to subordinate allegorical to literal interpretation. Tyndale is representative of the more radical voices:

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Tropological and anagogical are terms of their [i.e., Roman Catholics’] own feigning and altogether unnecessary. For they are but allegories both two of them and this word allegory comprehendeth them both and is enough. (156)25

This reduction of three senses to one is intended to clarify the opposition between what Tyndale and others take to be the two basic kinds of exegesis: literal interpretation, which is Scripture as it “expoundeth itself,” on the one hand, and “similitudes or allegories” which we “borrow … of the scriptures and apply … to our purposes,” on the other (158). Allegory, for Tyndale, is “not the scripture” and “proveth nothing”; rather it is a kind of homiletic procedure made of “free things besides the scripture” and used by expositors to “declare a text or a conclusion of the scripture more expressly, and to root it and grave it in the heart” (158–9). The Church, however, places allegory ahead of the literal sense, in defense of its own, unbiblical traditions—“damnable doctrine,” writes Tyndale (160). How might Coverdale reconcile his translation of a biblical paraphrase, which obviously aims to “declare a text or a conclusion of the scripture more expressly,” with Tyndale’s condemnation of extra-biblical interpretation? Does not Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura contradict the paraphrast’s assumption that “bare” Scripture is obscure? Paraphrase justifies its expansions on the original as restoration rather than addition of sense, spoken in the person of the original author—“non commutatis personis” (with no change of persona), as Erasmus writes; the commentator, on the contrary, elaborates on the original text from his own, extrinsic perspective and addresses the original author in the third person.26 Although paraphrase is “not the scripture,” it presents its difference from the original text as a reconstruction of what is already implicit in the original, obscured by the distance between author and new audience.27 Like translation, though in a different mode, paraphrase thus claims to allow Scripture to speak for itself, in line with Evangelical and Protestant emphases.

Interestingly, Philip August Boeckh makes precisely the same point just over 300 years later in an essay on the “Theory of Hermeneutics,” 1886, trans. John Paul Pritchard, in The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. Kurt Muelller-Vollmer (New York: Continuum, 1988), 139–40. 26 Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chez Erasme (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1981), 1:587. 27 Bernard Roussel, “Exegetical Fictions? Biblical Paraphrases of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” trans. Mark Vessey, in Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament, ed. Hilmar M. Pabel, and Mark Vessey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) makes a related point, emphasizing the “paradoxical position” of the paraphrast: “[t]he authority of the text and the partiality of its interpretation are both affirmed” (66, 73); see also Bateman, “General Introduction,” Paraphrasis D. Erasmi Roterodami in omneis epistolas apostolicas, pt. 3, ed. John J. Bateman, in Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 7/6 (Amsterdam: NorthHolland, 1997), 1–4; Mark Vessey, “Introduction,” in Holy Scripture Speaks, 14–15. 25

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Although Campensis did not advocate radical reform, his paraphrase does illustrate the notion of Scripture as self-explanatory: it draws language and imagery from other places in Scripture, most notably from the Psalter itself, to explain obscure places in individual Psalms—using one part of the biblical book to explain another, exactly as Augustine and after him Luther advised.28 For example, among the curses the speaker of Psalm 137 calls down on himself should he forget Jerusalem (lines 6–8 in the Vulgate, 5–6 in Campensis), one is that, according to the Vulgate version: Adhereat lingua mea faucibus meis (l. 7)

Translation: Let my tonge cleve to my throte29

Campensis expands and interpolates: Opto, ut sic hereat lingua mea ne possim loqui: imo et palato meo affigatur (l. 6)

Translation: I am content that my tongue cleve so, yee and to styck so unto the rofe of my mouth, that I be not able to speake30

The latter part of Campensis’s line (“[lingua mea] palato meo affigatur”) echoes another description of God’s punishment of Israel, at Lamentation 4:4: “adhesit lingua lactantis ad palatum eius in siti” (the tongue of the nursing child sticks to the roof of his mouth for thirst).31 This parallel provides a specific context for Campensis’s expansion. On the one hand, Campensis specifies the implied result of 28 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 168 [3.83]: “Ubi autem [sententiae] apertius ponuntur, ibi discendum est quomodo in locis intellegantur obscuris” (Where, however, [these meanings] are expressed more clearly, it is there to be learned how the same are to be understood in obscure places). Martin Luther, De servo arbitrio. D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Karl Drescher, vol. 18 (Weimar, 1908), 606: “Si uno loco obscura sunt verba, at alio sunt clara” (If the words are obscure in one place, yet in another they are clear). 29 Miles Coverdale, trans. The Psalter or booke of Psalmes both in Latyne and Englyshe. Translated into Englyshe out of the como[n] texte in Latyne, which customably is redde in the churche (London, 1540). Early English Books Online. Cambridge University Library, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver= Z39.882003&res_ id=xri:eebo&rft_ id=xri:eebo:image:2396 (accessed January 24, 2004). 30 Coverdale, Paraphrasis. 31 Compare the image of suckling infants in the final line of the Psalm, discussed below. The Vulgate’s text itself echoes Ps. 21:16 (Vulgate numbering): “lingua mea adhesit faucibus meis.”

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the invoked curse, that the Psalmist is struck dumb; on the other, he gives the image a more naturalistic cast by fixing the Psalmist’s tongue to the roof of his mouth rather than in his throat—with an implicit suggestion that it is thirst that brings the condition on. Consciously or not, Campensis uses the language of Lamentations to explicate Psalm 137, Scripture to explain Scripture.32 Moreover, Campensis likely believed that Jeremiah was the author of both books. Lamentations follows, and is sometimes appended to, the Book of Jeremiah; it was traditionally attributed to that prophet—as was Psalm 137, evoking the same events.33 When Campensis enlarges on this Psalm with reference to Lamentations, he might well have felt that he was using Jeremiah to explain Jeremiah. Sixteenth-century biblical translation bases its claim to veracity, and its claim to authority, on a compromise between abstracted sense and verbal form; sixteenth-century paraphrase on the other hand finds veracity in thoroughgoing revision of verbal form. Campensis uses the license associated with paraphrase to make various kinds of intervention into the texture of Psalm 137: for example, he elaborates on the Psalmist’s usage, as in his expansion on the phrase “terra aliena,” and he provides more naturalistic exposition of the Psalmist’s imagery, as in his expansion on the self-invoked curse. These changes are intended to enhance the intellectual and imagistic intelligibility of the Psalm. Most of Campensis’s interventions, however, have to do with a different order of significance; his most substantive expansions on the text of Psalm 137 concern an interconnected mix of emotions: desperation, hatred, vindictiveness, and longing. Campensis’s reading of the Psalm resembles that of a modern commentator, Mitchell Dahood, who describes the controlling idea of Psalm 137 as the balancing of Israel’s “intense love for Zion” against its “unyielding hatred of her foes.”34 Campensis’s paraphrase amplifies the Psalm’s strong sense of measure-for-measure justice: he accentuates Israel’s suffering and the cruelty of her oppressors, on the one hand, and Israel’s triumphant vengeance against these oppressors, on the other. Campensis’s amplification of the Psalm’s emotional texture affects the Psalm as a whole. Here, in full, are the Vulgate version of Psalm 137 and Campensis’ paraphrase, followed by Coverdale’s translation of both texts: Vulgate 1 Super flumina Babilonis illic sedimus et flevimus, dum recordaremur Sion. 2 In salicibus in medio eius suspendimus organa nostra. 3 Quia illic interrogaverunt nos qui captivos duxerunt nos, verba cantionum. 32 Similarly, Campensis’s interpolation in line five (“terra, que statuas et nihili deos pro vero colit”)—discussed above—recalls the condemnation of idolatry at 1 Corinthians 8:4: “nihil est idolum” (KJV: “an idol is nothing”). 33 The Vulgate heads the Psalm (136 in its numbering) “David Hieremiae.” In his 1534 Bible, Lefèvre calls Psalm 137 a “Pseaulme de David a Jeremie,” and Coverdale, in the Great Bible, attributes it directly to Jeremiah. 34 Mitchell Dahood, Psalms III: 101–150. The Anchor Bible (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), 269.

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Et qui abduxerunt nos hymnum cantate nobis de canticis Sion. Quomodo cantabimus canticum domini in terra aliena. Si oblitus fuero tui Hierusalem, oblivioni detur dextera mea. Adhereat lingua mea faucibus meis, si non meminero tui. Si non praeposuero Hierusalem in principio laeticiae meae. Memor esto domine filiorum Edom in diem Hiersualem. Qui dicunt: exinanite, exinanite usque ad fundamentum in ea. Filia Babilonis misera beatus qui retribuet tibi retributionem tuam, quam retribuisti nobis. Beatus qui tenebit et adlidet parvulos tuos ad petram.

Campensis 1 Iuxta flumina Babylonis quum olim sederemus et fleremus amare, propterea quod in mentem venisset nobis tui o Sion. 2 Et ad salices, quae erant illic in media Babylonis, suspendissemus citharas nostras. 3 Hostes, qui captiuos abduxerat nos, impetrare conabantur a nobis modulos illos, quibus carmina nostra modulari consueueramus: et qui insultabant manifeste nobis, iubebant nos signa laetitiae edere, cantate inquientes nobis unum aliquod ex carminibus Sion. 4 Tanquam cantare nobis libuerit laudes domini in ea terra, quae statuas et nihili deos pro vero colit. 5 Si unquam oblitus fuero tui Hierusalem, et dextera mea officii sui oblita citharam pulsauerit in gratiam alterius quam unius dei mei. 6 Opto, ut sic haereat lingua mea ne possim loqui: imo et palato meo affigatur, si non quoad vixero memor fuero tui, et si non praeposuero laudes ipsius Hierusalme summo gaudio, quod nunquam contingere poterit mihi. 7 Rationem habe domine, et perpende qualia sint, quae designant in nos Idumaei hostes hi nostri, et quam crudeliter tractauerint Hierusalem, quo tempore expugnauerunt eam: quum dicerent mutuo sese adhortantes, vastate, crudeliter vastate, usque ad fundamenta subuertite eam. 8 Filia Babylonis, quae nunc exultas insolenter, misera vere es, quanquam ignoras: felicior enim te veniet, qui talionem reddat tibi, et supplicium de te sumat pro contumelia, quam affecisti nos. 9 Fortunatus veniet victor, qui et te apprehendet, et infantes ab uberibus tuis dependentes illidat in lapides.35 Coverdale’s Vulgate 1 Upon the ryvers of Babilon even there sat we & wepte, whyle we remembred Sion. 2 Upon the willowe trees in the myddes therof hanged we up our instrumentes. 3 They that led us captyve, requyred of us there some dytyes of songes. 4 And they that caryed us awaye (sayd:) syng us a songe of prayse out of the melodies of Sion. 5 Howe shall we synge the Lordes songe in a straunge lande?

This text represents a collation of two editions of Campensis’s paraphrase (1534,

35

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Psalms in the Early Modern World / Ferguson 6 If I forget the O Jerusalm, let my ryght hande be forgotten. 7 Let my tonge cleve to my throte yf I thynke not upon the: 8 If I set not forth Jerusalem in the begynnynge of my gladnesse. 9 Remember (O Lorde) the chyldren of Edom in the daye of Jerusalem: 10 Which saye: Downe wyth it, downe wyth it, even to the foundacion therin. 11 O myserable daughter of Babilon: blessed shall he be, that shall paye the thy rewarde wherwyth thou has recompensed us, 12 Blessed shall he be that shal take and smyte her children agaynst the hard stone. Coverdale’s Campensis 1 As we sat somtym by the ryvers of Babylon, and wepte bytterly, because we thought upon the O Syon. 2 And as we had hanged up oure harpes upon the salowe trees, that were in the myddest of Babylon. 3 Oure enemies that had led us away prysoners wold have had of us those plesant melodies that we were went [sic; wont?] to tune our songe withal: & they that openly dyd laugh us to scorne, commaunded us to shewe some tokens of gladnesse sayng singe us a balet of sion. 4 Even as though it were a pleasure for us to singe the lordes prayses in soche a lande as worshyppeth ymages & vayne goddes in steade of god him selfe. 5 yf I forget the (o hierusalem) at any tyme & yf my ryght hande thynke not upon his deutie, or smyte the harpe for the pleasure of any other but only my god 6 I am content that my tongue cleve so, yee and to styck so unto the rofe of my mouth, that I be not able to speake: yf I remembre the not so longe as I lyve: And yf I preferre not the prayses of Hierusalem, above the greatest joye that ever maye happen unto me. 7 Consydre (o lorde) and marck what maner of thynges they be, that these enemyes of ours the Idumytes do agaynst us, and howe cruelly they intreated Hierusalem, what tyme as they wanne it by laying sege therto, when they spake one unto another amonge them selves, sayeng, Destroye it Destroye it and spare not, downe wyth it even unto the grounde. 8 O thou doughter of Babylon that now art [also? all too?] wanton in thy myrth: verely thy mysery is greate, though thou knowest it not: for there shall come one more blessed then thou, that shall rewarde the soche lyke agayne, and be avenged of the, for the reprofe that thou hast done unto us. 9 There shall come an happye and vyctoryous man, whych shall both laye handes upon the, and shall cast agaynst the stones, the chyldren hangynge by thy brestes.

The Israelites sit and weep at the beginning of the Vulgate version; in Campensis they weep “amare” (Coverdale: “bitterly”). In line three, Campensis attaches a description to those who have carried the Israelites into exile: “hostes” (Coverdale: “oure enemies”). More intrusively still, Campensis adds, in the same line, an entire phrase, describing the oppressive treatment suffered by the Israelites: “insultabant manifeste nobis” (Coverdale: “openly dyd laugh us to scorne”). In the latter, Campensis builds on the version iuxta Hebraicum, which replaces the

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Vulgate’s “abduxerunt nos” with “affligebant nos” (line four in both versions). In line seven, Campensis expands on the presentation of the sack of Jerusalem, interpolating explicit descriptions of the cruelty of Israel’s oppressors: “qualia … quae designant in nos Idumei hostes hi nostri, et quam crudeliter tractauerint Hierusalem” (Coverdale: “what maner of thynges … that these enemyes of ours the Idumytes do agaynst us, and howe cruelly they intreated Hierusalem”).36 In the same line, Campensis inserts “crudeliter” a second time, in recreating the cries of the Edomites at the razing of Jerusalem: “vastate, crudeliter vastate”; Coverdale translates this insertion as indirect speech: “Destroye it Destroye it and spare not.” Throughout, Campensis expands on his original in order to illustrate the terrible cruelty of Israel’s oppressors and the pitiful suffering of the Israelites. Campensis’s amplification of the miserable treatment of the Israelites is complemented by his amplification of the Psalmist’s animosity towards the Israelites’ oppressors. In the last line of the Psalm, the version iuxta Hebraicum changes the Vulgate’s “Filia Babilonis misera” to “Filia Babilonis vastata.” Surprisingly, Campensis follows the Vulgate. This is anomalous in Campensis’s version, both in that Campensis otherwise seconds every substantial change introduced by the version iuxta Hebraicum,37 and in that he forgoes here a verbal figure expressive of the measure-for-measure justice otherwise prominent in his version: “Filia Babilonis vastata” would echo the cries of the triumphant Babylonians at the sack of Jerusalem: “vastate, crudeliter vastate.” As an example of the latter tendency: in the last two lines of the Psalm, Campensis increases the sense of dramatic irony in the Psalmist’s direct address to the Babylonians: “Filia Babylonis, que nunc exultas insolenter, misera vere es, quanquam ignoras” (additions to the Vulgate in italics; Coverdale: “doughter of Babylon that now art … wanton in thy myrth: verely thy mysery is greate, though thou knowest it not”). Campensis also changes the word for the avenger of the Israelites from “beatus” to “felicior” (Coverdale: “more blessed”) and more fully articulates the final statement of measure-for-measure justice: “qui talionem reddat tibi, et supplicium de te sumat pro contumelia, quae affecisti nos.”38 Coverdale’s translation fails in the latter phrase to render adequately Campensis’s expressive alliteration (“talionem reddat tibi,” “supplicium de te sumat”) and parallelism (“supplicium de te sumat pro contumelia”): “that shall rewarde the soche lyke agayne, and be avenged of the, for the reprofe that thou hast done unto us.” 36 Coverdale mistranslates “designant” as “do”; note, however, that “intreat,” corresponding to Campensis’s “tractauerint,” is used in its earlier sense to mean treat, handle (OED, s.v. Entreat v. I.1) and not with the sense of request, plead belonging to the word’s modern incarnation, “entreat.” 37 Campensis accepts the iuxta Hebraicum version’s replacement of the Vulgate’s “organa” with “citharas” in line two and adapts its insertion of “laeti” [joyful] at line four to the phrase “signa laetitiae” [signs of joy] in line three of the paraphrase. 38 The Vulgate is more general—and, incidentally, more troublingly circular: “qui retribuet tibi retributionem tuam, qua[m] retribuisti nobis.”

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Campensis’s finest touch comes in the final and resonant image of Israel’s avenger, who, as the Vulgate renders it, “tenebit et allidet parvulos tuos ad petram” (Coverdale: “shall take and smyte her children agaynst the hard stone”). Campensis’s paraphrase of this line constitutes one his most substantive elaborations in the Psalm: “qui et te apprehendet, et infantes ab uberibus tuis dependentes illidat in lapides.” Coverdale renders the passage literally enough—“whych shall both laye handes upon the, and shall cast agaynst the stones, the chyldren hangynge by thy brestes”—but lumbers through Campensis’s expressive syntax: “ab uberibus tuis dependentes illidat in lapides.” Campensis’s paired prepositional phrases express (1) Israel’s exile from Zion to Babylon, (2) the Babylonians’ anticipated fall from triumph to defeat, and (3) the interdependence of these events. The image of Israel’s avenger tearing Babylonian infants away from their mothers’ breasts and smashing their heads against stones might seem unforgivably violent; and yet the Psalm’s portrayal of the exiled Israelites’ intense misery lends this terrifying vengeance an aspect of perfect justice. Both Campensis and Coverdale reinforce the larger, thematic coordination of suffering and vindication, but only Campensis succeeds in expressing this complex of despair, hope, resentment, and revenge in a single, compact verbal figure. This heightened sense of measure-for-measure justice, familiar from biblical literature in general, plays an important role in Campensis’s reconstruction of Psalm 137. Through his emphasis on the text’s emotional resonance, Campensis amplifies the Psalm’s affective integrity. Campensis introduces a related change into his paraphrase by reducing the number of lines in the Psalm from twelve to nine. In his Dedication, Campensis asserts that although his version does not follow the original “word for word,” its “verses follow the verses exactly according to the most exact division of the Hebrews, which (verses) are confused in many places in the vulgar edition” (Aii).39 This attention to verbal form is anomalous in Campensis’s paraphrase—and in paraphrase generally—but complements his accentuation of the affective unity of Psalm 137. In the Vulgate text, the Psalm falls into three parts of four lines each: the first part evokes the misery of the exiled Israelites; the second reflects on Israel’s responsibilities to the Lord; the last folds together the cruelty of Israel’s oppressors with their eventual punishment. It is perhaps only by accident that Campensis’s reduction of each part from four to three lines clarifies these divisions—the tripartite structure within each part reflecting the tripartite structure of the whole. In his Dedication and in his paraphrase of Psalm 137, Campensis suggests that paraphrase restores meanings obscured by the temporal and cultural distance between original and new audience; the implication is that, as far as the new audience is concerned, paraphrase might convey the original’s meaning more fully than does the original itself. There is evidence that Campensis’s version of the Psalms

39 Modern scholarship confirms Campensis’s line divisions in Psalm 137. See, e.g., Dahood, Psalms III: 101–150, 268.

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seemed to some to threaten the authority of the Vulgate text.40 In his Dedication, Campensis attempts to deflect this charge: he reminds his readers that his version is a paraphrase, not a translation, and thus makes no claims upon ecclesiastic authority (Aiiv). Campensis acknowledges his readers’ familiarity with available Latin versions of the Psalter and uses the Dedication to raise the issues involved in choosing between them. He makes, for instance, the oft-repeated points that the received Latin version of the Psalter is clearly not the work of Jerome and that it is translated from the Septuagint version rather than “ex ipsis Hebraicis fontibus” (Aii–Aiiv). Echoing Jerome himself, Campensis dismisses the apocryphal account of the seventy translators arriving, by inspiration, at identical Greek versions. Campensis notes further that there exists a version that can be ascribed to Jerome with certainty, a version moreover made “iuxta Hebraicam veritatem” (Aiiv). Why the latter is not received by the Church in place of the inferior version made from the Greek Campensis does not understand. In his paraphrase, Campensis acted on his preference for the version iuxta Hebraicum by following all but one of its divergences from the Vulgate text. Campensis’s paraphrase took part in the scholarly comparison of the received Latin versions of the Psalter; in this, it is analogous to Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples’ Quincuplex Psalterium (1513), which set out the four received Latin Psalters followed by Lefèvre’s own version reconciling the differences between them (“psalterium unum conciliavimus”).41 Coverdale published his English paraphrase in very different circumstances. In his Dedication Campensis notes that, in keeping with the Roman church’s prohibition, he has not produced a vernacular version of the Psalter, though he cites the stated intention of Clement VII to do so—prior to the sack of Rome—and voices his hope that the “Ecclesiae consensus” will see fit to return to this project in the future (Aiiv–Aiii). Coverdale, meanwhile, published his version just as Henry VIII broke with Rome and began to permit vernacular translation of Scripture, a signal token of defiance to Roman ecclesiastic control. As happened with Erasmus’ writings, translation from Latin into the vernacular turned a moderate voice radical.42 When conservative scholastics preached public sermons in London, Vocht, 3:163–4. Lefèvre d’Etaples, Quincuplex Psalterium, ed. Guy Bedouelle (Geneva: Droz,

40 41

1979), 233. 42 By 1522, William Roye’s English translation of the Paraclesis, An exhortation to the diligent studye of scripture, was an instrument of Lutheran propaganda. Schuster calls Roye’s translation of the Paraclesis “the first serious attempt by English reformers to exploit the powerful pen of Erasmus in the protestant cause,” commenting further that “[r]eading the Paraclesis anew in the climate created by the distribution and destruction of Tyndale’s New Testament invites an access of striking ironies and reverberations unforeseen by its author in 1516” (1192). On Roye’s expansions of Erasmus’s Latin, see L.A. Schuster, “Thomas More’s Polemical Career, 1523–33,” in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More 8/3, ed. L.A. Schuster, R.C. Marius, J.P. Lusardi, and R.J. Schoeck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 1193–4; see also D.P. Parker, ed. An exhortation to the diligent studye of scripture and An exposition in to the seventh chaptre of the pistle to the Corinthians, trans. William Roye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 28–36.

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Brussels, and Paris against Erasmus’ substitution of sermo for verbum at Jn. 1:1, Erasmus responded in the 1520 Apologia de ‘In principio erat sermo’ that “Nunc evulgant, quod erat inter eruditos disputandum, et evulgant apud coriaros” (Now they vulgarize what was meant to be disputed among scholars, they vulgarize it among tanners); “Nos illa doctis scripsimus, non populo” (I wrote those things for the learned, not for the people).43 Coverdale did precisely that about which Erasmus was complaining: he vulgarized a text intended by its author for learned audiences. The resulting version went beyond biblical paraphrase’s indirect claims to authority. While Campensis published his version as a supplement to available Latin versions, Coverdale’s paraphrase was one of the very first Psalters made available in English in the sixteenth century. Coverdale is ambiguous in his prologue about whether it is the original or a translation that is to be authorized as the biblical “texte”; although Coverdale assigns his paraphrase a secondary role in relation to this “texte,” the fact is that, in 1534, hardly any other English text of the Psalms was available to most of what he calls his “naturall countre.” What is the meaning of Coverdale’s stated intention that his paraphrase should help the reader “both understonde the texte more easely … and for the textes sake love it the better,” when his paraphrase would represent the only “texte” available at publication? How can a version be secondary when it practically stands alone? In the stately phrasing of another era, B.F. Wescott has written that Coverdale (unlike Tyndale) “was a man born to receive rather than create impressions” (55n.). Such estimations of Coverdale’s work do not adequately reflect the multiple and often ambiguous conceptions of original and version, word and meaning, current in Reformation treatments of the Bible. Coverdale concedes that it was his ignorance of the biblical languages that brought him to translate a Latin intermediary for his first English Psalter, and yet there is an important strain of Reformation exegesis that describes paraphrastic overgoing of the original words as allowing for an exposition of meaning fuller than that provided by the original text. The context in which Coverdale published his English Psalter further accentuated the work’s potential claim to authority. This is not to suggest that Coverdale imagined that his paraphrase could make an exclusive claim to biblical authority. On the contrary, his use of a paraphrase for his first Psalter and his series of Psalters taken as a group suggest, despite Protestant promotion of the unique authority of sola scriptura, that such claims can only ever be plural and complex.

LB 9:112F, 112E; qtd. in Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 156 n. 43. Boyle points out the “curious contradiction” between Erasmus’ commitment to the vernacular in the Paraclesis and the position he takes in 1520, in the Apologia (7). 43

Chapter 6

Rightful Penitence and the Publication of Wyatt’s Certayne Psalmes 1

Clare Costley King’oo

Wyatt in 1541 In January 1541 Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, charged Sir Thomas Wyatt with treason, reviving an accusation that he had first made against the courtier three years previously.2 Bonner’s chief allegation was that, while serving as Henry VIII’s ambassador to the Spanish court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, Wyatt had aligned himself with cardinal Reginald Pole (and the larger “papist” community) in opposition to the English king.3 Imprisoned in the Tower of London, Wyatt defended himself from Bonner’s charge with characteristic evasiveness: “[Y]e bring in now that I shulde have this intelligens with Pole by cawse of our opinions that are lyke[,] and that I am papyste,” he wrote, adding equivocally, “I thynke I shulde have much more adoe with a greate sorte in Inglande to purge my selffe of suspecte of a Lutherane then of a Papyst.”4 By addressing the issue of what others might claim about his beliefs rather than that of his own convictions, Wyatt managed to respond to Bonner’s accusation without either condemning Pole or associating himself categorically with any one religious party. Wyatt remained in the Tower from mid January to the end of March 1541, and it was probably at around the time of his imprisonment that he composed his verse paraphrase of the seven Penitential Psalms.5 This lengthy poem is based 1 I am grateful for the support of a Northeast Modern Language Association Summer Fellowship, which enabled me to complete crucial archival research for this project. 2 Bonner first issued a complaint against Wyatt in September 1538. Wyatt’s friend Thomas Cromwell suppressed the accusation, but it came to light again after Cromwell’s execution in July 1540. 3 Pole was descended from the Plantagenet line, and thus held a claim to the English throne; his elder brother, Henry Pole, Lord Montague, was beheaded in December 1538 for treasonous conspiracy. 4 Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963), 195–6. 5 Most scholars believe that Wyatt wrote his paraphrase before, during, or after his imprisonment in 1541, though some argue that he composed it in response to an earlier imprisonment in 1536. For overviews of the dating discussion, see Ellen St. Sure Lifschutz, David’s Lyre and the Renaissance Lyric: A Critical Consideration of the Psalms of Wyatt,

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on a variety of sources, including, most notably, I sette salmi de la penitentia di David, an Italian prose paraphrase by Pietro Aretino, first published in Venice in 1534. From Aretino’s work Wyatt adapted not just the seven psalms, but also a series of seven narrative prologues that inscribe those psalms into the story, recounted in 2 Samuel 11–12, of King David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba and subsequent murder of Bathsheba’s husband Uriah. These prologues provide a unifying dramatic framework for the psalms, transforming them into seven prayers composed by David as he repents for his sins.6 Modern critics have endeavored to find a veiled polemic in Wyatt’s reworking of Aretino, examining the relationship between the Italian source and the autograph text of Wyatt’s paraphrase in the Egerton manuscript for clues to the English poet’s purposes.7 However, the poem has proven as resistant to these readings as has Wyatt’s evasive statement of defense. Scholars generally concur that Wyatt relies more heavily on Aretino’s text at the opening of his poem (that is, in the first two or three prologues and psalms) than at the end.8 But there is little agreement about why Wyatt chose Aretino as a source or what he intended when he translated and reshaped the Italian paraphrase.9 Approaches to these questions range from the biographical to the political to the religious. Biographical critics liken the psalmist of the English paraphrase to Wyatt himself, arguing that David’s situation mirrors Wyatt’s in 1541. Thus both Alistair Fox and Raymond Southall, for example, suggest that David’s repentance for his adulterous liaison with Bathsheba in the paraphrase reflects the fact that, after his trial in 1541, Wyatt was charged by Henry VIII to abandon his longstanding relationship with his mistress, Elizabeth Darrell, and return to his wife, Elizabeth Brooke.10

Surrey, and the Sidneys (University of California, Berkeley: PhD Diss., 1980), 108–10; R.A. Rebholz, ed., Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 455; Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 520–21n1. 6 Lynn Staley notes that Wyatt’s prologues “supply the details of the drama of conversion that the Penitential Psalms themselves were thought to epitomize”; see “The Penitential Psalms: Conversion and the Limits of Lordship,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 254. 7 Wyatt’s paraphrase is written in his own hand in The British Library MS Egerton 2711, fols 86r–98v. 8 Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey, and Early Tudor Poetry (London: Longman, 1998), 161; Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 44. 9 Raymond B. Waddington, “Pietro Aretino, Religious Writer,” Renaissance Studies 20, no. 3 (June 2006): 291. 10 Alistair Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 280–85; Raymond Southall, The Courtly Maker: An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and His Contemporaries (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), 168.

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Taking an alternate tack, political readers assert that Wyatt’s engagement with the Penitential Psalms was rather more complex than a strict identification of the figure of David with the poet alone might allow. Stephen Greenblatt, for instance, proposes that David’s sexual aggression in Wyatt’s work was meant to “glance, slyly and indirectly, at Henry VIII”; Ellen Lifschutz agrees, positing that Wyatt intended his version of the seven psalms to function as “a moral persuasion specifically, though not explicitly, addressed to Henry VIII”; and Lynn Staley contends that “Wyatt’s careful handling of the story of King David … suggests ways in which the Penitential Psalms could be used to analyze the nature of secular sovereignty.”11 As evidence for their arguments, Greenblatt, Lifschutz, and Staley all quote from Wyatt’s contemporary Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who, in a sonnet published on the occasion of Wyatt’s death, appears to explain the paraphrase once and for all by situating it in the tradition of specula principum. In Wyatt’s psalms, Surrey posits, “Rewlers may se in a myrrour clere / The bitter frewte of false concupicense.”12 The third class of interpreters looks to sixteenth-century religious controversy to explain Wyatt’s objectives. The consensus generally holds that in his paraphrase Wyatt takes the opportunity to advance his own evangelical (and, as some scholars believe, specifically Lutheran) convictions.13 Several critics argue in particular that Wyatt transforms the ideal “Catholic” penitent of I sette salmi into an exemplar for “Protestant” repentance, thereby subtly promoting the furtherance of the Reformation at a time when the Henrician Church mandated a more conservative theology. According to R.A. Rebholz, for instance, Aretino’s psalmist—who is “caught up” in a “continuing cycle of sin and forgiveness and sin”—is refashioned by Wyatt into “the type of the Reformed Christian who experiences the genuinely profound, almost despairing sense of his sinfulness only once before the critical act of believing that God forgives him.”14 Likewise, Elizabeth Heale maintains that in 11 Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 121; Lifschutz, David’s Lyre, 143; Staley, “The Penitential Psalms,” 253. James Simpson complicates the debate: “Wyatt may … be registering protest against Henry …, but the evangelical form of the protest equally neutralizes it, since evangelical theology, in Henrician England at any rate, played directly into royal interests.” See The Oxford English Literary History. Volume 2. 1350–1547. Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 328. 12 Surrey’s poem was later copied into the Egerton manuscript: see The British Library MS Egerton 2711, fol. 85v. 13 For the theory that Wyatt uses David as an instrument to proclaim his own Protestant faith, see H.A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959), 217; Muir, Life and Letters, 256; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 237. For the idea that Wyatt’s beliefs are specifically Lutheran, see Fox, Politics and Literature, 282; Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 225. 14 Rebholz, Sir Thomas Wyatt, 454.

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Wyatt’s version of the Penitential Psalms “Aretino’s thoroughly Roman Catholic conversion narrative becomes a distinctly, but cautiously, Reformed one.”15 But the consensus about Wyatt’s religious purposes in his adaptation of Aretino is not without its detractors. Raymond Waddington, for example, complicates the picture by challenging the very assumption that Aretino’s paraphrase represents orthodox Roman Catholicism in the first place.16 And Greg Walker argues that far from advocating a subversive form of Protestantism in his paraphrase, Wyatt carefully and deliberately abides by the theological positions laid out in the authorized documents of Henry VIII’s church—such as the Ten Articles of 1536 and The Bishops’ Book of 1537.17 In sum, it has been virtually impossible to provide an authoritative answer to the principal question that Wyatt scholars have asked for decades: what did the poet hope to convey when he adapted Aretino’s paraphrase? It would seem, in fact, that Wyatt’s purposes must remain a mystery. Yet if the question of what Wyatt intended cannot be solved, there is perhaps another question that can be—namely, what kind of work could Wyatt’s rendition of Aretino be expected to execute (or what kind of effect could Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms be relied upon to produce), and why?18 This question is especially intriguing because the Penitential Psalms themselves occupied a highly ambiguous symbolic space in Reformation-era England. The Penitential Psalms (those numbered 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, and 142 in the Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate Bibles) were selected out of the Psalter in the patristic period, and by the tenth century were being used in rites of public penance.19 When penance was established as a sacrament in the twelfth century, the Heale, Wyatt, 160, who adds: “[A] continual stress on merit in the Italian original is replaced by an insistent emphasis on the primacy of grace.” See also ibid., 170. In addition, Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 115, contends that “Wyatt captures the authentic voice of early English Protestantism, its mingled humility and militancy, its desire to submit without intermediary directly to God’s will, and above all its inwardness.” 16 Pointing out that Aretino cultivated lasting friendships with several reformers and apostates, Waddington, “Pietro Aretino,” 291–2, suggests that it may in fact have been the Italian writer’s “scripture-based, Christ-centered religion with its emphasis on justification by faith” that led Wyatt to choose I sette salmi as a source. 17 See Walker, Writing Under Tyranny, 375: “We misunderstand Wyatt’s position … if we see his Penitential Psalms as motivated by a Lutheran doctrinal impulse at odds with the official position of the Henrician church. In doctrine his text was carefully conformist, following the contours of the official statements of faith even where they were implicitly contradictory.” 18 Waddington, “Pietro Aretino,” 284, makes a similar point about Aretino’s religious writings: “authorial intention and reception are two distinct issues; the probably insoluble question of Aretino’s own ‘sincerity’ perhaps is less important than the question of how his writings were understood.” 19 In the Masoretic Text (the standard Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible), and thus in most Protestant Bibles, the same psalms are numbered 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143. 15

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seven psalms were incorporated into its rituals. In addition, they were a common feature in late-medieval Books of Hours (or primers), and were recited regularly, along with the Litany and the Office for the Dead, as prayers for the souls of the deceased. However, in the sixteenth century both the sacrament of penance and prayers for the dead came under intense scrutiny by evangelical reformers, who eventually dismissed them (along with the entire devotional structure relating to purgatory and good works) as superstitious rites. From the perspective of emerging Protestantism, therefore, the Penitential Psalms no longer possessed any sacramental or liturgical justification. Yet these seven texts, which had been connected to the rituals of the Roman Church for so many centuries, were not immediately devalued in evangelical culture. Rather, the Penitential Psalms took on added significance in reformist circles, where penance was undergoing radical revision. For Martin Luther in particular it became vital to approach the Penitential Psalms with new eyes. Thus in the first publication ever to bear his name, a verse-by-verse commentary on the seven psalms composed in 1517 and revised in 1525, Luther used the wellknown texts to redefine the meaning and practice of penance.20 Disparaging the ecclesiastical sacrament of penance as an attempt to earn God’s redemption, Luther argued that true repentance involved simply receiving the free gift of God’s grace: it was to be understood as an internal and unseen alteration of the soul rather than an external and visible activity.21 Moreover, following Luther, early evangelical reformers tried to find new ways of using the Penitential Psalms. Thus in 1529 George Joye retained the seven psalms in a primer that he edited, purposefully divorcing them from their established liturgical contexts by leaving out the Litany and the Office for the Dead. By the spring of the following year, this revolutionary decision had been condemned by an assembly of more conservative clerics: “He puttith in the booke of the vii. Psalmes,” the assembly complained of Joye, “but he leveth owt the 20 Luther’s commentary is titled Die sieben Bußpsalmen. For the German text of the 1517 edition, see Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ser. 1 (Schriften). 73 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–), 1:158–220; there is no published English translation. The text of the 1525 edition is available in German in ibid., 18:479–530, and in English in Martin Luther, Luther’s Works. The American Edition, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann. 55 vols (St. Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955–1986), 14:137–205. 21 In turn, Sir Thomas More summarily dismissed the Lutheran position on penance. See, for example, The confutacyon of Tyndales answere (London: W. Rastell, 1532), STC 18079, sig. Aa.iii.v: “And who shall lesse set by hys [Christ’s] commaundementes / then they that vppon the boldenesse of onely fayth, set all good workes at nought, & lytell force the daunger of theyr euyll dedes, vppon the boldenesse that a bare fayth and sleyght repentaunce wythout shryfte or penaunce suffyseth.” Note that titles and publication details from early printed works largely follow the STC listings, though abbreviations have been expanded and a small number of corrections have been made silently. Abbreviations have also been expanded in quotations from early works.

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whole latanie [Litany], by which apperith his erronyous opynyon agenst praying to saints.”22 In what way, then, could Wyatt’s version of these contested psalms be put to service in mid-sixteenth-century England? Wyatt in 1549 With the exception of a few short pieces included in the miscellany The Court of Venus, none of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poems made it to press before the poet’s death in 1542.23 In fact, Wyatt’s paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms, issued posthumously at the end of 1549 with the title Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid, was the first of his works to circulate independently in print.24 And the publication details of this printed edition, I believe, suggest that Wyatt’s rendering of the Penitential Psalms was picked up in the mid sixteenth century by (and for) the reformist agenda. The slim volume of 1549 was dedicated to Lord William Parr, marquis of Northampton, printed in London by Thomas Raynald, and apparently edited by the man whose name is given along with Raynald’s in the imprint of the text as “John Harryngton” (Figures 6.1 and 6.2).25 I identify this last individual, who also signed the dedication to Parr, as John Harington of Stepney—poet, anthologist, and father of the Elizabethan courtier and translator, Sir John Harington of Kelston.26 But the issue I want to underline here is that all three of the key figures 22 David Wilkins, ed., Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae, a Synodo Verolamiensi A. D. CCCCXLVI ad Londinensem A. D. MDCCXVII. Accedunt constitutiones et alia ad historiam Ecclesiae Anglicanae spectantia. 4 vols (London: Gosling, 1737), 3:733. 23 The title The Court of Venus refers to a collection of three separate volumes of verse published between 1537 and 1564. 24 Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid, commonlye called thee .vii. penytentiall psalmes, drawen into englyshe meter by sir Thomas Wyat knyght (London: T. Raynald and [i.e., for] J. Harryngton, 1549), STC 2726. There are only three surviving copies of Wyatt’s Certayne psalmes, two in Cambridge and one in Dublin. Signature numbers for this publication will be given in parentheses. 25 Ebook users please note: the reproduction, transmission, display, rental, lending, or storage (in any retrieval system or server or database or electronic storage media) of any of the three images in this chapter is prohibited without the consent of the copyright holders, except for the end user’s personal non-commercial use. 26 The person whose name is recorded as “John Harryngton” in the imprint (on the title page) and “John Harrington” in the dedication to Parr is almost certainly John Harington of Stepney, and not a bookseller with the same name, as some scholars have posited. The link between Certayne psalmes and John Harington of Stepney was first made a century ago: see A.K. Foxwell, A Study of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poems (London: University of London Press, 1911), 1. For the more recent (but very likely erroneous) bookseller suggestion, see Ruth Hughey, ed., The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry. 2 vols (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960), 1:45, esp. n59; Ruth Hughey, John Harington of Stepney:

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Title page. Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid (London: T. Raynald and [i.e., for] J. Harryngton, 1549), STC 2726. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.54.156.

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From the dedication to Lord William Parr. Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid (London: T. Raynald and [i.e., for] J. Harryngton, 1549), STC 2726. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.54.156. Sig. A.i.v.

associated with Wyatt’s Certayne psalmes were linked with evangelicalism in the mid sixteenth century. The editor (Harington) and the dedicatee (Parr) in particular left some fairly clear traces of their religious allegiances and objectives. Like Wyatt, both Harington and Parr were familiar with the precarious nature of Tudor politics. And, again like Wyatt, both were subject to periods of imprisonment. Yet neither of them shared Wyatt’s taste for, or skills in, evasion or equivocation when it came to spiritual matters.27 As a young man, John Harington studied music at court, and attracted Tudor Gentleman; His Life and Works (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 37–8, and 228n213; Richard Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 6, and 89n7. I owe thanks to Steven K. Galbraith of the Folger Shakespeare Library for sharing his invaluable expertise with me while I endeavored to resolve this conundrum. 27 My biographies of Harington and Parr are based principally on Hughey, John Harington, 3–81, and Susan E. James, Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 71–86, 343–402. See also the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,

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the notice of Henry VIII by writing an anti-monastic hymn, which the king is said to have sung frequently.28 He was incarcerated twice in his life—the first time during the protectorate of the duke of Somerset (I will return to this in a moment), and the second at the beginning of the reign of Mary, when he was suspected of collaborating in the abortive revolt against the queen led by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, the poet’s son. He also attended the princess Elizabeth while she was confined in the Tower, and remained on good terms with her after she ascended the throne.29 In the late 1540s, he benefited greatly from the dissolution of the monasteries, coming into possession of former conventual properties in Somerset, Berkshire, and Gloucestershire.30 William Parr’s affiliations with the new religion were perhaps even stronger than Harington’s. Having taken a pivotal role in the suppression of the 1536 “Catholic” uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, the younger brother of Queen Katherine Parr made a name for himself as a leading evangelical during Edward’s reign.31 Like Harington, he was imprisoned in the Tower by Mary on two occasions—in 1553, for playing a key part in the attempt to secure the crown for Protestant Lady Jane Grey, and again in 1554, when he, too, was accused of involvement in the Wyatt fiasco. In 1549, both Parr and Harington were caught up in the tumultuous business of evangelical reform. Both men, indeed, began the year accused of conspiring with the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour against the Lord Protector Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset.32 Parr narrowly avoided imprisonment on this occasion, but Harington was confined in the Tower and questioned heavily about his role in several schemes associated with radical evangelicalism, including an alleged plot to marry Edward VI to Lady Jane Grey. Throughout his incarceration, which lasted until the spring of 1550, Harington seems to have engaged himself in a range of scholarly and

online edition (henceforth ODNB), s.v. “Harington, John (ca. 1517–1582)” (by Jason ScottWarren); “Parr, William, marquess of Northampton (1513–1571)” (by Susan E. James). 28 Hughey, John Harington, 15–16. Harington probably arrived at the court of Henry VIII in 1538. 29 Elizabeth was godmother to his son, John Harington of Kelston, born to his second wife, Isabell Markham. 30 He acquired these dissolved monastic lands in 1547, partly as a result of his first marriage to Ethelreda Malte (a natural daughter of Henry VIII). The estate of Kelston in Somerset, a former rectory, eventually became the principal country estate of the Harington family. 31 The Pilgrimage of Grace was a militant uprising in the Northern counties, in protest of Henry VIII’s various attempts to break from Rome. It was suppressed in the early months of 1537, and by the summer of that same year many of its leaders had been executed. 32 Harington had entered the service of Sir Thomas Seymour by the spring of 1546. After the death of Henry VIII, Seymour became Lord Admiral (and fourth husband to Katherine Parr).

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poetic pursuits, and he must have edited Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms at this time.33 He produced an English version of Cicero’s De amicitia (On Friendship). This text was published after his release with a dedication to Katherine Willoughby, duchess of Suffolk—a former intimate of Katherine Parr and a generous patron of evangelical publications.34 It may also have been during his imprisonment that Harington prepared for print a set of metrical psalm translations by the reformist zealot William Hunnis; he had this work published in 1550.35 While Harington was spending the year reading, writing, and undergoing interrogation in prison, Parr was keeping himself equally busy, if not more so, on behalf of further reform. In the summer of 1549, he made an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to put down the Norfolk rising led by Robert Kett.36 And in the autumn, he became involved in the coup against Somerset staged by John Dudley, earl of Warwick, which put effective political control of England in Warwick’s hands and led to a greater consolidation of evangelicalism in the nation. He also attended a series of disputations about the sacrament of the Eucharist, where he openly supported the evangelical denial of the Real Presence. (When a similar set of disputations was arranged in 1551, Parr was present again, this time with Harington).37 There is, then, plenty of evidence to suggest that both the editor and the dedicatee of Certayne psalmes backed the advancement of the Reformation in the mid sixteenth century. And it therefore comes as no surprise to find that the book’s printer was also connected with reformist activities. Little is known of Raynald outside of his achievements in the London book market. But these achievements are telling nonetheless. Over the course of four or five years, beginning in 1548 and ending at around the time of Mary’s accession to the throne, the printer issued works by a host of famous evangelicals, including John Bale, Thomas Becon, George Joye, William Tyndale, and Ulrich Zwingli.38 33 Harington does not appear to have been hampered in his literary efforts by his stay in the Tower. 34 The booke of freendeship of Marcus Tullie Cicero (London: T. Berthelette, 1550), STC 5276. For more information about the duchess of Suffolk, see ODNB, s.v. “Bertie, Katherine, duchess of Suffolk (1519–1580)” (by Susan Wabuda). 35 Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid, and drawen furth into Englysh meter by William Hunnis (London: The Wydowe of J. Herforde for J. Harrington, 1550), STC 2727. 36 Although Kett’s revolt of 1549 was largely focused around the issue of enclosures, it began as an act of religious rebellion when the people of Wymondham, Norfolk, broke the law to celebrate the life of Saint Thomas Becket. 37 For the religious disputations of 1549 and 1551, see Hughey, John Harington, 39. According to James, Kateryn Parr, 370, William Parr’s convictions were “a mix of humanist philosophy, Lutheran dogma, and Calvinist embroidery.” 38 There seem to have been two printers named Thomas Raynald, one probably the son and apprentice of the other. Raynald the elder started printing in 1539 and produced mostly medical texts, while Raynald the younger began work in 1548 and favored religious literature. For more details, see ODNB, s.v. “Raynald, Thomas (fl. 1539–1552?)” (by I. Gadd). I assume it was Raynald the younger who published Wyatt in 1549.

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While the biographies and achievements of the three men involved in the publication of Wyatt’s paraphrase situate the text within an evangelical milieu, so too does the timing of its release. According to its colophon, Certayne psalmes was published on “[t]he last day of December” in 1549. This means that Wyatt’s paraphrase would have appeared on the book market during a period of rapidly escalating political and religious turmoil.39 Indeed, it would have surfaced less than a week after Warwick’s new Council, afraid of losing ground to religious conservatives (and/or their sympathizers), had ordered the bishops in England to confiscate and destroy all Latin service books, along with any other books, such as breviaries or primers, that might have hindered the use of the Book of Common Prayer. The Council’s order was issued on December 25, 1549. It was encoded and extended in the January 1550 Act for the Defacing of Images, which called upon local officials to oversee the destruction of all books and images affiliated with the Papal Church. Given the allegiances of those involved in the publication of Wyatt’s paraphrase, it is likely that the emergence of Certayne psalmes was timed specifically to add support to this aggressive anti-traditionalist campaign. The specific date for the publication and marketing of Wyatt’s paraphrase is worth underscoring because the timing has been both misrepresented and misunderstood in recent criticism. Greg Walker, for instance, gives the publication date as “the first day of September” instead of “[t]he last day of December”—a small error with potentially big consequences when one is endeavoring to interpret the work in relation to the swiftly changing political arena at the mid-point of the sixteenth century.40 And Brian Cummings argues that the publication of Certayne psalmes “indicates a new phase in Tudor religious polity, in which the Lord Protector Seymour attempted to entrench the Edwardian evangelical faith with reams of printed evangelical piety.”41 But this suggestion unfortunately misses the fact that Wyatt’s paraphrase appeared after Seymour had been deposed in October 1549. The publication is thus far more likely to have been associated with Warwick’s attempts to secure religious and political authority in the nation. Lastly, a couple of significant textual details also speak to the publication’s links with the cause of religious reform. First, the extended title of the printed volume boasts that Wyatt’s paraphrase will prove “very pleasaunt & profettable”— to, specifically, “the godly reader” (Figure 6.1).42 Second, in his dedicatory letter, Beth Quitslund summarizes the turbulence of late 1549 as “a political crisis that looked to some at the time like an ecclesiastical one”; see The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 100. 40 Walker, Writing Under Tyranny, 522n16. 41 Cummings, Literary Culture, 228. 42 Here it is also worth noting that the title given to Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms seems to echo that given to the first edition of Thomas Sternhold’s psalms, most likely published in 1548: Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid, and drawen into Englishe metre by Thomas Sternhold (London: [N. Hill for] E. Whitchurche, [1548?]), STC 2419. Quitslund remarks upon this connection in The Reformation in Rhyme, 73. A new, enlarged, 39

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Harington celebrates Parr’s support for the project using a distinctly reformist vernacular.43 After extolling both the martial and the scholarly virtues of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Harington writes: “I thought that I could not find a more worthy patron for soch a mans worke then your Lordship, whom I haue allwayes knowen to be of so godlye a zeale, to thee furtheraunce of gods holy & a secret gospel” (A.ii.v). With evangelical (and perhaps also evangelistic) gusto, then, Harington confirms the marquis of Northampton’s commitment to the Reformation, while also implicitly associating Wyatt, and Wyatt’s poem, with that commitment. But if the publication of Certayne psalmes was meant to add weight to the expansion of the new religion in the winter of 1549–1550, how was it supposed to do so? What qualities, in other words, might three Edwardian evangelical reformers— Harington, Parr, and Raynald—have found valuable in Wyatt’s paraphrase? The answer may lie in what they chose to emphasize: a story of conversion not merely from sinner to saint, but from one kind of penitent to another. “Ryghtfull Penitence” As I have mentioned, for his English verse paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms Wyatt borrowed from Aretino’s prose version a number of narrative prologues that dramatize the customary link between the seven psalms and David’s vita. This means that there are two voices in Wyatt’s poem, the first belonging to the narrator of the prologues, and the second to the psalmist, David. These voices are clearly differentiated from one another in Wyatt’s autograph text: the narrator uses stanzaic ottava rima and speaks predominantly (though not entirely) in the third person, while David expresses himself in terza rima and speaks in the first person.44 But in the 1549 printed edition the narrator’s voice is differentiated from the psalmist’s in an additional, and more immediately noticeable, way: for the prologues, which are left untitled in the Egerton manuscript, are now furnished with headings attributing them to “The Auctor” (see, for example, Figure 6.3).45

edition of Sternhold’s psalms was released at around the same time as Wyatt’s paraphrase: Al such psalmes of Dauid as Thomas Sternehold … didde in his life time draw into English metre (London: E. Whitchurche, 1549), STC 2420; the publication date in the colophon of this edition is December 24, 1549. 43 Whether or not Parr actually provided any kind of backing for the 1549 publication remains open to question. The writers of early modern dedications often honored their “patrons” with more hope than assurance. The complexities of the literary patronage system in the period are summarized in Jason Scott-Warren, Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 49–58. 44 Zim, English Metrical Psalms, 47. 45 Ibid., 47, 73, and 275n21. The first prologue in Certayne psalmes is titled “The Prologe of the Auctor,” while each of the subsequent six prologues is labeled “The Auctor.”

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Prologue to the second Penitential Psalm. Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid (London: T. Raynald and [i.e., for] J. Harryngton, 1549), STC 2726. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.54.156. Sig. B.iii.r.

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The import of these headings is made manifest when the printed text is compared not just to the Egerton manuscript, but also to the only two remaining handwritten copies of Wyatt’s paraphrase dating from the mid sixteenth century (both apparently derived from a combination of the Egerton manuscript and Certayne psalmes).46 The first of these copies appears in the Arundel Harington manuscript, a verse collection housed at Arundel Castle.47 As in Wyatt’s autograph version, its prologues are not given any titles at all. The second copy is found in a pocket-sized manuscript dedicated to Wyatt’s paraphrase alone, now part of the Royal Collection at The British Library.48 In this second copy each prologue is titled either “The Prologue” or “The prologue,” except for the first, which is labeled “The prologue to the sixst [sic] psalme of Dauid,” and the fifth, which has no title at all. In sum, while the manuscript in the Royal Collection marks off the narrative links from the psalms, it is only in Certayne psalmes that the narrator is invoked as the “auctor”—a term that, in sixteenth-century English, meant not just “creator,” but also “authority.”49 The 1549 publication is therefore exceptional among contemporary versions of the paraphrase, since it not only sets the narrator’s voice apart from David’s, but also privileges that voice, giving it extra command. In addition, the publishers of Certayne psalmes encourage their audience to ascribe to the prologues the authority of Wyatt himself—not least because, in his dedicatory epistle, Harington refers to the poet as “thee Auctor” of the entire paraphrase (A.ii.v). Moreover, the syntax of the book’s title seems to suggest that it will be the “prologe[s] of the auctore” principally, rather than the psalms themselves, that prove most “pleasaunt & profettable to the godly reader” (Figure 6.1). In other words, consumers of this edition are meant to pay particular attention to what the narrator—the “auctor”—has to say. And he has a great deal to say. Indeed, from the very beginning he takes charge of the tale, not simply reporting on, but also critiquing, David’s penitential words and actions; his is a voice of wisdom that provides a detailed, knowing, analysis of the advances—and the setbacks—in David’s quest for forgiveness.50 46 For the relationship between the different sixteenth-century versions of Wyatt’s paraphrase, see Kenneth Muir, “The Texts of Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms,” Notes and Queries 14, no. 12 (December 1967): 442–4. But contrast Hughey, The Arundel Harington Manuscript, 1:44–50; Hughey, John Harington, 16–17, 38–9. 47 Arundel Harington MS, fols 108r–18r. For more details on this manuscript, see Hughey, The Arundel Harington Manuscript. 48 The British Library MS Royal 17 A XXII, fols 3r–36r. The manuscript is 6 x 4 ¼ inches. 49 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, s.v. “author,” n., 1 and 4. 50 For a similar argument about Aretino’s paraphrase, see Staley, “The Penitential Psalms,” 253: “By moving between third- and first-person narration, Aretino slips back and forth between object and subject, preventing us from the process of identification that the Penitential Psalms were meant to foster. We may speak with David, but we also observe him as a sinful king.”

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In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus largely on the prologues in which the narrator speaks (since they are given special prominence in the 1549 publication), as well as on the dialogue that emerges between the prologues and the psalms. I would like to contend that, if we read Wyatt’s paraphrase from an Edwardian perspective, the narrator appears to amend a centuries-old convention. It was widely held in the Middle Ages and Renaissance that after being rebuked by the prophet Nathan, David did penance for his sins in a wholly exemplary manner. But Wyatt’s prologues can be read as reworking this tradition. In Wyatt’s paraphrase David first attempts to atone for his sins by following the customary pre-Reformation model of penance (or, at least, an evangelical representation of such), then exchanges that model for a new, reformed, alternative. And it is only after David has made this switch, the work seems to suggest, that his ultimate reconciliation with God is worthy of imitation. The David introduced by the narrator at the opening of Wyatt’s paraphrase is the David of extra-biblical myth. At times, in fact, he even comes across like the hero of a late-medieval romance. Thus in the first prologue he is led astray by “Loue,” who, appearing “in the eyes of Barsabe the bryghte,” tempts him to commit the sins of murder and adultery (A.iii.r). As soon as David’s “trecherye” has been “spied, out” by the prophet Nathan (who shows him “threates” from heaven), the king of Israel is gripped with fear and anguish, and embarks on a course of extravagant atonement for his misdemeanors (A.iv.v).51 Wyatt’s first prologue unusually suggests that David sent Uriah to his death before he began his affair with Bathsheba, and not the other way around. But, on the whole, sixteenthcentury readers of Certayne psalmes would have been thoroughly familiar with this David. They would have known him as the David whose exploits in love and war were frequently depicted in Books of Hours and recounted at length in legends and in sermons.52 Most significantly, they would have known him as the David whose catastrophic and embarrassing fall into sin was successfully offset by his subsequent arduous penance.53 Indeed, at the opening of the paraphrase, Wyatt’s David bears a strong resemblance to—for instance—the David of William Caxton’s hugely popular Legenda aurea (Golden Legend), who, to make amends for his transgressions, subjects himself to grueling physical torture while composing the fourth Many of the lines in Certayne psalmes are broken at the mid-point with a comma, indicating a caesura. I have retained these commas in my quotations from the text, even though doing so occasionally disrupts the sense of my prose. 52 For illustrations of David in medieval and Renaissance Books of Hours, see Clare L. Costley, “David, Bathsheba, and the Penitential Psalms,” Renaissance Quarterly 57, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 1235–77. 53 Alexandra Halasz makes a related point about Aretino’s version of David: “Aretino’s poem [sic] is typical of the extrabiblical development of David’s story in which the penitential example of the psalms provides concrete evidence that David merits redemption and is therefore an appropriate model for (Catholic) Christian conduct.” See “Wyatt’s David,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 321. 51

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Penitential Psalm, the Miserere.54 The Legend’s chapter on David follows the biblical text of 2 Samuel as far as Nathan’s rebuke of the adulterous king. Then the narrator launches into a lengthy account of a conversation he once had about “the hystorye of Dauid” while riding in the company of “a noble knyght named Syr John Capons”: [T]his said noble man told me that he had redde that dauid dyde this penaunce folowyng for thyse said synnes / that he dalf hym in the ground standyng nakyd vnto the heed so longe that the wormes began to crepe in his flesshe / and made a verse of this psalme Miserere / and thenne cam out / and whan he was hole therof / he wente in agayn / and stode so agayn as longe as afore is said and made the second verse / and so as many tymes he was doluen in the erth as ben verse[s] in the said psalme of Miserere mei deus / and euery tyme was abydyng therin tyl he felte the wormes crepe in his flesshe / This was a grete penaunce and a token of grete repentaunce / For ther ben in the psalme xx. verses / And xx tymes he was doluen ... / Therfor god toke away this synne and forgaue it hym / but the sone that she brought forth deyed.55

Here Caxton furnishes David’s penance with a certain poetic—or, to be more specific, a certain psalmic—form. First, he establishes a precise correspondence between the number of verses in the psalm and the king’s reiterative self-burial. David interred himself until worms “began to crepe in his flesshe,” Caxton writes, “as many tymes … as ben verse[s] in the said psalme of Miserere mei deus.” He goes on to argue that the correlation between David’s repeated self-humiliation and the number of verses in the psalm was integral to the magnitude of the king’s penance: “This was a grete penaunce and a token of grete repentaunce,” he notes, “[f]or ther ben in the psalme xx. verses / [a]nd xx tymes he was doluen.” In conclusion, he links the enormity of David’s repentance to God’s forgiveness: “Therfor god toke away this synne and forgaue it hym.” Caxton’s “[t]herfor” merits attention; it implies that by burying himself repeatedly, by allowing worms to penetrate his flesh, and by engaging in the slow and painful composition of a psalm, David was able to win absolution for himself. The David of Wyatt’s paraphrase sets out to redeem himself in a similar way. Immediately upon being discovered by Nathan, the horror-struck king exchanges his royal accoutrements for a type of “vyle clothe” that only “scantlye” covers “hys nakednes,” hurriedly picks up his harp, and flees to “a darke caue / Within the ground” (a cave which the narrator likens to a “pryson or graue”); there he drops to his knees, offering “playnts hys soule to saue” (A.v.r–v). The point I want to stress, Caxton first published his English version of the Golden Legend in 1483, or perhaps 1484: see Jacobus de Voragine, [Legenda aurea sanctorum, sive, Lombardica historia] (London: W. Caxton, [1483?]), STC 24873. The text was issued once again by Caxton (in a partial reprint of 1487), and subsequently republished by Wynkyn de Worde, Richard Pynson, and Julian Notary. 55 Voragine, [Legenda aurea], STC 24873, fol. lxx.r. 54

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though, is that while Wyatt’s narrator carefully records each one of David’s early attempts at doing penance, he also casts suspicion on the value of these activities.56 The late-medieval sacrament of penance involved three components: contrition, confession, and satisfaction. Any sinner who carefully performed all three of these would cleanse himself both of his culpa (his guilt deserving damnation), and of his poena (the spiritual debt he had incurred by sinning), thereby making himself right with God. At the beginning of Wyatt’s paraphrase, David’s penitential effort (which includes sighing, crying, sorrowing, hiding half-naked in a cave/grave, playing his harp, acknowledging his transgressions, and composing his psalms), encompasses all three parts of the sacrament in what appears to be an exemplary— if rather exaggerated—way.57 But what is striking is that this torturous endeavor does very little good for David. Indeed, when David stops for breath after the first psalm, the narrator makes it plain that the king has hitherto failed to relieve himself of the burden of his sins: he is (the narrator says) akin to a diseased man who, although he may enjoy a “truce” in his fever, is in reality “not yet healed” (B.iii.r–v). To be more precise, on almost every count the David introduced initially by the narrator fits the classic mid-sixteenth-century evangelical caricature of a conservative (or “papist”) penitent. Thus it is not at all astonishing that his problem is represented as a matter of the heart. In the first couple of prologues especially, the fear-bound king seems to be engaged far less in grieving over his sins than in carefully crafting and delivering a series of highly rhetorical speeches that (he hopes) will convince God to pardon him. David does not pour out his soul in natural remorse; instead, as the narrator puts it in the opening prologue, he looks for the best way to “appease” God, “sekyng to conterpase [counterpoise] / Hys songes wythe syghes” (A.vi.r). Additionally, the narrator suggests that David may be merely feigning penitence: “More lyke was he, the same repentaunce / Then statelye prynce, of worldelye gouernaunce” (A.v.v; my emphasis). At the beginning of the paraphrase, then, David acts exactly as Martin Luther, in his commentary on the Penitential Psalms, warns the faithful not to act. He tries to procure his own redemption. And he fails. It is not until the third prologue that this caricatured and even somewhat laughable penitent begins to make tangible progress in his reconciliation with God; and this progress seems to accompany a gradual shift on David’s part towards a newer, more Lutheran, understanding of penance. After singing in the second Penitential Psalm of the great benefits of “knowledgynge” (confessing) one’s sins, the psalmist pauses to consider the nature of divine mercy—a mercy that has never been “denied, but where it was wythstande [resisted]” (B.v.r, B.viii.r). David has caught a brief glimpse of God’s willingness to grant forgiveness to sinners without 56 As Heale, Wyatt, 166, notes: “In Wyatt’s development of Aretino’s prologues … David’s agency in the work of redemption, especially that of his art, imaged by the playing of his harp and his tuning voice, is critically scrutinized.” 57 Except that David confesses directly to God rather than to a priest.

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being cajoled into doing so. Now the narrator likens the king to a delinquent servant who, upon being pardoned for his misdemeanors, meditates upon his master’s “greate goodnes” and “grace” and sheds tears “as gladsome recompence” (B.viii.r). Significantly, it is at precisely this moment of grace-recognition that the presence of God makes its first intervention in the drama: the darkness of the cave is suddenly pierced by a sunbeam that, falling on David’s golden harp, is reflected into the eyes of the king, surprising him with “ioye, by pennaunce of the harte” (B.viii.v).58 Even after this experience, David does not immediately submit to the workings of God’s grace: he still has some way to go on his spiritual journey before he is able to reject completely a merit-based model of forgiveness. Nevertheless, there are increasing signs that he has begun to give his consent to an alternative soteriology. In the third Penitential Psalm, for example, David admits that while he had once relied on his virtues to assist him, as soon as a crisis arose he discovered that they amounted to very little: And when myne enemyes, dyd me most assayle My frendes most sure, wherein I set most trust Myne owne vertues, sonest then dyd fayle And stode aparte … . (C.ii.v)

This passage diverges considerably from the psalm itself, in which friends are just friends, even if they do abandon the psalmist in his time of need.59 Thus in the Coverdale Bible, one of Wyatt’s principal sources, the text reads: “My louers & frendes stonde lokyng vpon my trouble, and my kynsmen are gone a farre of.”60 Wyatt’s (admittedly ambiguous) translation seems to transform David’s friends into his own virtues—virtues in which David placed his hope until they proved inadequate to save him. At this point David appears to have recognized that there is little he can do by himself to ensure that he is forgiven. Moreover, towards the end of the fourth Penitential Psalm, the Miserere, David draws what might be taken as a Lutheran distinction between inner and outer penance: “I wold haue offered, vnto the sacrifice,” the psalmist says to God, “[b]ut thou delytest not, in no soche glose / Of outeward dede, as men dreame and I differ from Jan Lawson Hinely, who argues that the sunbeam falling on the harp is a sign that God approves of David’s art: see “‘Freedom through Bondage’: Wyatt’s Appropriation of the Penitential Psalms of David,” in The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 152–3. The idea of the beam of light is not original to Wyatt; as Zim notes, it seems to come most directly from John Fisher: see English Metrical Psalms, 57, 276n28. 59 Hinely, “‘Freedom through Bondage,’” 159–60. 60 Biblia the bible, that is, the holy scripture … translated out of Douche and Latyn in to Englishe. M.D.XXXV. ([Cologne?: E. Cervicornus and J. Soter?], 1535), STC 2063, Psalm 37. 58

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deuyse” (C.viii.v).61 He goes on to explain that the kind of offering God requires is spiritual rather than material: The sacrifice, that the lorde lyketh moste Is spirite contryte, lowe harte in humble wyse Thou doeste accepte, O God, for pleasaunt hoste [sacrifice] Make Syon, Lorde, accordynge to thy wyll Inward Syon, the Syon of the hoste [sic; “ghost” in Egerton MS.] Of hartes, Jerusalem strengthe thy walles stylle. (C.viii.v)

Wyatt’s David argues three things: first, that God is interested in hearts rather than acts; second, that if any heart is to impress God, it must be a lowly one; and third, that on his own a man cannot make his heart—his inner Zion—lowly enough to be acceptable in God’s sight. According to David, therefore, God alone is the master builder who is able to construct humility in the city of the spirit. Heale remarks that this passage represents “the most clearly evangelical expression of the importance of grace and the error of reliance on good works that we have had so far.”62 And it must have seemed that way to the Edwardian publishers of the text, too—even if, as Walker notes, “the striking image of the inward Zion, the Zion of the ghost or spirit,” actually derives from Aretino (and possibly other more theologically conservative sources as well).63 Hence the fourth Penitential Psalm marks a turning point for David—at least, as Wyatt’s narrator tells the story. In the prologue that follows the Miserere, the narrator suggests that things are looking up for the psalmist: having just sung “[o]f mercye, of fayth, of frayltie, of grace / Of goddes goodnesse, and of iustyfynge,” the penitent is now able to “measure / Measureles mercye” against “measureles fautes” (D.i.r–v). Furthermore, while the key accessories to David’s penitential work—his harp and his dark cave—are highly visible in the first four prologues, the narrator fails to mention them from the fifth prologue on.64 These things seem to disappear Not only does this heavily charged statement drive a wedge between outward performance and inner merit, but it also summons all the negative valences associated with glossing in evangelical polemic of the time. 62 Heale, Wyatt, 167. For similar arguments, see Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning, 115; Robert G. Twombly, “Thomas Wyatt’s Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms of David,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 12, no. 3 (Fall 1970): 375–6. 63 Walker, Writing Under Tyranny, 368. The biblical text does not imply that the Zion and Jerusalem mentioned by the psalmist are meant to be taken as anything other than their geographical locations. The corresponding passage in the Coverdale Bible reads: “The sacrifice of God is a troubled sprete [sic], a broken and a contrite hert (o God) shalt thou not despise. O be fauorable and gracious vnto Sion, that the walles of Jerusalem maye be buylded”; see Biblia the bible, STC 2063, Psalm 50. But, as Walker points out, Aretino’s commentary on Psalm 101 includes this statement: “il Signore ha edificato Sion nelle sincere menti de gli huomini eletti dallo Spirito santo” (“the Lord has built Sion in the pure minds of the men elected by the Holy Spirit”). 64 Heale, Wyatt, 166–71; Hinely, “‘Freedom Through Bondage,’” 156. 61

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from sight (the narrator’s sight, and thus ours also) as David’s understanding of his penitential obligation changes.65 David’s last significant relapse occurs just before the sixth Penitential Psalm, when the king temporarily reverts to his old ways: judging himself “by penaunce, cleane oute of thys case,” David gives credit for the remission of his sins to his personal “payne and penitence” (D.vi.v). Yet he is at last able to bring his own lessons to bear on the matter. Correcting himself, he damns his deeds and declares that the name of “ryghtfull penitence” may be borne only by a “sore contryte hart, that doth his faulte bemone” (D.vii.r). Where in the first six prologues and psalms the poem traces David’s difficult path from pre- to post-Reformation penitent, the final prologue reveals how this path has pleased the divinity. Over the course of the paraphrase, David has learned that true penance is not a work that earns forgiveness, but rather a readiness of the soul to receive grace.66 In addition, he has come to the point where, at the close of the penultimate psalm, he can encourage all of Israel to trust in God, who, by his “grace and fauor,” will “redeme” their “iniquitie” (D.viii.v). A moment later, David is the recipient of a mystical, prophetic, vision that far surpasses the sunbeam of the third prologue—a vision of heaven itself, complete with God’s redemption of man “when ful rype tyme shulde come” (E.i.r). Moreover, not only does the divinity reveal himself to David the evangelical penitent, but he does so in an emblematically reformed fashion; for what David “beholdes” in “the hyghte of heauen” is Christ “thee worde” that promises to destroy death (E.i.r).67 Reading and editing Wyatt with Edwardian eyes, then, Haringon, Parr, and Raynald must have identified with the narrator (or, as he was called in their edition, “the auctor”), whose privileged perspective gives a reformist slant to the story of David’s penance. To put it another way, Wyatt’s interpretation of the Penitential Psalms—an interpretation that challenges the traditional penitential system—must have worked incredibly well for these reformers at a time when they desperately needed to shore up their religious and political power. If their appropriation of the Penitential Psalms for the evangelical cause is surprising to us (given the long association of these psalms with the sacrament of penance and prayers for the dead), they were building upon a history of such appropriations that began with Luther at the very moment of his break with Rome. The first evangelicals might have rejected penance as a sacrament, but, as the Edwardian edition of Wyatt’s paraphrase reveals, that made it all the more important for them to develop a model of what proper repentance—or “ryghtfull penitence”—should be.

Though at the opening of the sixth Penitential Psalm, David himself points out that he is speaking from within a cave (see D.vii.v). 66 I disagree with Halasz, “Wyatt’s David,” 323, who argues that the final prologue “presents an unregenerate David” and therefore opposes “the implied teleology of the psalm sequence.” 67 Heale, Wyatt, 169–70. 65

Chapter 7

Psalm 44 (45) and Nuptial Spirituality in Juan de Avila’s Audi, filia 1

James F. Melvin

“Listen, daughter, and see, and incline your ear, and forget your people, and the house of your father, and the King will desire your beauty (Ps. 44:11–12).” With this epigraph translated into Castilian from Psalm 44 (45), Juan de Avila (1499–1569) begins his influential treatise on the spiritual life, the Audi, filia (1556; revised 1574), in which the reader becomes identified with a virgin bride united to her divine king in mystical marriage.2 Although scholars of early modern Catholicism have long acknowledged Juan de Avila’s importance as a clerical reformer, far less consideration has been given to his contribution to the mystical literature of Golden Age Spain because of the Audi, filia’s lack of first person accounts of spiritual ecstasy and the absence of Pseudo-Dionysian apophatic language to describe the spiritual ascent.3 Not only does this prejudice privilege the 1 Many thanks are due to E. Ann Matter and to Jodi Bilinkoff for their comments on earlier versions of this essay, and to Aaron Ilika, for his suggestions concerning my translation of Avila’s Castilian into English. 2 In this essay I will be using the critical edition of the Audi’s “authorized” 1574 text, found in San Juan de Ávila, Obras Completas, ed. Luis Sala Balust and Francisco Martín Hernández, vol. I (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2000), cited hereafter as Audi. Avila follows the Septuagint and Vulgate rather than the Hebrew Bible, which numbers this as Psalm 45. Since the preparation of this essay, a translation of the Audi into contemporary English has appeared as John of Avila: Audi, filia—Listen, Oh Daughter, trans. Joan Francis Gormley, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 2006). On the theme of mystical marriage in the history of Christian spirituality, see E. Ann Matter, “Mystical Marriage,” in Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 31–41. 3 E. Alison Peers claimed that Avila’s association with figures such as Teresa of Jesus, Ignatius Loyola, and Luis de Granada earned a place for him in discussions of Golden Age of mysticism, yet he dismisses the Audi by arguing: “A summary of his principal writings will show that none of them is in the main mystical … Not one of its [the Audi’s] hundred and thirteen chapters is concerned with the higher stages of mental prayer.” E. Allison Peers, “The Teresan Period: Juan de Ávila,” in Studies of the Spanish Mystics (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 127, 130. Similarly, Melquiades Andrés Martín demonstrates Avila’s importance for the tradition of recollection spirituality (recogimiento), but his examples are drawn almost entirely from

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problematic criterion of “mystical experience”—first established in the twentieth century by William James, Evelyn Underhill, and others—but it overlooks the role played by Psalm 44 alongside the better known Song of Songs in the tradition of Christian nuptial spirituality.4 Juan de Avila’s choice to structure his bestselling devotional book according to verses 11 and 12 of Psalm 44 extends the psalm’s role in nuptial mysticism out of the monastic cloister and its Latin liturgy into the world of popular vernacular devotional reading.5 Situating the Audi in the tradition of spiritual writing based on Psalm 44, this essay examines how Juan de Avila uses the psalm’s eleventh and twelfth verses to organize his guide and describe the soul’s ascent to, and union with, its divine spouse. Reading the Audi against the backdrop of Tridentine reform, in which women religious were enclosed and female holy figures were seemingly transformed from vessels of divine revelation to victims of diabolical deception, may lend support to the view that Avila’s use of Psalm 44’s bridal imagery to describe spiritual perfection was another attempt to render lay religious authority—especially that belonging to women—passive

Avila’s letters and his pláticas. Los Recogidos: nueva visión de la mística española (1500– 1700) (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, Seminario, 1976), 868–88. In particular, Avila’s Plática Tercera, which I shall discuss below, demonstrates Avila’s familiarity with the apophatic tradition in mystical theology, citing Pseudo-Dionysius’s De divinis nominibus and De mystica theologia, and Francisco de Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet. Third Spiritual Alphabet. The Plática Tercera was unpublished until 1910 and the manuscripts are not dated. Sala Balust and Martín Fernández believe that Avila’s pláticas to the Jesuits date from 1560–1568 when he lived at Montilla and was closely associated with the Jesuits. “Estudio Biográfico,” 198. I will be citing the critical edition of the Plática Tercera, hereafter cited as Plática, in Sala Balust and Martín Hernández, eds, San Juan de Avila, Obras Completas, Vol. I, 813–26. 4 For criticisms of the tendency of scholars of mysticism to privilege accounts of subjective “mystical experience,” see especially Robert H. Sharf, “Experience,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 96–8; Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism’,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 2 (2003). On the Song of Songs tradition and nuptial mysticism, see E. Ann Matter, “Mystical Marriage”; idem, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 5 Terence O’Reilly notes Juan de Avila’s importance in the development of “decloistered” spiritualities in sixteenth-century Spain. Terence O’Reilly, “Meditation and Contemplation: Monastic Spirituality in Early Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Faith and Fanaticism: Religious Fervour in Early Modern Spain, ed. Lesley K. Twomey (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997), 37–57. The wide diffusion of the Audi, filia among the early modern Spanish reading public is acknowledged in León Carlos Alvarez y Santaló, “Religiosidad moderna y cultura lectora en la España de los siglos XVII al XVIII,” in Estudios sobre iglesia y sociedad en Andalucía en la edad moderna, ed. Miguel Luis López, Guadalupe Muñoz, and Antonio Luis Cortés Peña (Universidad de Granada, 1999), 225–66; Pedro M. Cátedra, “‘Bibliotecas’y ‘Libros de Mujeres’ en el Siglo XVI,” Península: Revista de Estudos Ibéricos (2003): 13–28.

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at a time of crisis for clerical identity and authority.6 Accordingly, I consider the implications of the Audi’s gendered language and nuptial imagery for the construction of clerical authority in the early modern church. Juan de Avila occupied an interesting place in the contested religious discourse of his day, leading Alison Weber to label him as one of the period’s “great compromisers.”7 His education at the University of Alcalá, a center of Erasmian thought, and his anonymous translation of the devotio moderna classic, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, place him firmly in the camp of those who sought to exclaustrate and democratize the way of religious perfection.8 Additionally, as a young priest, Avila was denounced to the Inquisition for allegedly heretical sermons in which he severely criticized Spanish society’s status quo.9 However, Avila was also a leader of Catholic reform in Spain, writing letters about clerical formation to the council fathers at Trent and guiding the Jesuits in the establishment of their educational system.10 Moreover, he was a sought-after spiritual director, known for his concern for moderating excessive enthusiasm among women through the discernment of spirits.11 6 For Trent’s decree on the enclosure of women religious, see Session XXV, 3–4 December 1563. Norman P. Tanner, SJ, ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 777–78. The literature is vast on the changing perception of female visionary experience. See especially Alison Weber, “Between Ecstasy and Exorcism: Religious Negotiation in Sixteenth Century Spain,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993): 221–34; Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Avila’s work is treated as an attempt to restrain female religious enthusiasm by emphasizing the primacy of virtue over visions in Angela Muñoz Fernández, Beatas y santas neocastellanas: ambivalencias de la religión y políticas correctoras del poder (SS. XIV–XVI) (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 1994), 150. 7 Alison Weber, “Between Ecstasy and Exorcism,” 234. 8 Luis Sala Balust and Francisco Martín Hernández, “Estudio Biográfico,” in San Juan de Ávila, Obras Completas, ed. Luis Sala Balust and Francisco Martín Hernández, Vol. I (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2000), 27. Thomas à. Kempis, Contemptus mundi nuevamente romançado, trans. Juan de Avila (Sevilla: Juan Cromberger, 1536). 9 Sala Balust and Martín Hernández, “Estudio Biográfico,” 35–47. 10 Avila’s importance as a clerical reformer is well-treated in David Coleman, Creating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture in an Old-World Frontier City, 1492–1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), idem, “Moral Formation and Social Control in the Catholic Reformation: The Case of San Juan de Avila,” SixteenthCentury Journal 26, no. 1 (1995): 17–30. On the complicated relationship of the Jesuits to Tridentine reform, see John W. O’Malley, SJ, “Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early Modern Catholicism,” The Catholic Historical Review LXXVII, no. 2 (1991): 177–93. 11 Juan de Avila’s importance in this arena is underscored by Teresa’s desire to have him approve the orthodoxy of her controversial Vida. Alison Weber, “The Three Lives of the Vida: The Uses of Convent Autobiography,” in Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World, ed. Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 121.

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Since Origen, Christian exegetes have often identified the king and bride of Psalm 44 with those of the mysterious and erotic Biblical epithalamium, the Song of Songs.12 Jerome’s famous Letter 22 to the virgin Eustochium opens with verses 11 and 12 of Psalm 44 and employs its nuptial imagery in order to model the ideals of spiritual life for noble women in late-antique Rome who sought to become “house ascetics” at a time when female monasticism was just beginning.13 Around the same time, Ambrose and Augustine described virginity as a form of nuptial union with Christ in commentaries on Psalm 44.14 Later, the tenth-century Carolingian commentator Paschasius Radbertus employed the psalm to instruct nuns in his care on the life of prayer.15 Likewise, the author of the twelfth-century Speculum Virginum used Psalm 44’s nuptial language to compose a rule for women religious that was popular throughout the High Middle Ages.16 During the mid-fifteenth century, the Spanish Cistercian nun Teresa de Cartagena composed a spiritual guide for her nuns, the Arboleda de Enfermos, which she also structured on Psalm 44.17 See Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R.P. Lawson, Ancient Christian Writers 26 (New York: Newman Press, 1956), 165. Felix Asiedu notes that contemporary biblical scholars consider Psalm 44 to be the psalm most similar to the Song of Songs. Felix Asiedu, “The ‘Song of Songs’ and the Ascent of the Soul: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Language of Mysticism,” Vigiliae Christianae 55, no. 3 (2001): 313. 13 David G. Hunter, “The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church: Reading Psalm 45 in Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine,” Church History 69, no. 2 (2000): 281–303. For the critical edition of Letter 22, see Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae, ed. Isidorus Hilberg, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, vols 54–6 (Vienna, 1996), 54–6. Jerome likewise employs the nuptial language of the Song of Songs in Letter 22. 14 Asiedu, “The ‘Song of Songs’ and the Ascent of the Soul”; Hunter, “The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church.” Critical editions are available in Augustine, Enarratio in ps. xliv, ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 38 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1956), Ambrose, De virginibus in Verginità e Vedovanza, ed. Franco Gori. Opera omnia di Sant’Ambrogio 14:1–2 (Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1989). 15 Alf Härdelin, “An Epithalamium for Nuns: Imagery and Spirituality in Paschasius Radbertus’ ‘Exposition of Psalm 44(45),’” in In Quest of the Kingdom: Ten Papers on Medieval Monastic Spirituality, ed. Alf Härdelin (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 1991). Beda Paulus, ed., Pascasii Radberti Expositio in Psalmum XLIV, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 94 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1991). 16 See the essays in Constant J. Mews, ed. Listen, Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Jutta Seyfarth, ed., Speculum Virginum, Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio Mediaevalis 5 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1990). 17 Ronald Surtz, Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Teresa of Avila (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 23. Gregorio Rodríguez Rivas has suggested that Avila was influenced by Cartagena’s Arboleda. See Gregorio Rodríguez Rivas, “La influencia de Teresa de Cartagena en el Audi, Filia … de Juan de Ávila,” Archivum: Revista de la Facultad de Filología 41–2 (1991): 329–38. 12

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Like its predecessors, the Audi was originally intended to provide religious instruction for female readers. Avila began writing these instructions around 1530 at the request of his spiritual advisee, doña Sancha Carrillo.18 When the first edition of the Audi, printed in 1556, appeared on the 1559 Index of Prohibited Books, Avila himself complained that the text had been printed without giving him the chance to correct the manuscript, and he spent the remainder of his life editing the work.19 The approved edition was published in 1574, five years after Avila’s death, at almost twice the length of the original. Despite the great difference in length, the only major difference between the two texts is that the latter has a greatly expanded explanation of Catholic teaching on grace and justification to resolve the doctrinal concerns surrounding the 1556 edition, as well as a slight change of order in the verses he employs from Psalm 44.20 The Audi appears to have been immensely popular from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, with thirteen printings in Spanish, four in Italian, three in French, two in German, and one in English, as either stand-alone copies or within his collected works.21 For example, the preface to the 1620 translation into English for the Recusant Catholic community notes the “extraordinary fame” of the Audi, as well as the fruit that it had produced in Spain, France, and Italy.22 Within Spain, one example that suggests the Audi’s deep influence on devotional culture can be found in a biography of a beata in the city of Avila, Mari Díaz (d. 1572), whose Jesuit author claims that Díaz had been inspired to move to the city of Avila in her middle aged years when she heard an interior voice that spoke the words of Psalm 44:11–12.23 18 Doña Sancha died in 1537, most likely from the extreme rigors of her ascetic life, which Avila had attempted to moderate. Avila is also thought to have written her vida, all manuscripts of which have disappeared. Sala Balust and Martín Hernández, “Estudio Biográfico,” 169, 66–7. 19 Avila’s disavowal of the 1556 printing can be found in the prologue to the 1574 edition. Audi, 536–7. See also the discussion of this controversy in Martín Hernández and Sala Balust, “Estudio Biográfico,” 176–7. 20 The 1574 edition modifies the schema of Psalm 44:11 from “Audi, filia. Et vide. Et inclinam aurem tuam” to “Audi, filia. Et inclinam aurem tuam. Et vide.” For a detailed comparison of the two editions, see the introduction to the critical edition by Luis Sala Balust and Francisco Martín Hernández in Audi, 377–404. 21 For a bibliography of the Audi’s print history, see the “Bibliografía Avilista” in San Juan de Ávila, Obras Completas, xlvii–li. 22 Juan de Avila, The audi filia, or a rich cabinet full of spirituall ievvells. Composed by the Reuerend Father, Doctour Auila, translated out of Spanish into English, trans. Tobie Matthew (Saint-Omer: English College Press, 1620), n.p., Early English Books Online. Cambridge University Library, http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:2331/search/full_ rec?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=SINGLE&ID=99836085&ECCO=N&FILE=../ session/1246553101_6994&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&S UBSET=1&ENTRIES=1&HIGHLIGHT_KEYWORD=default (accessed July 1, 2009). 23 “se determino venir a Avila con desseo de buscar mas perfeccion obedeciendo a la interior voz del señor que la deçia oye hija y vee, y oluida la tierra y la casa de tus padres y conbdiciara el Rey tu hermosura.” This account, written sometime around 1599

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Juan de Avila’s humanist leanings are evident when we consider the authorities he references in the Audi; patristic writers abound: we find the most citations from Augustine, followed by Jerome, Gregory the Great, Athanasius, and John Chrysostom. Yet the nuptial mysticism of the High Middle Ages also marks Avila’s discussion, as he cites more than 12 different works by the famous commentator on the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairveaux. His most frequently cited nonbiblical source, however, is Jerome’s Letter 22, which he cites at least eight times. Jerome’s epistle to the noble virgin Eustochium undoubtedly served as a model for Avila’s instructions on virginity and the spiritual life.24 Avila’s structure for the Audi is not altogether different from Jerome’s, as he begins the treatise by quoting verses 11 and 12 from Psalm 44. Likewise, Avila follows Jerome by informing the reader that in these verses God speaks to his bride—who is understood to signify both the Church and the individual Christian’s soul: “These words, devoted bride of Jesus Christ, the prophet David speaks—or, rather, God through him—to the Christian Church, warning it what it must do so that the great king Jesus Christ might love it … And … your soul is one of those of this Church.”25

or 1600, is contained in Pedro de Guzmán’s chronicle of the city of Avila’s Jesuit college, found within his “Historia de la Compañía de Jesús de la Provincia de Castilla la Vieja,” Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Castellana 35-II, 273r. One should note that Juan de Avila neither hailed from nor visited the city of Avila, but he maintained correspondence with Mari Díaz, as well as several local priests there. Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 80. 24 Sala Balust notes that Avila may have been familiar with a 1520 edition of Jerome’s writings in Spanish. Sala Balust and Martín Hernández, “Estudio Biográfico,” 170. Jerome, Epístolas de S. Hieronymo nueuamente traduzidas de latín en lengua castellana y partidas en libros, epistolas y estanças por Juan de Molina (Valencia: Juan Joffré, 1520). Likewise, there was a 1516 collection of Jerome’s opera omnia published by Erasmus, Omnium operum Divi Eusebii Hieronymi Stridonensis … cum argumentis et scholiis D. Erasmi Roterodami, 9 vols (Basel: Officina Frobeniana, 1516). Note that in her autobiography, Teresa of Jesus specifically mentions reading Jerome’s Letters during her period of conversion, and specifically references Letter 22 to describe the challenges of the spiritual life. Santa Teresa de Jesus, Obras Completas. Edición Manual, ed. Efren Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink, 9th edn (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2003), 40, 73. 25 “Estas palabras, devota esposa de Jesucristo, dice el profeta David—o, por mejor decir, Dios en él—a la Iglesia cristiana, amonestándole lo que debe hacer para que el gran rey Jesucristo la ame … Y, … vuestra ánima es una de las de esta Iglesia.” Audi, 539. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. David Hunter notes that whereas Ambrose and Jerome both interpret the bride of Psalm 44 to represent both the church as well as the individual virgen, Augustine’s focus remains on the church as the body of the faithful. David G. Hunter, “The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church,” 286, 293–4, 296.

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Avila divides his treatise into four stages based upon verses 11 and 12.26 After opening the Audi’s first chapter by explaining to the reader that she is the bride described by the psalm, he continues by pointing out that the psalmist’s first instruction to the devout soul is to listen, “because the beginning of the spiritual life is faith, and this enters into the soul, as St. Paul says, by way of listening.”27 According to Avila, humans struggle to listen to the spiritual language of the divine because they are distracted by the language of the world (mundo), the flesh (carne) and the devil (diablo) as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience.28 Thus, in chapters 1 through 44 (“Listen, daughter”), Avila leads the reader through a purgative process in which he instructs the reader to listen to God while learning how to ignore the languages of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Avila then modifies the psalmist’s order, and uses chapters 45 through 55 to continue on this theme of listening, explaining the psalmist’s command to “incline your ear.”29 In the second stage, chapters 56 through 96, he teaches the reader to look, first within herself, and then at Christ: “Now listen to the second word that says see.”30 It is here that Avila first leads his reader to gaze upon Christ and we find an abundance of nuptial imagery provided by verses from the Song of Songs.31 After this nuptial vision, the reader returns to a more purgative focus in the third stage, comprised of chapters 97 through 99 (“Forget your people”), and chapters 100 through 102 (“Forget your father’s house”).32 In the final stage, chapters one hundred three through 113, the nuptial imagery is at its most redolent, as Avila reveals to his reader that following this process of recollection and mortification, “The King will desire your beauty.”33 Here we find the second largest number of references to the Song (five), as well as four of the six quotations that Avila makes of Psalm 44 itself. Just as Avila begins the treatise with an epigraph of Psalm 44:11–12 to map the spiritual path that lies before the reader, he completes the guide by quoting Psalm 44:12 to inform the reader that as a result of the interior purification that he prescribes in the intervening chapters: “The King will desire your beauty.” Andrés Martín considers the Audi to prescribe a five-part ascent, which he takes from the original order of Psalm 44:11–12 employed in the 1556 edition: 1) Listen; 2) See; 3) Incline your ear; 4) Forget your people and your father’s house; 5) And the King will desire your beauty. Andrés Martín, Los Recogidos, 113. However, Avila’s reversal of “See” and “Incline your ear” in the 1574 edition combines “Listen” and “Incline your ear” into one part, focused on listening to God. Note that Jerome does not switch these verses in Letter 22. 27 “ … porque, como el principio de la vida espiritual sea la fe, y ésta entre en el anima, como dice san Pablo, mediante el oír.” Audi, 539. 28 Audi, 539–40. 29 “Inclina tu oreja.” Audi, 632. 30 “Ahora escuchad la segunda palabra que dice ve.” Audi, 656. 31 These chapters contain nine of the sixteen references that Avila makes to the Song of Songs, and chapters 68 and 69 are a gloss on Song 3:11. 32 “Olvida tu pueblo, y la casa de tu padre.” Audi, 754. 33 “Y cobdiciará el Rey tu hermosura.” Audi, 759. 26

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As the Audi transitioned from a set of instructions for a specific female correspondent to a more general guide for the spiritual life, its audience likely came to include male readers.34 Nonetheless, Avila’s address to the reader remains decidedly feminine. Choosing the feminine for the reader’s gender, Avila speaks to her as “virgin” (doncella) at least 24 times, and at 6 others addresses her as “bride (esposa) of Christ.”35 On other occasions she is the “servant or slave (sierva) of Christ” or “redeemed soul” (ánima redimida). Likewise, the mimetic and sensual form of nuptial mysticism depicted in the Audi was particularly popular with female audiences in late medieval and early modern Catholic Europe.36 Although figures such as Bernard of Clairveaux employed the Song of Songs’s nuptial imagery to instruct monks in the ways of prayer, historians of medieval religiosity have shown that the topos of mystical marriage was found most often in writings that dealt with female religious life.37 Regardless of male or female authorship, texts for women describing mystical marriage frequently characterize the spiritual ascent as one in which a feminine bride expresses her desire for her celestial spouse and achieves union with him through a self-identification with Christ’s Passion.38 No doubt because of its origins and its employment of nuptial imagery to describe the spiritual ascent, the Audi has acquired a reputation as representing a particularly “feminine” devotional text.39 In his prologue, Avila writes: “Este libro fue escripto a aquella religiosa doncella que dije, la cual, y las de su calidad, han menester más esforzarlas el corazón con confianza que atemorizarlas con rigor … más si la disposición de tu ánima pide más rigor de justicia que blandura de misericordia, toma de aquí lo que hallares que te conviene, y deja lo otro para otros que lo habrán menester.” Audi, 537. 35 In early modern Spanish, “virgin” was understood as a distinctly female virtue. Avila’s near-contemporary Sebastian de Covarrubias defines doncella as “la muger moça y por casar … en sinificacion rigurosa la que no ha conocida varón,” and likewise, virgen, as “Latine virgo, puella intacta.” Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid: Turner, 1977), 483, 1010. 36 Matter, “Mystical Marriage,” idem, “Theories of the Passions and the Ecstacies of Late Medieval Religious Women,” Essays in Medieval Studies 18 (2001): 1–16. 37 Matter, “Mystical Marriage,” 36–9. On male and female understandings of mystical marriage, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 38 Matter, “Mystical Marriage,” 37. 39 Pedro M. Cátedra, “‘Bibliotecas’ y libros ‘de mujeres’ en el siglo XVI,” 20. My research in the city of Avila’s notarial archives from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found six priests who owned copies of one or more titles by Juan de Avila. All but one owned his collected works, which would have included the Audi, but none owned a stand-alone copy of the Audi. By comparison, the 1582 will and postmortem inventory of Ana María de Jesús—a well-to-do pious woman of the city with ties to St. Teresa’s Convent of San José—includes two copies of the Audi and a copy of Jerome’s Letters among other popular devotional books. Archivo Histórico Provincial de Avila, Protocolos 151, 122r–6r, 174r–7v. 34

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The Audi and its predecessors raise a number of issues related to gendered language and clerical authority. Because they were authored by men for the religious instruction of women, they disclose little about the women’s actual religious experience. Yet as David Hunter argues, the male attitudes that surface in these texts tell us a great deal about how the “rhetoric of virtue could serve in an economy of power relations among men.”40 To paraphrase Constant Mews’s question about the Speculum Virginum’s place in medieval female religiosity, is this simply an attempt by male clergy to control women?41 Even in cases when devotional writings were intended to be read by women and men, the possibility arises that authors employed gendered language to sharpen the differentiation between lay and clerical status.42 Written at a time described by Jodi Bilinkoff as one of “profound contestation, redefinition, and reaffirmation” for Catholic Europe, Juan de Avila’s spiritual writings reveal much about sixteenth-century negotiations of religious authority.43 Not only did the threat of Protestantism loom large within the imaginations of Spain’s ecclesiastical defenders, but the increasing popularity of monastic-inspired mental prayer and recollection among the laity—particularly women—contributed to a climate of increasing suspicion and misogyny.44 When we look closely at the language of ascent that Avila employs in parts two (“See”) and four (“And the King will desire your beauty”), it is precisely the self-identification of the soul with Christ’s Passion reached through recollected prayer that brings about the marriage of the bride to Christ. Some of Avila’s most exuberant nuptial imagery is found in the second stage, which instructs the reader to observe her sinfulness in order to gain self-knowledge and then to gaze upon the Passion of Christ in order to receive consolation to heal the pain caused by an awareness of her sinfulness.45 Here we find Avila using the Song of Songs to Hunter, “The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church,” 282. Mews, ed., Listen, Daughter, 11. 42 Jodi Bilinkoff, “Navigating the Waves (of Devotion): Toward a Gendered Analysis 40 41

of Early Modern Catholicism,” in Crossing Boundaries: Attending to Early Modern Women, ed. Jane Donawerth and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 161– 72; Elizabeth A. Clark, “Sex, Shame and Rhetoric: En-gendering Early Christian Ethics,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (1990): 221–45. 43 Jodi Bilinkoff, “Confession, Gender, Life-Writing: Some Cases (mainly) from Spain,” in Penitence in the Age of Reformations, ed. Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 170. 44 Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 17–42. On recollection (recogimiento) see Andrés Martín, Los Recogidos. 45 Avila begins chapter 68: “Los que mucho se ejercitan en el propio conocimiento, como tratan a la continua y muy de cerca sus propios defectos, suelen caer en grandes tristezas, desconfianzas y pusilanimidad de corazón … Y para esto, ninguno otro hay igual como el conocimiento de Jesucristo … especialmente pensando cómo padeció y murió por nosotros.” Audi, 680.

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speak to his reader: “Your spouse has told you: If you do not know yourself, oh beautiful among women, leave and follow the footprints of your herd, and pastor your sheep (Song 1:8).”46 Again echoing the Song of Songs, Avila reminds his reader: “Remember what the spouse says to the bride: A garden enclosed, my sister, my bride, a garden enclosed (Song 4:12). Because not only must you be pure and guarded in the flesh, but also recollected in the soul.”47 Avila understands the enclosed garden of the Song of Songs to refer to the recollected state brought about by an ascetic lifestyle nourished by mental prayer.48 To “enclose” and recollect herself, Avila recommends that she choose a location set apart for twicedaily mental prayer, meditating on the Passion in the mornings and her selfknowledge in the afternoons.49 Avila’s discussion of the bride as the “enclosed garden” described in the Song of Songs carries with it an implicit suggestion to the reader to render herself invisible by withdrawing from the public sphere, a recommendation loaded with implications for a discussion of gender and authority.50 Yet E. Ann Matter has suggested that through the honor accorded a bride of Christ, “this model brings about a new phenomenon: the use of mystical marriage as a form of resistance against the intellectual and spiritual restrictions attendant on the strictly cloistered life, a subversion of the limitations imposed on religious women.”51 Likewise, through her recollection, the Audi’s reader-bride spiritually leaves her physical enclosure and goes forth to meet her bridegroom: “Be like one of the souls to whom the Holy Spirit speaks in the Songs: Go out and look, daughters of Zion, at the King Solomon with the crown with which his mother crowned him on the day of his marriage (Song 3:11).”52 The honor that Avila accords to his reader as the bride of Christ not only allows for a transcendence of physical limitations placed upon her as a woman, but he likewise offers the possibility of being transformed into Christ through 46 “y deciros ha vuestro esposo: Si no te conoces, ¡oh hermosa entre las mujeres!, salte y vete tras las pisadas de tus manadas, y apacienta tus cabritos … (Cant. 1,8).” Audi, 658. 47 “Y acordaos que dice el esposo a la esposa: Huerto cerrado, hermana mía, esposa, huerto cerrado (Cant. 4,12). Porque no sólo habéis de ser limpia y guardada en la carne, mas también muy cerrada y recogida en el ánima.” Audi, 663. 48 Note that Juan de Avila and his disciples Luis de Granada and Diego Pérez de Valdivia were among the most influential proponents of recogimiento spirituality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. 49 Ibid. 50 Margaret Brennan, “Enclosure: Institutionalizing the Invisibility of Women in Ecclesiastical Communities,” in Women—Invisible in Theology and Church, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Mary Collings (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1985), 38–48. 51 Matter, “Mystical Marriage,” 38. 52 “Sed vos una de las ánimas a quien dice el Espíritu Santo en los Cantares: Salid y mirad, hijas de Sión, al rey Salomón con la guirnalda con que le coronó su madre en el día del desposorio de él (Cant. 3,11).” Audi, 681.

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self-identification. Employing passionate love language, Avila provides his reader with a script for addressing her divine bridegroom: “The fire of your love, that you want to burn in us until setting us on fire, scorching us, and burning what we are, and transforming us into you, you blow on us with the mercies that you did for us in your life and you make it burn with the death that you endured for us.”53 This transformation is made possible by the virgin’s imitation of Christ’s Passion: “The first and principle among things, in which you have to imitate, is in the exterior harshness and mortification of your body, so that you might have some similarity to his divine one … Look with much attention, how much he enjoys gall and vinegar; look how narrow a bed he lays upon … and gather in yourself force to flee the gifts of your body in clothing, bed, and food.”54 After this imitation and “beautification,” Avila’s virgin at last finds herself desired by Christ and in union with him as she contemplates the Ecce Homo: “Look, then, at this man, in himself, and look at him in you. In himself, so that you can see who you are, and at yourself, to see who he is.”55 In spite of his frequent recourse to the language and imagery of the Song of Songs to describe the soul’s marriage to the divine, Avila returns to Psalm 44 to narrate the completion of the reader’s journey. Avila explains that, like the apostles on Mount Tabor who witnessed the Transfiguration, she will see Christ’s dazzling face, and because of her own purification, he tells her: “You will appear like him like the sun, and the souls redeemed by him, white like the snow. Those … who, confessing and abhorring with sorrow their own ugliness, ask to be beautified and washed in this pool of the blood of the Savior; from which they emerge so beautiful … that the words already spoken will be sung with great truth and joy: The King will desire your beauty (Ps. 44:12).”56 We find many inversions in Avila’s spiritual ascent: the Passion and Transfiguration, corporal and spiritual beauty, flesh and spirit, the human soul and Christ, and of course, gender—as the bride and Christ see themselves in each “El fuego de amor de ti, que en nosotros quieres que arda hasta encendernos, abrasarnos y quemarnos lo que somos, y transformarnos en ti, tú lo soplas con las mercedes que en tu vida nos heciste, y lo haces arder con la muerte que por nosotros pasaste.” Audi, 683. 54 “Y lo primero, y principio de cosas mayores, en que le habéis de imitar, sea en la exterior aspereza y mortificación de vuestro cuerpo, para que tengáis alguna semejanza con el suyo divino … Miralde con mucha atención, cómo gusta hiel y vinagre; miralde en cuán estrecha cama está acostado … y cobrad vos esfuerzo para huir los regalos de vuestro cuerpo en vestidos, y cama y comida.” Audi, 699. 55 “Mirad, pues, este hombre en sí y miradlo en vos. En sí, para ver quién sois vos; en vos, para ver quién es él.” Audi, 778. 56 “Parézcaos él como el sol, y las animas por él redemidas, blancas como la nieve. Aquellas … confesando y aborreciendo con dolor su propia fealdad, piden ser hermoseadas y lavadas en esta piscine de sangre del Salvador; de la cual salen tan hermosas … que le sean cantadas con gran verdad y alegría las palabras ya dichas: Deseará el rey tu hermosura (Sal 44,12).” Audi, 780. 53

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other. Becoming united with Christ and seeing herself one with him in his Passion amidst these other inversions suggests that through her spiritual perfection she has transcended her physical status as a woman—the very thing for which the Carmelite mystic Teresa of Jesus was lauded in her canonization ceremony.57 Indeed, in the early purgative stages of the ascent, Avila instructs the virgin that she must learn from the example of St. Antony of the Desert and “fight like a man” against temptations.58 Yet in spite of these various possibilities for the virgin’s empowerment as the bride of Christ and the transcendence of her female status, it seems that her ascent remains dependent upon obedience to a confessor. Unsurprisingly—perhaps because of Avila’s fame as a pastor of souls—the spiritual director’s role looms throughout the Audi’s instructions, especially in part one as the reader learns to ignore the languages of the world, the flesh, and the devil so as to better hear God speaking to her. One of the foundational steps for the virgin is to obey the teachings of the church and place herself under the care of a confessor: “Around the fulfillment of the Lord’s will, in which our good exists, you can ask me: In what way will you know that? To this I say that where there is the commandment or the word of God or of his church, you have nothing else to inquire … When this does not exist, you must hold in the same way what your superior orders … And when this is lacking, take for the will of the Lord the counsel that is given to you from him whom you should take it.”59 If this were not enough, Avila warns of those who do not relate all of their inner experiences to their spiritual director, and thereby go “not well confessed” and will continue to suffer from temptations.60 Because confessor-penitent relationships were so important for devout men and women of sixteenth-century Spain, yet had so much potential for dangerous emotional attachments or simply bad advice, Avila displays concern that the virgin elect her spiritual director wisely.61 The virgin must examine whether the confessor Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity, 17. “Debéis a pelear varonilmente … Acordaos cómo San Antón.” Audi, 601. 59 “Cerca del cumplimiento de la voluntad del Señor, en que está nuestro bien, me 57 58

podréis preguntar: ¿En qué la conoceréis? A lo cual os digo que donde hay mandamiento y palabra de Dios o de su Iglesia, no tenéis más de inquirir … Y cuando esto no hay, habéis de tener por lo mismo lo que manda vuestro superior … Y cuando todo esto faltare, tomaréis por voluntad del Señor el consejo que os diere persona de quien se debe tomar.” Audi, 758–9. 60 “Suele, a los que estas tentaciones tienen, dar mucha pena el haberlas de decir abiertamente a su confesor, por ser cosas tan feas y malas … Y, por otra parte, si no las dicen muy por extenso, y no relatan cada pensamiento, por menudo que sea, paréceles no ir bien confesados.” Audi, 596. 61 Teresa likewise instructed her nuns to select their spiritual directors wisely and warned against the dangers of an inexperienced confessor, another instance of female religious agency. Alison Weber, “Saint Teresa, Demonologist,” in Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 124–45.

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displays a “very good and approved life and reputation,” and more importantly, whether he is “wise and experienced”—all reiterations of the importance of the confessor’s own experience of the spiritual life.62 Moreover, Avila’s requirement that the confessor be experienced in the ways of prayer suggests that such a priest would have passed through a path similar to that described in the Audi. Indeed, while Avila avoids a detailed discussion of this point in the Audi, his view on the spiritual experience needed to be a good confessor is evident in the Plática Tercera, an address about prayer that he delivered to a group of Jesuits in order that they might better understand their pastoral responsibilities.63 In contrast to the Audi, Avila’s description of a three-part spiritual ascent in the Plática is fundamentally apophatic.64 Nevertheless, he cannot avoid using nuptial language when he speaks of the soul’s union with God as “weddings that cannot be described” and involving a “very intimate love” for which words are inadequate.65 Moreover, Avila spends much time in the Plática emphasizing that his Jesuit listeners must themselves pass through stages of humility and docility, becoming like children before their own confessors, in order to become proficient guides for the spiritual life.66 In the Audi, Avila insinuates that priests with this experience are in fact rare, as he notes: “When you find such a confessor, give thanks to our Lord and obey and love him as something that he [the Lord] has given you.”67 Interestingly, he grants that if no good spiritual director can be found, it is better for the virgin to fulfill her minimum annual sacramental obligations by confessing and receiving communion two or three times throughout the year, and to progress spiritually on her own by reading pious books and practicing recollected mental prayer.68 Avila further betrays this concession to his virgin reader when he compares her personalized “Y la esposa de Cristo … no fácilmente ha de elegir confesor, mas mirando que sea de muy buena y aprobada vida y fama, y de madura edad … un confesor sabio y experimentado.” Audi, 555, 596. 63 Plática, 813–26. 64 Avila describes the marriage between the soul and the divine in recollection thus: “Est ergo el recogimiento un silencio en Dios, in quo coniungun[tur] ignota cum ignoto, porque obra el entendimiento muy poco: Ideo ignotus ab eo Deus. Ignota; porque no sabe lo que tiene. Coniungitur ineffabiliter: hacen también el ánima y Dios unas bodas que no se pueden decir; no hay palabras y, si hay algunas, serián bajas y estorbarían el amor muy estrecho.” Plática, 819. 65 “hacen también el anima y Dios unas bodas, que no se pueden decir; no hay palabras y, si hay algunas, serían bajas y estorbarían el amor muy estrecho.” Ibid. 66 “Ha menester maestro y regalarle como a un niño…Es menester primero ejercitarse en mortificaciones y en obras de obediencia, humildad, cosas bajas.” Plática, 821. 67 “Y cuando tal confesor hallárades, dad gracias a nuestro Señor y obedeceldo y amaldo como a cosa que él os dio.” Audi, 555. 68 “Mas si tal no lo hallárades, muy mejor es que os confeséis y comulguéis en el año dos o tres veces, y tengáis cuenta con Dios y con vuestros buenos libros en vuestra celda, que no, por confesar muchas veces, poner vuestra fama a algún riesgo.” Audi, 555. 62

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process for achieving self-knowledge with a monastic chapter meeting: “Enter into chapter with yourself by night, judging yourself very particularly, as you would a third person. Reprehend and punish your own faults, and preach to yourself, with much greater care than any other person would … Because believe that, while this examination and reprehension of yourself lasts, your faults will not be able to last without being remedied.”69 These instructions suggest that Avila actually endows his reader, as the bride of Christ, with a certain amount of spiritual agency.70 After all, she is reminded that the confessor only deserves her affection as a friend of her spouse—not as the spouse himself.71 While serving as a warning against developing an emotional attachment that could lead to temptations, such an instruction opens the possibility for the bride of Christ, by virtue of her “marital status,” to claim a higher focus for her obedience than her confessor, who is a “bride of Christ” of sorts through his own experience of prayer. Although less well known among today’s scholars of mystical literature than contemporaries such as the Carmelites Teresa of Jesus and John of the Cross, Juan de Avila makes a significant contribution to the tradition of Christian nuptial spirituality with the Audi, filia. By translating the nuptial spirituality associated with Psalm 44 from the cloister into the emerging world of printed vernacular devotional literature, Avila’s Audi was one of the most influential texts of a period in which the piety of the devout underwent profound changes. With the Audi, Juan de Avila draws on a tradition extending back to the Patristic age that understands the marriage described in Psalm 44 to be the same as that of the Song of Songs. Like his predecessors, Avila employs this nuptial imagery—interpreted as a marriage between Christ and the church or Christ and the individual Christian—in order to prescribe a rule for the spiritual life and describe the soul’s ascent in a text originally destined for a female audience. Because of both the Audi’s popularity with female readers and Juan de Avila’s efforts as a clerical reformer, the text offers a useful opportunity for examining the role played by the gendered language of nuptial mysticism in the construction of clerical authority and religious identity. Surely, the Audi’s traditional employment of Psalm 44’s bridal metaphor to depict spiritual perfection as a process of withdrawal, enclosure, obedience, humility, and nuptial union with a masculine deity reveals the powerful—even dangerous—possibilities that gender offers to

69 “Entrad en capítulo con vos a la noche, juzgándoos muy particularmente, como haríades a otra tercera persona. Reprehendeos y castigaos de vuestras faltas, y predicaos a vos mesma, con mucho mayor cuidado que a otra persona alguna … Porque creed que, durando este examen y reprehensión de vos mesma, no podrán durar mucho vuestras faltas sin ser remediadas.” Audi, 668–9. 70 On the complex and often reciprocal relationships of authority between confessors and penitents, see Bilinkoff, “Confession, Gender, Life-Writing,” Lu Ann Homza, Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 71 Audi, 555.

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construct and delimit religious authority.72 However, a facile assertion that this form of spirituality as presented in Juan de Avila’s Audi, filia served primarily to extend clerical hegemony over the laity through gendered depictions of spiritual perfection proves difficult to maintain after a close reading of the text and situating it in his broader oeuvre. Feminist scholarship about mystical marriage in medieval and early modern female spirituality has pointed out the subversive potential offered to pious women as they transcended the limitations of their bodies and became wedded to Christ through their devotion to and imitation of his Passion. Any claim that the Audi served to extend clerical hegemony is further complicated by the participation of men in the tradition of nuptial spirituality. As one of the most popular devotional titles of its day, the Audi also counted men among its readers. Moreover, it presumes that a good confessor would have undergone the spiritual experience described in its pages. In the end, of course, early modern confessors still retained authority over those dependent upon their sacraments and spiritual direction. Nonetheless, theirs was an embedded authority, and one invested only from passing through a state of gender confusion that seems unavoidable in the Christian mystical tradition, as Juan de Avila’s Audi, filia shows.

72 For a recent theological criticism of bridal mysticism’s negative potential, see Susan A. Ross, “Can God Be a Bride? Some problems with an ancient metaphor,” America 191, no. 13 (2004): 12–15.

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Chapter 8

Spenser’s Equations of His Queen with Christ: Royal Supremacy and Royal Psalms Carol V. Kaske

Features strange yet essential to the Church of England, at least in the earlier centuries of its existence, are both the general adulation offered to English monarchs and the attribution to them of supreme power over the church. In the Dedication to the Fifth Book of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1597), the usually judicious Hooker declared that just as the war cry of the Israelites once was, “by the sword of God and Gedeon [sic],” so all citizens of England should sing “by the goodness of Almighty God and his servant Elizabeth we are.” Patrick Collinson, after recording this adulatory statement both of the Royal Supremacy and of the personal importance of Queen Elizabeth I, adds that Hooker “proposed to make this the emblem, inscription, style, and title for the English Church.”1 Since the statement is part of the conclusion of the Dedication of Book V, some rhetorically heightened gesture toward a ruler would have been appropriate; but this one goes beyond courtly protocol and endorses sacral monarchy. Although Edmund Spenser (1554?–1599) could hardly have known Hooker’s statement in time for his own major religious pronouncements, since Laws Book 5 was published seven years after Faerie Queene Book One (1590) and one year after Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and Fowre Hymnes (1596), he almost certainly knew a similar statement in an anonymous document of 1576, before he had written anything, a document that may indeed be Hooker’s source for the stark words, “by his servant Elizabeth, we are”—the “Prayer for the Queen on her byrth daye.” While ostensibly designed for September 7, it became also an optional appendage to the Accession Day service—that service of thanksgiving for Elizabeth’s coronation in 1558 which was ordered to be repeated every November 17 from 1576 onwards: We blesse and praise thy holy name for that precious jewell … our moste gratious Soverayn, whose sacred person according to thy word we doe reverentlye repute Richard Hooker, Complete Works, Vol. 2., ed. John Keble (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970 [repr. of final edition by Keble, 1888]), 9. Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 1. Joseph Dallett, Thomas D. Hill, Debora Shuger, Lynn Staley Johnson, Anne Lake Prescott, other friends, and the readers for the press all contributed to this article. 1

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Both these last phrases and Hooker’s seeming echo of their sense attribute to Queen Elizabeth I that role as sustainer of all mankind expressed in St. Paul’s characterization of God to the Athenians on Mars Hill, “in whom we live, and moove and have our being” (Acts 17.28, see also 22, 25, emphasis mine). “According to Lathbury,” says Evan Daniel, “the day of the queen’s accession was observed even after Elizabeth’s death as a day of thanksgiving … for the gracious deliverance wrought out for the Church by her instrumentality,” even though King James I after a year established his own Accession Day service (Daniel, 535, n.), and even though the Accession Day service was normally revised to fit each new monarch (Daniel, 536). Daniel in 1905 speaks of the service as still in use though in a modified form (536). The editor of Liturgical Services records that in his time (1847) certain institutions still dedicated a holiday called Queen’s Day to Elizabeth’s Accession (558 n. 3).3 In light of these facts, Margaret Christian is not overstating when she declares: “the Church of England … effectively made Elizabeth’s accession [and James’s, and that of those succeeding monarchs who chose to celebrate theirs] part of the Anglican church year,”4 thus sacralizing them. Daniel expresses the modern reader’s worry that “there is something almost profane” when this Accession Day liturgy applies to a human sovereign attributes appropriate only to God.5 2 Emphasis mine. [Church of England,] Liturgical Services … in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. William Keatinge Clay, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1847), quotation, 556, n. 1; complete text of entire service, 548–61. For facts and other circumstances of publication, see also 462–4. 3 For how long it was used, see Liturgical Services, 558, n. 3, and Evan Daniel, The Prayer Book: Its History, Language, and Contents (London: Wells Gardner, 1905), 535–6. 4 Elizabeth’s Preachers and the Government of Women: Defining and Correcting a Queen,” Sixteenth Century Journal 24.3 (1993): 572. The service consists of a quotation from 1 Tim 2, 1–3; a menu of several Proper Psalms, including as an option Royal Psalm 21; as the First Lesson, a menu of three biblical stories about good kings; as the Second Lesson, Romans Chapter 13, affirming that the powers that be are ordained of God; the Epistle, I Peter 2.11; the Gospel, Matt. 22.16-21, which last includes, “Give therefore to Caesar, the things which are Caesars, & give unto God, those things which are Gods” (Daniel, 535); the Collect for the Queen (Daniel, 536; entire text printed in Liturgical Services, 76), and finally, after the sermon, Psalm 100 (Liturgical Services, 558). 5 Daniel adds in his summary, “the hymn used instead of the Venite is a cento of passages from the Psalms, several of which have a distinct Messianic meaning, and it has long been felt that there is something almost profane in applying them to a human Sovereign” (536). The cento is a pastiche of Psalmic verses about the vicissitudes of Israel which Daniel sees as being healed by Christ and as implicitly and blasphemously paralleling the vicissitudes of England under Mary, healed by Elizabeth. The really “profane” praise of Elizabeth, however, is that quoted in my text above, which is in an optional “accompaniment to this prayer.” Also “profane” in this same “accompaniment” (556) is a further parallel of Elizabeth to the Messiah: God vouchsafed “to lead the same [Elizabeth] along to that place of regall dignity, of which thowe haste said, Even I have sett my Kinge upon my holy mount

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Nevertheless the entire population doubtless regularly heard this cento and this optional deification of Elizabeth which would lead them to believe that Elizabeth was a sacral monarch. While others have written about the cult of Elizabeth, no one has yet followed Hooker’s lead and traced this reverence to the Scriptures. In the Christian society of Tudor England, the Bible would inevitably have exercised some influence on societal and legal notions. A striking example of this influence was exercised by that large and amorphous group of Psalms—now classified under the title “the Royal Psalms”—which portray various kings, mostly David, in an idealistic light. The psalms in question were widely known and cited individually (see for example Psalm 2 quoted in n. 5 above and Psalm 21, an option in the Accession Day service). Although psalms in general have often been seen as useful for private devotions because of their immediacy, these psalms at their worst obtrude a public figure between the individual and God. Even many psalms not pervasively royal contain isolated references to “the king,” e.g., Psalm 28.8; 61.6-7; and 63.11, and thus at their best intertwine the king’s welfare with that of ordinary citizens. Still we may wonder, especially we in the United States, how the king came to occupy so much of the spotlight. The Royal Psalms: History of the Term and the Concept The category Royal Psalms is concise but oversimplified, anachronistic, and fuzzy around the edges. I use it loosely for any psalm that includes a reference to a good king. It was invented by modern biblical scholars—chiefly Hermann Gunkel in an article of 1913.6 Gunkel took an anthropological approach to the religion of ancient Israel as expressed in the Bible and compared it with other ancient religions of the Middle East, about which we know comparatively more through the evidence we have of their rituals. His Royal Psalms included 2, 18, 20, 21, 45, 72, 89,101, 110, 132, and 144 (listed by a late twentieth-century follower of his, J. H. Eaton in his book Kingship and the Psalms).7 Gunkel’s Danish follower Mowinkel put many other psalms in this category. As Myers summarizes, they discovered that these other religions, particularly the religion of the Egyptians,

of Sion” (quoting Royal Psalm 2, verse 6, Liturgical Services, 556, n. 1). Contemporary Catholics of course pointed out the blasphemy of equating Elizabeth in language and position in the liturgy with God, Christ, and the Virgin Mary. Even the Protestant Robert Wright objected that ceremonies for Accession Day and Elizabeth’s birthday made her into “a god,” see Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 114–28, especially 121, 124, 125–6 and n. 56. 6 He reportedly developed it in his book, completed by J. Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen (1933), the section entitled “die Gattungen der religiösen Lyrik Israels.” 7 Studies in Biblical Theology, 2.32 (Naperville, IL: Allenson, [n.d.], henceforth cited parenthetically by page in text, 111–29).

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taught that their sovereigns were to some debatable degree divine.8 This belief provides a genetic explanation for the seemingly divine attributes of Israelite kings both in the Book of Psalms and in other Messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Bible. It renders any allusions we may find to the psalms in Spenser more appropriate to Queen Elizabeth and to my argument, though in so doing it prevents the common reader of today from empathizing with the speaker. This approach is called formcriticism, similar to genre-criticism today, though it also places more emphasis on origins. While these relatively modern exegetes discovered an illuminating kinship and therefore are frequently cited and quoted, their notions have been seriously qualified. Robert Alter, for example, whose work on the Bible is widely cited and in its own way well-informed, approaches the Bible primarily as a literary critic. In his essay “Psalms” in The Literary Guide to the Bible,9 he tones down formcriticism’s claims of ritual origins on the basis of a close and text-centered reading. Alter concludes that the number of Royal Psalms or royal passages and verses—so classified because of their supposed references to rituals involving the king—was probably smaller than what Mowinkel and his subsequent followers like Eaton, whose main sympathy lies with form-criticism, postulated. “Using the tenuous threads of comparative anthropology,” Alter charges, Gunkel and Mowinckel concluded that “the psalms referring to God’s kingship were used for an annual enthronement ceremony in which the Lord was reinvested as king. In fact, it is by no means self-evident that all the psalms were used liturgically” (247). Myers in his “Foreword” voiced similar objections. In contrast, Eaton avers that “there is little firm sign of a ‘private’ psalmody. The style and setting remain preponderantly those of Jerusalem’s official cult” (86). This is contrary to Alter and Myers, at least in emphasis. Eaton realigns himself with Alter when he says that the number of Babylonian motifs “that is sufficiently established for purposes of comparison with biblical materials” is limited (94) and when he complains of scholars who just make up “festal events” (95). Moreover, in their eagerness to establish the existence of a genre, Alter complains, the form-critics made all psalms sound alike, whereas the subtle individual deviations from convention constitute one of their attractions (247). Biblical exegetes today sometimes debate as to how intimately the Israelite king was connected with God in the minds of the original scriptural writers and their audiences. Mowinkel had claimed that the king was divine, but had himself introduced the qualification that he was not one of the ‘great gods’ but a minor divinity such as is possible in the polytheistic Middle Eastern religions of the time (on Egypt, see Eaton, 98). Using a method which, like Alter’s, is centered not in the sources but in the biblical texts themselves, Myers in his “Foreword” Keith R. Crim, The Royal Psalms (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1962); here I cite the “Foreword” by Jacob M. Myers. Either author will henceforth be cited parenthetically by author and page, 9. On the Egyptian king’s divinity, see Eaton, 96, 98. 9 Ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 246–7. 8

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reduces Mowinkel’s claims for the king’s immortality (based on such scriptures as Isaiah 9.6) to the claim that the king, his court, and his dynasty comprise a “corporate personality” of Yahweh which will endure forever (Myers, 10). Brown also affirms that the king’s eternity means a “permanent Davidic dynasty” and adds that the king’s eternity and universality were “partly an exuberant wish for long life and many victories.”10 The king’s present divinity can also be reduced to his possession of, or rather his being possessed by, God’s spirit (I Sam. 10.10; 11.l6; 16.13–14; Brown, 158; Eaton,11). Various degrees of divinity are ascribed to the king in various passages of the Psalms themselves, as well as in other messianic scriptures (Myers, 9). Brown discerns in the Hebrew Bible three stages culminating in the hope for a human Messiah who is also somehow divine and who saves his people from their sins. Brown cautions, however, that “although the Jewish hope of the Messiah was highly idealized, there was no expectation of a divine Messiah in the sense in which Jesus is professed as Son of God …. The Christian understanding of a spiritual Messiah with a kingdom not of this world represented a change rather than a restoration” (Brown, 160–61, n. 220). Spenser’s Elizabeth, however, resembles such a Christian Messiah in that her surrogate “Eliza” in “Aprill” is declared without qualification to be the daughter of the God Pan and in that Spenser’s friend E.K. aligned this declaration with classical apotheoses of rulers, on which see below. “Aprill” does not even include the mitigating circumstance of adoption which is frequently used to tone down the king’s divine paternity, e.g. in classical panegyric and in Psalms 2.7 and 89.26–7 as well as in their Middle Eastern sources (Brown, 156–7). The higher degrees of divinity can be seen in a typical hermeneutical instance: the four or five epithets applied to the coming Messiah in Isaiah 9.6: “Wonderfull, Counseller, The mightie God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of peace” (Geneva version) translated by Brown as four epithets: “Wonder-Counsellor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of peace” (158). Crim aptly summarizes: “The application of this term [‘Mighty God’] and the next one [‘Everlasting Father,’ or ‘FatherForever’] to the Messiah indicates that he is more than human, but a detailed explanation is very difficult” (64; for further details, see my section “Elizabeth as Prince of Peace,” below). These epithets, as well as other Messianic words and phrases (for example, Ps. 110.3)—perceived not only by Christians from the New Testament writers to the present day but also by Gunkel and Mowinkel as prophecies of the divine nature of a future king—are deconstructed by Brown (156-58) as holdovers from the past: traditional courtly titles of a monarch, voiced especially at his coronation. The king once was God, Brown says in effect, but that was long before Isaiah 9.6 was written; and usage had already diluted the claim’s force to that of a metaphor for a spiritual investiture such as could have occurred in a pious culture at any king’s coronation. Christian exegetes assume with Mowinckel that the divinity was still taken literally, but they deny that the divinity in question was Egyptian. They affirm that Raymond E. Brown, Introduction to New Testament Christology (New York, NY: Paulist Press,1994), Appendix I, “History of the Hope for a Royal Messiah,” henceforth cited by page in text, 157. 10

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the epithets necessarily prophesy a Messiah so divine as to be begotten by God. Besides defining terms and providing background, this history has not advanced my argument much, since it is impossible to pin down one typical Hebrew concept of a king’s divinity. This whole debate about Royal Psalms and other Messianic texts among biblical scholars parallels the scholarly disagreements about Spenser’s equations of his queen with Christ: both sets of debaters are arguing as to whether the phrases denote a literal apotheosis, conventional courtly rhetoric, or something in between. Although the views of Gunkel, Mowinckel, and the other “higher,” anthropological critics of the Bible have been toned down by exegetes of the later twentieth century such as Alter, Myers, and Crim, we shall see that their notions were in effect resurrected by literary critics who believed that Elizabeth I was to one degree or another apotheosized—by students of her cult like Roy Strong and Frances Yates and by Spenser critics under their influence such as Thomas Cain and David Lee Miller. Both patterns arise partly because many literary critics from the twentieth century onward delight in the frisson evoked by blasphemy. Whatever their conclusions may be, this analogous debate constitutes one more indication that Spenser’s hyperbolical praises of his ruler have a biblical model. Spenser and his contemporaries seem not to have recognized the category now termed Royal Psalms. The earliest reference I can find to something resembling such a category is by George Wither in his seventeenth-century Preparation to the Psalter, who finds there “the glorious magnificence of our Redeemer’s Empire” expressed in “the height of Heroicall Poesie.”11 In the sixteenth century, theologians did at least talk about Psalmic references to the king. Of unparalleled sophistication is the comment of Tremellius and Junius (their edition has often been called “the Protestant Vulgate”, to be discussed again below), that the divinity in Psalm 89 can be attributed “tenuiter”—in a weak sense—to other sovereigns as being types of David and Christ.12 As this example shows, they commented mostly in terms of typology, a sort of allegory widely practiced, as McClennen announces, even by the usually literalistic Protestants, referring a given psalm literally to David and Israel and then through them allegorically to Christ and his Church.13 The Psalms in general were classified into genres in many different ways, including subject matter, mood, rhetorical stance, and relevance to the reader’s personal life, but not according to their Jewish roots. An English exegete of the sixteenth century, Archbishop Matthew Parker, in his prefatory material to his nearly anonymous book, The Whole Psalter Translated into English Metre, designates what are, in effect, genres. They include among others praise, lament, and “those which curse Quoted by Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 47. 12 Testamenti veteris Biblia Sacra … Latini …. ex Hebraeo facti, trans. and ed. Emmanuel Tremellius and Franciscus Junius (London: H. Midleton [sic], 1585), hereafter TJ, on Psalm 89.27–8 [sic]. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. 13 See Joshua McClennen, The Meaning and Function of Allegory in the English Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Studies, 1947). 11

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menacingly” (translation mine).14 Lewalski surveys many Early Modern lists of Psalmic genres.15 Neither the critic nor the Archbishop mentions Royal Psalms as a group. It may suggest a royal association with Psalms or certain Psalms (perhaps via David), that some Psalm paraphrases, commentaries, and sermons were specifically dedicated to monarchs.16 With the possible exception of Wither, the rest of the Early Modern theorists may have refused to call it a genre because references to the king are often isolated in psalms which are not pervasively royal. To speak genetically for a moment, these isolated references may represent liminal examples in which a motif is applied to a king that once was applied to a commoner or a motif was democratized that once was confined to a king. If so, in this restraint, Early Modern exegetes manifest more literary sophistication than do some of the form-critics. Further evidence that the monarch is sacred is that English society made him or her the head of the Church. This notion constitutes the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, which Hooker’s “Dedication” also implicitly endorses. Of course Christ is the head of the church; but the monarch is his secular analogue and deputy (see Eph. 4.15; 5.23; Col. 1.18; 2.19), and this qualifies him or her to “govern” the clergy, though some theologians limit the monarch’s jurisdiction to their temporal affairs. This analogy was embraced eagerly by Henry VIII and hesitantly by Elizabeth. She modestly preferred the title “supreme governor,” because she was among those who felt that the title “head of the church” belonged to Christ alone.17 Nevertheless she often acted with the decisiveness and the aura of a “head.” Such Messianic analogies of her to Christ, often by way of analogies to David, Christ’s ancestor and type, were supported by the widespread belief among English Protestants, especially after the victory over the Armada, that England was God’s chosen people, the new Israel. Social practices and legal notions can be studied in this way, as if they had sources as do literary works; this is cultural poetics. Such analogies are in part literary. Nothing throws more light on socio-literary interconnections like the above than to scrutinize the role of Spenser in them—a topic which will occupy the rest of the present essay. We shall see that Spenser too was influenced by Messianic scriptures and that his exploitation of them can be connected to the social character of the Tudor monarchy. Scripture can influence both poets and society, so that its influence is not linear but radial or at the very least two-pronged. The interactions of these factors can be envisaged in geometrical terms in a diagram such as is shown below. 14 Parker’s name is indicated by an acrostic within the text (London: John Daye, [1567]), STC #2729). 15 39–53; 131–8. 16 See for example Richard Beeard [sic], A Godly psalme of Mary Queene (1583), Andrew Willet, Ecclesia triumphans (1603), and Daniel Dyke, Certain comfortable sermons upon the 124 Psalme (1616). I owe this point to the anonymous reader for the press. 17 See Claire Cross, The Royal Supremacy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 23, 27–8; Thomas Rogers, The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England, an Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, 1st ed. 1586, ed. J.S.S. Perowne, Parker Society, vol. 45 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1854) on Article 37, 337.

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Fig. 8.1

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Circulation of Cultural Energy

The aforementioned influence of the Messianic Scriptures (Royal Psalms and prophecies of the Messiah) on Elizabethan ideas of sacral monarchy and the Royal Supremacy is represented by the vertical line from the upper right to the lower right corner. Spenser’s deifications of Queen Elizabeth lodged at the lower left corner will be seen chiefly in interplay with Royal Psalms and other Messianic Scriptures, which interplay forms the diagonal line from the upper right to the lower left and vice versa, as explained below. Sapience, a biblical personification, to be discussed below, occupies the upper left corner and influences both Spenser’s deification of Elizabeth below it and the legal notion of the Royal Supremacy to the lower right. Naturally, Spenser’s deifications of Elizabeth could also have interacted with the doctrine of sacral monarchy directly without the intervention of either of my proposed scriptural sources at the other two corners; and this interaction is represented by the horizontal line running from the lower left corner (Spenser) to the lower right (society), and vice versa. Moreover, the use to which poets put a given scriptural verse or social idea can affect whether and how it is perceived by others, so that the influence can be reciprocal. I will argue first and most obviously that Spenser was passively influenced in the way dear to old-fashioned source-criticism in his application to Elizabeth of the Royal Psalms and other Messianic Scriptures (and of the Sapiential scriptures too) and secondly that his allusions to these scriptures in his portrayal of her in turn actively politicized them, making them links to the sacral monarchy and the Royal Supremacy if they were not already perceived as such. Depending on whether one talks in terms of influence or of allusion and political strategy, one could envisage an arrow on this diagonal pointing not only to but

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from Spenser. These influences or allusions can explain most of the hyperbolic claims that Spenser makes about Elizabeth. Two scholars have attempted to explain these claims. Spenser exhibits what Thomas Cain calls a “strange veneration of Elizabeth as quasi-divine.”18 This veneration is also subjected to a more learned and nuanced argument by Åke Bergvall in “Between Eusebius and Augustine: Una and the Cult of Elizabeth.”19 He argues judiciously that the Tudors and their apologists vacillated in their views of kingship (20) between those of Augustine and those of Eusebius of Caesarea (born AD ca. 260, died 339 or 340)—a Greek Father who called his own emperor “a friend of God” and held him responsible for the spiritual as well as the temporal welfare of his subjects.20 Such Byzantine Caesaro-Papism resembles certain praises of Elizabeth.21 Citing “O Goddesse heauenly bright, / Mirrour of grace and Maiestie divine,” Cain states that the fourth stanza of the Proem to the first book of the Faerie Queene (hereafter FQ in notes and parentheses) fashions her as a “mediatrix” and adds that “this Christ-like role expresses the Protestant cult of Elizabeth as national savior.” Bergvall scorns Cain’s extreme terms like “mediatrix” and “Christ-like” as an exaggeration of the already-exaggerated flattery by Spenser and the Tudor propagandists. On this particular stanza Bergvall is right. Bergvall goes a bit too far in the skeptical direction, however, when he says, “To take the flattery of Spenser’s Proems at face value as a religious statement would surely be misguided” (20). (In the Faerie Queene, proems are the special sections of verse prefacing each of the books.) And while the mode of the proems may well be political rhetoric, the passage we are about to consider, Faerie Queene I.x.59, occurs in the body of the text, not in a proem, and therefore has less overtones of flattery. Also the two quotations with which the present essay began, though rhetorical, are not political but religious—statements of the royal supremacy ascribing to Elizabeth a property of God, his role a sustainer of the universe, one by Richard Hooker and one by an anonymous liturgist within 18 Thomas Cain, Praise in the Faerie Queene (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 52. 19 English Literary Renaissance 27 (1997): 3–30, especially 20–21. 20 Berthold Altaner, Patrology, trans. Hilda C. Graef (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1961), in a thorough survey, characterizes Eusebius as “the prototype of weak-kneed political bishops” (263) because, in his “extravagantly exaggerating panegyric” (that is, Panegyrical Writings in Honor of Constantine), he called his emperor “friend of almighty God” (265). In his Manual of Patrology and History of Theology (original edition, Paris: Desclée and Brouwer, 1927, translation, Paris: Desclée and Company, 1933), Fulbert Cayré says, “his praises of Constantine are far too flattering,” chap. 2, 318–27, quotation 324. 21 Eusebius and Spenser exhibit similar grounds for it: Constantine transformed the state religion of his empire from pagan to Christian; Elizabeth transformed hers from Catholic to Protestant; thus both seemed to their supporters to be agents of God. Frances Yates in her seminal book Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975) explains that both rulers put an end to religious persecution; true enough, but that is a lesser issue. To give Yates due credit, it was she who first brought Eusebius into the discussion of Spenser’s encomia of Elizabeth, 42–44 and Plate 4a.

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the Prayer Book itself. These quotations incline us as scholars to take Spenser’s apotheoses of Queen Elizabeth seriously despite their strangeness. Some scholars enjoy estranging texts; others aim to naturalize them. Also to his credit, Cain alludes,22 albeit parenthetically (whereas Bergvall alludes to it not at all) to the study of sacral monarchy by Ernst Kantorowicz—groundbreaking but mentioning neither Spenser nor the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy and only once a Royal Psalm.23 Like Cain and Bergvall, I too trace Spenser’s veneration of Elizabeth to sacral monarchy, although (except for my and Cain’s common interest in the Shepheardes Calender) I focus on different passages; like Bergvall, I trace the adulation of Elizabeth to Eusebius, but I also trace it to a more originary source, the Scriptures. This inquiry is further justified by the fact that the Protestants acquired a newly direct experience of all of the invariably assigned Psalms (including the Royal Psalms) from the new vernacular versions and from the increasing tendency to recite or sing them congregationally. The following five passages—the pastoral poem and four selections from Spenser’s romance-epic The Faerie Queene— directly or indirectly equate Queen Elizabeth I with Christ. Elizabeth as “Heuenly Borne” The existence of surrogates for Elizabeth is announced by the proem to Book Three, “Ne let his [Raleigh’s] fairest Cynthia refuse, / In mirrours more than one her selfe to see, / But either Gloriana let her chuse / Or in Belphoebe fashioned to bee: / In th’one her rule, in th’other her rare chastitee”(Proem 5.5–9). One mirror does not call into question the other, for they are not contradictory, though the kaleidoscopic shift from unapproachable monarch to girl-scout (see III.v.30–41) does create a certain mystery. On many occasions Spenser declares Elizabeth or one of her surrogates in the poem to be “heuenly borne/of heauenly race/borne of heuenly birth/borne of heauenly brood.”24 Elkin Calhoun Wilson backs up Spenser’s statements with ample parallels from the milieu and argues from these that, without that prompting from the church-state such as James I was later to issue, Spenser and other poets spontaneously attributed to Elizabeth “divine right.”25 We shall see that this motif alludes to that divine paternity which is attributed to the king of Israel in Royal Psalms 2.7 and 89.26-27, in the NewTestament citations of Royal Psalm 2.7, and in the doctrines of sacral monarchy and the Royal Supremacy more or less metaphorically derived from them both. 22

Cain cites Kantorowicz (see next note) on p. 197, n. 24. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 393, n. 265. 24 Eliza’s “heauenly race,” “Shepheardes Calender, Aprill”, 53; Una “borne of heauenly brood,” I.iii.8.7; Una “yborn of heuenly birth,” I.iii.28.9 (Archimago speaking but not necessarily lying); Una “most virtuous virgin born of heauenly berth,” I.x.9.3; Gloriana “heuenly borne,” I.x.59; Belphoebe “by her stately portance borne of heuenly birth,” II.iii.21.9; again, Belphoebe is “heuenly borne and of celestiall hew,” III.v.47.4. 25 Elkin Calhoun Wilson, England’s Eliza (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 225–6. 23

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Gloriana as Christ In the “Letter of the Authours” commonly called the Letter to Raleigh, Spenser announces that Elizabeth in her public role is symbolized by Gloriana whereas in her private role she is symbolized by Belphoebe. In I.x.59, the clearest and most outspoken passage, Spenser claims that Gloriana is that soueraigne Dame, That glory does to them for guerdon graunt: For she is heuenly borne, and heauen may justly vaunt.

Some have even interpreted the “For”-clause literally as meaning that this heavenly birth entitles her to bestow glory in a Christian heaven. If so, Spenser is imitating Eusebius by attributing to her a salvific role. Eusebius called his emperor Constantine a “friend of God,” presumably as a co-worker with him in the process of redemption. Later commentators call him “weak-kneed” and “flattering” for this (see notes 20 and 21). But provided one realizes that back then, the Book of Wisdom was respected as canonical, the claim is scriptural, for Wisdom 7.14 and 27 say that the king is the friend of God and that Wisdom and his desire for her qualified him for this status. This astonishing statement can be mitigated by saying, though the text does not encourage it, that heavenly birth is metaphorical, as it is in the case of Spenser’s beloved in the Amoretti (61.6). At the very least, I would say, Spenser is equivocating between literal and metaphoric. Similarly equivocal in I.x.59 is the word “glory”—earthly glory or reward in heaven? (See “glory” in my Appendix of Images in Spenser and Biblical Poetics.) “Glory” can be either earthly or heavenly depending on whether the implied perspective is “guided by romance or epic attitudes” or theological.26 A more precise source and target of allusion for Gloriana’s paternity is Royal Psalm 2.7, which pictures God saying directly to David and prophetically to Christ: “Thou art my Sonne; this day have I begotten thee.” God also affirmed to Elizabeth that he was her father, according to Thomas Bentley in his monumental Monument of Matrones: “Thou art my Daughter in deed, this daye have I begotten thee.”27 Bentley may in fact be the immediate source of the royalist passages in The Faerie Queene, for he is early enough to have influenced it (1582), though not early enough to have influenced the Shepheardes Calender (1579). What was “This day”? God “adopted” the Hebrew king as his son at his coronation and/or anointing; it is a legal metaphor. The Geneva version explains “this day have I begotten thee” metaphorically “as touching mans knowledge, because it [presumably David’s anointing by Samuel] was the first time that David appeared Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 186–8. I am imitating Darryl Gless’s comment on the equivocal word “prove,” Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 57 and n. 18. 27 Thomas Bentley, The Monument of Matrones: conteining seven severall Lamps of Virginitie or distinct treatises (London: H. Denham, 1582), 307. 26

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to be elected of God (gloss e).”28 According to Bentley, “this day” in the life of Elizabeth refers to the day of her coronation, historically the original Accession Day, for Bentley says that his entire third “lamp” or section of prayers and meditations is “to be properlie used of the QUEENES most excellent Majestie, as especiallie upon the 17. daie of November,”29 the anniversary of her accession. In its allegorical and typological interpretation, Psalm 2.7 refers to Christ the Messiah, in which case God’s fatherhood is literal. “This day” in the life of Christ would seem to point to John’s baptism on which occasion a voice from heaven announced to a crowd of spectators, “This is my beloved Sonne” (Mat. 3.17; Mark 1.11; Luke 3.22; see also Mat. 12.18; 17.5; Mark 9.7; Luke 9.35) as if legally adopting him. This interpretation could be true whether or not God had also in fact begotten him. Christians unlike Jews believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah and that even in the Old Testament, in scriptures such as these, the Messiah is defined as both human and divine. For example, Acts 13.33 and Hebrews 1.5 both quote Psalm 2.7 as a prophecy of Christ as the Son of God; and these scriptures in turn are cross-referenced by the Geneva gloss (gloss *) on Psalm 2.7. Indeed it would seem that the Bible surrounds all Israel’s kings—particularly David— with some aura of divinity. Elizabeth was frequently compared to David, as John N. King demonstrates.30 Because Psalm 2.7 was applied directly to Elizabeth by Bentley, Spenser could count on an audience which would accept and even relish his comparisons of Elizabeth to Christ. The extension of this aura of divine paternity to Elizabeth and other rulers (presumably only the godly ones) is further supported by the comment of Junius and Tremellius on another Messianic psalm, Psalm 89.26-27. (Psalm 89 happens to have been assigned in the Lectionary for evening prayer on the seventeenth day of every month, which in November would be Accession Day [“The Table for the Order of the Psalms,” Liturgical Services, 40]). Speaking for the moment in the persona of God, the psalmist proclaims of David (who is mentioned in 89.20; 35), “He shall cry unto me, Thou art my Father …. Also I will make him my first borne.” The gloss on this verse in the Geneva Bible explains as follows: “His [David’s] excellent dignitie shall appear herein that he shall be named the sonne of God, and the first borne, wherein he is a figure of Christ (gloss y).” As previously noted, this apotheosis, says the gloss on this verse

The Bible, that is, the Holy Scriptures conteined in the Olde and Newe Testament (London: Christopher Barker, 1594), Psalm 2.7. The 1560 version of the Geneva is widely available in the 1969 facsimile edition by Lloyd Berry (Madison, WI, 1969). It does not, however, include those glosses added by Tonson in 1576; but 1594 does, making it an ideal edition for Spenser. On the other hand, since Spenser died in 1599, we do not need those glosses added in 1599. 29 Bentley, Title page of “The Third Lampe,” also substantially reproduced on his page 253. 30 John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 256; see also Susan Doran, “Queen Elizabeth and Old-Testament Kings,” Sixteenth-Century Conference, Minneapolis, MN, October 28, 2007. 28

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in the Junius-Tremellius Latin Old Testament,31 can be “applied in a weak sense [tenuiter] to other sovereigns as types of him [Christ].” Bentley similarly deified Queen Elizabeth. This typology is probably the literal meaning of Bentley’s and Spenser’s apotheoses of Elizabeth as well. Such an apotheosis, insofar as it was believed, must in turn have strengthened in the minds of Spenser’s readers Elizabeth’s disputed claim to the Royal Supremacy; this strategy could be represented by my horizontal line pointing from Spenser in the lower left to the Royal Supremacy on the lower right. Poets participate in an alternating current of energy, both perceiving and being perceived. Elizabeth as Daughter of Pan in “Aprill” In his “Aprill” eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender, celebrating “Eliza” as “queen of shepherds,” Spenser says she was begotten by Pan (Henry VIII) on the nymph Syrinx (Anne Boleyn): For shee is Syrinx daughter without spotte, Which Pan the shepheards God of her begot: So sprong her grace Of heauenly race, No mortall blemishe may her blotte. (50–54)

The reference to Elizabeth is clear, even if some details are not.32 “Without spotte” modifies “daughter” not “Syrinx.” The “heavenly race” is from the father. Louis Montrose rightly interprets these lines as referring to Elizabeth as “God’s heir” and “supreme governor of the English church and state”.33 Unfortunately he also says “the genealogy alludes to the immaculate conception of a blessed virgin.”34 It is Eliza’s mother Syrinx, standing for Anne Boleyn, who is analogous, not as virgin but as mother, to the Virgin Mary. Elizabeth the daughter is analogous to Christ because fathered by God or a god. In a later passage, as we shall see, she is free from Original Sin (the strong meaning of “without spotte,” III.vi.3). The incest raises no problem (on Elizabeth’s legal and almost physical incest and her imaginative sublimation of it to good spiritual incest parallel to that of the virgin Mary, see Marc Shell)35 because the two persons of the Godhead are treated as 31

TJ on Psalm 89.27–8 [sic]. Although they are Protestants, they follow the Catholics in the numbering of the verses of this psalm, calling our passage 27–8 instead of 26–7. 32 Shepheardes Calender, “Aprill,” in Spenser, Shorter Poems, ed. Richard McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999). 33 Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes’ and the Pastoral of Power,” ELR 10 (1988): 167. 34 Ibid.; see also Cain, Praise in the Faerie Queene, 16, and McCabe’s note to line 50 in Shorter Poems. 35 Transcriber and commentator, Elizabeth’s Glass (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Incest is the main theme of his extensive commentary (stated, for example, on 26 and notes 74a-76). Despite the frequent brilliance of Shell’s links of the

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quite distinct persons here. (Pan is again a surrogate for the Judaeo-Christian God in “July”[144]). Even a cultural critic should strive to construct as consistent an interpretation as possible. Montrose supposes an allusion to the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin by her parents, St. Anne and Joachim, thus contradicting his previous, well-founded Christological interpretation of Eliza. The entire doctrine is the product of Romanist tradition, with its unscriptural characters St. Anne and Joachim, as I will show in more detail below in discussing a line which could conceivably bear a secondary reference to the doctrine—III. vi.7–10. Merely defining the immaculate conception shows how repugnant it is to Protestantism.36 John N. King rightly corrects this error as he finds it in David Lee Miller:37 “surely the allusion is to the virgin birth of Christ rather than to the Immaculate Conception whereby St. Anne bore the Virgin Mary.” So far, so good. “Furthermore,” King adds, “it is debatable whether the explicit comments that Pan (“begot,” i.e., procreated) Eliza define a virginal conception.”38 They do define not the immaculate conception but a virginal conception if Pan represents God or a god as E.K.’s gloss argues that he does. No one ever suggested that the Virgin Mary was begotten by God as Eliza was; Mary was just miraculously protected from the Original Sin that accompanies sexual generation. Since “without spotte” modifies “daughter,” I do admit as an ancillary meaning, though I do not build upon it, Lynn Staley Johnson’s feminine interpretation of Eliza as somebody’s bride on the grounds that she is a female “withoute spotte”— an image not particularly Marian but twice an epithet for brides in Scripture (Song of Solomon 4.7; Rev. 19.5). The other time the phrase is used in Spenser, it is neither epithalamic nor Marian but intellectual, for a personification of Truth.39 fourfold incest of God, Jesus, and Mary to Elizabeth Tudor’s associations with incest, he sometimes distorts the evidence, as when he claims that Plate 5—a twelfth-century mosaic of the Dormition of the Virgin from Palermo, Sicily—illustrates Jesus as a “family member” to Mary just because he holds her soul in the form of an infant, whereas any departing souls were conventionally depicted as infants rising to meet God or Christ. 36 “The Virgin Mary was, in the first instant of her conception, preserved untouched by any taint of original guilt, by a singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, in consideration of the [future] merits of Christ Jesus,” Pope Pius IX, Bull of 8 December, 1854, Ineffabilis Deus, quoted in Henry Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 380. 37 “Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen” (hereafter “Representations”), Renaissance Quarterly, 64 and n. 78, addressing David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 “Faerie Queene,” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988), 95, 235–6, 238–40. King’s rebuke could also be applied to Cain’s interpretation of Eliza when Cain makes “without spotte” and “no mortall blemish” out to be exclusively Marian and then claims they make “Eliza’s birth [into] a variety of Immaculate Conception” (16). King does still believe there is something Marian about Elizabeth, even though it is not the Immaculate Conception. 38 64 and n. 78, discussing “Aprill” 51 and 54. 39 Lynn Staley Johnson, “The Shepheardes Calender”: An Introduction (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 165–6. Staley is the main critic to affirm that “Aprill” pictures Elizabeth as a bride; this much of her symbolism is undeniably

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Eliza is of necessity the bride of Christ (as in Revelation 19.5 and in Bentley) or of England, not of God as Mary implicitly is, because God is already Eliza’s father, as we have seen. Incest is an interpretation of last resort. If Eliza resembles the bride in the Song of Solomon, which seems likely, it must be as the bride of Christ, symbolizing the Church, or just possibly the bride of England, as in Bentley. As Scheper tacitly shows, Protestants did not see the bride in the Song of Solomon as the Virgin Mary, they saw her as the church or the individual soul.40 The deifications of Queen Elizabeth and the celebrations of her virginity spring from grounds other than Marian imagery.41 The search for portrayals of Elizabeth as the Blessed Virgin—portrayals which supposedly served subconsciously to fill the void left in the hearts of her formerly-Catholic subjects—has turned up only a few clear examples, certainly none in Spenser. The text trumps the milieu: just because a motif exists in the culture does not prove that it exists in Spenser. In the first place, Spenser does not imitate or allude to the immaculate conception, a doctrine which he would have abhorred, only to Christ’s virginal birth. While it is difficult to prove a negative, and to survey all the criticism on this subject would take up too much space in this study, I can report the following facts and observations: Osgood’s concordance to Spenser lists 75 instances of the word “virgin.” Of these, some passages might be connecting some virgin in the text with the Virgin Mary, but weakly, not demonstratively—passages such as “Faire virgin, to redeem her deare / Brings Arthur to the fight” (I.viii, Argument). Only one instance deals explicitly with the Virgin Mary in her solitary procreation of Jesus, and it has no connection with Elizabeth or any of her surrogates: “So taking flesh of sacred virgins wombe / For mans dear sake he did a man become” (Hymne of Heavenlie Love, 146–47). A survey based on a concordance does not of course settle the matter, but it is a start. To reason deductively for a moment, the notion that a Protestant poet would include a motif precisely because it was distinctively Catholic, is paradoxical and highly speculative. Besides the historical facts that the Virgin had been deeply loved by many believers and that her worship had recently been forbidden, the notion behind all this seems to be one whose applicability to the Renaissance is doubtful—the Freudian Return of the Repressed. This favorite topos of cultural poetics—Elizabeth as Mary—originated in the cautious and scholarly study by Elkin Calhoun Wilson. He rightly cites no specific examples of it from Spenser; and even he says sacral monarchy was more feminine. The other occurrence of “without spotte” is “most sacred virgin without spotte of sinne” (III.iv.59.8) referring to a personification of Truth, and hence does not refer to the Virgin Mary but is a non-sexual analog to Una. 40 George L. Scheper, “Reformation Attitudes toward Allegory and the Song of Songs,” PMLA 89.3 (1974): 551–62. These are the only meanings Scheper finds in Protestant interpretations. Only once does he mention applications of the Song of Songs to Mary, and then it is in a tradition firmly labeled Catholic, 553. 41 On the latter, see, for example, John Bugge, Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval Ideal (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975); Carol Kaske, “Chastity” in Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 1990).

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important: “Surmounting all the symbols of virginity that Elizabeth attracted was the halo of divine right.”42) Spenser never mentions Queen Elizabeth in the same breath as the Virgin Mary; it is always one or the other. In the milieu, many supposed equations of Elizabeth with Mary are loose, as King admits of his own,43 connections of entities (like Queen Elizabeth and Mary or Solomon) that are distinct in the sources. Finally, sacral monarchy is a notion capacious enough to subsume, in the right context, a few discreet hints of the Virgin Mary that one might find in Spenser’s portrayal of Elizabeth; but I see none, and Spenser’s Protestantism renders it unlikely. Getting back to “Aprill,” the claim about Eliza’s parentage is direct except insofar as the entire lyric is written in that syncretic, Christian-humanist discourse, noted by E.K., in which Christian divinities are given the names of classical gods. This oblique mode, similar to that in which Belphoebe’s virginal birth is recounted (see below), renders the statement less blasphemous. True, the philandering Pan and his historical counterpart Henry VIII are figures incongruous with the Judaeo-Christian God, but this incongruity is common to all interpretations of “Aprill”; and indeed the philandering habits of kings have never stopped poets from identifying them with God. Spenser’s annotator E.K. for once understands exactly (except when he equates Pan with Christ instead of God the Father) what Spenser/Colin is saying about her parentage. After retelling the story from Ovid, and of course equating Pan on the political level with Henry VIII, he explains in his gloss to line 50 that Elizabeth’s parentage is here portrayed in classical terms as divine—first in a “poetical” way and then in terms analogous to literal affirmations about actual classical rulers: But here by Pan and Syrinx is not to bee thoughte, that the shephearde simplye meante those Poetical Gods; but rather supposing (as seemeth) her graces progenie [he means “progenitors”] to be divine and immortall (so as the Paynims were wont to iudge of all Kinges and Princes, according to Homeres saying.

E.K. then quotes two lines of Homer in Greek, which read, in McCabe’s translation: “Proud is the heart of kings, fostered of heaven; for their honour is from Zeus, and Zeus, god of counsel, loveth them).” In his note on this, McCabe adds: “Cf. Iliad, 2.196-7” (McCabe, 532–33). E.K. then picks up his main sentence where he left it when he launched this parenthesis: “[the shephearde] could devise no parents in his judgment so worthy for her as Pan the shepheards God, and his best beloved Syrinx.” Thus E.K. reads the divine foster-father as a literal tenet of a civic religion. He affirms, and I agree, that first Pan and then Zeus (in E.K.’s note) stand in for God as the monarch’s divine foster-father. This tenet is a classical equivalent of sacral monarchy and of the divinity attributed to the king in Psalms 2.7 and 89.26-27.

42

Wilson, 224. In “Representations,” 51, 53; see also my section on “Prince of Peace,” below.

43

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Una as “Borne of Heuenly Berth” Una, the heroine of the Legend of Holiness, has been regarded as another surrogate of Elizabeth as early as in the contemporaneous marginalia to the Faerie Queene, such as those of John Dixon (Cain, 59, 62, 71). As mentioned above, Una, like Gloriana, bears sacred overtones; she is “borne of heuenly berth” (I.x.9.3). Una’s divine paternity, like that of Messianic kings, of sacral monarchs, of Eliza, and in a sense of Gloriana, is metaphorical to the extent that, as is mentioned in the very next line, she has literal earthly parents—Adam and Eve, the king and queen of Eden (I.vii.43; I.x.9.4; I.xii.26.1, II.i.1)—but not so metaphorical as to make her a mere Everywoman. This explicitly double paternity befits Una’s recognized role as the true church, which is not only comprised of human beings from every age but also engendered by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. It befits someone like her who can be deceived (I.iii.26-32, 38–40) but who never sins. Elizabeth as Prince of Peace In the Faerie Queene, whatever their other concerns, the Proems always address or talk about Queen Elizabeth. In IV Proem 4, Spenser directly describes Elizabeth as a retrospective type of Christ: that sacred Saint my soueraigne Queene, In whose chast breast all bountie naturall, And treasures of true loue enlocked beene, ..................... To her I sing of love, that loueth best, And best is lou’d of all aliue I weene: ...................... The Queene of loue, and Prince of peace from heauen blest.

“Prince of peace” echoes the prophecy of the Messiah in Isaiah 9.6: “and he shall call his name Wonderfull, . . . The mightie God, The euerlasting Father, the Prince of peace. Spenser is again sacralizing the monarch. Indeed, Spenser is imitating the more exact application of this biblical epithet to Elizabeth by Thomas Bentley in his Monument of Matrones, who prays: “Heare, O Lord, the voice of hir humble and dailie praiers, and let hir continue a Prince of peace, roiall Ruler ouer thy people.”44 So far as I can tell, Spenser’s phrase “Prince of peace,” has been treated by three previous Spenserians, Krier, King, and Cain, and merely glanced at by two others, Hamilton and Wells. Theresa Krier says the epithet gives Christological sanction to Elizabeth’s erotic potential. John F. King finds a source, an engraved title page labeling Elizabeth “Regina Pacis,” (“Queen of Peace”), which is a close but not an exact verbal parallel. Nevertheless this engraving serves my argument 44

Bentley, “The Fourth Lampe,” 721.

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because it also labels her “flos de Jesse” which is a genealogical metaphor for Christ (See Isa. 11.1: “a rodde foorth of the stocke of Ishai”).45 Spenser’s phrase “Prince of peace” is shocking not because of its gender, for “prince” in Elizabethan English is gender-neutral, but because it occurs both in a secular passage and in an erotic context—a problem which Krier as quoted above addresses but does not explore in depth. Similarly, though not so blasphemously, the poet Sir John Davies describes Elizabeth as both stoical and “Thron’d like the Queen of Pleasure” (Hymne of Astraea, #25 “Of her Moderation”). From this incongruity created by Davies, Roy Strong draws a generalization that covers Spenser’s deifications as well: “Renaissance monarchical mythology tries by the use of extreme forms of contrasting imagery somehow to reconcile the dual nature of royalty, divine and human, soul and body, mind and passions. The Elizabeth cult is held together by such paradoxes.”46 Strong manages to find analogues and a context for society’s deification of her, but more can be said. In “Queene of love and Prince of peace,” Spenser is ascribing to Elizabeth what he previously charged his Stoic censor with lacking: “natural affection.” And, as Krier said, he adds the Christological epithet to sanction natural affection. He does this, not to claim that natural affection is Christlike in itself (even Spenser could not claim that), but that it is the precondition for the valid imitation of Christ, in refutation of those Christian Stoics who belittled the role of natural affection both in Christ and in virtuous persons. Elizabeth as Sapience, Both Directly and through Una Una represents not only the True Church as a collective but Elizabeth as its supreme governor. Supreme governorship is, to be precise, that power an English sovereign has over the national Established Church. Article 37 of the Thirty-nine Articles defines the Royal Supremacy as the ecclesiastical King, Tudor Royal Iconography, 256-257 and Fig. 85. Theresa Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 131. Evaders include the following. Robin Headlam Wells, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ and the Cult of Elizabeth (London: Croom Helm, 1983, hereafter cited parenthetically in text), mentions it only in his own metaphor, 21, and in the unexplained title of his Chapter One. Cain does not comment on it in detail but characterizes the entire Proem to Book IV as “reckless,” 165. A.C. Hamilton, editor, text ed. by Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki, 2nd ed. rev. (New York: Longman, 2001) ignores the biblical overtones and merely glosses the epithet as declaring Elizabeth the sponsor of the virtue of friendship. Wells, while interpreting a picture bearing no clear reference to Spenser, claims that the Virgin Mary traditionally represented the culmination of the Tree of Jesse and that Elizabeth who culminates this one has displaced her (16), that is, usurped her identity. The tree pictured here, however, is labeled at the bottom where Jesse would be, as the tree of Edward III; it carries no clear reference to any Scriptural character. A tree is just a conventional way of representing descent from any one individual. 46 Sir John Davies, The Poems, ed. Robert Krueger and Ruby Nemser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), “Hymne of Astraea, #25,” 85; Roy C. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 47. 45

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prerogative which we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in Holy Scriptures by God himself: that is, That they should rule all Estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal.47

Spenser for his part would have had to swear allegiance to the Royal Supremacy in order to enjoy the privileges of his academic degrees and to hold public office as he did, and we have no evidence that he was reluctant to do so.48 On the contrary, in an encomium of England, Spenser seems to commend the Royal Supremacy: he says that there “Religion hath lay powre to rest upon her” (Colin Clouts, 322). Since nobody would commend having lay power rest upon church power, I agree with those who construe the peculiar syntax of this statement to mean that religion has lay power to rest herself upon, that is, for support—say, to summon and fund ecclesiastical conferences, one recognized activity of a sacral monarch. This arrangement sounds like the Royal Supremacy. This commendation exemplifies Spenser’s cultural work to promote the Elizabethan Settlement. There is a set of scriptures that supplies both Elizabeth and Una with a model of such female ecclesiastical leadership—the Sapiential scriptures, chiefly Proverbs, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus or Sirach. I propose that Spenser through the numinous character Una sometimes associates and sometimes actually merges Elizabeth with the semi-divine biblical and Apocryphal character Sapience. Una has already been compared to Sapience.49 This is because Una is a spiritual teacher and guide to Red Cross and others and her rival Duessa, like that of Sapience, is a whore. Both Una and Sapience seek their erring menfolk, for Sapience, see “[Wisdom] shall deliver thee from the strange woman” (Proverbs 2.16), and from the “harlot” (Prov. 7.5–27; 9.13–18, see also Wis. 8.1–4). Similarly, Una delivers Red Crosse from her rival not only vicariously by bringing Arthur to physically liberate him from Orgoglio’s dungeon into which his intercourse with Duessa has precipitated him but also directly and psychologically from his infatuation by causing her true ugliness to be revealed. (Because on the allegorical level fornication with Duessa In Gilbert Burnet, An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles… rev. ed. James Page (New York: Appleton, 1881), Article 37, p. 497. The doctrine is also quoted and discussed in Thomas Rogers, Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England, An Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles. Parker Society, ed. J.J.S.Perowne (Cambridge, 1854). The Articles of Religion are available in many printings of the Book of Common Prayer, especially the older imprints. 48 Norman L. Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559, Royal Historical Society Studies in History, no. 32. (London: Royal Historical Society, 1982), 101. 49 For example by A. C. Hamilton’s note on I Proem 4.1–4 citing Wisdom 7:26 and by James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 142, apropos of Redcrosse in the Wood of Error , citing A. C. Hamilton’s own book, The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 35, citing in its turn Ecclesiasticus 4.17–19; Nohrnberg for his own part adds Ecclesiasticus 21:22–23 apropos of Faerie Queene I.i.13, in particular. 47

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symbolizes the spiritual fornication of conversion to Romanism and because exposure is precisely the way in which truth fights such falsehoods, I cannot agree with Harry Berger’s excessively literal and resistant reading of this punishment as overly “cruel.”50) All of these biblical books talking about Sapience were prescribed in the lectionary (though less and less frequently as time went on)—even Wisdom and Sirach which are deuterocanonical. Moreover, as it happens, these readings were scattered through the months of October and November; hence they too would have been read around the time of Accession Day. Only a divine Una could know that Redcrosse is “chosen,” that is, among the elect (I.ix.53). Sapience too is on the literal level both female and divine—an emanation of God (Wis. 7.25–6). Wisdom 7.27 affirms like Eusebius that a holy soul can be “a friend of God” and that it is Sapience which elevates him or her to this status, suggesting that all godly rulers are closely linked to Sapience. Spenser portrays a divine Sapience in propria persona in the Hymne of Heavenly Beautie. Given that Una is heavenly born, her having earthly parents does not disqualify her from being Sapience; it only makes her a lower emanation in the same chain of being and thus more akin to Elizabeth. One of the reasons that Spenser linked Elizabeth to Sapience is in order to defend the legitimacy of female sovereigns and especially female supreme governors of the church. Sir John Davies, in his Hymne to Astraea #22, “Of her Wisedome,” claims that a semi-divine female inspires and tutors Elizabeth: Joves best beloved daughter, Showes to her Spirit all things that are,

As Jove himselfe hath taught her.51

Some such idea must underlie both Spenser’s affirmations of Elizabeth’s wisdom (for example, III.ii.2–3; V.ix.32.6); and his apparent deifications of her (for example, I Proem iv). One of the reasons that Spenser linked Elizabeth to Sapience in this way is in order to defend the legitimacy of female monarchs and especially female supreme governors of the church. This and any link of Elizabeth to Sapience would function as a scriptural counterweight to the Pauline strictures invoked by such misogynists as John Knox who objected to having a female as monarch and especially as head of the church. Wisdom 8.1 says that Sapience “reacheth from one ende to another mightily, and comely doth she order all things,” as does a monarch. Also, Fruen has discovered that Melanchthon equated the biblical 50 See “Displacing Autophobia in Faerie Queene I: Ethics, Gender, and Oppositional Reading in the Spenserian Text,” ELR 28.2 (1998): 163–82, especially 173–4. 51 Davies, The Poems, “Hymne of Astraea #22,” 83. Krueger and Nemser claim that “Wisdom” is Minerva or Pallas Athene, 355; but aside from the classical name of her father “Jove” (which could be just a humanist code-name for the Judaeo-Christian God, as “Pan” is in “Aprill”), the “Wisdom” of Davies resembles even in name the biblical “Wisdom”—a daughter or at least an emanation of God (Wis. 7.25) and so is more likely to be the biblical Wisdom, or a conflation of the two.

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Sapience with such gender-neutral entities as natural law and natural revelation— things which could be personified in a woman, especially a royal woman.52 True, the typical biblical exegete allegorized Sapience as Christ, thus downplaying her gender; but the very existence of a feminine symbol for Christ would have strengthened the claim of a woman to a Christlike office. Precision is needed both as to the text and as to the doctrine. Robin Headlam Wells (31) correctly identifies Una as Elizabeth in her role as Supreme Governor of the Church, but merely on the grounds that she is a royal virgin without spot, whereas a more important and less common requirement is wisdom. This social influence which I am proposing is represented by the diagonal line in my diagram from Sapience to the Royal Supremacy; and Spenser’s part in promoting this influence is represented by the right angle which runs from Sapience through Spenser and thence horizontally to the doctrines at the lower right. Elizabeth as Born of a Virgin In her fourth and last character or role (though the resemblances are so interrelated that it is difficult to count them), Spenser indirectly gives Elizabeth another Messianic attribute: not only are two of her surrogates—Gloriana and Una— heavenly born, but another announced surrogate, Belphoebe (Letter to Ralegh and III Proem), is born of a virgin. This role is adumbrated in “Aprill” insofar as Eliza’s father is supernatural. In III.vi.6–8, her mother Chrysogone was impregnated by the sun while she slept after bathing. In bald paraphrase, this does not sound much like Mary conceiving Christ. But when Spenser says, “She [Belphoebe’s mother] bore withouten paine that she conceived / Withouten pleasure” (III.vi.27.2–4), he echoes a traditional topos for Mary’s virginal birthing of Jesus.53 Belphoebe’s birth, Spenser says, was of the wombe of Morning dew, And her conception of the ioyous Prime And all her whole creation did her shew Pure and vnspotted from all loathly crime, That is ingenerate in fleshly slime. So was this virgin borne … (FQ III.vi.3).

This fits the conception and birth of Christ. The universally agreed-on rationale was that Christ was physically and genetically free of original sin, having been conceived without a man, the traditional vehicle of Original Sin.

52

For more detail, see Jeffrey P. Fruen, “The Faery Queen [sic] Unveiled? Five Glimpses of Gloriana,” Spenser Studies 11 (1990): 65–70; and my section on Sapience in “Edmund Spenser” in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, ed. Rebecca Lemon, et al. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 199. 53 See Hamilton’s note on III.vi.27.1–3.

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As others have already recognized, Spenser echoes not only the scientific analogues, not only the doctrine of Christ’s virgin birth, but also what Royal Psalm 110.3b says of the Messianic monarch: “The dewe of thy birth is of the wombe of the morning.” In agreement with Upton, I quote the version incorporated in the Psalter of the Book of Common Prayer, which in turn essentially reproduces the Great-Bible version, which is Coverdale’s. Sternhold resembles Spenser too.54 This verse in this version was traditionally interpreted as alluding to the virgin birth of Christ, probably because 110.1 clearly illustrates Christ’s divinity for which it was cited by Christ himself. Dew like rain symbolizes fertility; but because it materializes silently out of nowhere it is mysterious, like the virgin birth, and it contrasts with ordinary births which being sinful and therefore painful are clamorous. This psalmic imagery for Christ became even more famous in the Christmas carol “I syng of a mayden”: he cam also stylle þer his moder was as dewe in aprylle þat fallyt on þe gras. he cam also stylle to his moderes bowr as dew in aprille, þat fallyt on þe flour. he cam also stylle þer his moder lay

as dew in aprille, þat fallyt on þe spray.55 Dewlike drops of water played a part not only in Belphoebe’s birth but also in her conception (FQ III.vi.6–8), and we can now see that these drops also come from Psalm 110.3b. This influence is represented by the diagonal line downward to Spenser from the Messianic Scriptures in the upper right, or, if we look on it as an allusion, by the diagonal line going from Spenser upward to these scriptures. Belphoebe’s role as Christ-figure flatters Elizabeth both morally and politically (i.e., sacral-monarchically) in the same way that the heavenly birth of other surrogates does. This narrative of Belphoebe’s parthenogenesis is tacked onto the last five stanzas in the preceding canto (III.v.51ff.)—the account of her decision to remain a virgin—giving one reason for it. That is, Belphoebe found this decision easier than do most mortals because being born of a virgin she was innately free from “the loathly crime / That is ingenerate in fleshly slime” (III. vi.3). The historical Elizabeth too, though by no means born of a virgin or free from original sin, had by this time decided to remain, or as the film Elizabeth puts it, to “become” a virgin. Spenser’s claim that Belphoebe and therefore Elizabeth Upton in Works: A Variorum Edition, Vol. 3. Faerie Queene Book Three, ed. F. M. Padelford (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934), 249, note to III.vi.3.1. See the conspectus of versions of the verse in Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in The Faerie Queene (Memphis, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1976), Appendix C, Example 29, on Coverdale; Shaheen diminishes the likeness to Spenser of the Psalter in the BCP by accidentally quoting it as saying, “the deawe of thy birth, is the wombe of the morning” when it should be “the deawe of thy birth is of the womb,” and so on; he omits the second “of.” 55 Carleton Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), Songs of the Nativity #81, 119. 54

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was born of a virgin is another fictive mythological genus like that in “Aprill,” this one to explain the decision. It could be translated, “Elizabeth is so chaste it is as if she were born of a virgin, without concupiscence.” Catholics and Protestants agreed that Christ decided to remain a virgin, a decision facilitated, presumably, by his own parthenogenesis which truly exempted him from both original sin and concupiscence. In sober paraphrase, Spenser is calling Elizabeth’s decision Christlike. The historically patent falsity of the divine parentage Spenser attributes to her is intended to elicit not skepticism but the shock of catachresis—a Baroque frisson, as do John Donne’s praises of Elizabeth Drury in the Anniversaries; Spenser here fulfills, as Cain says of another “semideification,” “the requirement of epideictic rhetoric that encomium be elevated to the maximum” (16). It is an example of the panache Spenser exhibited, according to his friend Gabriel Harvey, in his now-lost work Dreames—a panache adumbrated in “Lucian, Petrarche, Aretine, Pasquill, and all the most delicate, and fine conceited Grecians and Italians … lively Hyperbolicall Amplifications, rare, queint, and odd in every pointe.”56 In similar hyperbole, all the Tudors are portrayed as free of original sin (though not born of virgins or begotten by gods) when Spenser implicitly contrasts with the story of Adam’s fall alluded to in Arthur’s reading material (the Briton Monuments in II.x.50) the faery Genesis in II.x.60-67 in Guyon’s Tudor-allegorizing book Antiquities of Faerie Land.57 On a cynical note, both fictive genealogies (from a god and Syrinx in “Aprill” and from the sun and the virgin Chrysogone in III.vi) also function as mystifications of Elizabeth’s birth—useful ones since she was technically a bastard on at least three counts: in the eyes of Roman Catholics, Henry VIII had of course only one wife, his first, Catherine of Aragon, and one legitimate child, Mary; Elizabeth’s mother the former Anne Boleyn was later charged with multiple adulteries, which raised the question as to whether Elizabeth’s true father was the king; and Henry VIII later nullified for a time on these and other grounds his marriage to Anne Boleyn and hence Elizabeth’s legitimacy. As Montrose puts it, Spenser is “cleverly countering Catholic insinuations of Elizabeth’s bastardy with an insinuation of her divinity.”58 Harvey in Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters, With Two Others of the Same, in Works: A Variorum Edition, Vol. 9, The Prose Works, ed. Rudolph Gottfried (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), Appendix 1, 471. It is Harvey who contributes the italics. 57 See Harry Berger, The Allegorical Temper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 108–9 and Carol Kaske, “Spenser’s Pluralistic Universe: The View from the Mount of Contemplation,” in Contemporary Thought on Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard C. Frushell and Bernard J. Vondersmith (Carbondale, Ill: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), 127–30. 58 Montrose, 167. For a stronger statement and further grounds for it, see Marc Shell, Elizabeth’s Glass: with “The glass of the Sinful Soul” (1544) by Elizabeth I, and “Epistle dedicatory” & “Conclusion” (1548) by John Bale (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 9–10. Shell exaggerates the scandalousness of the timing, however: Elizabeth was born a decent time after the marriage—eight and a half months (January 25 to September 7). 56

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As a final footnote, in the Letter to Raleigh, Spenser seemingly alludes to the legal doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies explored by Kantorowicz in the reference to the queen’s “two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady” (see Hamilton’s note, 716). If one considers this doctrine to be a hallmark of sacral monarchy, then the Letter contains a literal, explicit application of it to Elizabeth and a clear analogy of it to Christ’s two natures—divine and human (On Christ’s two natures and those of a monarch, see Kantorowicz, 16–19 et passim). Richard Hardin counters, however, that this statement could be just an instance of Spenser’s fundamental distinction between public and private—a distinction that is voiced elsewhere with no reference to the monarchy, for example in the Letter’s distinction of the virtues into public and private. Therefore I do not rest my argument upon Elizabeth’s “two persons” but mention them here only as a possible confirmation of her Christlike role manifested elsewhere. Even Hardin concedes, though, that Henry VIII and Elizabeth encouraged the general doctrine and practice of sacral monarchy as rhetoric, and an authorized rhetoric is sufficient to establish a background for Spenser’s deifications. Besides, the legal doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (which Hardin mentions only in a brief parenthesis59), is more than rhetoric and seems to me to be a corollary of sacral monarchy. A tertium quid is needed between serious political and religious doctrine on the one hand and the “cult of royalty” and political rhetoric (Hardin) that makes up the “Tudor propaganda” of “exaggerated erastianism” (that is the privileging of the state over the church, Bergvall, 20) on the other. One is, as I have argued, the statement by TJ that even other sovereigns can claim the power and the loyalty ascribed to David and the Messiah in a Royal Psalm (89) “in a weak sense as being types of him” (of David and Christ). Typology, as Wells rightly says in his otherwise erroneous argument for a typological relationship between Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary, is more than metaphor, it is a divinely arranged analogy, “not just an imaginary [relationship] but a kinship of character and of providential function between two historical figures”—“a significance which can only be perceived in its entirety within the context of a Christian humanist view of world history” (21). Although their terms do not always map neatly onto each other, another tertium quid is Debora Shuger’s “high Christian royalism,” which is in turn her refinement of the familiar term “sacral monarchy.”60 In one of her meticulous definitions, she says this sentiment differs “not only from the more secular Aristotelian royalism of men such as Hooker [usually] and Sir Thomas Smith, but also from what we think of as divine right absolutism” (56–7); it is more like the rarely mentioned doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (71). Sacral monarchy manifests it self, for example, “in the Richard F. Hardin, Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and Monarchy in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 30, inclusive pages 27–31. 60 Debora K. Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in “Measure for Measure” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 56–7. 59

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recurrent affirmations of a divinity hedging the crown—affirmations that seemed to need neither explanation nor defense”(57). Sacral monarchy is a “doctrine”— something more definite than what Kantorowicz calls “mysticism” and others “the cult of royalty.” High Christian royalism “attempts to discern how and where within the state the divine still penetrates the haunts of men” (Shuger, 71). Elizabeth is identified as a sacral monarch and a Christ-figure in various ways, all described as “hevenly”; by one of these ways, that is, by being represented as Una, she is also a Sapience-figure; she is the Prince of Peace; she is a semi-divine Israelitish monarch; she is a mediatrix to God and a gate-keeper of heaven; and one of her surrogates is born of a virgin. Spenser’s flattery works by “exploding” the Queen into various surrogates of her and ascribing to them Christ-like attributes, some of which, such as being born of a virgin (or at least without a human father) and hence free of “mortal blemish,” he might not have been able to ascribe to her in propria persona. Spenser performs cultural work for both the monarch and that nation which was dependent on her for its unity and its morale. In political terms, by portraying Elizabeth through Una as both Sapience and the True Church, Spenser vigorously supports her claim to be supreme governor of the English Church. Through all his Christological rhetoric, he gives back to her in myth, mysticism, and allegory that likeness to Christ as the head of the church which she modestly refused in reality. By further publicizing these scriptures and this political doctrine, Spenser contributes to a circuit of cultural energy that empowers the Tudor monarch.

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PART 3 Psalmic Voice(s)

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Chapter 9

Re-revealing the Psalms: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and Her Early Modern Readers 1

Margaret P. Hannay

John Donne, in one of the most important contemporary statements on the Sidney Psalmes, called Philip and Mary Sidney “David’s successors,” who in their “holy zeale” wrote metrical Psalms that “in formes of joy and art doe re-reveale” the words of David to us in English.2 Most contemporary praise and most modern studies of the Psalmes of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, focus on their art and on their importance as a literary model, yet for some early modern readers these metrical paraphrases retained their function as the Word of God. That is, even when Mary Sidney clothed the Psalms in 126 different verse forms and innumerable literary flourishes, even with the conscious or unconscious developments that reflected her politics, gender, and class, they were still considered by some contemporary readers to be appropriate for worship and for religious instruction.3 In the sixteenth 1 In this essay I am much indebted to the insights of Michael G. Brennan, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Anne Lake Prescott. 2 John Donne, “Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countess of Pembroke his Sister,” in John Donne: The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952; rpt. 1978), 34. On Philip and Mary Sidney as “Moses and Miriam,” see Michelle Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 11–43. 3 On the various uses of the Psalms see Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 41; W. Stanford Reid, “The Battle Hymns of the Lord: Calvinist Psalmody of the Sixteenth Century,” Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 2 (1971): 36–54; Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 84–105; Anne Lake Prescott, “Evil Tongues at the Court of Saul: The Renaissance David as a Slandered Courtier,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21 (1991): 163–86. On class and gender in Pembroke’s Psalmes see Hannay, “‘House-confined Maids’: The Presentation of Woman’s Role in the Psalmes of the Countess of Pembroke,” English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 44–71; idem, “‘When Riches Growes’: Class Perspective in the Pembroke’s Psalmes,” in Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove, and Karen Nelson (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 77– 97; Suzanne Trill, “Sixteenth-Century Women’s Writing: Mary Sidney’s Psalmes and the

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and seventeenth centuries the Sidney Psalmes might be read primarily as literary works, as they are most often read today, but they were also read simultaneously as the words of the Sidneys and the words of David. Most remarkably, on occasion the translator/poets evidently slipped out of sight, and only God’s words remained visible in these metrical Psalms. Metrical Psalm paraphrase is a Christian tradition, because in Hebrew the Psalms are already poetry, as Philip Sidney and many of his contemporaries recognized. Sidney called the Psalms “a divine poem,” saying that “it is fully written in metre, as all learned hebricians agree, although the rules be not yet fully found.”4 Jews who read the Hebrew Psalms thus had no need to present them as poems, nor did they need to translate them because they encountered a living text in its original language. But because most Christians read or recited the Psalms in Latin or in the vernacular, the need for translation forced a space between the sacred text and text they read. And because the most recited form of the Psalms in early modern England was Miles Coverdale’s prose, as included in the Great Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, poets (including contributors to The Whole Booke of Psalmes) had an impetus to restore the Psalms to their original poetic form in a self-conscious attempt to return to an older form of personal spirituality. English readers did not always perceive that gap between original and translation, especially when they were reading Coverdale’s familiar prose. The Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer was, for many of the unlearned, simply God’s Word. The multiplicity of other translations meant that more sophisticated early modern readers did have some sense that the sacred Word exists independently of the specific words used, as Hannibal Hamlin observes, but “because of the central place of the Psalms in English daily life, and their vital functions within the body of English culture, they were thus, in a powerful if peculiar sense, English works.”5 Yet biblical translators were acutely conscious of the space between the original and their translations, aspiring to narrow that gap by making the most literal translation possible, noting in italic type, for example, where extra words were supplied to make sense in English, as the translators of the Geneva Bible did. In their prefatory letter, “To Our Beloved in the Lord,” they say “we may with good conscience protest, that we have in every point and worde, according to the measure of that knollage which is pleased al mightie God to give us, faithfully ‘Femininity of Translation,’” in Writing and the English Renaissance, ed. Suzanne Trill and William Zunder (London: Longman, 1996), 140–158; and Danielle Clarke, “‘Lover’s Songs Shall Turne to Holy Psalmes’: Mary Sidney and the Transformation of Petrarch,” Modern Language Review 92. 2 (1997): 282–94. 4 Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 77. See also Mary Sidney Herbert, Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 318–21. 5 Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6.

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rendred the text … for the edifying of the brethren in faith and charitie.”6 Matthew Parker, in his preface to the Psalms in the Bishops’ Bible (1568), encourages the learned to correct any errors; as David Norton remarks, “this is an effort to destabilize the translation in the quest for Truth.” Parker, like other scholars of the period, clearly thinks of the English text as “unfixed” and in need of continuing improvement to make the translation as accurate as possible.7 Poets obviously encountered particular difficulties in staying close to the sacred text while rendering it in meter and (usually) rhyme. To judge by the defensive prefaces to various metrical Psalters, readers—and singers—of poetic versions could be quite critical when they believed the poetry swerved from the original meaning, or at least that meaning as conveyed by Coverdale. Both Parker and Robert Crowley, for example, invite their more skeptical readers to check their versions against the Hebrew. 8 With such emphasis on accuracy, poetic form becomes entangled with sacred function—and nowhere more than in Mary Sidney’s Psalmes, which become decidely individualized poems. Instead of using the common meter that made the form nearly invisible, she renders Psalm 51 in rime royal, for example, Psalms 100 and 150 in different sonnet forms, and Psalm 117 as an acrostic. She typically adds alliteration, compound epithets, polyptoton, chiasmus, parenthetic statement, a variety of forms of repetition, and numerous types of wordplay. She recycles archaic words and mints new ones. She adds or expands metaphors, reshapes the poem through rhetorical questions, and supplies connections between sections. She adds classical allusions and echoes phrases from recent secular poems by Edmund Spenser, Thomas Wyatt, and especially her brother Philip. Furthermore, her choices in wording reflect her own social class and personal experience—as a woman, as a courtier, and as a poet.9 It is because many of her Psalm paraphrases depart so radically in form and style from the biblical originals that they make such an interesting test case in the reception of metrical Psalms. I will look first at what she says she was doing, and then at what contemporary readers said about her Psalmes, and what they did with them, to ask: How much could be changed before the Word of God became for them primarily—or merely—the words of the poet? That is, just how elastic were the Psalms? Most recent critics have assumed that the poetic complexity of the Sidney Psalmes prevented their use for worship, and perhaps some contemporary readers 6 The Bible and Holy Scriptures, Geneva, 1560, Facsimile, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), ***4. 7 David Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 38. 8 Matthew Parker, The Whole Psalter Translated into English Meter (London: John Day, 1567), B3; Robert Crowley, The Psalter of David Newely Translated into Englysh Metre (London: Robert Crowley, 1549), **ii; see also George Wither, Schollers Purgatory (London: George Wood, 1624), C2v. 9 See “Methods of Composition,” Collected Works, vol. 1, 56–77.

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agreed. Roland Greene, contrasting fictional and ritual uses of poetry, says that Philip Sidney’s Psalter “struggles free of ritual uses at nearly every turn.” Sidney avoids the familiar common meter, for example, and his poems are so individualized that either singing or re-experiencing them would be difficult.10 That is, the poems leave little opportunity for the reader to identify with the speaker, as readers of the Psalms were trained to do. At least one seventeenth-century user of the Sidney Psalmes apparently agreed—the editor of one manuscript who replaced Mary Sidney’s complex quantitative renditions of Psalms 120–127 with simplified paraphrases suitable for singing to the common tunes.11 Yet even that editor seemed to find the rest of the Sidney Psalmes acceptable, and, as we shall see, some contemporary readers celebrated the Countess of Pembroke’s Psalmes for their utility in private meditation and sacred song, and perhaps even corporate worship, as well as for their literary quality. Mary Sidney herself, despite her intense focus on poetic form and style, seems to have a sense that she was transmitting, rather than altering, sacred text. Perceiving her originals as intricate poems, she endeavored to transmit the biblical texts in all of their artistic and theological complexity. Her clearest statement of her conceptualization of her role appears in her dedicatory poem to Queen Elizabeth. Discussing her act of translating, paraphrasing, or metaphrasing the Psalms, as her work was variously described by her contemporaries, she first briefly uses the metaphor of citizenship, claiming that the “Psalmist King” is “Now English denizend, though Hebreu borne.”12 David seems, in Mary Sidney’s account, perfectly content to alter his nationality, and he remains very much himself, though in a new cultural context. He has simply packed his bags and moved residence from one country—and language—to another. There is no indication that the text has been altered in any substantive way by the journey. Her more extended metaphor is the familiar idea of translation clothing the text. The metaphor had long been associated with translation in general and with metrical Psalms in particular. William Hunnis, for example, uses it as part of the modesty topos when he apologizes for the quality and presentation of his own metrical versions of the penitential Psalms set to music. He claims that the Psalms 10 Roland Greene, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Psalms, the Sixteenth-Century Psalter, and the Nature of Lyric,” Studies in English Literature 30 (1990): 27, 37. 11 “Rhymed Versions of 120–27,” Collected Works, Vol. 2, 355–6; see also Debra Rienstra and Noel Kinnamon, “Circulating the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter,” in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 64–9. 12 “Even Now that Care,” Collected Works, vol. 1, 103. Manuscripts of the Sidney Psalmes are described in their titles most commonly as “donne Into English Verse” (as MS N, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, MS 1100), but also as “translated” into verse (as MS C, Bodleian, MS Rawl. poet 24), and “metaphrased” (as MS G, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.16). On the contemporary usage of these terms, which imply varying degrees of freedom in translation but were often used interchangeably, see Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 8–13.

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are “More rich … in threedbare cote, / than some in silken gowne,” because the Psalms exist independently from their garb. 13 Mary Sidney’s use of the metaphor is similar in its presuppositions about the nature of the biblical text, although she employs it for a variety of rhetorical purposes. She first uses it to explain that the Psalmes are the work of two authors: her brother Philip “did warpe” or set the structural thread, “I weav’d this webb to end” (“Even Now,” 27). Then she emphasizes the divine nature of the Psalms. The “stuffe,” or fabric, is not theirs but God’s she claims, adding that their “worke [is] no curious thing” (28). In saying that their work is not “curious,” or overly elaborate, she may be echoing Arthur Golding’s claim that in translating Calvin’s commentary on the Psalms he acted as “a faithfull Interpreter, rather indeavoring too lay foorth things plainlye … too the understanding of many, than too indyte things curiously too the pleasing of a few.”14 Coverdale and other early reformers had envisioned the Psalms replacing popular music, rather than court lyrics, hoping that ploughmen would whistle “Psalms, hymns, and such godly songs as David is occupied withal” and women would sing them as they spin, instead of “hey nony nony, hey troly loly, and such like fantasies.”15 As Debra Rienstra and Noel Kinnamon argue, Mary Sidney’s insistence that the Sidney Psalmes are not “curious” thus may reveal some anxiety about producing a Psalter clearly meant for the few rather than the many in its attention to literary form and style.16 The poetic nature of the Psalms mandated a need for both scholarly commentary and poetic translation, but the goal was to bring the two genres closer together while making them accessible to the common reader. That is, authors of metrical Psalms seem to agree that their ultimate goal was accurate transmission of sacred words, a transmission insured by consulting the best scholarship. But if one could attain the ultimate goal of the “highest matter in the noblest forme,” as Donne put it, was it a good idea? Or would the beauty of the form obscure the text? Is bad poetry a help in transmitting sacred text? The revisers of The Whole Booke of Psalmes seemed to think it might be. They said their changes were made because “we thought it better to frame the ryme to the Hebrewe sense, then to bynde that sense to the Englishe meter.”17 Accuracy over meter, content over form. So they William Hunnis, Seven Sobs of a Sorrowfull Soule for Sinn (London: [no publisher given], 1589), A3v. 14 “Epistle Dedicatorie,” in The Psalms of David and others. With M. John Calvins Commentaries, trans. Arthur Golding (London: H. Middleton, 1571), *5. 15 Miles Coverdale, Remains of Bishop Coverdale, ed. George Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), 537. 16 Rienstra and Kinnamon, “Circulating,” 50–57. See also Lyn Bennet, Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 96–7; and Kimberly Anne Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 75–112. 17 The forme of prayers and ministration of the sacraments, &c. used in the Englishe congregation at Geneva: and approved, by John Calvyn (Geneva, 1556), B2, B4. 13

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weakened the poetry in revision to bring it closer to the Hebrew, or at least that is what they said, and apparently thought, they were doing. Clarity is more important than style because the purpose of all scriptural translation, including metrical Psalms, is primarily edification of the church as a whole. The learned, presumably, will consult the original texts and commentaries on their own. So Parker, in advocating sung Psalms, writes his prefatory materials in common meter and composes metrical Psalms for congregational use to instruct believers. Us song should move: as sprite therby, Might tunes in concord sing: God graunt these Psalmes: might edifie, That is the chiefest thing.18

It may be difficult to imagine the complex Sidney Psalmes used in this way, and yet some early modern readers did use Mary Sidney’s Psalmes for sacred song. At least two of her poems, Psalms 51 and 130, were set for treble voice and lute for private performance in the seventeenth century (they are in the hand of the composer Richard Allison in British Library MS 15117); and portions of her Psalm 97 seem to have been used in All the French Psalm Tunes with English Words (1632).19 Donne’s statement that the “Angels learn by what the Church does here” (line 28) implies that the Church itself should sing these Sidney Psalmes. Donne, using the same clothing metaphor that Mary Sidney uses repeatedly, contrasts the excellence of the Psalms available for private use with the deplorable state of the Psalms for public use: they are “So well [attired] in Chambers, in thy Church so ill.” So, he says, “I must not rejoyce as I would doe” in the Sidney Psalmes. Private use is not enough. Donne, writing both as poet and as dean of St Paul’s, says that the inferior English Psalter used by the church is not just a poetic problem; its inadequacy impedes the Reformation itself. “I can scarce call that [the Church] reform’d untill/ This [the Psalter] be reform’d.” He then describes the Psalter as a national offering, an English gift to God, asking “Would a whole State present/ A lesser gift than some one man hath sent?” That is, would the country present to God a lesser gift than the Sidneys have done? “And shall our Church, unto our Spouse and King/ More hoarse, more harsh than any other, sing?” (38–44). Does he envision public use of the Sidney Psalmes? It is not impossible. Mary Sidney herself supports congregational singing, still contested in some circles, and says that the learned should “admire” the Psalms with both “soule and voice,” implying song as well as religious meditation (“Angell Spirit,” 13). Perhaps she hoped that her Psalmes would be set to music for such use. Michael Brennan has Parker, Psalter, B3v. Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘For Musicke is the Handmaid of the Lord’: Women,

18 19

Music, and the Psalms,” in this volume, pp. 106–58; Jim Doelman, “A SeventeenthCentury Publication of Three of Sir Philip Sidney’s Psalms,” Notes & Queries 38 (1991): 162–3.

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suggested that, just before the turn of the sixteenth century, there was a window of opportunity that might have allowed for printing the Sidney Psalmes as an attempt to replace The Whole Booke of Psalmes for public worship. If so, Donne’s poem would have made an appropriate commendatory verse to be used as a preface.20 And, I would add, the Simon van de Passe engraving of Mary Sidney holding out “Davids Psalmes” would be equally suitable on a title page for such a publication. If the Sidney Psalmes had been adopted for congregational singing, like their literary model the 1562 French Pseaumes of Clément Marot and Theodore Beza, then some of the Sidneys’ simpler Psalm versions might indeed have been sung by maids as they spun. Mary Sidney emphasizes the clothing metaphor in her graceful dedication to the queen, imagining herself presenting the Psalmes as she had presented a New Year’s gift of clothing to Elizabeth: And I the Cloth in both our names present, A liverie robe to bee bestowed by thee (“Even now,” 33–4)

The translation has now become a royal garment suitable for the queen to distribute as she sees fit. This may imply that the Countess of Pembroke expected the queen to take a role in the circulation of the Sidney Psalmes, although there is no record that Elizabeth did so.21 The poem later returns to this clothing motif when she gives an extensive comparison of Elizabeth to David, saying that the Psalms are tried on by “each good soule.” Some Psalms will fit each reader (“some sorting all”), but only Elizabeth will find that all the Psalms fit, that is, “all sort to none but thee” (63–4), because Elizabeth’s life echoes David’s in the sequence of persecution eventually followed by triumphal reign. The Countess of Pembroke also uses the clothing metaphor in “To the Angell Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney,” saying that God “may daigne his own transform’d / in substance no, but superficiall tire”—attire (8–9). Once again she asserts that only the clothing has changed, not the body. Her goal is, she says, “to praise, not to aspire/ To [equal], those high Tons, so in themselves adorn’d.” Already divine poetry, the Psalms may be honored, or praised, by English versions, while the learned (“all of tongues”) will “admire / Theise sacred Hymmes thy Kinglie Prophet form’d” in the original Hebrew. This statement of her desire to present the text accurately, not to alter it, replaces a stanza in an early draft that specifically addresses The Whole Booke of Psalmes (“what the vulgar [vernacular] form’d”) and the international competition to replace it as “Nations grow great in pride, and pure desire / So to excell in holy rites perform’d” (10–14).

Michael G. Brennan, “The Queen’s Proposed Visit to Wilton House in 1599 and the ‘Sidney Psalms,’” Sidney Journal 20 (2002): 27–54. 21 Margaret P. Hannay, “Mary Sidney and Scribal Publication,” in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18. 20

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Donne also uses this clothing metaphor in a national context, ashamed that the Psalms were “So well attyr’d abroad, so ill at home” (38). He quotes from Psalm 97:1 to show the patriotic contribution of the Sidneys: And who that Psalme, Now let the Iles rejoyce, Have both translated, and apply’d it too, Both told us what, and taught us how to doe. They shew us Ilanders our joy, our King, They tell us why, and teach us how to sing. (18–22)

When Mary Sidney says that the Psalms “Oft having worse, without repining worne,” would “undispleased sing … to thy musicke,” she refers to this unofficial international competition to produce a Psalter in the vernacular that would rival the Marot-Beza Psalter (“Even Now,” 31–2). Sir John Harington of Kelstone makes a similar comparison when he speaks of her translating a “subject” that had been “rude and ruinous before” (6), and Thomas Moffet claims that her “penne divine and consecrated palmes,/ From wronging verse did Royall Singer raise.”22 That is, her pen rescued David’s Psalms from the “wronging verse” of The Whole Booke of Psalmes.23 Many of their contemporary readers agreed, usually stressing both her sacred content and poetic form. Moffet terms Mary Sidney’s Psalmes “sweet and heavenlytuned,” both well written and sacred. The description “sweet,” a term derived from Italian and French precedents and often used to describe Edmund Spenser’s poetry, is probably the most frequent epithet for her verse. Sir Edward Denny says that “shee so sweetly tuned” her verse, for example, and Aemilia Lanyer mentions the “sweet harmony” of her verse and describes David’s Psalms “written newly by the Countess Dowager of Pembroke” as “rare sweet songs.”24 Donne says that John Harington, The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 310; Thomas Moffet, The Silkewormes and Their Flies (1599), Facsimile, ed. Victor Houliston (Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 1989), G1. 23 Richard Todd, “‘So Well Atyr’d Abroad’: A Background to the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter and Its Implications for the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29 (1987): 74–93. On the complex and changing English attitudes towards The Whole Booke of Psalmes, see Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 19–50. Beth Quitslund notes that apparently “the first Protestant printed aspersions against The Whole Booke of Psalmes come in the context of praising Pembroke’s work,” private correspondence; see Quitslund’s The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603 (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2008). A critical edition of The Whole Booke of Psalmes edited by Beth Quitslund and Nicholas Temperley is forthcoming from the Renaissance English Text Society. 24 Sir Edward Denny to Lady Mary Wroth, 26 February 1622, printed in The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1983), 240; Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 27. 22

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the Sidney Psalmes were written both “sweetly and sincerely,” with both artistic style and religious devotion (35). John Davies of Hereford, the calligrapher who transcribed (with gold highlights) the magnificent Penshurst manuscript of the Sidney Psalmes, also refers to their “sweet Straines,” but he seems to make more separation between form and content. The Sidney Psalmes provide “So sweet a Descant on so sacred Ground.”25 The “Ground,” or the melody itself, comes from God; the Sidneys provide a “Descant,” or counterpoint embellishment. Yet he, like Donne, says that their Psalmes will be sung by angels: “Angels … shall chant it in their Quires,” so that their words are fit for heavenly as well as earthly use. Her Psalmes (Davies addresses her alone here, not Philip Sidney) “shall serve for Men and Angels use;/ Then both, past Time, shall sing thy Praise and Paines” (51–2). Like Donne, he says that her Psalmes are fit for the use of “Men” (used inclusively here as all people) and “Angels.” And, in eternity, both men and angels will “sing thy Praise and Paines.” Davies’ statement is cleverly ambiguous. They will sing her praise of God (her Psalmes), and they will sing her praise, that is, praise her and the “paines,” or the care and labor, that she expended on her Psalmes. Notably, they will praise her virtue and her poetry. This idea that her Psalmes would bring her fame with God and on earth is frequently stressed, as in Samuel Daniel’s statement that “Those Hymnes which thou doost consecreate to heaven,” originally sung by “Israels Singer to his God,” have given eternal fame “Unto thy voice … . By this, (Great Lady,) thou must then be knowne,/ When Wilton lyes low levell’d with the ground.”26 Daniel thus voices the most familiar reading of the Sidney Psalmes. Written originally by “David” to glorify God, the Sidneys’ poems nonetheless bring fame to the Sidneys. The poet/translators, for Daniel and others including Lanyer, are foregrounded. And yet Lanyer does simultaneously portray a company of women singing Mary Sidney’s Psalmes to glorify God. Mary Sidney, the first English woman known to have composed such an ambitious body of poetry (some 300 pages of verse), was celebrated as much for her religious devotion as for her artistic achievement. The activity of rendering the Psalms was itself seen as a devotional activity, one demonstrating virtue. Davies, for example, terms her Psalmes “A Worke of Art and Grace (from Head and Heart)” (41). In this account art comes from intellectual effort, the head, but grace (here perhaps in the sense of divine grace) comes from the heart. Donne praises the Sidneys’ “holy zeal” in their paraphrases; similarly, Lanyer says that Mary Sidney should be esteemed for her virtue, and that, in her Psalmes, “aftercomming ages” will “read/ Her love, her zeale, her faith, and pietie” (161–2). The term “zeal” functions as the Protestant code for active service to the faith; composing metrical Psalms was considered such service. William Browne, in his elegy, summed up her life by her contribution to public religious discourse. There 25 Davies, John of Hereford, The Muses Sacrifice, or Divine Meditations (London: George Norton, 1612), ***3. 26 Samuel Daniel, “To ... Countesse of Pembroke,” in Delia and Rosamond Augmented. Cleopatra (London: Simon Waterson, 1594), H6r–v.

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was “so much divinity” in her, he says, that her loss would injure “Our Age, too prone to Irreligion.”27 So, in addition to praising the literary quality, or the “sweetness,” of the Psalmes, poets and clergy praised their composition as an expression of piety. Equally important to contemporary readers was the learning displayed in her Psalmes in her consultation of various texts and commentaries that they believed would lead to accuracy in the transmission of sacred text; such scholarship was itself considered an act of devotion, one that prepared the translator to serve as a mouthpiece for the Holy Spirit. Walter Sweeper, for example, minister of Stroud, Gloucestershire, who calls Wilton “a little University” and says that he “gained the greatest part of my little learning through my acquaintance with [the Earl of Pembroke’s] house and family,” praises the Countess of Pembroke’s own “learning humane and divine.”28 Mary Sidney’s rendering of the Psalmist’s prayer that “I may Thy Scholar be” (Variant Psalm 119H. 32) may well reflect her own attitude towards her task. For, while translators of secular works have a dual voice, their own and that of the original author, the Psalms are more complex. “David’s infolded voices express Christ and ourselves as well as his own circumstance,” as Anne Prescott reminds us.29 Anthony Gilby, referring to his English translation of Beza’s commentaries on the Psalms, explains the process of composition: Beza, he says, has written “a briefe and a plaine declaration of the meaning of the holie Ghost, who did endite the Psalmes, and set them foorth by his secretaries, David and others.”30 That is, these Psalms have multiple authors, in descending order from God, through David, to Beza, and then to Gilby himself. Donne sees a similar progression in the Sidney Psalmes: The songs are these, which heavens high holy Muse Whisper’d to David, David to the Jewes: And Davids successors, in holy zeale, In formes of joy and art doe re-reveale To us … (31–5)

Like Beza’s Psalms, the Sidney Psalmes have four authors, in descending order from God, through David, to the Sidneys, who “re-reveale” those words to us in William Browne, “Elegy on the Countess Dowager of Pembroke,” British Library Lansdowne MS 777, f. 44. 28 Walter Sweeper, A briefe treatise declaring the true noble-man, and the base worldling (London: William Jones, 1622), A3; Sweeper, Israels Redemption by Christ wherein is confuted the Arminian Universall Redemption (London: William Jones, 1622), A2v. 29 Anne Lake Prescott, “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 134; see also Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 301–2; Zim, 6, 43–79. 30 Anthony Gilby, trans., The Psalmes of David, truly opened and explaned by … Theodore Beza (London: Henry Denham, 1581), A2v. 27

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English. The Sidneys thus become David’s successors in revealing God’s words to the people; as David spoke God’s words to the Jews, so the Sidneys speak them to us. For some readers, this entire process seems to collapse: the translator/poet becomes translucent and nearly disappears from sight, so that only God is seen as author. The most notable example appears in the two manuscripts of the Sidney Psalmes that have been rubricated for Morning and Evening Prayer. One certainly and the other possibly was owned by Mary Sidney’s relative Sir John Harington of Kelstone, who also was active in circulating the Sidney Psalmes.31 Such rubrication would imply that the work was intended for worship, quite possibly even public worship. In this case, since each rubricated form of the Sidney Psalmes is extant in a single manuscript (they are quite different, one the complete Sidney Psalter in order and the other a collection of miscellaneous Psalms) such worship would presumably be either private or in the household. By using the Psalmes for worship such readers demonstrate that for them the Sidneys’ words can function, like Coverdale’s, as simply the Word of God. Harington presented three of Mary Sidney’s Psalms from his rubricated manuscript to their mutual relative Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford, in quite a different context, one that was simultaneously literary and devotional. He transcribed them in a small miscellany together with Mary Sidney’s translation of Petrarch’s The Triumph of Death, some of Harington’s own epigrams, and an assortment of other poems including even Thomas Nashe’s notoriously ribald “The Choice of Valentines” —about as far from religious meditation as one can well get, at least in one’s reading. In the context of the transcriptions themselves, then, the Psalmes are presented as courtly literary works, included with an assortment of other things that Harington thinks will interest such a sophisticated reader as the Countess of Bedford. But the letter that he sends with the poems privileges the enclosed metrical Psalms as a religious work. He says that he is sending her “the divine, and truly divine translation … Donne by that Excellent Countesse, and in Poesie the mirrois of our Age” to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, praising her similarly “admirable gifts, of the mind, that clothe Nobility with virtue.”32 The phrasing may not be redundant: “the divine, and trulie divine translation” of the Psalmes presumably means “divine” in the sense of well written and “truly divine” in the sense of sacred. In another context Harington speaks of Mary Sidney’s Psalmes as religious instruction. Comparing translation of the Psalms by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, with the founding of Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1347 by Mary de St Pol, daughter of Guy de Chatillon and the widow of Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, he says British Library Add. MS 12047; “Manuscripts of the Psalms,” Collected Works, vol. 2, 317–19, 342–3. 32 Harington to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, 19 December 1600, Inner Temple Petyt MS 538.43.14, f. 303v. See also Gavin Alexander, Writing after Sidney: the Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 130–133. 31

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Both works advance the love of sacred lore, Both helpe the soules of sinners to convarte. Their learned payn I prayse, her costly almes; A Colledge this translates, the tother Psalmes. (11–14)33

That is, Mary Sidney’s work in translating the Psalms will have as wide an impact as the founding of a college to train priests—both efforts will advance sacred learning and thereby “helpe the soules of sinners to convarte.” Literary excellence is not seen here as an impediment to spiritual instruction, as Golding had feared. Of course training priests was an exercise by and for the most educated, so Harington may have seen a similar role for Mary Sidney’s Psalmes. Denny goes even further. In his familiar castigation of Lady Mary Wroth’s secular prose romance by contrast with the “holly Psalmes” translated by her “virtuous and learned Aunt,” not only is Mary Sidney now singing “in the quier of Heaven those devine mediations which shee so sweetly tuned heer belowe,” but her Psalmes “left to us here on earth” will win her “dayly more and more glory in heaven as others by them shall be enlightened, who as so many trophies shall appeare to her further exaltation in gods favor.”34 Those who are “enlightened,” or taught, by her Psalmes will themselves become “trophies” that will exalt her in God’s eyes. Thus both Harington and Denny attribute power to her Psalmes. They will change the reader in ways analogous to scripture itself. Like Donne, they present the Sidneys, in some sense, as successors to David, bringing God’s word to English readers. Harington elsewhere says that the Countess of Pembroke’s former chaplain Gervase Babington helped her with the Psalmes, because “it was more then a woman’s skill to expresse the sense so right as she hath done in her vearse, and more then the English or Latin translation could give her.”35 Of course we need to discount Harington’s misogyny (“it was more then a woman’s skill”)—any relative of Mary Sidney and of Lucy, Countess of Bedford should have known better. Furthermore, as G. Lloyd Jones notes, both Elizabeth Falkland Cary and Lady Jane Grey did study Hebrew, and perhaps Queen Elizabeth and Katherine Cooke as well.36 So it is certainly possible that Babington, recognized as a Hebrew and Greek scholar, did give the Countess of Pembroke some basic instruction in biblical Hebrew when he served as her chaplain in 1581/82. In a work dedicated to her two years later, he advises her to continue in the “studie of his worde, and all other good learning,” perhaps implying that she had begun a program of biblical Harington, Letters and Epigrams, 310. See also Franklin Williams, “Sir John Harington,” TLS, 4 September 1930, 697; and Michael G. Brennan, “Sir Robert Sidney and Sir John Harington of Kelston,” Notes & Queries 34 (1987): 232–7. 34 Denny to Wroth, 26 February 1622, 240. 35 Harington, Nugae Antiquae, vol. 2, ed. Thomas Park (London: Vernor and Hood, 1804), 172–3. 36 G. Lloyd Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 240–243. 33

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study.37 And in his dedication of A Profitable Exposition of the Lords Prayer in 1588 Babington says that she should let the word of God “be your Poesie, (Right Honorable) as pleasant as ever it was,” evidently a reference to her Psalmes.38 So, while Harington’s comment may disparage women’s learning in general and Mary Sidney’s presumed own lack of Hebrew scholarship in particular, it demands a closer reading. In the first place, Harington does assume that she consulted numerous translations and that reading Latin was as natural as reading English for her. And even his statement on Hebrew is somewhat ambiguous. “It was more then a woman’s skill to express the sense so right” does not necessarily imply that she knew no Hebrew at all; rather, as a woman, she would not have had rigorous training in that third scholarly language at school and then university. And, most importantly, even in disparaging her, he says that she achieved the ultimate aim of the biblical translator—expressing “the sense so right.” The significance of this evaluation may be seen by comparison with Gilby’s translation of Beza entitled, The Psalmes of David, truly opened and explaned by Paraphrasis, according to the right sense of everie Psalme … declaring the true use thereof. Similarly, the translators of the Geneva Bible claim, “For God is our witnes that we have by all meanes indevored to set forthe the puritie of the worde and right sense of the holie Gost for the edifying of the brethren in faith and charitie.”39 Thus, in saying that Mary Sidney’s Psalmes did “express the sense so right,” Harington is claiming that she had achieved the ultimate goal of biblical translation—her Psalm paraphrases, like the Geneva Bible and Beza’s commentary, faithfully rendered the meaning of the text. Whether or not she could read Hebrew easily, or at all, she does show awareness of the importance of the biblical originals when she says, as we have seen, “all of tongues with soule and voice admire/ Theise sacred Hymnes thy Kinglie Prophet form’d” (“Angell Spirit,” 13–14). That is, all who know the biblical tongues experience the glory of the Psalms in their original form. We now know, by comparison of her words with other Psalm versions and commentaries, that she did consult virtually every Psalm version and commentary available to her in English, French, and Latin, but maintained a critical attitude toward these sources, which frequently disagree with each other.40 Relying most heavily on the commentaries of Calvin and Beza (in Latin and in English translation), she tends to choose the meaning closest to the Hebrew.41 Melody Knowles has 37 Gervase Babington, A Brief Conference Betwixt Mans Frailtie and Faith (London: Henry Midleton for Thomas Charde, 1584), A5. 38 Babington, A Profitable Exposition of the Lords Prayer (London: T. Orwin for T. Charde, 1588), A6v. 39 The Bible and Holy Scriptures. Geneva, 1560, ***4. 40 Collected Works, vol. 2, 1–32. 41 Collected Works, vol. 2, 15–19; Noel J. Kinnamon, “God’s ‘Scholer’: The Countess of Pembroke’s Psalmes and Beza’s Psalmorum Davidis … Libri Quinque,” Notes and Queries 44 (1997): 85–8; Theodore Steinberg, “The Sidneys and the Psalms,” Studies in Philology 92 (1995): 1–17.

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recently concluded that Harington was right that “Pembroke’s Psalmes reflect an exceptional poetic fidelity to the original text … and this fidelity seems not to have depended on her ability to read Hebrew.”42 Chanita Goodblatt and Mayer Gruber concur that she may not have had direct access to the Hebrew text, but she was astute in the choice of the scholarship she read. For most modern readers, the gap between the Hebrew Psalms and Mary Sidney’s poetical Psalmes seems an abyss. As Hamlin says of English metrical Psalms in general, “what makes [them] most intriguing is often not their accuracy but the imaginative boldness of their error.”43 And, we might add for the Sidneys, the audacity of their form. Although they were heavily indebted to the Marot-Beza Psalter as a literary model, and they had some English precedents because Thomas Wyatt had used terza rima for the penitential Psalms, Anne Lock had written a sonnet sequence on Psalm 51, and Matthew Parker had used a few different verse forms for his Psalms, no one before them had produced such an array of English verse forms. Certainly when we look at Mary Sidney’s Psalm 78 rendered in ottava rima, for example, or the freer paraphrase of Psalm 88 that anticipates George Herbert’s lyrics, scholarly transmission of the biblical text would not be the first thing we would note. And yet most contemporary praise of Pembroke as an individual and as the author of the Psalmes stresses her scholarship, as well as her poetic ability and her religious devotion. Dedications typically emphasize her learning, even when combined with a ritual nod toward her beauty.44 Of course we need to discount hyperbole meant for a potential patron, but even so the terms of praise are instructive. Thomas Heywood, for example, praises “the beautifull and learned Ladie Mary, Countesse of Penbrooke,” and Abraham Fraunce presents his work to “Dominae Mariae, Comitissae Pembrokiensi … piae, formosae, eruditeae.”45 (Even the Latin dedication is itself a compliment, as were Latin dedications by others including Charles Fitzgeoffrey, William Gager, Henry Parry, Walter Sweeper, and Thomas Watson.) Michael Drayton terms her “learnings famouse Queene,” Nathaniel Baxter says that she is “for learning had in admiration,” and William Camden calls her a Lady “most addicted to

42 Melody D. Knowles, “Pembroke’s Hebrew,” forthcoming. Chanita Goodblatt and Mayer I. Gruber also conclude that Pembroke had ready access to Hebrew scholarship in English and Latin, “Dialogue and David’s Voice: Jewish Exegesis and Christian Hebraism in the Sidneian Psalms,” forthcoming. 43 Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 11. 44 Geoffrey G. Hiller, “‘Where thou doost live, there let all graces be’: Images of the Renaissance Woman Patron in Her House and Rural Domain,” Cahiers Elizabèthains 40 (1991): 37–52. 45 Thomas Heywood, Gynaikeion: or, Nine Bookes of Various History. Concerning Women (London: A. Islip, 1624), Mm1v; Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Covntesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch. Entituled Amintas Dale. Wherein are the most conceited tales of the Pagan Gods in English Hexameters together with their auncient descriptions and Philosophicall explications (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1592), A2.

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delightful studies.”46 The scholarship of her Psalmes was particularly evident to contemporary readers. Harington’s praise, for example, of her “learned payn” in translating (13), parallels Donne’s praise of the Sidneys’ “sweet learned labors” (54), and Nathaniel Baxter’s praise of her “learned Poems, and her Layes.”47 Ritual praise of her virtue is also combined with her scholarship, as when Denny terms her “vertuous and learned” in describing her Psalmes. Even more significant is Lanyer’s assertion that Mary Sidney’s “virtue, wisdome, learning, dignity” exceed her brother Philip’s (152). Such comparison of her personal qualities, as well as her Psalmes, to those of her famous brother would underscore the claim, so evident elsewhere in Lanyer’s Salve Deus, that women could equal men in both spirituality and artistic achievement. Like Donne, these readers see Mary Sidney as a successor to David, one whose scholarship, whose “art,” and whose “joy” or religious devotion, allow her to bring God’s word to English readers. In a very real sense, she was perceived to share in some part of the divine inspiration given to David, and so her innovative and highly individualized poems remained, at least for some early modern readers, the Word of God. Devout readers could sing her rime royal rendition of Psalm 51, utilize her Psalmes for spiritual instruction, or even use them to replace the Coverdale Psalms for worship in Morning and Evening Prayer. Re-revelation was, for these readers, still God’s revelation.

46 Michael Drayton, “Sixth Eglog,” in The Works of Michael Drayton, vol. 1, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931-41), 74; Nathaniel Baxter, Sir Philip Sydneys Ouránia, that is, Endimions Song and Tragedie, Containing all Philosophie (London: Edward White, 1606), B4v; William Camden, The Historie of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth … Composed by way of Annals, tr. R. N.[orton] (1630), 4: 2000. 47 Baxter, Ouránia, N2v.

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Chapter 10

Sibling Harps: The Sidneys and the Chérons Translate the Psalms 1

Anne Lake Prescott

The Psalms are arguably our greatest, lyric sequence, but unlike the Rime of Petrarch, say, or Ovid’s Amores and Tristia, they are not by one person. True, in the Renaissance there were differences of opinion over which are by David. Historically, chronologically, could David have written “By the waters of Babylon” (Ps. 137)? Or does this matter if they are divinely inspired and often prophetic? In a sermon on Psalm 90, perhaps by Moses but perhaps by David, John Donne says that “we can get no farther, then that the holy Ghost is the Author … and we seek no farther.”2 The Psalter, then, can have a particularly convoluted knot of voices. David speaks for himself and for Christ, but when we say the Psalms, ran a common reminder, we should interiorize them so that the Spirit might also blow through us. How distant must a translation or paraphrase be, however, before the voice changes from that of David/God to one we hear as we hear other human speech? Does quoting the Psalms introduce a flash of divinity, wanted or not, into ordinary discourse? When young Elizabeth (it is said), upon hearing of her accession, quoted Psalm 118 to the effect that “this is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes” was her voice entirely her own? Thinking about such matters also raises interesting questions about the gender of the psalmic voice when recited or translated. Does the voice of Philip Sidney’s versions have the same gender as that of his sister when writing hers? When referring to the speaker of Mary Sidney’s translations most scholars, although not all, use “he” or “his,” but what of Anne Lock’s 1560 paraphrase of Psalm 51? In English it is easy to avoid gendering the lyric “I,” so it is poignant to watch at least two French women religious poets—Anne de Marquets and Gabrielle Coignet—steer away from gendered language as their own voices approach quotation or paraphrase of the Psalms.3 A related question can arise when we consider early modern verse 1 In identifying the Psalms I give both the numbers used by the Chérons, who follow the Septuagint numbering preferred by the Roman Catholic Church, and those used by the Sidneys, who follow the Masoretic numbering system preferred by Protestants. 2 John Donne, Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 46. 3 See my “Two Annes, Two Davids: The Sonnets of Anne Lok and Anne de Marquets,” in Chanita Goodblatt and Howard Kreisel, eds, Tradition, Heterodoxy and

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translations with a divided authorship: those by Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze, for example, or by Philip and Mary Sidney, or the handsome volume I describe in this essay. Essay de pseaumes et cantiques mis en vers, et enrichis de figures is a volume of psalms turned into French by Elisabeth Sophie Chéron (1648–1711) with illustrations by her younger brother, Louis. Published at Paris in 1694, it offers three sets of psalms (prophecy, captivity, and penitence), some canticles, and a celebratory poem in the French of “Mr. de Senecé” and the Latin of “Mr. Boutard”—not liminal but terminal—praising the author. Graced with “delicatesse” and “politesse,” we read, Elisabeth-Sophie is another Sappho (5). By 1694 this compliment to a female poet was a cliché, and the image of a psalmist Sappho may seem a little pagan; yet one painting ascribed to Chéron shows an aristocratic lady dressed as that same archetypal female poet.4 Chéron’s Penitential Psalms—the traditional seven—were soon set to music by Antonia Bembo, and Louis XIV gave her a pension; it is possible that she learned Hebrew. Also an accomplished artist, she was one of the first women taken into the Academy, and apparently held off her many suitors until she married in 1692, when she was 44; understandably, there is no record of children.5 Elisabeth and Louis were divided not only by medium—she wrote the words, he did the engravings—but by religion: she was Catholic like her mother, converted after an education at a convent; he remained a Huguenot like his father, and at some point after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 left France for the safety of exile in England. There he would, among other accomplishments, illustrate Tonson’s 1720 edition of Milton and contribute some illustrations to Religious Culture: Judaism and Christianity in the Early Modern Period (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2007), 311–29. 4 The painting figures often in the results of a Google Image search for ElisabethSophie Chéron, as does a lovely self-portrait. For a reproduction see also Mary D. Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 68; it is held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Rouen. As Ashgate’s reader pointed out, moreover, Mary Sidney’s translation of Psalm 125 is in Sapphics. 5 On her life, if with barely a mention of her psalm translations, see René Demoris, ed., Hommage à Elizabeth Sophie Chéron: Texte et Peinture à l’Age Classique (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1992; Prospect 1) This is largely an edition of La Coupe du Val-de-Grace (a curious text that includes an exchange with Molière) together with essays on her. According to the introduction by Jean-Marc Poiron, Chéron abjured her Protestantism on Lady Day (March 25) in 1668, at St. Sulpice, joined the French Academy in 1672, and in 1692 married Jacques Le Hay. She also wrote a brief mock-epic, in four “chants,” published posthumously. The poem, Les Cerises Renversees (1717), printed in the volume ed. Demoris, sings of a heroic dispute in a Parisian street over a catastrophically spilled basket of cherries; the gods fail to bring peace, but an earthly French écu pressed into the right mortal palm resolves the terrible conflict. No Hudibras or Rape of the Lock, the poem is still funny.

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the 1724 edition of Sidney’s Arcadia.6 Exactly when he did reach England the available sources do not make clear; the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says he emigrated in 1695; some other results from a web search note a record of his presence in England in 1693. Perhaps he traversed the Channel several times. Whatever his exact whereabouts in 1694, and whenever the pair planned the volume (which might matter), he and his sister published at about the same time as his decision to emigrate. Their collaboration is thus also a reminder that ties of affection and shared intellectual or artistic interests could then reach across ideological barriers even in a time of religious conflict and persecution, and even though the texts on which they collaborated include passages often cited by all sides as ammunition in their mutual denunciations. After all, both Catholics and Protestants could agree on the value of the Psalter, even if there remained some confessional differences in emphasis—differences that seem to affect the 1694 volume less than one might anticipate. To devote a whole section to Penitential Psalms continues an early medieval tradition even more vigorous in Catholic than in Protestant countries; on the other hand, to insist on the supposed circumstances behind the psalms suggests a more recent, even a Reformed, stress on the history behind the Psalter, whatever that history might be. To those interested in how women translated the Psalms, then, this is an intriguing volume to juxtapose to Mary Sidney’s, aside from the difference between the quasi-stability of the Chérons’ impressive print volume and the Sidneys’ varying manuscripts. I doubt the Chérons were aware of the Sidney Psalter, but it is not impossible that Louis had heard of it after settling in England, particularly when asked to make some illustrations for the 1724 Arcadia.7 (See Figure 10.1.) The chief difference, I think, is one that might modify (not contradict, but modify) arguments by several scholars that, for all her fidelity to Scripture and to her intelligently pondered sources, Mary Sidney can subtly comment on politics in ways that seem particularly impelled by the Reformation.8 Chéron’s paraphrases— she is much looser than either Sidney—can move the Psalms even further into a public world in passages that, in Sidney’s hands, retain (or adopt) a more lyric individual voice. On the other hand, I can find no indication that Chéron edges 6 On his illustrations of Milton’s epic see Marcia R. Pointon, Milton & English Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 18–34; she finds Chéron competent but unoriginal. 7 I quote the copy held at Harvard’s Houghton Library. It is hard to cite it by page or signature, for it seems oddly put together, the continuity being interrupted by engravings and blank pages. The groupings are short, though, and the psalms easily located. 8 See, e.g., Margaret P. Hannay, “‘Princes You as Men Must Dy’: Genevan Advice to Monarchs in the Psalmes of Mary Sidney,” ELR 19.1 (1989), 22–41, and, on her rhetorical gestures toward restoring Jerusalem, Anne Lake Prescott, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Ruins of Rome,” Sidney Journal 23 (2005), 1–17. The scholarship on Mary Sidney, unlike that on E-S Chéron, grows rapidly and I fear I do not do it justice. See, at a minimum, the entire 2005 Sidney Journal and Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700 II (Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke), Part III.

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Illustration by Louis Chéron from Arcadia in Sir Philip Sidney’s Works (London, 1725), I (image 44). © The British Library Board.

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her translation into a more feminine sensibility; quite the contrary. It is true that where the Bible has an authorial “I” Chéron will sometimes use a more general plural, but when she does, infrequently, use “je” in grammatical circumstances requiring a gendered adjective or past participle the gender is always masculine. This is David, some other prophet, or an unnamed male Israelite speaking, not Elisabeth-Sophie; in Donne’s terms, she is all Moses and no Miriam (although Mary Sidney’s role as Miriam is not free of contradiction).9 Let me now take a few examples to show how the two women—and their brothers—recreate or imagine the psalmic voice, examining two psalms from each of the Chérons’ set. Because this is an essay on two productions by paired siblings, it seems fair to start where the Chérons start, with Psalm 8, “Domine, Dominus,” translated by Philip, not Mary, Sidney.10 Chéron includes it in the “prophetic set,” authored by the prophet David and particularly “prophetic” because, as Augustine notes in his sermon on this psalm, Jesus quotes its allusion to “babes and sucklings” (Matt 21.16).11 Louis Chéron’s picture (Figure 10.2) shows David, back to us and harp set to one side, head turned to the Tetragrammaton inscribed in a blazing sun while two soldiers (David’s Israelites? Caesar’s Romans?) look on. His sister’s somewhat flaccid version of the psalmist’s song to God’s power and glory does not show her at her best, although the lines, pleasantly varied in length, are smooth. Sidney repeats the opening (“O Lord, that rul’st our mortal line, / How through the world thy name doth shine”) at the psalm’s close, making a circle, just as does the Bible, and he would have found in the version by Clément Marot that he almost certainly read an even subtler close that instead of quite repeating the claim that God’s name is great and admirable changes the lines’ order a little and exclaims that by right it is so (“Comme à bon droict”).12 Chéron’s stress is on an inconceivable power whose name makes everything bow (“Tout fléchit”), but 9 John Donne’s “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his sister” calls the pair “this Moses and this Miriam” (l. 46); on the ambiguities of being Miriam and matters of gender, see Michelle Osherow, Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), chapter 1. 10 On siblings, see also Patricia Demers, “‘Warpe’ and ‘Webb’ in the Sidney Psalms,” in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, eds Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 41–58. Demers rightly notes the seventeenth-century interest in the Penitentials, but the Chérons’ treatment of them is untraditional. 11 The Works of Saint Augustine: A translation for the 21st Century, trans. Maria Bouldking, O.S.B. (Hyde Park NY: New City Press, 2000) I, 131. 12 Chéron has no “shine” but her brother’s illustration may make the word redundant. I quote Philip Sidney from The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney, eds. Hannibal Hamlin, Michael G. Brennan, Margaret P. Hannay, and Noel J. Kinnamon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The note to Psalm 8 says that the repetition follows the Book of Common Prayer, but, like Marot’s version, it also follows the Bible. I quote Marot’s Œuvres complètes II, ed. François Rigolot (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 110; I thank Prof. Rigolot for his advice and a copy of this attractive edition.

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Psalm 8: A crowned David prays to God; from Pseaumes nouvellement mis en vers françois, enrichis de figures (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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her praise is oddly vague where Sidney’s is concrete (that Sidney specifies God’s inscription of his “glory” on the cosmos as His “story” is also a reminder, perhaps, of his own interest in narrative). Woman though she was, if childless, Chéron has mere “enfans” praising God whereas Sidney, like the Bible, imagines children at the breast—not just “babies” but also “sucklings”13 Those whom God’s glory “confounds” are merely the wicked (“méchants”), not Sidney’s “en’mies … bent to revenge and ever-hating”—Sidney’s words have biblical precedent, and Marot is more vivid yet, but perhaps Chéron knew all too well that God’s enemies were defined differently by her brother’s co-religionists and her own and that such a difference had been the cause, was still the cause, of murderous hating. The rest of the brief psalm praises God’s works, and again Chéron is less specific than Sidney, less visual. Earth and the seas praise acknowledge man (“Homme”) as their “Maistre,” and so do big and small animals (“Les plus grands animaux, comme les plus petits”) as man extends his empire over “tous les Elemens”; and the psalm ends with praise of God’s “immensité”—not just bigness but, more literally, what is beyond measuring. There is, however, no circling back to the beginning—the psalm’s omega, so to speak, does not return to and literally recapitulate its alpha. Sidney had been more quasi-political as well as more concrete in his vision of the bird as “free burgess of the air”; that his fish make “unworn paths” is a brilliant meditation on repeated action that leaves no trace (nothing for spies, enemies, and censors?). And his frustrated Astrophil might envy not just the sheep and oxen but “all the beasts forever breeding, / Which in the fertile fields be feeding.” That Chéron contents herself with unspecified big and little creatures apparently uninspired to make animal love is curious, and that she is more abstract than Sidney or the Bible (or Marot), thinking in categories and without noting action, does not itself make her translation bad. Yet it remains intriguing that Philip should be more interested in sucking babies and mating animals than is Elisabeth-Sophie. After all, a good deal of scholarship on Mary Sidney has noted how she incorporates touches that recall her gender.14 Here it is a sister, though, if not a mother, who minimizes them. That Philip Sidney goes beyond the Bible in stressing the world’s fertility and its creatures’ sensuality is likewise intriguing psychologically; maybe the family that owned Penshurst knew more about mating sheep, fertile fields and swimming fish than a Parisian, no matter how accomplished. I turn now to Psalm 68/69, likewise in the prophetic set, a psalm that the Chérons make more explicitly typological; this is no distortion, of course, for those who think that these psalms foretell the sufferings and triumphs of Christ—

Less succinctly but more vividly, Marot’s specifies babies that one nurses: “enfans qu’on allaicte.” Chéron’s minimizing of the sucking is interesting. 14 On Mary Sidney’s feminine concerns and images see most notably Margaret Hannay, “‘House-confined maids’: The Presentation of Woman’s Role in the Psalmes of the Countess of Pembroke.” ELR 24 (1994), 44–71. 13

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and of ourselves. As Augustine says when explicating the opening verses, “[T]he head is prefiguring the members.”15 The picture (Figure 10.3) shows David, with a harp, facing us; there is a book—I assume the Gospel—and Christ is on what looks like a cloud, his back to us, gazing at a chalice (communion cup for the “members”? or the cup that Jesus the head asked his Father to let pass from him?). Even here the question of voice arises: David’s words foretell the sufferings of the Word, Christ, but he is himself a figure for that Word—the multiple voice is made visible. There are no tempestuous seas that in the text overwhelm the speaker, for the stress is on David and Christ. The headnote explains: “The following psalm, according to patristic opinion, is a prophecy of Our Savior and of the ills that the Jews will draw upon themselves by this crime. It also represents the triumph of the Gospel.”16 In a post-Reformation context, that last thought sounds Huguenot, but Augustine had said the same of this psalm. There is, however, no explicit anti-Jewish thought in Augustine’s long and subtle commentary, only an equation of the Psalms storms with those who cried “crucify him.” Nor is there in Sidney’s version; even the annotations to the Geneva version, which affirm the psalm’s typological and prophetic status, do not blame Jews in general, only “Judas & suche traitors.” Christ’s enemies in the marginalia are less the Jews than the “reprobate.”17 After all, England had few Jews to worry about but it did have a healthy supply of reprobates. Chéron’s translation is in sixteen dixains with varying metrical and rhyme patterns.18 No longer a translation or even a paraphrase, one could argue, this is an expatiation, an expansion, a meditation—a work of piety and literary adventure, but provoking the question of how Chéron’s voice relates to David’s, or for that matter to Christ’s, as imitation. I quote the first dixain so as indicate the flavor. I am no poet, so comparisons with Sidney are unfair. The Geneva Bible says (for example): “Save me, ô God: for the waters are entred even to my soule. I sticke fast in the depe myre, where no staie is: I am come into depe waters, and the streames runne over me. I am wearie of crying:

Augustine, Expositions III, 367. “Ce Pseaume, suivant le sentiment des Peres, est une Prophetie de la Passion de

15 16

N. S. & des maux que les Juifs se devoient attirer par ce crime. Il nous represent aussi le triomphe de l’Evangile.” 17 Is this from a Calvinist identification with ancient Israelites? Or the fear of cognitive dissonance when writing of ancient Israelites (good) and modern Jews (bad)? Indeed there is a typically ambiguous early modern comma that could mean the descendants of those who betrayed Christ are all like those traitors or that the condemnation follows only those who are like them. And in terms of Calvinist understanding of modern Jews this does matter. The marginal comments tend to drop the typology that the headnote makes clear; it explains the end of the psalm as referring to the kingdom of Christ and the “preservacion of the Church.” 18 The effect, visually and hermeneutically, would be interesting to compare with Anne Lock’s sonnets on Ps. 51.

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Fig. 10.3

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Psalm 68/69: David harps with Christ behind him (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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my throte is drye: mine eyes faile, whiles I waite for my God.” Chéron says (but in French): My God, my only hope, my sole recourse, Draw me from th’abyss in which my soul is plunged, Submerged today by torrents of ills. It dies without your aid. In this gulf of pain my timid constancy Succumbs, remains without defense; By a stormy sea I see myself engulfed— All its angry waves roll o’er my head, I yield to the rage of a horrible tempest, If by your hands, Lord, I am not preserved.

And here is Mary Sidney’s stunning first stanza of one of her most forceful psalms as it edges into a perhaps metaphysical and certainly a vatic manner: Troublous seas my soule surround: save, ô god, my sincking soule, sincking, where it feels noe ground, in this gulph, this whirling hoale. waiting aid, with ernest eying: calling god with bootless crying: dymm and dry in me are found ey to see, and throat to sound.19

As the two translations proceed, Sidney’s words enact the desperation and terror of an individual sinner, sunk in sin and scoffed at by both the public and those “private now at banquetts plac’t, / singing songs of wyny tast.” Sidney knows that the voice is also that of the grieving Christ and that the prayers are also for the restoration of a Zion where “his name who love and prize, / stable stay shall eternize,” but although capable of nudging her translations in one direction or another, here, as the note in the edition by Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan observes, she avoids overt typology (despite the psalm’s reference to being fed vinegar, something hard not to hear as an invitation to typological reflections on the Passion). Chéron keeps David’s desperation, terror, anger, and eventual confidence, but her Christological additions shift the voice away from the merely human to the also divine. When David begs that God “not allow me to remain in the darkness of the tomb” (Geneva has “pit”), she clearly hopes, and in utterly traditional ways, that we will think of Easter. No wonder David can later cry, “O mort! où sont In this essay I quote Mary Sidney’s psalms from The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke, eds Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) II. I have found that the force of Mary Sidney’ shorter lines becomes even more evident when read aloud (to students, for example) with a touch of the chant, perhaps as to a harp rather than as to a lute. 19

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tes traits”—fairly close to Paul’s “Oh death where is thy sting” (Corinthians 15). Biblical exegetes had long since learned to hear—to desire—this double voice, the voice Louis Chéron illustrates. In Mary Sidney’s day, this typology had come to live, perhaps uneasily, with an increased tendency to associate the Psalms with the specifics of David’s life. In any case, by not intruding Christological details or parallels, legitimate though she would have thought them, Sidney allows the focus to remain on David’s inwardness, his personal anguish, whatever that anguish’s relevance to Christ’s passion—and of course to our own pain as we imaginatively enter the whirlpool and recognize it as our own. I cannot resist lingering here over one detail. When Sidney’s psalmist asks God to multiply his enemies’ sins (Chéron has “augmenter”), he exploits the power of zero, which in early modern English is regularly called by its etymological cousin, “cipher”: may the Lord, “Causing sinne on synne to grow, / add still Cyphers to their summ.” This is hardly charity, but it is a brilliantly imagined injunction, one impossible in biblical times: may God add zeros to their ills, thus increasing them by a factor of ten, a hundred, a thousand. Mary’s way of putting the notion touches on the paradox that zero brought with it—a nothing that can make an amount not all, of course, never all, whatever the similarity of shape between an empty zero and a full circle, but placed on a trajectory toward that all (and they say girls aren’t good at math). Interestingly, two of the twenty-five or more English printed texts that use the word before 1596 are relevant to the Sidneys: John Stubbs’s Gaping Gulph, which fears that the duc d’Alençon, even if not officially a king, might multiply his influence by adding his nothing to those he sponsors, and Stephen Gosson’s Anatomy of Abuses, which thinks of actors as speaking ciphers (for Marlowe, women are “nothing” without male company—that little vertical shaped like “one”—but Thomas Lodge’s gallant if confused lover says the reverse: she is the “substance” and he the cipher).20 Sidney has company in her witty use of nothing much, of the vanishing point and the full globe. In the Chérons’ volume, after prophecy comes captivity, and Christ disappears from the illustrations. The most famous of this group is Psalm 136/7, “Super fluminia”: “By the rivers of Babel we sate, and there we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harpes upon the willowes in the middes thereof” (Geneva). The harps appear in the illustration (Figure 10.4) together with “haut-bois”, or oboes (maybe a pun on “haut bois” if hung high on a tree, suggests Ashgate’s clever reader). The psalm must bring a lump to the most secular throat until its final wish to see Babylonian children dashed to pieces. But remember, said many exegetes, the babies represent evil desires or God’s enemies—not our own personal ones. In Augustine’s allegory, the human part of the God’s Jerusalem, our native City of Peace, is caught in the earthly City of Confusion, but not forever. The Geneva

20 John Stubbs, The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf … (1579), C2v; Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions … (1582), A8v; Marlowe, “Hero and Leander,” I.255–6; Thomas Lodge, Euphues Shadow (1592), C4v.

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Psalm 136/137: Israelites Refusing to Sing During the Babylonian Captivity (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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notes, not surprisingly, read the exiled Israelites as the church as a whole and their grief as sorrow over its decay. Louis Chéron would agree. Sidney’s translation again edges into what we often consider George Herbert’s territory. She begins: “Nigh seated where the River flowes, / that watreth Babells thanckfull plaine, / which then our teares in pearled rowes / did help to water with their raine.”21 The captives cannot sing: “ô no, we have nor voice, nor hand / for such a song, in such a land.” Wonderful imprecision! Geneva has a “strange” land and Chéron an “impious” one. As for Babylon “that didst us wast, / thy self shalt one daie wasted be.” There is no overt suggestion in the text of what this Babylon might have meant for Protestants and even for some reformist Catholics—papal Rome. Her readers would remember the comparison, but here the homesick voice (an Israelite’s, God’s, the speaker’s) is largely that of an individual wishing to go home and angrily confident that tyranny will not forever triumph. Chéron’s stress lies even more on that tyranny. Babel’s bank is “proud.” To sing the Lord’s songs is more specifically to “profane them”—Israelite silence is not merely grief but a refusal to dirty holy songs by sending them to undeserving ears and landscape. Most interesting, perhaps, is the architectural stress of the Edomite cry to destroy Jerusalem. Sidney has the “bloody victors” say, “downe downe with it, at any hand / make all platt pais, lett nothing stand.” Chéron’s version has odd echoes of the older poetry of ruination in, to cite the most compelling example, Joachim du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome (Spenser’s Ruines of Rome), that elsewhere Sidney exploits. Chéron’s Babylonians blaspheme God’s name as they cry “exterminate, desolate their fatherland (“patrie”): may all its people lie buried under these famous towers, under the demolished walls, their rivers changed to waves of blood and their altars broken. May Jerusalem be one vast cemetery.” That goes well beyond the biblical text. Why? The French religious civil wars were long over, as was the more recent Fronde. And yet some anger or fear accelerates the rhetoric here. Did she sympathize with her brother Louis more than we knew? The last stanza asks who can avenge us, in “nôtre juste querelle?” For the Geneva annotators the answer is Cyrus, God’s instrument. Chéron’s reply may have a touch of typology: our rescuer is he who has chosen the “Seigneur.” In any case, her version seems even more communal than Sidney’s interiorized cry of anguish and anticipation, relevant though both anguish and anticipation were to the latter’s England—and to herself. The illustration to Chéron’s Psalm 120/121, “Levavi oculos meos in montes,” shows a nameless Israelite (not David, for this is the time of the Babylonian Captivity), back to us, arms outstretched, looking to the hills (Figure 10.5).22 Is he welcoming help? Beseeching God for it? Louis Chéron, or his printer, recycled the illustration for Psalm 64/5 in the same section, a psalm of exile and longing for home. To repeat—it is unclear when Louis planned to leave, or left, for a permanent 21 Sidney also notes that the Israelites evidently still have their harps with them, even if now “uselesse, and untouched,” which may matter. 22 “Levavi” is the perfect tense, but translations vary in the tense they give the verb “lift.” The Hebrew, Betty Travitsky informs me, suggests either the present or the future.

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Psalm 120/121; An Unnamed Israelite Lifts his Eyes to the Hills (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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home in the safety of English exile, and we do not even know exactly when he and his sister put the volume together. And yet there is a pathos to the picture that invites speculation, even if the physical obstacles are hills, not waves or the religious divide. Some illustrations in this section are crowd scenes, but this one is strikingly private, personal, lyric. So, in the same group, is his image for Psalm 41/42 “Quemadmodum Cervus,” “As a hart” (Figure 10.6, although the Hebrew gives the animal an ambiguous gender), with a panting deer that in traditional commentary is sometimes associated with David, sometimes with Christ.23 But here, according to the headnote, the figure is “some prophet” from the start of the Babylonian captivity who “had seen the first Temple and who wished to see the second” (D1). In both cases, the sister reads the psalms in terms of a nation’s long public trauma and her brother imagines a single speaker alone and aching. Elisabeth-Sophie’s version of Psalm 120/21, then, reads in the psalm a public hope that contrasts tonally with her brother’s lyric picture of a lonely kneeling figure. The speaker is at first single (“Mes yeux”), and the hills are a place from which we can hope not only for God’s “bontez” but for revelation, a place where “Dieu se fait entendre”—makes himself heard, understood. These hills have a touch of Sinai, perhaps. The pronouns then become plural—God will not suffer our feet to slip and will be a sure defense against our enemies. Whether the burning sun or the cold moon “Eclaire” (“illuminates”) the Universe, the psalm concludes, we will not suffer the unlucky (“importune”) “influence” of their various “aspects.” In these sad “deserts” far from our “patrie” he will sustain us and the lives that he gave us. Unlike her brother, then, Elisabeth-Sophie stresses community, imagining a prophet not gazing in solitary desire but speaking for and about an exiled people.24 And there is a touch of astrology in her lines on the sun and moon quite missing from Sidney’s version of the same psalm. That English version, with exclusively feminine rhymes for its decasyllables (not quite pentameters) that here add to the verse’s musicality, is a lyric meditation on longing written in the first person, with an imagination at first more like that of Louis than of Elisabeth-Sophie Chéron, although the note in the Oxford edition cites Beza’s argument that the Israelites can now see the Judean hills and rightly observes that Sidney includes traces of dialogue by putting some comments in the form of questions.25 From these “lively mountaines” comes “all my reliefe, On patristic and Renaissance Christological views of this hart/hind see my “The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life,” Spenser Studies VI (1986), 33–76. 24 The belief that the Reformation brought a new emphasis on and even helped to create an inward self has too often ignored much Catholic culture (to say nothing of classical and biblical), but it is tempting to see a religious as well as an aesthetic difference between the two Chérons. True, Mary Sidney herself can on different occasions stress both a communal longing to rebuild Jerusalem and a gendered awareness of interiority. 25 A note in the Geneva Bible, which uses the future tense familiar from the KJV (“I will lift mine eyes”) rather than the Latin “Levavi oculos,” suggests an alternative reading in which the speaker lifts his eyes above the hills, presumably to avoid even a hint of pagan mountain-worship. 23

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Psalm 41/42: An Israelite Prophet, Thirsty Like a Deer (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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my aid, my comfort.” But the tone changes to something more militant—“March, march lustily on, redoubt no falling”—and then the fortissimo assertion that God “sleepes not, sleepes not a whit, no sleepe no slumber /once shall enter in Israells true keeper.” So, again, “march.” Where Chéron imagines a “seure défense” against Israel’s enemies, Sidney imagines something more like an Israelite Marseillaise. As for the sun and moon, they remain dangerous, but not because they have “importune” aspects (in Geneva and the King James Version they “smite”—we are still in a world in which heavenly bodies can perform long-distance damage on earth, but the language is marginally less astrological). Rather, the sun against which God protects the Israelites has “violently right reflected” beams and at night there is the foiled threat of “Moony vapours” that might have bred “grevaunce” with its “mist.” “You,” then, shall be “safe in all thy goings, in all thy commings.” More than the plain text of the Bible, both Chéron and Sidney make the psalm plural, public, communal—and militant, confident of the “secours qu’Israël doit attendre” (the aid that Israel should await) and, in the English, ready to march, sure of Jehovah’s “relief” when “present perill” requires it. Neither poet quite invents such readings, but they add their own emphases to the plain text of Scripture, and both imagine an Israelite bound for home and visually unlike Louis Chéron’s prophet, on his knees and literally not in any position to say “March!” In the Chérons’ volume there follow “Psalms of Penitence,” several of which they situate during the Babylonian Captivity rather than associate them with David’s sin and repentance. In thus reading some of these psalms historically but not biographically they depart from a tradition that Mary Sidney doubtless knew very well. They also eliminate or minimize typology (although whether Jesus, who took on humanity’s sins, had anything to repent remains a nice theological question). Psalm 50/51 was of course thought to be said by David, and on that both Rabbinical and Christian scholarship agreed. Many late Medieval and Renaissance pictures show the moment when the prophet Nathan rebukes David or, more commonly, that when David first glimpses an often naked Bathsheba—his affair with her and the murder of her husband Uriah, whom he sends into battle to be killed is, of course, what the psalmist is repenting.26 Louis Chéron offers not just king and prophet or king and bathing lady, but king, empty throne, prophet, and the here somewhat indifferent lamb to which Nathan refers in his fable of the rich man’s theft of a poor man’s single ewe (Figure 10.7). In all probability Nathan did not bring a real lamb with him as a prop. But Chéron knows a powerful analogy when he sees it—mentally sees it.27 26 The literature on the Penitential Psalms is vast. For a recent informative study, see Clare Costley [King’oo], “David, Bathsheba, and the Penitential Psalms,” Renaissance Quarterly 57.4 (2004), 1235–77. 27 Similarly, for Ps 41/42 Louis Chéron shows a man praying near a dry tree, longing for God as the deer longs for water (the headnote ascribes the psalm to some nameless prophet—hence no Davidic crown on the kneeling figure—writing during the Babylonian captivity). Lying near him, but facing away—a matter of artistic tact, I think, rather than allegorical confusion—is the deer itself.

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Psalm 50/51: Nathan Rebuking David (Typ 615.94.276, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

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Sidney’s eight passionate seven-line pentameter stanzas are more faithful to the biblical text than to the back-story. The Geneva notes refer to that story, of course, and predictably equate the “Zion” that David begs God to favor with the Church. For many a Protestant, the accompanying prayer that God might rebuild the walls of Jerusalem would have had geopolitical and eschatological resonance: papal Rome must die that the New Jerusalem might live and the Temple be restored, but Sidney does not let that hope, or not in full ideological dress, intrude openly, whatever her overtones. More to my point, she keeps the focus where it is in the text itself, if not in 2 Samuel 12: on the speaker alone with God. No Nathan. No lady, husband, or lamb, and indeed some Medieval miniatures of a penitent David show him by himself with his prayers. The translation includes an image that Crashaw, for example, might envy: may God forgive David so that his “brused bones mai daunce awaie their saddnes.” (Chéron’s dried and grief-broken bones will “leap with happiness”—active but less pulled together in their motion.) Sidney does not comment explicitly, as she might well have done in her war-torn world, on the meaning of “Jerusalem” as a city of Peace, but her wordplay itself does so when she asks, “with thie favor build up Salems wall, / and still in peace, maintaine that peacefull place.” Amen. Chéron’s seven variously patterned dixains do not explicitly mention David’s specific sins—neither, after all, does the psalm itself—although her David admits that he has forgotten God’s Commandments and laments that everything brings a bloody image to his eyes, a specter (Uriah’s ghost?) that pursues him. More to my general point, Chéron adds details that make the psalm even more public, as befits its context in 2 Samuel, and further remind us that this is a king speaking; one may even very tentatively wonder if, in spite of her pension and her abjuration, she is thinking that Louis XIV might contemplate David’s murders and adulteries, and perhaps even his ability to consolidate power. In the second stanza David says that only God had known of his sin (what about Nathan?) but that he has now confessed before “the eyes of my enemies,” consoling himself with the “Holy Word.” In the concluding stanza, the one on Jerusalem, David asks that God not punish “mon peuple” for his own sin, and also prays that “mon peuple” will “see that thou hast pardoned me.”28 This David prays, then, not only to be forgiven but to be seen to have been forgiven. To perceive here the difference between a publicly performative early modern Catholicism and Louis Chéron’s more interiorized Calvinism might be going to far, if only because the Sidney Psalter itself has so much political resonance, but such details remain haunting. One might wish that Nicolas Hilliard, say, had illustrated the Sidney Psalter. Would Psalm 51 have had 28 The anonymous reader of this essay suggests that there could be an allusion to David’s disobedient census-taking and his prayer that God not punish Israel for his own sin in so doing (2 Sam. 24). If so, and this is an attractive suggestion, the intrusion of David’s history into one of the Bible’s great lyric moments shows yet again Chéron’s frequent interest in converting the traditional reading of the Penitential Psalms into something more collective.

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a bathing lady? a prophet? a lamb? And is that praying figure male like David or female like the Countess of Pembroke? I end with one more pairing, again of a prayer of penitence, Psalm 129/130 (De Profundis). Like other Penitential Psalms in the Chéron volume—and in such Protestant texts as the Geneva Bible—the psalm has here been detached from David’s biography, where so much tradition had placed it, and made to allude more explicitly to Israel’s national story, in this case the Babylonian Captivity.29 Mary Sidney retains the individual agony of this famous psalm, rendered into English even more intense than the French of Marot’s version; both exploit the rhetorical power of pained repetitions, Marot all in lines of six syllables, Sidney in varied meters.30 Sidney’s passion (“my ernest, vehement, cryeng, prayeng, /graunt quick, attentive, heering, waighing”) is personal, the agony of an “I,” of “my soule,” but the translation soon turns, as does the original, to Israel: the verbs become imperative, telling Israel to “attend” God “well” and God will “thee restore / thy state will free.” What is freedom for Mary Sidney? She may well have thought of Babylon, but it seems likely, again, that she also thought of the Church, so much of it held captive, in her view, by that modern Babylon: Rome. Once fully free, and in God’s good time, the walls of a new Jerusalem will rise. Chéron also ascribes Psalm 129/30 not to the penitent David but to “quelque Israëlite,” held anguished in the shackles (“les fers”) of the Babylonians. In making the anguish implicitly communal—the Israelite belongs to a captive nation—she has the company of the Geneva Bible (“The people of God from their bottomles miseries do crye unto God”). As he considered how to illustrate the psalm, did her brother also think, if only to himself, of the now captive Huguenots, forced to choose among conversion, slavery in the galleys, an illegal escape, or even death? His engraving, though, puts the focus even more on the single person, showing a barefoot, cloth-draped, and impressively muscled man alone in a jail cell, bars on the high window, and chains attaching him to a stone pillar. Some of his illustrations for these “Psalms of Penitence” are crowd scenes; that for Psalm 31/32, for example, shows David, chased from Jerusalem by Absalom, reciting the psalm in front of his followers; that for Psalm 37/38 shows David afflicted by the plague and surrounded by dead or dying subjects while an angel hurls a shaft at his victims. But this one, even though applied to the Babylonian captivity (the Chérons’ Psalm 101/102 is another), has the pathos of isolation added to that of exile. The Marot-Beza Psalter (Geneva, 1563) headnote ascribes it to “someone,” not to David, although to a “celuy” who prays for Israel—as the text of the psalm says. In the Geneva Bible, although the speaker is (or has) an “I,” the headnote ascribes the psalm to “The people of God” who “confesse their sinnes.” Sidney and Chéron work in a tradition ambiguously poised between singular and plural, individual and communal. 30 Marot, 152. On Sidney’s style see Roy T. Eriksen, “George Gascoigne’s and Mary Sidney’s Versions of Psalm 130,” Cahiers Élisabéthains: Late Medieval and Renaissance Studies 36 (1989), 1–9 (reprinted in Ashgate Critical Essays II; see above). Like many, Eriksen hears anticipations of George Herbert in Sidney’s psalms, including this. Agreed. 29

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Chéron’s translation into six stanzas of alexandrines is a study in voice and pronouns, first from the self-expressive “I” in the abyss to the imperative voice telling God, addressed in the second person as suits tradition, to efface the sins that cause “my tears.”31 After two stanzas of lament the voice, although still singular, now shifts to a prayer not to weigh “our” sins, for “we” could not survive such justice. Then back to “my” tears and then to “thy people” of Israel, “oppressed by an unjust power” (“opprimé d’une injuste puissance”) from dawn to dusk. Thy people, in chains, implore thy clemency; do not scorn this unfortunate “peuple”—if abandoned by Thee, Lord, nothing can save it and its loss, its “perte,” is “infaillable.” Mary Sidney certainly hints, here and elsewhere, at modern analogies for the travails and travels of Israel, but her stress on Israel is lighter, her stress on the speaker’s pain greater. In some regards, then, the illustration better suits her translation than it does that of Louis Chéron’s sister; it shows a chained prisoner, but one would need the psalm to recognize a member of the captive Israelite nation. What to conclude? Perhaps very little, or very little apart from the Sidney’s (at least to my Anglophone ear) greater poetic force, but perhaps that littleness can be my point. What is striking is the ambiguity, when taken as a bilingual and pictorial whole, in terms of individual inwardness on the one hand (or heart) and concern for a nation or church on the other. Mary Sidney is one of her time’s most powerful translators of psalms into English verse, with impressive metrical variety and rhythmic force, so it is not surprising that some of that power goes into what can seem a personal expression, whoever the speaker and of whatever gender. Yet her poetry can also suggest the hopes and prayers of a religious community— sometimes in literal exile and in any case far from its true home—hoping for freedom, for a return, for the rebuilding of ruined walls, and inspired, at times, to “march.” She can remember babies and also advise princes. Her psalms, that is— and as some of the scholars I have cited in this essay might agree—do not entirely fit the paradigm of a Reformed turn inward to find a lyric self or female voice, for they look outward with equal vigor. The same doubleness of vision is in Louis Chéron’s engravings, and in his case the fear of isolation and the fear of collective exile must have been immediate and personal. His solitary figures are not always tragic, but some show the same inner intensity we hear in Mary Sidney’s psalms. On the other hand, even his jailed and exiled Israelite, alone with his chains, knows he has company weeping out there near the waters of Babylon. Male and female can merge in some psalm translations. So can the praising, beseeching private self and the equally pressured, equally rejoicing, world outside.

The rhymes divide the poem into two halves, each with an abba, cdcd, efef scheme.

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Chapter 11

David’s Lyre, Kabbalah, and the Power of Music Don Harrán

Whenever an evil godly spirit overcame Saul, David would take his lyre and play upon it with his hand. Then Saul was refreshed and relieved, for the evil spirit departed from him (1 Sam. 16:23).

This study is not about David’s psalms, but about his lyre.1 Even so, they relate: the curative effect of the lyre was seen to be identical with that of the psalms. Saint Basil (d. 379) wrote that by singing them one “placates wrath, reconciles enemies, … and puts demons to flight.”2 David’s lyre, as an analogue, is no less relevant to psalms than are Basil’s words on the therapeutic value of psalmody to the early modern world. Michael Praetorius recognized this by adverting to Basil in the first volume of his Syntagma musicum (1614), repeating and reinforcing the early Christian’s assertions in a chapter “on the effectiveness and the religious, devout fruit of psalmody, which, upon the meditation and multiple celebration of the divine truth, everywhere solemnly arouses appropriate emotions toward one’s neighbor and against Satan in a person who stands in the presence of God and the angels.”3 But there is more to the relationship between David’s lyre and psalms than their capacity to “put demons to flight.” I will return to it at the end, in an attempt to provide a more comprehensive explanation of their conceptual affinities. The story of David, who, by playing on his lyre, lifted Saul’s spirits, was a commonplace in the early music treatises and histories for instantiating the power of music over the listener.4 Usually no more was said of it than what appeared in 1 I wish to thank Professor Thomas J. Mathiesen (Indiana University) for graciously responding to my request to read and comment on the study: his suggestions were invaluable. 2 From his “Homily on the First Psalm,” in Jacques P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae graecae cursus completus, 166 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1857–1866), 29:209–13, esp. 212 (translation above after the Latin by Praetorius; see next footnote). 3 “De efficacia, & religioso devotoquè fructu Psalmodiae, quod veritatis divinae meditatione ac celebratione numerosa, convenientes coram Deo & Angelis erga proximum & adversus Stanam affectus ubique solenniter excitet”: Michael Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, 3 vols (Wolfenbüttel: Elias Holwein; Wittenberg: Johann Richter, 1614/15– 1618/20; repr. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959), 1:16–17 (for Basil). 4 For example, Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks (early 3rd cent.), trans. from the Greek by G.W. Butterworth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: W.W. Heinemann, 1919), 12/13 (from chap. 1); Cassiodorus, Institutiones

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the biblical verse above. But Angelo Berardi (d. 1694) went one step further. In part 1, chapter 10 of his Miscellanea musicale (1689),5 he prompted the question: where does the power come from? Of two possibilities—the music, the instrument, he expanded on the second “in conformity to the opinion of the kabbalists.” This same “opinion,” as it pertains to “the setup of David’s lyre,” or so the chapter was entitled,6 does not appear, as far as can be determined, in kabbalist writings proper. Nor does music in relation to Kabbalah find a place in the subject matter of the music theoretical sources. True, Berardi may have been influenced by Athanasius Kircher (d. 1680), who, in recounting the story in his Musurgia universalis (1650), suggested a kabbalistic interpretation as one among others (“various people explain [it] in various ways”; see below, under Kircher). But while Kircher proceeded to the “others,” Berardi stuck with the kabbalistic one for the content of his chapter, drawing on several germane concepts to account for the power of David’s music making over Saul. The chapter is unique in the literature. In the end, Berardi rejected “the opinion of the kabbalists,” or more exactly the applicability of their tenets. But, in discussing them, he indirectly confirmed what was well known from earlier music theory: music may be approached through the music itself, as musica practica, or through its extramusical connections and connotations, as musica speculativa. Moreover, though his repudiation of musica speculativa was peremptory in the chapter itself, it is debilitated, as will be seen, by

(mid-6th cent.), ed. R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), 148 (from bk. 2, chap. 5 “on music”); Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX (622–33), ed. W.M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 1:3.17.3; Aribo, De musica (between 1068 and 1078), ed. Jos. Smits van Waesberghe (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1951), 47; Gioseffo Zarlino, Istitutioni harmoniche (Venice: [Francesco de’ Franceschi], 1558; repr. New York: Broude Brothers, 1965), pt. 1:7, pt. 2:76; Scipione Cerreto, Della prattica musica vocale, et strumentale (Naples: Gio. Iacomo Carlino, 1601; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1969), 1.8.16; Wolfgang Caspar Printz, Historische Beschreibung der edelen Singund Kling-Kunst (Dresden: Johann Georgen, 1690; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1964), 37; Jacques Bonnet, Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusqu’à présent, 3rd edn, 4 vols (Amsterdam: M. Ch. Le Cène, 1725; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1966), 1:33; Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to 1789, 4 vols (London: for the author by T. Becket, J. Robson, G. Robinson, 1776–89; repr. Baden-Baden: Heitz, 1958), 1:196; Johann Nicolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, 2 vols (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1788[–1801]; repr. Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1967), 1:112–13. 5 Miscellanea musicale (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1689; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1970), 31–5. On Berardi’s music treatises, see Karl-Friedrich Waack, “Angelo Berardi als Musiktheoretiker” (Ph.D. Diss., Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel, 1955), and Arved M. Larsen III, “Angelo Berardi (1636–1694) as Theorist: A Seventeenth-Century View of Counterpoint” (Ph.D. Diss., Catholic University, Washington, DC, 1978). 6 “Compositione della Cetera di David conforme l’opinione de Cabalisti” (Miscellanea, 31).

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his extensive treatment of it elsewhere in the Miscellanea and his other treatises,7 which raises the question: where does Berardi really stand on the issue? David’s Playing before Saul from a Kabbalist Perspective After reporting that David, by using his lyre, was able “to repress and mitigate Saul’s fits of temper” and thus conquer the “evil spirit” that awakened them, Berardi quoted 1 Samuel 16:23,8 then declared: “Under no circumstances would the kabbalists admit that this was the consequence of the armonia (music).” Rather they contended that Saul was calmed because “the strings [of the lyre] were artfully ordered.”9 To elucidate the kabbalists’ thoughts on the aforementioned “setup [compositione] of David’s lyre,” Berardi included five charts: one with the fifteen “strings of the Davidic lyre according to the kabbalists”10 (Figure 11.1)—it transmits most of the information to be found in the rest; another with the first five strings tabulated for their different kinds of being (“essence,” “life,” etc.); a third with the ten sefirot, or divine emanations in kabbalist doctrine, as they apply to strings 6–15 (“regnum,” “fundamentum,” etc.); a fourth with the same sefirot arranged from highest to lowest in an inverted triangle (Figure 11.4 ); and a fifth with strings 6–15 in a threefold listing for their various affiliations with angelic orders (“angels,” “archangels,” etc.), planets, and inner and outer manifestations (“elements,” “things that grow,” etc.). The five charts have been compacted here to form a single one (see table in Figure 11.2, with the Hebrew names for the sefirot adjoined in brackets).11 Missing from the first of them, though now included in Principally his Ragionamenti musicali (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1681) and Documenti armonici (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1687; available on website http://www. musica-antica.info/berardi/documenti/documenti_home.php), about which more below. 8 “Quandocumque spiritus Domini malus accipiebat Saul David tollebat Citharam, & percutiebat manu sua, & refocilabatur Saul, & levius habebat, recedebat enim ab eo Spiritus malus”: for translation, see above, epigraph (the Vulgate omits the first malus in some, though not all editions, and has arripiebat for accipiebat). 9 “… haveva forza di reprimere, e mitigare le furie di quello spirito maligno che tormentava Saul … [plus biblical verse, in Latin] … Li Cabalisti non vogliono amettere in conto alcuno, che questo fosse effetto dell’armonia, ma ben si [recte bensì] provano, che ciò procedesse dalle corde artificiosamente ordinate”: Miscellanea, 31–2. 10 As said at the outset, there are, to my knowledge, no technical descriptions of the Davidic lyre in kabbalistic writings proper. The instrument did play a figurative role in them, however, as an embellishment of a passage in the talmudic tractate Berakhot (Blessings), on which see final section below. 11 Comments to the table: the ten sefirot (indicated, as an editorial addition, by Roman numerals) begin properly with string 6, hence the equivalents 6 = I, 7 = II, etc.; on string 6, the Latin Elementa in chart 1 is replaced by the Italian Il sempre essere (“eternal being”) in chart 5, as is, in the same two charts, the Latin for the angelic orders (Angeli, Arc[h]angeli, etc.) and various correspondences (Vegetabilia, Animalia, etc.) by its Italian equivalents (Gl’Angeli, Gl’Arcangeli, etc., and Il vegetativo, L’animale, etc.); string 9 has 7

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Fig. 11.1

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“The strings of the Davidic lyre according to the kabbalists”: first chart of five in part 1, chapter 10 of Angelo Berardi, Miscellanea musicale (1689), 32.

the synthetic version after the others or Berardi’s comments in the chapter, were the examples for the existential species associated with strings 1–5 (“stones” for “essence,” “plants” for “life,” etc.; Miscellanea, 32–3) and, for strings 6–15, the names of the planets.12 Chart 1 does, however, contain the two firmaments beyond the planets: the Starry Heavens and God’s abode as Prime Mover.13

trite synemmenon for B-flat, yet lacks paramese for B-natural (both pitches occur in the second octave of the Guidonian gamut; see below); on string 15, the Latin for seraphs should be seraphim. 12 Though not the planetary signs, already indicated in chart 1 (see Figure 11.1). 13 Added to the table after their placement in chart 5. Berardi follows the Ptolemaic ordering of spheres from the (fixed) Earth outward, in concentric circles, through the seven (moving) planets (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), to the Fixed Stars, or firmament. The outermost sphere, the Prime Mover, was a later Christian addition. One element missing from the charts is the association of the planets with their corresponding modes (a term for older scales designated by the names Dorian, Phrygian, etc.), a shortcoming that Berardi remedied in a later chapter “on the order and use of modes” (Miscellanea, 171–3). There he gives two alternative successions, of which the first (171) is as that in the table, to which he adds the modal assignments: Moon = 1 [Dorian]; Mercury = 2 [Hypodorian]; Venus = 3 [Phrygian]; Sun = 4 [Hypophrygian]; Mars = 5 [Lydian]; Jupiter = 6 [Hypolydian]; Saturn = 7 [Mixolydian]. The second (172) is as that in Gaffurius’s diagram (Figure 11.2).

Fig. 11.2

A compilation of the five charts in Berardi, Miscellanea musicale, part 1, chapter 10.

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David’s lyre here is not the ten-string instrument evoked in Psalms 33:2, nor is it one with 24 strings, as Berardi described it in an earlier chapter.14 Rather it has 15, which he numbers and lays out, in ascending order, over two octaves (from A to a'). The strings are identified, in the second row, by their Greek names in the two basic successions of pitches in ancient Hellenic theory, the so-called Greater and Lesser Perfect Systems (proslambanomenos, hypate hypaton, etc., until nete hyperbolaion),15 and, in the fourth row, by their labels within the Guidonian gamut, i.e., the range of pitches established by Guido of Arezzo (d. after 1033) (A re, B [natural] mi, etc., until a' la mi re). Berardi’s proposition is clear: the kabbalists have their own ideas on why David’s playing was effective. But uncertainties and inconsistencies unfold in his presentation of them. For one thing, the notion of the Davidic lyre as having 15 strings, implied in chart 1 after their numeration, is undermined, in charts 3–5 and most of the surrounding discussion, by the concern with the ten sefirot, which would suggest a decachord (in line with Pss. 33:2). For another, the superimposition of the ten sefirot on two octaves causes discrepancies in the relation of tones to planets. In the well-known illustration of the seven planets plus Starry Heavens in Franchinus Gaffurius’s Practica musicae (1496), the Moon is pitched at the proslambanomenos, as the lowest note of the scale, Mercury at the hypate hypaton, as the next to lowest, and so forth, after the order in Boethius’s De institutione musica (see Figure 11.3).16 Not so in the Miscellanea, where the planets start from string 7, so that the Moon is positioned not at the proslambanomenos but at the lichanos meson.17 14 Pt. 1, chap. 3, which is important not only for the author’s description of instruments but also for his clarification of terminology. On the cetera Berardi says there that “in David’s time the Hebrews used one with twenty-four strings” (Miscellanea, 17). In Pss. 33:2 the instrument is called (in Hebrew) nevel ‘asor, or a “ten-string harp.” But, as Berardi observed, the words cetera, arpa, and lira were variously interchanged (“though the arpa is an instrument different from the cetera, for some, nevertheless, it carries the same name; moreover, the cetera is sometimes … called a lira”; 16–17). For the cetera on which David played before Saul the Hebrew verse has kinnor. 15 Thus, in the second octave, as two terms mentioned above, trite synemmenon for B-flat in the Lesser Perfect System, yet paramese for B-natural in the Greater Perfect System. 16 See Gaffurius, Practica musicae (1496), trans. from the Latin by Clement A. Miller ([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, 1968), [8]; and Boethius, De institutione musica (early 6th cent.), 1.27 (trans. from the Latin by Calvin Bower as Fundamentals of Music [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], 46–7). 17 One might have expected the proslambanomenos to coincide with the lowest of the sefirot, on string 6, and be connected with the Moon, but Berardi had to accommodate ten sefirot, hence assigned the Earth to the lowest of them and the Fixed Stars and Prime Mover to the two highest (with the seven intermediate planets on strings 7–13). The ancient treatises differ on the ordering of planets and pitches, as was noted, moreover, by Boethius, De institutione musica 1.27: for their review, see Mathiesen, Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 397, 409, 428–9, 491–3, and 570–571. Berardi’s arrangement seems to be his own.

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Apollo and the Muses, the planets, and their musical associations in Franchinus Gaffurius, Practica musicae (1496), frontispiece.

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Berardi’s chapter contains a number of kabbalistic elements (sefirot, planets, angels, etc.) that, though disparate, are of one piece. They can be traced to Pico della Mirandola, to judge from Berardi’s comment that “the kabbalists were of the opinion, as Pico della Mirandola reports,” that all the sefirot and divine emanations governed David’s lyre, which shows that nothing can be referred to the music itself and that David, [playing] on such a lyre, was able to expel not only the rage but also all the malign spirits of Saul (De cab. 71).18

So it is rightly with Pico that one should begin.19 What kabbalist foundations did he lay for Berardi’s account? De cab.[ala] 71 designates Pico’s “seventy-one kabbalistic conclusions”: they derived from his earlier exposition of 47 kabbalist theorems and were meant to demonstrate the relevance of Kabbalah to Christian doctrine. Both sets were included in his monumental summary of theological and philosophical ideas drawn from all times and cultures and published as nine hundred “conclusions or theses” (1486).20 But none of the articles in either set has the passage above, and the only mention of David among the nine hundred is in a section on Orphic hymns, to which his psalms are compared in their magical prepotence (“Just as the hymns of David marvelously serve the work of Kabbalah, so, truly, do the hymns of Orpheus serve the work of permissible and natural magic”).21 The source of the passage is, to all appearances, a later sixteenth-century Christological commentary by the Franciscan cleric Arcangelo of Borgonovo (a 18 “Sono stati d’opinione i Cabalisti, come riferisce Pico Mirandolano: Quod omnes sephirot, & emanationes divinae, Citharae Davidis praeerant ad ostendendum nihil, esse quod ad Musicam possit refferri, & talis [recte tali] Cithara non solum furorem, sed etiam omnes Saulis spiritus malignos Davidem expellere potuisse arbitrantur. De Cab. 71” (Miscellanea, 32). 19 The major study on Pico and Kabbalah is Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), which, among other topics, treats “the range and progress of Pico’s kabbalistic studies” (chap. 4) and “what Kabbalah meant to Pico” (chaps. 11–16), with no reference to music however. See, also, Klaus Reichert, “Pico della Mirandola and the Beginnings of Christian Kabbala,” in Karl Erich Grözinger and Joseph Dan, eds, Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 195–207. 20 Conclusiones, sive, theses DCCCC Romae anno 1486 publice disputandae sed non admissae, in Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia, 2 vols (Basle: Heinrich Petri, 1557; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969), 1:63–113. 21 “Sicut hymni David operi Cabale mirabiliter deserviunt, ita hymni Orphei opere vere licite et naturalis Magie”: Conclusiones numero XXXI secundum propriam opinionem de modo intelligendi hymnos Orphei secundum Magiam, article no. 4; Pico, Opera omnia, 1:106. For Pico on magic in relation to Kabbalah, see Sheila Rabin, “Pico on Magic and Astrology,” in M.V. Dougherty, ed., Pico della Mirandola: New Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 152–78.

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commune in the province of Piacenza) not on Pico’s 71 but on his 47 conclusions. It is entitled Cabalistarum selectiora, obscurioraque dogmata, etc. (“The more select and obscure of the kabbalists’ principles excerpted by Giovanni Pico, long ago, from their treatises and explained, now for the first time, with brilliant interpretations, by Arcangelo of Borgonovo, of the Minorite order”).22 There, on folio 176, one reads that David, by his lyre, put Saul’s evil spirit to flight. It is not to be wondered that [Saul] could not endure a thoroughly dissonant harmonia (music), since, in his case, the evil spirit had destroyed all harmonia that he should have possessed in himself and in conjunction with God and other creatures.23

Berardi, had he wanted to, could have learned his Kabbalah from writings, in Latin, by the Christian Hebraists Johannes Reuchlin, Francesco Zorzi (Giorgi), and others.24 His notions of it are so general, in fact, as to be traceable to any number of sources beyond the two to which reference will be made below, specifically,

22 Arcangelo of Borgonovo, Cabalistarum selectiora, obscurioraque dogmata, a Ioanne Pico ex eorum commentationibus pridem excerpta, et ab Archangelo Burgonovensi Minoritano, nunc primum luculentissimis interpretationibus illustrata (Venice: Francesco Franceschi Senense, 1569): I worked from the copy in the National Library of Israel, until recently the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem (shelfmark: RR 8773). The author first cites the conclusio, then “explains” it at considerable length (while the 47 conclusiones could be summarized in about two pages, the commentary runs to 219 folios!). 23 “& David cithara malum spiritum a Saule fugabat, non enim harmoniam pati potest ille, qui dissonus penitus est. In casu nanque suo spiritus malus omnem harmoniam perdidit: quam in se ipso, & cum Deo & alijs creaturis habere debebat”; Cabalistarum selectiora, fol. 176r–v (on the continuation “Ad sonum etiam,” etc., see below). 24 Reuchlin, De verbo mirifico (Basel: Johann Amerbach, 1494) and De arte kabbalistica (Haguenau: Thomas Anselm, 1517), trans. from the Latin as On the Art of the Kabbalah by Martin and Sarah Goodman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Zorzi, De harmonia mundi totius cantica tria (Venice: [de Vitali], 1525; 2nd edn, Paris: André Berthelin, 1545) and its translation by Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie as L’Harmonie du monde, divisée en trois cantiques (Paris: Jean Macé, 1578); Cesare Evoli, De divinis attributis, quae Sephirot ab Hebreis noncupantur (Venice: Domenico de’ Farri, 1589); Liber Iezirah, sive Formationis mundi, ed. and trans. from the Hebrew by Guillaume Postel (Paris: s.n., 1552). To complete the picture, one might mention Pietro Colonna Galatino, De arcanis catholicae veritatis (Ortona: Gershom Soncino, 1518); Paolo Riccio (Paulus Ricius), In cabalistarum seu allegorizantium eruditionem esagogae (Augsburg: [in officina Millerana], 1515); and Riccio’s partial translation of Sha‘arei ora (Gates of Light) by Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla (d. 1305) as Portae lucis: haec est porta tetragrammaton iusti intrabunt per eam (Augsburg: in officina Millerana, 1516). On Christians expounding Kabbalah, see Joseph Dan, ed., The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and their Christian Interpreters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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Arcangelo’s commentary and, of great popularity in its time for demystifying Kabbalah, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala denudata.25 The ten sefirot stand at the center of theosophical Kabbalah as outlined in the late thirteenth-century Zohar.26 Their prominence in Berardi’s chapter is obvious from its charts, where they are linked not only to the ten upper strings of David’s lyre (see table in Figure 11.2, also Figure 11.4),27 but, after Pico’s example, to the planets.28 “Whatever certain kabbalists say,” Pico wrote in one of his 71 conclusiones, “I myself say that the ten sefirot correspond to ten numerical divisions in a building.” He recognizes three divisions on the top, first the Empyrean, absent from Berardi’s chart, and as the second and third spheres, the Prime Mover and the Starry Heavens, and so on (“Jupiter would be fourth, Mars fifth, the Sun sixth,” etc.).29 (The reason why his enumeration of the planets and heavens beyond them differs from that in Berardi’s chart 1 is mainly because Berardi accommodated Earth to the sixth string—where it corresponds, as expected, to the lowest sefirah, known as malkhut or shekhinah30—and the seven planets to strings 7–13, which leaves only two places at the top.) Berardi implied that the planets, through their various attributes (impulsivity for Mars, concupiscence for Venus, etc.), exerted their influence on human behavior.31 “All the stars and planets in the firmaments,” 25 Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata seu Doctrina Hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theologica, 2 vols (Sulzbach: Abraham Lichtenthal, 1677–84). On its concepts and significance, see the various writings in Andreas B. Kilcher, ed., Die Kabbala Denudata: Text und Kontext (Bern: Peter Lange, 2006). 26 Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of the Zohar), 3 vols (Vilna: Romm, 1912). On the sefirot, see, for an overview, Gershom G. Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1977), 96–116, also Arthur Green, A Guide to the Zohar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 28–59. 27 Pico wrote, under no. 66 of his 71 conclusiones, that the soul adapts to the ten sefirot in such a way as to agree with the first of them through unity, the second through intellect, the third through reason, etc. (Opera omnia, 1:92). For the sefirot in the Cabalistarum, see fols. 19r–20r, and passim (keter, 111; binah, 77; malkhut, 81, 98; etc.). 28 The planets were incorporated into kabbalistic doctrine from the earliest writings on, starting with the previously mentioned Liber Iezirah (Heb. Sefer yetsirah, or “Book of Creation”), of which the contents can be dated in part to the sixth century, and continuing on to the Zohar (e.g., 3:251a–b). 29 Conclusiones cabalistice numero LXXI, no. 48: “Quicquid dicant ceteri cabaliste, ego decem spheras sic decem numeracionibus correspondere dico, ut edificio incipiendo, Iupiter sit quarte, Mars quinte, Sol sexte … cum supra edificium … primum mobile secunda, celum empyreum prima”; Pico, Opera omnia, 1:91–2. 30 “Adamah terra, humus: est Malchuth; vocaturque adamah terra, quia locata est sub omnibus Sephiroth, sicut tellus, quae sub omnibus mundi incolis” (Kabbala denudata, 31, also 156). 31 The planets have the power to awaken “various effects, inclinations, and customs in men” (“Varij quippe sunt effectus, inclinationes, & mores in hominibus”): Cabalistarum, fol. 33v, with the attributes of the planets detailed on 34r (they differ, here and there, from those on Berardi’s chart 1 [Figure 11.1], where, for example, under Sun, one has “vitalis facultas,” to be compared with its more vivid description, in the Cabalistarum, as “imaginatio sciendi, & spirandi natura”).

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The ten sefirot arranged in an inverted triangle, with the highest (and widest, i.e., most embracing) on the top: Berardi, Miscellanea musicale, 34 (the fourth of five charts in part 1, chapter 10).

one reads in the Zohar, “are appointed as overseers and officers to serve the world. … No herb or tree, or grass or grain can grow or flourish except in the sight of the stars that stand above them.”32 In the Cabalistarum, the link between planets and music is established via the recognition of planetary harmonia as comprising “seven forms of sound, which, [in a succession of tones and semitones], clearly achieve a perfect consonance at the octave.”33 The comment could have served Berardi as a precedent for his ordering of David’s lyre, on which the “planetary octave” (Moon to Starry Heavens) starts on string 7 (Figure 11.2). A comparison with its ordering by Gaffurius (Figure 11.3) shows the octave as constituted from the same succession of Moving Planets (Moon, Mercury, etc.), with, again, Earth, the Fixed Planet, at the bottom and the Starry Heavens and (outside the octave) the Prime Mover, now Apollo, at the top. Yet Gaffurius unites the Prime Mover with the Earth (and its elements) by a

Zohar, 2:171a–72a; after Isaiah Tishbi in The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, trans. from the Hebrew by David Goldstein, 3 vols (Oxford: Published for the Littman Library by Oxford University Press, 1989), 2:663–4. 33 “… septem planetarum harmonia, in qua sunt septiformes soni, qui diapason, consumatum videlicet consonantiam complent” (fol. 50r). 32

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python,34 allegedly the one that Apollo killed in the Pythian games: its spirit (the “mentis Apollineae vis,” or force of Apollo’s mind) moves downwards, in an ever new conquest of evil, into the planets (and their corresponding Muses) to mold all levels of cosmic, natural, and human activity.35 A similar diagram occurs in a Hebrew print of the kabbalistic Sefer yetsirah (Book of Creation) (1562, though of medieval provenance; Figure 11.5). It depicts a serpent, now resembling a penis, which connects (through insemination?) with seven concentric circles for each of the planets and an eighth one, along the outer edge, for the twelve zodiacal constellations. The inscription, at the center, reads: “In the segments of the tali”—a cryptic term meaning, variously, snake, totality, spiritual infusion—“lies the world and its [elements]: earth, air, water, fire.”36 To complete the sentence, one might say that the same world with its elements marks the sphere of humans affected by the surrounding planets in relation to the Zodiac. In the continuation of the earlier quotation from the Zohar, about the world as ruled by stars and planets, one reads that the angels appointed to them “serve in the presence of the Holy One, blessed be He.” Pico recognized the nine angelic orders in the second of his forty-seven conclusiones and Arcangelo cemented their relevance to Kabbalah in his commentary.37 Angels figure heavily in the index38 as “reporters to God on all our words and works, whether good or bad,” or as “caring for our salvation and exceedingly bewailing our perdition,” or as forming “hierarchies,” with the angels “in the first ternary hierarchy [of Seraphs, Cherubs, Though Gaffurius identifies it, in a later interpretation of the frontispiece, as the three-headed Cerberus; see his De harmonia musicorum instrumentorum opus (Milan: Gotardus Pontanus Calcographus, 1518; facs. repr. edn Giuseppe Vecchi, Bologna: Forni, 1972), fol. 93v (I owe this information to Thomas J. Mathiesen). 35 Gaffurius’s ideas on cosmic harmony were drawn mainly from Marsilio Ficino’s annotated translation of Plato’s Timaeus. For the iconography of his illustration, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967), 265–9, and Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. from the French by Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 140–142; and for its musical content, James Haar, “The Frontispiece of Gafori’s Practica musicae (1496),” Renaissance Quarterly 27 (1974): 7–22. 36 Sefer yetsirah (Mantua: Jacob Cohen of Gazzuolo, 1562), fol. 99a (“be-torei hatali ‘olam va-arets ruach mayim esh”). On tali as a binding force, see the early kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (d. after 1291), Sefer otsar ‘eden ha-ganuz (The Hidden Treasure of Eden, 1285; a commentary on Sefer yetsirah): “The tali is nothing else but the connections of the planets, and thus it marks the head of the connections” (after transcription of Hebrew on website http://hebrew.grimoar.cz). In the Zohar, tali is said to be “the snake of the firmament [nachash rakia‘ ],” where, in its midst, it makes “a resplendent path” and links with “all the lesser stars” (1:125a–b; see Tishbi, The Wisdom of the Zohar, 2:666–7, also 666n42, for a possible identification of tali with the Milky Way). 37 Cabalistarum, fols. 6v–11r (with reference, moreover, to the 12 signs of the Zodiac, in Hebrew mazalot). 38 Fols. a 7v–d 7v, esp. b 1r–v. 34

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The 12 signs of the Zodiac, the seven planets, and, in the middle, the serpent (tali), from Sefer yetsirah (1562), fol. 99a. Courtesy, The National Library of Israel, formerly the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem (under shelfmark R4 = 37 A 2115).

and Thrones] representing the diffusion of the highest essence in the Trinity,” and so on.39 The nine orders appear in Berardi’s explanations of David’s lyre in association with the nine highest strings under their traditional names (from top down: Seraphs, Cherubs, Thrones, Dominions, etc.). 39 For “angels and angelology” in Jewish mysticism, see the entry by Joseph Dan, Samuel Abba Horodezky, and others in the Encyclopaedia judaica, 2nd edn, 22 vols (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 2:150–161, esp. 158–9 (with references to Zohar, the “Book of Creation,” etc.); and at large, Peter Marshall and Alexandra M. Walsham, eds, Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On Trinity, see below.

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Later in the chapter, Berardi designates the different worlds in which the sefirot operate, namely, atsilut, beri’ah, yetsirah, and ‘asiyyah (“the sefirot emanate from God, the kabbalists say, and therefore this emanation is called atsilut, which results in beri’ah, ‘creation,’ yetsirah, ‘formation,’ and ‘asiyyah, ‘making’ or ‘doing’ ”).40 They are comprised in humans, who, through sefirotic emanation, beginning in God (atsilut, or “I,” as a generative force), replicate the divine process of origination, after Isaiah 43:7 (“I have created him, formed him, and even made him”).41 More problematical are the five kinds of actuality that Berardi allies with strings 1–5, namely, “essence,” “life,” “feeling,” “reason,” and “understanding”: they can be equated with separate stages of human maturation under ‘asiyyah, from existence as starting with being (esse) and culminating in cognition (intelligere).42 Thus we learn (from the Cabalistarum) that “In the Holy Scriptures it is said: 40 “Le Sephirot, emanano da Dio, dicono i Cabalisti, e perciò questa emanatione si chiama Azilut ne viene Be[r]ia, la Creatione, Iezirà, [la] Formatione, Assia, la effettione” (italics added; Miscellanea, 34). The four constitute the acronym aby‘a, about which see Kabbala denudata, 12–13 (“aby‘a is an abbreviation for the four systems or worlds,” identified as emanatio, creatio, formatio, and factio, which Berardi changes to effectio; each of the four is constituted as its own series of sefirot). For the functions of beri’ah, yetsirah, and ‘asiyyah, tentatively outlined in early sources contemporaneous with the Zohar (though not in the Zohar itself) and more fully defined by later sixteenth-century kabbalists, see Scholem, Kabbalah, 118–19, also Green, A Guide to the Zohar, 111. 41 The verse combines three others from Genesis: 1:1 (the Lord “created” heaven and earth), 2:7 (He “formed” man), 1:31 (He saw everything He had “made”). On humans as a composite of the different “systems or worlds,” see, for various references, Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 119. 42 The five kinds of being can be traced to various sources of similar, though not identical content: Plotinus, Enneads (between 253 and 270), ed. and trans. from the Greek by A.H. Armstrong, 7 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1966–88), the sixth Ennead, in its first three sections on “kinds of being”; Aristotle, De anima, ed. and trans. from the Greek (as On the Soul) by Walter Stanley Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1964), 413a–14b, on five different souls (nutritive, appetitive, sensory, locomotive, cognitive); Ficino, bk. 3, chap. 1, on five degrees of ascent (body, quality, soul, angel, God), in his Platonic Theology, ed. James Hankins with William Bowen, Engl. trans. from the Latin by Michael J.B. Allen and John Warden, 6 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–6), 1:212–31; and Charles de Bouelles (alias Carolus Bovillus), Liber de sapiente (Paris: Henri Stéphane, 1510), chap. 2 on four levels of being (esse, vivere, sentire, intelligere) that resemble the five in Berardi’s listing (Bouelle’s intelligere may be construed as a combination of ratio, on string 4 of the Davidic lyre, and intellectus, on string 5). On Bouelles in this regard, see Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1927), 94, and for his treatise (as edited by Raymond Klibansky), the appendix to the same, 299–412, esp. 307–8 for chap. 2. Like Bouelles, Berardi, in his first chart (Figure 11.1), may have intended strings 1–5 to outline a path of nescience to cognizance in anticipation of a similar path that, starting on string 6, culminates, on string 15, with the tenth sefirah, David’s Lyre in communion with God, or full understanding (Cassirer describes Bouelle’s esse, vivere, etc., as “the different stages through which being runs in order to arrive at itself, its own concept”).

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‘And He [the Lord God] breathed into his [Adam’s] nostrils a breath or the soul of life’ [Gen. 2:7],43 so as to offer the body [various semblances of] life: vegetative, sensual, rational, and intellective or divine.”44 Berardi’s associations of vita with “plants” subject to growth, sensus with “animals” having sensations, ratio with “humans” exercising powers of reason, and intellectus with “angels” privy to divine knowledge are consistent with the second to fifth forms of being on his chart and can be sustained, by and large, by Arcangelo’s commentary.45 But the first form, in which essentia is equated with “stones,” needs some explanation: it too occurs in the commentary (same place), as “cum lapidibus in esse,” with lapides, “stones,” a synonym for petrae, or in the Italian on Berardi’s chart, pietre. Their connection with essentia is elucidated in another passage: “Many mysteries are there to petra, which in Hebrew is called even. It is a word formed from two others, namely, av and ben. The first of them means ‘father,’ yet the second means ‘son.’ ”46 Thus, for the Christian Hebraists, God the father and Christ the son conjoin as a total manifestation of “being.”47 The original source for the five kinds of being appears to be a work of the NeoPlatonist Proclus (d. 485), his Metaphysics. There he perceived divinity as pulsing through the universe and attaching to humans and lower forms of terrestrial being (stones, plants, and the rest).48 A more immediate source for Berardi, however, may 43 A slightly different formulation from that found in the Vulgate, itself close to the original Hebrew (“And He blew into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul”). 44 “In sacra scriptura dicitur. Et inspiravit in nares eius spiraculum, aut animam vitarum: ut praestat corpori vitam vegetativam, sensualem, rationalem, intellectivam atque divinam”: Cabalistarum, 30v. Having reached the last of them, one deepens knowledge by ascending through the sefirot, “the ten divine sources” (ibid.). See also 126r–v, where a human being is said to have the capacity to understand not only “lower, middle, alterable, and heavenly things,” but also “the angels and even God” (“ideo ultra inferiora, & media, alterabilia videlicet, & coelestia, apprehendit etiam Angelos, & ipsum Deum”). 45 Cabalistarum, fol. 126v, confirms the associations for the second stage (“cum plantis in vegetative virtute”), the third (“cum animalibus in sentire”), and the fifth (“cum Angelis in mente, & sapientia, sive in intelligere”), as it does for the first (see above, continuation). 46 Ibid., fol. 179r: “Multa hic sunt archana de petra: quae Hebraicè dicitur even, in qua dictione, duae formantur dictiones, scilicet av, & ben: quarum prima filium significat, secunda verò patrem.” 47 See, further, the explanations in Kabbala denudata, 16: “even, or lapis: it connects with kol, everything. Often the name Adonai of the last sefirah is thus called, as it is of [the first one] malkhut, or regnum, for it emphasizes the very foundation of the whole worldy construction” (“even Lapis. (Connectitur cum kol.) Saepius Adonai Nomen Sephirae ultimae, & ipsa Malchuth, Regnum, ita dicitur; quoniam ipsum totius mundanae fabricae fundamentum extat”). 48 See Proclus, Metaphysical Elements (before 485), trans. from the Greek by Thos. M. Johnson (Osceola, MO: [Press of the Republican], 1909; available on the website http://www.esotericarchives.com/proclus/metaele2.htm), pt. 2, proposition 145: “a stone … participates in the divine purifying power corporeally only; but a plant

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have been Kircher’s Musurgia universalis, in a chapter entitled “the symphony of stones, plants, and animals with the heavens” (2:390–394; on which more below). A few other details on Berardi’s chart require explanation before turning to the Musurgia proper. That “blessed souls” are assigned to malkhut, the first of the sefirot, ties in with the soul as “the fountain of life”;49 and that “fire” and “water” are assigned to the two highest ones ties in with what Pico said in one of his 71 theses, namely, that for the kabbalists “the heavens are made of fire and water.”50 The kabbalists recognized, to refer to another of them, “why the Son of God came with the water of Baptism and the Holy Ghost with fire.”51 Since water washes away sins, it is no surprise that “the just individual” strives to the condition of the Godhead. “The just individual,” Pico remarked (in one of his 47 theses), “is as a congregation of waters; and the sea toward which all rivers tend is divinity.”52 David’s playing was said in the original biblical verse to have conquered “the evil spirit.” As a complement to angels and angelology, so demons and demonology play a major role in Kabbalah, passing on into Arcangelo’s commentary.53 It is through the sefirot that the evil actions of the demons can be repaired and the demons themselves overcome. That is basically what Berardi meant in noting, as he has already been quoted, that “all the sefirot and divine emanations governed David’s lyre” and that by playing on it David “was able to expel not only the rage participates in it more clearly, through life. An animal has this form according to impulse or desire; the rational soul, rationally; intellect, intellectually.” Though lurking behind the pronouncements in the Cabalistarum, Proclus’s ideas are more clearly detected in Berardi’s second source (as below). 49 Kabbala denudata, 30. One reads there, moreover, that “the kinnor alias cithara is malkhut, for it is the daughter of ‘ten strings,’ after Pss. 33:2” (480) and that “David himself was called malkhut” (247), hence the connection between David, his lyre, its number of strings as ten, and (via malkhut) the ten sefirot. 50 Conclusiones LXXI, no. 67: “Per dictum Cabalistarum quod Caeli sunt ex igne et aquae”; Opera omnia, 1:92. For the heavens as “an inflow of fire,” from the Hebrew esh u-mayim (“fire and water”), see Reuchlin, De arte kabbalistica, trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman, 99. 51 Conclusiones LXXI, no. 45: “Scitur in cabala apertissime cur dei filius cum aqua baptismi venerit et spiritus sanctus cum igne” (for tongues of fire that, representing the Holy Ghost, appeared above the heads ot the Apostles during Pentecost, see Acts 2:3); Opera omnia, 1:91. 52 Conclusiones XLVII, no. 27: “Sicut congregatio aquarum est iustus: ita mare ad quod tendunt omnia flumina est divinitus”; Opera omnia, 1:82. The “spirit of God hovered upon the waters” (Gen. 1:2) may be altered, in this context, to read “upon His waters,” in distinction to human waters (see Gen. 1:6: “God said: ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters’ ”). 53 See the entry “Demons, Demonology,” by Scholem et al., in Encyclopaedia judaica, 2nd edn, 5:572–8, esp. 575–8; Scholem, Shedim, ruchot u-neshamot: mechkarim be-demonologiyyah (Devils, Spirits, and Souls: Studies in Demonology), ed. Esther Liebes (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2004); and in Arcangelo’s commentary, fols. 23r–v, 102v–4r, 131r–v, 133r–v, 193v–94r, 205v. “Demons” (shedim ve-ruchot) are on the Sitra achra (the evil side of the Cosmic Tree); Tishbi, The Wisdom of the Zohar, 2:533–46, esp. 533–4 (after Zohar 2:183b–84a), also Green, A Guide to the Zohar, 116–21.

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but also all the malign spirits of Saul.” For Pico’s commentator, however, David’s playing did more than simply quiet Saul. It restored “harmony” to his person (“in himself”) and to his relations “with God and other creatures,” among them David. How this happened is explained in the continuation, omitted by Berardi, though obliquely confirmed by the various correspondences he noted in his charts (proslambanomenos for essence and stones; paranete diezeugmenon for fortitude and its cognates, viz., powers, impulsivity, and Mars; etc.). Pico’s commentator, in sum, describes a process of sympathetic reaction: Dancers are led [to respond] to the sound of any instrument, for that delight [they take] in its sound moves their spirit and [body, in its] strength, to [start] leaping. So great is the power of harmonic proportions that they can arouse all spirits and senses to [react to] the motions corresponding to that sound, just as the blast of trumpets can excite soldiers and horses to [engage in] war. Nor is anyone moved to love a thing and its effects except from the agreement that [something else] has with it, as when a string of a lyre is moved54 by touching a string tuned to it[s pitch] on another lyre. Movement [of a string], indeed, is a certain contingency, whereby local [i.e., separate] movement [on the second lyre] cannot occur [of itself]: it arises in accordance with complementary movement [on the first lyre].55

How harmony relates to the sefirot is, then, through “a certain contingency”: for humans, said to be formed after God (Gen. 1:26–7), to realize their godliness, they must be stirred by a divine impulse. Only through shekhinah, or Immanence, do they achieve harmony with their Maker. Another Theorist on the Biblical Verse Berardi may have been inspired to treat the biblical verse about David’s lyre from his reading of Kircher’s Musurgia universalis.56 The beginning of its chapter on Here in the sense of “vibrated,” which pertains also to the continuation (read “movement” as “vibration”). 55 Cabalistarum, 176v: “Ad sonum etiam alicuius instrumenti choreae ducuntur: quia illa soni oblectatio animum & vires ad saltandum movet: tanta enim est virtus concentus proportionati, ut animos & sensus omnes ad motus illi sono correspondentes excitet: sicut tubarum clangore milites & equi ad bellum excitantur. nec enim movetur quippiam ad amorem & effectum alicuius rei, nisi ex conven[i]entia, quam habet cum ea. sicut corda citharae movetur ad tactum cordae alterius citharae sibi proportionatae. Motus enim est accidens quoddam, à quo motus localis provenire non potest: secundum motum alternativum producit.” 56 On Kircher as a music theorist, see Ulf Scharlau, Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) als Musikschriftsteller: Ein Beitrag zur Musikanschauung des Barock (Marburg: Görich & Weiershäuser, 1969), also David Darmschroder and David Russell Williams, Music Theory from Zarlino to Schenker: A Bibliography and Guide (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1990), 139–42. 54

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“how David, playing his lyre, rescued Saul from the evil spirit”57 could have shaped the beginning of Berardi’s. It reads as follows: To clarify this question [of how he rescued him], we shall first cite as proof the words of Holy Scripture. Thus in 1 Samuel,58 chapter 16, [verse 23] one reads: “Whenever an evil godly spirit [and so on: see epigraph for English].” The words of the sacred text teach us most clearly that it was by music that a certain bad godly spirit was routed.59

True, both Kircher and Berardi wanted to understand how Saul was mollified. For Kircher, as earlier noted, the kabbalistic explanation was one of several, and after presenting it, along with a reference to the sefirot, he went on to the other ones. Here is as much as pertains to Kabbalah: The rabbis say, about this passage, that David, while curing Saul, performed on a ten-string lyre constructed after the example of the sefirotic tree that, abundant with the effluxes of the ten divine properties [of the sefirot] as if they were certain fruit, produced this effect.60

One already senses different emphases: while Berardi was concerned with “the opinion of kabbalists” on the construction of David’s instrument, Kircher reported what rabbis of presumably kabbalistic persuasion have to say about the perception of sounds as regulated by the sefirot; while Berardi led one to conclude, from his charts, that the lyre had 15 strings, of which the ten representing the sefirot formed the core, Kircher conceived the instrument, unequivocally, as a decachord. But it is in the continuation that the two theorists went their different ways: unlike Berardi, Kircher dropped the kabbalistic argument to concentrate on possible alternatives, one of them astrological, the other medical. Pico’s name emerges in reference not to his kabbalistic theses, moreover, but to his mathematical ones: 57 “Quomodo David cytharizando Saulem à Spiritu maligno eripuerit”: Musurgia universalis, 2 vols (Rome: heirs of Francesco Corbelletti and Ludovico Grignani, 1650; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1970), 2:214 (title to chap. 2, which continues on to 215). 58 The original reads 1 Kings, after the Septuagint where the two books of Samuel and the two of Kings constitute the four of Kings. 59 “Ut hanc quaestionem melius enodemus adducemus primò verba Sacrae Scripturae, ita autem habetur lib. I. Regum cap. XVI. Quandocunque igitur Spiritus Dei malus arripiebat Saul, David tollebat cytharam, & percutiebat manu sua, & refocillabatur Saul, & levius habebat; recedebat enim ab eo Spiritus malus: Musicà igitur pulsum fuisse qualemcumque spiritum Dei malum, verba Sacri textua clarissimè docent,” followed by “quomodo autem id contigerit, varij variè” (“how this might have happened, however, various people explain in various ways,” already mentioned above): Musurgia, 2:214 (except for the omission of igitur, Berardi’s quotation of the Latin verse is identical). 60 “Rabbini aiunt hoc loco Davidem, dum Saulem curavit, Cytharam personuisse decachordam ad exemplar arboris Zephyroticae constructam, ac decem divinarum Virtutum effluxibus veluti fructibus quibumdam faecundam, hunc effectum praestitisse”: Musurgia, 2:214.

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They [the rabbis] say that David knew the constellation to which the harmony (concentus) had to be joined in order for the madness to be easily repressed and for [Saul] to be relieved, as Rabbi [Abraham] ibn Ezra wrote in the Mikra’ot gedolot.61 Pico della Mirandola in his seventh and eighth mathematical theses says [in the former] that music moves the spirits so that they may serve the soul, just as medicine agitates them so that they may rule the body, and [in the latter] that music heals the body through the soul just as medicine heals the soul by means of the body.62 From these comments one could easily determine why David, without effort, would have restrained the raging Saul.63

Kircher discarded the astrological explanation, saying that Ibn Ezra’s comment about David’s invocation of the stars for aid in appeasing Saul’s fury was “completely meaningless.” To his mind, David “played as much with his hand as Saul commanded” regardless of whether the stars were favorable or not.64 But Kircher did embrace the medical explanation, according to which “airy spirits” of sound when conveyed in small intervals and slow motion affect the mind: they discharge “pungent vapors that fly from the spleen of the stomach and the abdomen to the brain” and generate a soothing effect.65 David, with the sound of his playing, “so moved, warmed, and attenuated Saul’s spirits and vapors” as to be 61 Roughly, “large readers,” in reference to the books of the Hebrew Bible as printed in an enlarged format to accommodate translations into Aramaic and various commentaries. Yet Ibn Ezra (d.  1167) is not known to have written a commentary to the two books of Samuel. I checked the earliest edition of the Mikra’ot gedolot, ed. Jacob ben Hayim ibn Adoniya, 4 vols (Venice: s.n., 1525; repr. Jerusalem: Makor Publishing Ltd., 1972), but could not trace the source (was Kircher fantasizing?). 62 The reference is to two of the eighty-five mathematical theses within Pico’s Conclusiones sive Theses DCCCC, namely, nos. 7 (“Sicut medicina movet spiritus principaliter, ut regunt corpus, ita musica movet spiritus, ut serviunt anime”) and 8: (“Medicina sanat animam per corpus, musica autem corpus per animam”); Opera omnia, 1:101. Kircher quotes them fairly literally (as clear from the next footnote). 63 Musurgia, 2:214–15: “aiunt enim Davidem sidus illud cognovisse, cui concentus coniungendus esset, ut facilè phrenesis retunderetur, & se levius haberet, ita R. Abenezra, in Micra heggadolah. Picus Mirandulanus 7 & 8 thesi Mathematica, Musicam dicit movere spiritus, ut serviant animae, sicuti medicina eosdem agitat ut regant corpus, & musicam sanare corpus per animam, sicuti medicina curat animam mediante corpore, ex quibus quidem facile colligi poterit, quà ratione David facile furentem represserit Saulem.” 64 “unde quis non videt vanissimum Abenezra commentum esse, neque enim David illos siderum aspectus inspexerat, dum Saulis furorem sedavit, sed toties manu suà pulsabat, quoties Saul imperabat, sive hic sive alios [recte alius] aspectus vigeret” (Musurgia, 2:215), to which Kircher adds the marginal comment: “Rabbi Ibn Ezra invents trifling astrological causes for Saul’s cure” (“R. Abenezra Astrologicarum nugaces causas fingit curae Saulis”). 65 “Vel si mavis ut illos spiritus remittamus, & quietiores efficiamus, … sonis admodum lentis parvisque intervallis uti debemus, ut ad tardorum motuum concentum spiritis illi & vapores mordaces, qui ex stomacho, liene & hypochondrijs in cerebrum evolant, tardiores effecti quietum hominem dimittant” (Musurgia, 2:215).

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able “to dislodge the dissipated melancholic juice from the cells of his brain and dissolve it into thin spirits, which, through imperceptible perspiration, leave the sweat and pores” of a person’s body and change, if only temporarily, his mental disposition.66 Kircher’s medical diagnosis is after the spirit theory of the NeoPlatonists, in particular, Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499),67 himself influenced by the ancients, among them Galen (d. c. 216).68 But it was not to Ficino that Kircher referred, rather he invokes Pico, in the passage above, as an authority on medicine, in distinction to Berardi who, in treating David’s lyre, does so as one on Kabbalah. Kircher’s chapter is not the only place in his Musurgia and other writings, to be cited shortly, to mention the Hebrew lyre, or recount the story of David’s playing on it before Saul, or explain the king’s assuagement as physiologically induced, or even discourse on Kabbalah at length. From his chapter “on the ancient music 66 “Musica itaque Davidica Saulem … sedare potuit, … spiritus fumosque Saulis ita movendo, caleficiendo, atque attenuando, ut succum melancholicum dissipatum, è cerebri cellis deturbaverit vel dissolverit in auras tenues, quae per transpirationem insensibilem, sudorem atque poros abierint. … ubi spiritus illi melancholicum succum relinquerunt, non potuit saevire, donec redierint …” (ibid.). Saul’s fits of depression go far beyond the confines of the biblical verse to become a general concern, broached, among others, by Aristotle (recte Pseudo-Aristotle) in his Problemata, trans. from the Greek by W.W. Hett, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1961– 1965), 953a10–14. There, as problem 30, he asked why eminent persons in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts tend to be melancholic (trans. Hett, 2:154–69). On melancholy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century neoplatonist literature and its representation in art, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964), passim; and on Kircher’s medical theories in application to music therapy, Rainer Cadenbach, “Einige apologetische Erwägungen zur musikgeschichtlichen Relevanz von Athanasius Kirchers Phantasien zur Musiktherapie,” in Markus Engelhardt and Michael Heinemann, eds., Ars magna musices: Athanasius Kircher und die Universitalität der Musik (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2007), 227–52. 67 His De vita libri tres, letters, and commentary on Timaeus. For Ficino’s “spirit theory,” see D.P. Walker, “Ficino’s Spiritus and Music,” Annales musicologiques 1 (1953): 131–50, esp. 131–9, and its broader discussion in his Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975); Sabine Ehrmann, “Marsilio Ficino und sein Einfluß auf die Musiktheorie: Zu den Voraussetzungen der musiktheoretischen Diskussion in Italien um 1600,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 48 (1991): 234–49, esp. 239–42 (for medicine and spirit theory); Angela M. Voss, “Magic, Astrology, and Music: The Background to Marsilio Ficino’s Astrological Music Therapy and his Role as a Renaissance Magus,” 2 vols (Ph.D. Diss., City University, London, 1992), esp. 2:260–263; and Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 105–15 (“Spirit, Soul, Music”). 68 See, for a general summary, Rudolph E. Siegel, Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine: An Analysis of his Doctrines and Observations on Bloodflow, Respiration, Humours, and Internal Diseases (Basel: Karger, 1968).

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and instruments of the Hebrews,” it is unclear whether ten strings typify the lyre (cythara) or the psaltery (psalterium). We are told that “a many-stringed cythara existed before the Flood” and that 1 Samuel and the Book of Psalms “testify that David used a ten-string psaltery. … But nobody till now has rightly determined what the Davidic psaltery might have been.”69 Elsewhere a decachord seems to form the substructure of a chapter, already mentioned for its possible influence on Berardi, on “the symphony of stones, plants, and animals with the heavens”: it bears the heading “nature’s decachordon.”70 There ten enneachords, viz., ninestring instruments, are identically tuned to demonstrate the sympathetic reaction of all things above and below. Kircher included a chart that shows the ten instruments—which he may have intended as a metaphor for the ten sefirot—and their correspondences with ten worlds: archetypes (God and the hierarchies of angels), constellations (the Empyrean, the firmament, the seven planets via their astral signs, and Earth plus the Greek names for their pitches), minerals, stones, plants, trees, aquatic life, birds, quadrupeds, and colors (Figure 11.6; the chart may have prompted Berardi’s first one, in Figure 11.1). The harmony of sublunary bodies reflects that of heavenly ones.71 Kircher, as if a new David, closes his Musurgia with the exclamation: “May I sing psalms to You on a ten-string psaltery and may I praise and glorify You for ever and ever. Amen.”72 69 Musurgia, 1:47–9 (from the chapter entitled “De musica antiqua instrumentisque Hebraeorum, & qualia illa fuerint”): “& quidem Cytharam polychordam ante diluvium fuisse Sacrae nos docent Literae, decachordo quoque Psalterio Davidem usum liber Regum [recte Samuhelis liber primus—D.H.] psalmorumque testatur … Psalterium Davidicum quale fuerit, nemo rectè adhuc definivit.” The confusion in the Latin carries over from that in the original Hebrew (kinnor for lyre? nevel for psaltery?): see, for example, Bathja Bayer, “The Biblical Nebel,” in Yuval Studies of The Jewish Music Research Centre, 1, ed. Israel Adler in collaboration with Hanoch Avenary and Bathja Bayer (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press of Hebrew University, 1968), 89–131 (the author concludes that the nevel, in biblical times, was not a psaltery, but another variety of lyre, somewhat larger than the kinnor). 70 Musurgia, 2:390–394 (“Symphonismus Lapidum, Plantarum, Animalium cum Coelo,” with the heading “Dodecachordon Naturae”). 71 “…  coelestium corporum harmoniam  …  rerum sublunarium  …  & à coelestibus veluti reflexam quandam harmoniam”: Musurgia, 2:390. 72 “… in decachordo psalterio psallam tibi, teque in saecula saeculorum laudem & glorificem. Amen”: ibid., 2:462 (followed by a short “epilogue”). Beyond Kircher’s Musurgia, other sources confirm the centrality of the decade, among them Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De occulta philosophia ([Cologne: Johannes Soter], 1533; facs. repr. edn Karl Anton Nowotny, Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1967), or the same as described in an early English translation: “every number, or an universall number, compleat, signifying the full course of life: for beyond that we cannot number, but by replication”: Three Books of Occult Philosophy (London: Gregory Moule, 1650), bk. 2, chap. 13 “on the number ten,” 210. The discussion includes a diagram with the ten sefirot set in the first row (under the different names of God: Eheie, Jehovah, Elohim, Adonai, etc.), followed by five other rows with groupings of ten (viz., angels, constellations, animals, bodily parts, and, in the infernal world, the damned): in 1533 print, 128–9.

Fig. 11.6

Ten enneachords to illustrate “the symphony of stones, plants, and animals with the heavens”: Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis (1650), 2:393.

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Kircher reviews the therapeutic effect of David’s playing on Saul in a later chapter,73 again in conformity to spirit theory. He speaks of musicians who, in their choice of “harmonic rhythm,” i.e., pitches or intervals presented at a certain speed, transmit their motion through the air to the spirits. “Excited by the harmonic rhythm,” the spirits then awaken the soul to “various affections, be they love, joy, or sadness.”74 Applying the spirits to the biblical story, Kircher says that they clarify how David, by the force of his playing, removed the evil spirit from Saul, restoring his sanity.75 In a more facetious vein, he asks, elsewhere, whether in fact any particular lyre might have been powerful enough to cure Saul of his madness. Otherwise, why would Saul “attempt, twice, to stab the instrumentalist with his lance?”76 His hatred for David was so strong that it would have counteracted the effect of any playing.77 Kircher’s doubts about the potency of David’s music making are coherent with his doubts about the substantiality of kabbalist doctrine. In a chapter on whether music aids in curing illnesses,78 Kircher notes differences of opinion. “Various people assign various reasons and causes to their marvelous cure.” The kabbalists, for example, are wont to attribute them “to the sefirotic channels, by which divine power might flow into single things of the world.”79 Kircher then goes on to consider other opinions, as held by platonists, astrologists, and alchemists. That did not prevent him from treating Kabbalah in his Oedipus aegyptiacus (1652– 1654): there, in ten chapters (after the ten sefirot), he expanded at length (150 pages!) “on the allegorical wisdom of the ancient Hebrews.”80 Nothing is said On “whether the natural force of herbs, plants, and animals in conjunction with musical modes [i.e., scalar formations: see under footnote 13] possesses any power to cure illnesses” (“Utrum vis naturalis herbarum, plantarum, animalium Musicis modulis coniuncta, vim aliquam obtineat in cura infirmitatum”; Musurgia, 2:228–30). 74 “Musicus enim Rhythmum harmoniosum parem aeri, aer hic eodem Rhythmo harmonico informatus, eum communicat per auditivam potentiam spiritibus, spiritus denique Rhythmo hoc harmonico concitati, animum ad varios affectus, amoris, laetitiae, maeroris, pro motus qualitate concitant” (ibid., 2:230). 75 “… ex hisce luculenter patet, quomodo Saul maligno spiritu invasus, modulante Davide, sibi mox fuerit restitutus” (ibid.). 76 “Nam certum est Saulem à Davide non sempre curatum fuisse, siquidem bis psallentem lancea sua transfigere conatus est; harmonioso sono ad tam violentam atraebilis à Daemone conservatam commotionem dissipandam insufficiente”: Musurgia, 2:216. 77 “Quamvis etiam odium Saulis, in Davidem conceptum plurimum peritiae artis Davidicae derogare potuerit” (ibid.). 78 “De causis prodigiosae illius morborum curae ope Musicae expediendae”: Musurgia, 2:213–14. 79 “Varias huius prodigiosae curae rationes & causas varij assignant. Cabalistae more suo omnia canalibus sephirothicis, quibus divina vis in singula mundi influat, attribuunt, modum verò quo hoc fieri asserunt”: Musurgia, 2:213. 80 Oedipus aegyptiacus, hoc est Universalis Hieroglyphicae Veterum Doctrinae temporum iniuria abolitae instauratio, 2 vols (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1652–1654), in particular, for Kabbalah, 2:210–360 (entitled “De Allegorica Hebraeorum veterum 73

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in them about David’s lyre, but everything else pertaining to kabbalistic lore, as Kircher learned it from the Christian Hebraists, is there, including a chart that, like the one in his Musurgia and the others in Berardi’s Miscellanea, lists the sefirot (last row) with their affinities (rows 1–6), in this case the Decalogue, corporal parts, constellations, Hebrew ranks of angels, Latin angelic hierarchies, and God’s names (see Figure 11.7). Like so many other works by Kircher, Oedipus aegyptiacus, concerned with the abstruse meanings of Hebrew Kabbalah and Egyptian hieroglyphics, was born of his burning love of knowledge: the more esoteric, the better.81 It is doubtful, however, that Berardi consulted the Oedipus. Rather he would have consulted Kircher’s Musurgia and possibly his Phonurgia nova (1673), which reproduces verbatim the chapter of the Musurgia about David’s playing before Saul.82 The Rejection Though Berardi and Kircher differ on the means to the end, they concur on the end itself: both of them exclude the kabbalistic interpretation. It was not the construction of David’s lyre in its relation to the sefirot that allowed David to effect a change of mood in Saul, but the music he played on it. Berardi declared, at the end of his chapter thereabout (no. 10), almost triumphantly: “This opinion of the kabbalists is false. David never dreamed that his lyre would be so abundant with mysteries or so enriched in influxes as for it to conform to what they designated.”83 The devil who preyed on Saul was defeated by music: so Berardi insisted, in various places, even before he closed the chapter. Thus one reads, in the preceding one (no. 9): “Music has authority over the spirits, knowing (when it so pleases) how to lift and oppress them, how to restrain and swell them. … There is no breast so barbarous nor any Sapientia”). See Daniel Stolzenberg, “Four Trees, Some Amulets, and the Seventy-Two Names of God: Kircher Reveals the Kabbalah,” in Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004), 149–69. 81 On Kircher the polymath, see P. Conor Reilly S.J., Athanasius Kircher: Master of a Hundred Arts, 1602–1680 (Wiesbaden, Rome: Edizioni del Mondo, 1974); Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979); and Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (details in previous footnote). On the “universal” import of his Musurgia universalis, see Melanie Wald, Welterkenntnis aus Musik: Athanasius Kirchers “Musurgia universalis” und die Universalwissenschaft im 17. Jahrhundert (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2008). 82 “Quomodo David cytharizando Saulem à Spiritu maligno eripuerit,” in Phonurgia nova sive conjugium mechanico-physicum artis et naturae paranympha phonosophia concinnatum (Kempten: Rudolph Dreherr, 1673; repr. New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 196–9. 83 “Questa opinione è falsa, poiché David mai si sognò, che la sua Cetera fosse così copiosa di Misterij né tampoco così arrichita d’influssi, conforme l’hanno dissegnata i Cabalisti”: Miscellanea, 35.

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The ten sefirot with their various correspondences: Kircher, Oedipus aegyptiacus (1654), 2:290.

animal so ferocious, except for the tiger, as would not be softened and tamed by armonia (music).”84 Moreover, at the very beginning of chapter 10, before Berardi launched, in its second paragraph, into his kabbalistic exposition, he says: “The 84 “La Musica ha l’impero degl’animi, sa quando le aggrada sollevarli, e d’opprimerli, sa restringerli, e dilatarli … Non è petto così barbaro, né animale così feroce, levatene la Tigre, che non venghi raddolcito, e reso mansueto dall’armonia”; ibid., 30–31.

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demon who … makes fun of all the weapons of the world is chased away and conquered by music,”85 a statement for which he refers (in the portion marked by the ellipsis points) to his Documenti armonici published two years earlier. In time, he had written there, music was so perfected as to bend minds and bodies.86 He continued the sentence with references to Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch on the powers of music and then with the part about the demon being “chased away and conquered” by it, which he ascribes to Saint Thomas of Villanuova (Tomás de Villanueva, d. 1555), archbishop of Valencia.87 As the devil defeated by music, so, Thomas contends, he who, according to the opinion of Job, spurns arrows as if chaffs and stones and [spurns] slings as if reed-pipes, or who scoffs at a vibrating spear and regards the heaviest hammers as nothing,88 withdraws, terrified, at the sound of a lyre. One whom no power conquers does music itself conquer.89

Our ears are ringing with Thomas’s pronouncement long before we reach the end of chapter 10, where the same passage is repeated in full, lest the reader underestimate Berardi’s basic tenet: Saul was calmed not by the kabbalistic construction of David’s lyre but by the power of his music. Said otherwise: no abstract explanation can substitute for the music itself. A similar conclusion had been drawn by Kircher, who emphasized that “David freed Saul from melancholy  …  by the force and power of music alone.” How he did this was by a discriminating choice of intervals, rhythms, and harmonies, which he foresaw, from his experience in playing before Saul and his familiarity with his person, would affect his temper: “Il Demonio, che … si burla di tutte l’armi del Mondo, vien fugato, e superato dalla Musica”: ibid., 31–2. 86 This and following statements from Documenti armonici (1687; bk. 3, doc. 1). 87 In the Documenti armonici (ibid.), Berardi acknowledges having drawn Thomas’s comment from De can. Ecc. by [Giovanni] Bona (d.  1674). I am grateful to Kristen Castellana, Music Librarian at the University of Michigan, for checking Bona’s treatise De divina psalmodia (Paris: L. Billaine, 1663) and locating the comment in chap. 17, thus entitled (“De cantu ecclesiastico,” 407–38), 414. Bona’s source, as cited in a footnote there, is “Thom.[i] Valentin.[i] serm.[o] de visitat.[ione] B.[eatae] V.[irginis]” (“A sermon by Thomas of [Villanova, archbishop of] Valencia on the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin [Mary],” a feast celebrated on May 31). See Obras de Santo Tomás de Villanueva: sermones de la Virgen y obras castellanas (Madrid: La Editorial Católica, 1952), for the sermon (314–32) and the comment proper (320, in Spanish). 88 See Job 41:18–20 (Vulgate): “18Reputabit enim quasi paleas ferrum et quasi lignum putridum aes 19non fugabit eum vir sagittarius in stipulam versi sunt ei lapides fundae 20 quasi stipulam aestimabit malleum et deridebit vibrantem hastam.” 89 “Musica fugatur Diabolus, & qui iuxta sententiam Iob sagittas [reputat] quasi paleas, & lapides funde [recte fundae], velut stipulas spernit, deridet etiam vibrantem hastam, & durissimos malleos pro nihilo pendit, ad citharae [recte cithara] sonitum tremefactus recedit, & quem nulla vis superat, superat harmonia”; Documenti armonici (bk. 3, doc. 1). 85

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David … knew how to adapt a skillful and appropriate sound to the humor of the king. Perhaps he knew, when performing, which rhythms were particularly pleasing for Saul to hear and which others annoyed him, and also which metrical dances were likely to stir him, so that, in the end, the intended effect might be achieved. It was with the lyre’s harmonic motion along with David’s appearance as a beautiful and lovely adolescent arms-bearer that David was accustomed to affect the king so greatly. … Hearing words joined rhythmically to the melody and the plucking [of the lyre, the king felt his] spirits lifted from a dark prison as it were to a lofty region of light. There the sooty spirits pressing his heart were dissipated and, in the end, found themselves a place for dilating it. The result of its dilation was necessarily joy and respite from worries.90

Exeunt the kabbalists: their theory of emanations, we are told, counts for nothing in audition.91 Enter the musicians: their knowledge of music is not speculative, but practical. For them the power of music resides in the appropriate use of intervals, rhythms, and harmonies. Contrary Evidence to Sustain the Viability of Musica Speculativa If Berardi dismissed speculative data—and here I shall focus on Berardi alone—as irrelevant to music qua music, why did he apportion such a large place to it in his otherwise practically oriented Miscellanea,92 not to speak of his Ragionamenti musicali (as will be clear from the continuation, where parallel references to both are given in footnote)?93 In the Miscellanea he discourses, with no little enthusiasm, on spirit theory; he fantasizes relations between music and non-musical elements; “& appropriato sono humori Regis adaptare noverat, forsan Rhythmos quosdam quos Sauli gratissimos auditu noverat recitando & ad negotium facientes aut etiam saltu metrico eum in tantum sollicitando donec tandem intentum effectum consequeretur. Nam & motu cytharae harmonico quo Armigeri sui utpote Adolescentis pulchri & decori aspectu, mirum affici solitus erat,  …  verba harmoniae coniuncta Rhythmicè auditum vellicantia, animum veluti ex tenebroso carcere in altam lucis regionem elevabant. qua dissipati fuliginosi spiritus cor prementes, tandem cordi dilatandi se locum praebuere, ex qua dilatatione necessariò consequebatur laetitia, & molestiarum quies”: Musurgia, 2:215. 91 For a flat rejection of Kabbalah, in Jewish circles, for its seeming prohibition of word repeats in music, see Don Harrán, “Nomina numina: Final Thoughts of Rabbi Leon Modena on the Essence of Sacred Music,” Italia: studi e ricerche sulla storia, la cultura e la letteratura degli ebrei d’Italia 17 (2006): 7–63, esp. 15–25. 92 Pt. 1, designated “parte prima specolativa,” with sixteen chapters; and various portions of pt. 2, designated a “mixture” of speculative and practical science (“mista di speculativa, e prattica”), with 35. Pt. 3 (with 16) is concerned with “prattica” proper. 93 Many statements in the Miscellanea, it turns out, repeat or rephrase previous ones in the Ragionamenti. The Documenti armonici differs from them: aside from the few statements of a speculative character quoted above, its three books, with their various “documents,” i.e., chapters (30 in book 1, 20 in book 2, and 11 in book 3), are concerned with practica, specifically counterpoint in its various rhythmic and melodic combinations. 90

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he associates the planets with an imaginary monochord; and he waxes eloquent on the harmony of the cosmos. Spirit theory. Relying (it would seem) on Kircher, Berardi referred to Pico’s two mathematical theses, reported above, on music as medicine,94 from which he concluded that music, through its harmony and “hidden sympathy” (occulta simpatia), buoys up the heart and enlivens the spirits. It warms the body, ridding it of poisonous vapors; it improves the blood that courses through its veins. By calming the passions of the mind, music enables the body to resist or expel illness. It is no wonder that “famous physicians have earned a name for themselves as great musicians,” for music provides an understanding of bodily operations as perceived “in the proper proportion” of the limbs, humors, heart, brain, liver, groin, umbilical cord, pulse, and respiration. In tempering “hot and dry ingredients with damp and cold ones,” the physician “weaves a well-ordered harmony composed of consonances and dissonances that meet the proper ends and means.”95 Berardi cites the example of Asclepiades, “the outstanding physician,” who, through song, restored lunatics to their proper senses and cured the disconsolate of their melancholy.96 Music as metaphor. Soaring on the wings of fantasy, Berardi drafts a list of parallels between musical and non-musical elements. The five lines of the staff97 are likened to the five senses; the three clefs98 to the three potencies of the soul;99 white notes to good actions and black notes to evil ones; consonances to just desires

For this and following references, see pt. 1, chap. 15 on music as “fit to cure illness and useful for preserving health” (“Musica è atta a sanare l’infermita, & è valevole a conservare la sanità”); Miscellanea, 46–8 (and elsewhere, for example, pt. 1, chap. 16 “on the praises and nobility of music,” esp. 51). 95 “La Musica [g]li porge una perfetta intelligenza, che deve havere dell’armonia, che si trova nel corpo humano, che consiste nella debita proportione delle membra, e degl’humori, e considerando la corrispondenza del cuore, del cervello e del fegato la proportione dell’inguinaglia, dell’umbilico, e del cuore, il tuono, e tenore del polse moderato, che si ha la respiratione al sistole, e diastole, contemperando il medico l’ingredienti caldi, e secchi, con li humidi, e frigidi tesse una ben’ordinata armonia, composta di consonanze, e dissonanze risolute con i debiti termini e modi”: Miscellanea, 46. For similar statement, see Ragionamenti, 105–6. 96 See, for a general study, to be added to those under Ficino’s spirit theory, Penelope Gouk, “Music, Melancholy, and Medical Spirits in Early Modern Thought,” in Peregrine Horden, ed., Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 173–94. 97 On which music is written. 98 Clefs are signs set at the beginning of a staff to indicate the pitches to be represented on its different lines and spaces (there are separate signs for the G clef, F clef, and C clef). 99 Appears to refer to the three qualities of the soul defined by Plato and Aristotle as appetitive, spirited, and contemplative; see Plato, Republic 4.14–15 (438D–441C), Phaedrus 245–48, and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.13.18 (1102b29–31). 94

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and dissonances to wanton ones; cantus firmus100 to divine law and polyphony to human law; B-natural to severity and B-flat to piety; and so forth.101 Music of the planets (in their mystical reverberations). Berardi, in the first chapter of his Miscellanea, describes a monochord extending from the highest heaven via the different planets to Earth102 (Gaffurius’s serpent diffusing the mens apollinea?). Sun is set in the middle, an octave away from the outer boundaries.103 Thus the monochord covered two octaves, in anticipation of the same two according to which David’s lyre was constructed in part 1, chapter 10. One has a foretaste of the sefirotic influences to be reviewed in the same chapter, moreover, in the statement that Earth, at the lower end of the itinerary from divine to human, was “as a reflection of divine light.”104 In further anticipation of its content, Berardi mentions the planets as forming a pyramid, with Earth and the Empyrean at its extremities105 (see Figure 11.4, with the sefirot in a triangle). “As governed by the omnipotent hand of the Supreme First Master,” Berardi remarks, “the string of this monochord … produces sweetest harmony in all things created,” among them the planets that “move harmonically among themselves” and the heavens that God tuned “as if a harmonious cithara.”106 He did not speak of David’s lyre, but it could be inferred by analogy. Its sefirotic interpretation was suggested at the outset: in a foreword to the reader, Berardi says of the celestial spheres that “they spread and diffuse their lights and influences, turning about humans. … Everything that flows from the Highest Good do they lead back with themselves to the fount of Eternity from which they derive.”107 The order is that described in theosophical Kabbalah as descent from the Highest One to the beings created in His image and their return ascent to the Highest One.

Here in the sense of the ancient chant melodies used in church services. Miscellanea, 9–10 (altogether some twenty-eight similes). For analogous

100 101

statements, see Ragionamenti, 27, 117, 124, 130 (this last one likening the lyre to the human body and the psaltery to the soul). 102 See also Ragionamenti, 128. 103 “Distendono questo Monacordo dalla sumità del Cielo Empireo fino all’infimo della terra: se si divide per metà, se ne cava la diapason”: Miscellanea, 2. 104 “dall’Empireo sino al centro della terra, la quale era poi come un riflesso della luce divina”: Miscellanea, 3. 105 “La terra è base della Piramide  …  sino all’Empireo” (ibid.). Here, and in the previous statements, the Empyrean is not separate from the Prime Mover (as it was with Pico; see above), but identical with it. 106 “… i Pianeti … che caminano armonicamente frà di loro. … La corda di questo Monacordo governata dalla mano onnipotente del Supremo Prothomaestro … rende armonia soavissima in tutte le cose create. I Cieli … havendoli … accordati quasi armoniosa Cetera”: Miscellanea, 4. 107 “…  le sfere celesti i lumi loro, e gl’influssi, ragirandoseli attorno gli spargono, e diffondono. … e tutto ciò che scaturisce dal sommo bene, seco riconduce al fonte dell’Eternità, dal quale deriva”: ibid., fol. a 4r.

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Cosmic harmony. It is a small step from musica mundana of the planets to cosmic harmony. God is described, on page 1 of the treatise, as the “sovereign archmusician [who], at the beginning of the world, filled everything with marvelous harmony.”108 The harmony of humans, or musica humana, depends on the balance of the four elements, which themselves are compared (after earlier examples, among them the Istitutioni harmoniche of Zarlino)109 to the four strings of a cantus firmus (or divine law, as above), “on which strings are placed the notes of human life.”110 Berardi regards each human being, after the ancients, as constituting “a microcosm, or little world.”111 He returns to the argument in the concluding paragraphs of the treatise, as if to emphasize the primordial role it plays in its conceptual substructure. Earth, he says there, functions as the flesh of humans, water as their humors, air as their breathing, and fire as their bodily heat. He goes on to simulate bones to stones, limbs to edifices, thoughts to leaves, wishes to flowers, and works to fruits. “Thus with reason,” he concludes, “by representing all things, humans were called a mirror of the universe and an epilogue of every substance.”112 This is musica speculativa at its most phantasmagorical. It is reinforced by a three-voice canon113 notated as “three in one” in the tenor along with verbal instructions for supplying the alto and soprano: Berardi placed it at the beginning of his Miscellanea, where it suggests the mysterious, metaphorical underpinning of its content (see Figure 11.8).114 “Il sovrano Archimusico nel principio del Mondo riempì il tutto d’armonia mirabile” (Miscellanea, 1). For parallel statement, see Ragionamenti, 35–6. The threefold classification of musica into mundana, humana (see continuation), and instrumentalis (voices, instruments) derives from Boethius, De musica, 1.2 (Fundamentals of Music, trans. Bower, 9–10). 109 Istitutioni (see above, footnote 3), pt. 3, chap. 58, on composition for multiple voices and their names, esp. 238–9 (“musicians in their songs are used for the most part to writing four parts … which they call elemental [Elementali], after the example of the four elements … the lowest they call the bass, which we will assign to the element of the Earth, … the tenor, which we believe resembles Water,” etc.). 110 “…  la Musica humana  …  è quella unione, che si trova fra li quattro elementi: che sono le quattro corde del canto fermo,” etc. (Miscellanea, 9). On the four elements as parallel to four voices, see Ragionamenti, 121–3. 111 “Viene detto Microcosimo, cioè picciol Mondo” (ibid.), a point on which Berardi expands in his Ragionamenti, 127–9. 112 “In lui si riconosce per terra la carne,” etc., leading to the statement: “Onde con ragione rappresentando in se tutte le cose, fu chiamato specchio dell’Universo, & Epilogo d’ogni sostanza” (Miscellanea, 209). 113 That is, a composition in which all voices have the same melody, though start at different times. 114 On Berardi’s commitment to canon as a compositional procedure, see Denis Brian Collins, “Zarlino and Berardi as Teachers of Canon,” Theoria: Historical Aspects of Music Theory 7 (1993): 103–23. 108

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“Canon tres unum” (Berardi, Miscellanea, fol. a 3v), with two almost identical inscriptions. The upper one (“Altus prima [vox] vice in Diates.[saron]. Secunda [vox] vice in Diap.[ason] super. [ius]”) translates as “The first voice to be added [to the tenor] is the alto, at the fourth; the second one to be added [to it] is the superius at the octave”; the lower one (“A.[ltus] pri.[ma vox] vice secun.[da vox] vice C.[antus]”) omits “at the fourth” and “at the octave” and substitutes cantus for superius, both of which mean soprano.

(For a modern transcription with all three voices, see Example 11.1.) “Given and dedicated” by Berardi to his patron, Cardinal Viterbo Urbano Sacchetto, “as a gift,”115 the canon apostrophizes him as “the highest beautiful splendor.”116 Three in one stands for the Holy Trinity, by implication the perfect harmony toward which Berardi, at the end of the treatise, urges the “Christian musician” to aspire. It will be perfect, he says, “when we shall have been made worthy of enjoying the vision of that eternal light of deity that in one single fusion of three persons, and in … three divine hypostases, … shines throughout everything and comprises everything within itself.”117 “Angelus Berardus. D.[ono] D.[edit] D.[edicavit].” “in te summo  …  splendore decori,” upon which Berardi expatiates, in the

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dedication that precedes the example, by noting that pens of writers radiate light when they are employed for consecrating “singular splendors” (fol. a  2r) and that the cardinal was endowed with “brightness in his lineage, for he was born midst splendors” (“la chiarezza della sua Prosapia, che nacque coi splendori”; a 2v). 117 “perfettissima … l’armonia … Questa deve procurare il Musico Christiano, che all’hora si renderà perfetta, quando saremo fatti degni di fruire la visione di quell’increato lume di Deità, che in un solo di trè persone, & in … tre susistenze divine, … per tutto riluce, & il tutto in se stesso comprende”: Miscellanea, 210.

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Example 11.1 The canon as realized a 3. Text: “This resides in you, the highest beautiful splendor; you, as one, have what remains of heroes.” The passage is preceded by a reference of kabbalistic import, in the light of what we know from part 1, chapter 10, to an instrument of “ten strings that are the Ten Commandments,” in observing which “My bowels should sound like a  cythara” (Isa. 16:11).118 Musica Speculativa, Musica Practica, and the Power of Music Kircher concludes his treatment of Kabbalah in Oedipus aegyptiacus with a roaring denunciation of its doctrine.119 It hides its content “under the mystical and  symbolic wrappings of words and numbers,” hence lacks the support of empirical  demonstration or rational argument.120 It pretends that single characters, names,  118 “le cui dieci corde sono i pretti della legge: Il Profeta Esaia in se stesso lo chiamò  Cetera: ‘Venter meus ut Cythara sonabit’ ” (ibid.). 119 Under the heading “Conclusio contra Cabalam”: Oedipus aegypticus, 2:359–60. 120 “Et tametsi nihil in ea occurrat, quod demonstrativis rationibus innitatur, ac propriè  dictae scientiae rationem tueatur; Hebraei tamen … doctrinam sub mysticis ac symbolicis

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vowel signs, accents, breathing marks, and other minutiae conceal matters of the utmost profundity. Kircher wonders how “persons of a sound mind could ever be able to accept or approve such insane and fanatic aberrations.”121 Why is it, he queries, that the same kabbalists who ascribe the miracles of the Bible (Moses who divided the sea, Joshua who stopped the sun, Elijah and Elisha who raised the dead, etc.) to kabbalistic influence, and who boast of being experts in kabbalistic doctrine, never themselves were able to accomplish such things?122 His fury, one suspects, was fanned less by his distaste for Kabbalah than by his antipathy for the Jews. Kircher portrays Kabbalah as a “breeding-ground for every iniquity” and the Jews as “a race of persons more unknowing and slothful” than any other.123 “If the modern shoddy rabbis [of Kabbalah]” were to do anything of what they said was done in the Bible, the very thought that the Jews might “shake off the yoke of the daily servitude by which they have been oppressed in misery for 1,652 years would make every Christian feel unsafe anywhere in this world.”124 Kabbalah, he concludes, “is outlawed by the Church and … disclaimed by the scholars.”125 Like Kircher, so Berardi spurned Kabbalah, and probably for the same reason. Yet how is his disapproval of it to be reconciled with his patent interest in musica speculativa? Ever since ancient times, musica speculativa and practica were recognized as the two parts into which music naturally divided, the first for its intellection, the second for its composition and performance.126 With the growing preoccupation with musica practica from the seventeenth century on, their equivalence in the music treatises became increasingly more difficult to validate. verborum numerorumque involucris absconditam continere volunt”: Oedipus aegypticus, 2:359. 121 “Itaque in ea singulas literas, figuras, nomina, elementa, apices, lineas, puncta, accentus, spiritus, & quidquid est minutius, profundissimam quandam & abditissimam ingentium rerum significatricem doctrinam continere falsò sibi persuadent  …  Miror ego sanè, qui & quà ratione tandem fieri possit, ut sanae mentis homines, tam insana & fanatica deliramenta aut acceptare, aut approbare unquam potuerint” (ibid.). 122 “Legimus quidem Mosen mare dividisse  …  Iosue Solem stitisse  …  Eliam & Helisaeum mortuos excitasse … Si ergo tanta Cabalicae Magiae vis est & potestas … cur Cabalaei eius artis, ut iactant, peritissimi, talia nunquam patrarunt, aut etiam nunc patrare possunt?”: Oedipus aegypticus, 2:360. 123 “…  meritò totius iniquitatis officina censeri debet  …  cum ignariùs ignaviùsque hominum genus Hebraeis non nôrim”: ibid., 2:359. 124 “Certè si quid moderni Rabbinastri talium callerent, Christianus Orbis nuspiam securus foret. quin ad iugum diuturnae servitutis excutiendum, quo miseri iam 1652 annis oppressi tenentur, uti debuissent”: ibid., 2:360. Vol. 1 (of Oedipus aegypticus) was published in 1652, thus the oppression of the Jews, for Kircher, began with Christ’s birth. 125 “unde non immeritò ab Ecclesia, veluti execranda proscribitur, à sapientibus exploditur”: Oedipus aegypticus, 2:360. 126 See, for example, Aristides Quintilianus, Peri mousikes (3rd cent.; bk. 1, pts. 4–5), trans. from the Greek by Thomas J. Mathiesen as On Music in Three Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 74–7.

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Zarlino maintained their synthetic presentation,127 as did Francisco de Salinas and Pietro Cerone, and later Marin Mersenne and Kircher, though the concerns of Mersenne and Kircher were inchoately shaped by rational or physiological explanations.128 By “speculative” Berardi meant an inquiry into “the nature”— in the broadest sense of the term—“of consonances, modes, prolations, sounds, intervals, genera, tempo, meter, number [rhythm], proportions, etc., all as things to be comprehended.”129 But he also included in its purview the welter of general subjects covered in “the first speculative part” of his Miscellanea, namely: the nobility (and utility) of music; “universal harmony”; the threefold division of music into mundana, humana, and instrumentalis; the origins of music and its inventors; its capacity to move emotions and delight animals; let alone David’s lyre as conceived by the kabbalists.130 “To keep the science of music complete, then, these two parts [speculativa, practica] should always proceed in conjunction with one another and never separately.”131 In time, music theory evidenced a shift from the speculative to the practical.132 Descending from its “Boethian heights,”133 it moved noticeably toward a systematic pedagogy for imparting the fundaments of music to budding composers and performers, including schoolboys in the church choirs (who had still to deal with plainchant, i.e., older church melodies). Emphasis in the late seventeenth- and

As noted by Jairo Moreno, Musical Representation, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), esp. 25–49. 128 See Claude Palisca, “Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought,” in Hedley H. Rhys, ed., Seventeenth-Century Science and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 91–137. 129 “All’hora è speculativa quando va essaminando la natura delle consonanze, modi, prolationi, suoni, intervalli, generi, tempo, misura, numero, proportioni, &c. tutte queste cose sono intese dall’intelletto”: Miscellanea, 22. Terminology, roughly defined: modes are scales (see under footnote 13); prolations, longer and shorter notes in their temporal relationship; genera, two different orderings of scales (diatonic, chromatic); proportions, two or more meters in succession. 130 All of them, except for the last, subjects that came up variously in the Ragionamenti. 131 “Dunque per rendere perfetta la scienza della Musica queste due parti sempre devono caminare unite, e mai separate”: Miscellanea, 23. For parallel remarks, see Ragionamenti, 18–20. 132 See, for example, Robert W. Wason, “Musica practica: Music Theory as Pedagogy,” in Thomas Christensen, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 46–77. 133 The expression is from Thomas Christensen, “Music Theory in Clio’s Mirror,” in Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathiesen, eds, Music in the Mirror: Reflections on the History of Music Theory and Literature for the 21st Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 1–19, esp. 10. 127

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the eighteenth-century Italian treatises was placed on canto fermo (plainchant),134 counterpoint (canto figurato),135 figured bass,136 and instruments (violin, harpsichord, Spanish guitar, etc.).137 The subjects that interested Berardi in particular were modes, solmization,138 consonances and dissonances, styles of music (after the differentiation by his teacher and mentor Marco Scacchi into church, chamber, and theatrical, with their various subgroupings),139 and, as announced in the title to his Miscellanea, counterpoint (“to be treated, in all its portions, with rules and examples”).140 Counterpoint, i.e., composition, appears to have been his main concern.141 It is enough to consult the index to the Miscellanea to sense the new status assigned to musica speculativa. There one finds references to “Love (Amore), the father of music,” “the devil fears music,” “Socrates, in old age, learns music,” “armies incited against each other by the sound of trumpets,” not to forget the overriding question “whether the practice of music is nobler than its theory,” to

134 E.g., Lorenzo Penna, Direttorio del canto fermo (Modena: eredi Cassiani, 1689); Giovanni Lorenzo Gregori, Il canto fermo in pratica (Lucca: Bartolomeo Gregori, 1697); Angelo Michele Bertalotti, Regole utilissime per apprendere con fondamento e facilità il canto fermo (Bologna: Mario Silvani, 1706). 135 E.g., Giovanni Maria Bononcini, Musico prattico che brevemente dimostra il modo di giungere alla perfetta cognizione di tutte quelle cose, che concorrono alla composizione dei canti, e di ciò ch’all’arte del contrapunto si ricerca (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1673). 136 That is, a bass part provided with “figures” (numerals) to indicate the harmonies to be played. See, for example, Francesco Gasparini, L’armonico pratico al cimbalo: regole, osservazioni, ed avvertimenti per ben suonare il basso (Venice: Antonio Bortoli, 1708). 137 E.g., Carlo Tessarini, Gramatica di musica insegna il modo facile, e breve per ben imparare di sonare il violino (n.p., 1741); Fedele Fenaroli, Regole musicali per i principianti di cembalo (Naples: Mazzola-Vocola, 1775); Giovanni Pietro Ricci, Scuola d’intavolatura con la quale ciascuno senza maestro puole imparare a suonare la chitarriglia spagnuola (Rome: P. Moneta, 1677). 138 The different syllables used for denoting the tones of a scale (re, mi, fa, etc.). 139 In Scacchi’s Breve discorso sopra la musica moderna (Warsaw: Peter Elert, 1649); see, for translation, Palisca, “Marco Scacchi’s Defense of Modern Music (1649),” in Laurence Berman, ed., Words and Music: The Scholar’s View … in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 189–235, esp. 194–208. Berardi studied with Scacchi “at some time between 1650 and 1667”; entry on Berardi, by Larsen III, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie, 29 vols (New York: Grove’s Dictionaries; London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2001), 3:301– 3. He expanded on his teacher’s stylistic classifications in the Ragionamenti, 133–46. 140 “Con Regole, & Essempij si tratta di tutto il Contrapunto.” 141 As emphasized by Larsen III in both his dissertation (“Angelo Berardi (1636– 1694) as Theorist”) and his entry on Berardi for Grove. One reads, in the latter, that “the most important aspect of Berardi’s theoretical writings is his systematic description of contrapuntal composition. Documenti armonici and Miscellanea musicale provide a complete description of counterpoint as practiced in the seventeenth century.”

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which Berardi devoted a whole chapter (pt. 1, no. 5).142 His answer, as already said, was that the two should interact, though his preference seems to have been for practica, to judge from the concluding paragraph: “Worthy of eternal praise are the excellent composers who preserve music that in every age, and for every rank of persons, has always been of use and pleasure.”143 For Berardi, musica speculativa was no longer essential to the scientia musicae, rather it had become ornamental. It relayed charming stories about music, some mythological, others historical;144 it contained piquant, often recondite information about its meanings, effects, and uses; it formed a collection of musico-theoretical curiosities, to be perused with pleasure and wonderment as printed artifacts. In short, the details of speculativa had been museumized for their historical and aesthetic interest. That is what Berardi appears to have meant when he announced in the title to the Miscellanea that, beyond counterpoint, he addressed “the most curious subjects of music” while “interweaving its most beautiful secrets.”145 Speculativa now denoted “misteriosa,” “arcana,” “meravigliosa,” which is probably how he wanted his account of the kabbalistic views on David’s lyre to be construed. The origins of modern museums have been traced to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century “cabinets of curiosities” assembled by their discriminating owners,146 among them Kircher.147 Berardi described the main thrust of his theoretical writings as the exposition of counterpoint. “Were the young student,” he remarked, “to combine my three books, On the nobility of music, see, further, his Ragionamenti, 19, 23–4, 67, 74–6, 78–83. “Degni d’eterna lode sono gl’eccellenti compositori quali conservano la Musica,

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che in ogni tempo, & ad ogni grado di persone è sempre stata d’utile, e giovamento”: Miscellanea, 24. 144 On Berardi’s mixed historical and mythical account of music in its beginnings, see Andrea Luppi, “Le origini della musica tra storia e mito nell’opera teorica di Angelo Berardi,” Antiquae musicae italicae studiosi 4 (1988): 13–20. It applies not only to the Miscellanea, but even more significantly to the Ragionamenti. 145 “si discorre delle materie più curiose della Musica … con l’intreccio di bellissimi secreti,” etc. For parallel remarks, see Ragionamenti, 16–17. 146 See Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds, The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), also Stephen E. Weil, A Cabinet of Curiosities: Inquiries into Museums and their Prospects (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). 147 See Aldagisa Lugli, “Inquiry as Collection: The Athanasius Kircher Museum in Rome,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 12 (1986): 109–24; Maristella Casciato, Maria Grazia Ianniello, and Maria Vitale, eds., Enciclopedismo in Roma barocca: Athanasius Kircher e il museo del Collegio Romano tra Wunderkammer e museo scientifico (Venice: Marsilio, 1986); Reilly, Athanasius Kircher: Master of a Hundred Arts, 1602–1680, esp. 145–55 (“The Kircherian Museum”); also Eugenio Lo Sardo, ed., Iconismi e mirabilia da Athanasius Kircher (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1999). For an early prospectus, see G. de Sepibus, Museum Kircherianum, Romani Collegii Musaeum Celeberrimum (Amsterdam: Ex officina Janssonio-Waesbergiana, 1678); and for a catalog of a recent exhibit (at the Palazzo Venezia, Rome, 2001), Athanasius Kircher: il museo del mondo, ed. Lo Sardo (Rome: De Luca, 2001).

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viz., the Ragionamenti musicali, the Documenti armonici, and the Miscellanea, he would have an orderly presentation of counterpoint in its totality.”148 In the Miscellanea itself, the second and third parts were meant “to demonstrate the prime elements, rules, precepts, and observations for counterpoint” while the third part was to reveal “the diversity of counterpoints (being as many as the skilled contrapuntist knows how to invent), the multiplicity of imitative procedures, [and] the artifice of canons.”149 Beyond discoursing on counterpoint in at least two of the three treatises,150 Berardi showed his prowess as a composer in numerous sacred works (Masses, psalms, offertories, motets, sacri concentus). They met the needs of the various churches he served in Viterbo, Tivoli, Spoleto, and Rome as maestro di cappella. It is in these works and those of his contemporaries that he saw the power of music. “Art, building upon the teachings of nature, has led music to such perfection, that there is no power that it does not subjugate nor any impossibility that it does not overcome.”151 If David was able to cure Saul of the evil spirit with the sound of his lyre, how much more can the well-trained composer, in the early modern era, affect his listeners with counterpoint?152 Omnia vincit musica. “Se il giovane studioso unirà questi tre libri, cioè li Ragionamenti Musicali, li Documenti Armonici, e la Miscellanea, haverà per ordine tutto il Contrapunto”: Miscellanea, 168. A gross exaggeration: in the Ragionamenti only five of its 190 pages are concerned with counterpoint (146–50). 149 “Per non deviare dall’ordine incominciato doverei seguitare avanti dimostrando la diversità de contrapunti, che sono tanti, quanti ne sà inventare il perito contrapuntista, la multiplicità delle fughe, l’artificio de canoni” (ibid.). 150 The Ragionamenti, as said, is less practically oriented than the others. To the three one should add his Dicerie musicali (before 1681, now lost) and a short (32-page) compositional manual entitled Arcani musicali (1690; not consulted). His Il perché musicale is a collection of letters concerned with warding off errors in writing counterpoint (1693; 60 pages). 151 “Poiché l’arte, fabbricando sopra gli insegnamenti della natura, ha ridotto la musica a una perfezione che non vi è potere che non soggiochi né impossibilità che non superi” (Documenti armonici, bk. 3, doc. 1, though originally in the Ragionamenti, 69, and in a similar vein, 91–2). 152 On the question of “power” in Baroque music, see Harrán, “From Orpheus to Hercules: Differing Conceptions of Power in Music of the Baroque,” in Yosihiko Tokumaru and six others, eds, Tradition and its Future in Music (Report of the Fourth Symposium of the International Musicological Society, Osaka 1990) (Tokyo: Mita Press, 1991), 211–15, and, for the empowerment of solo instrumental music in the later seventeenth century, idem, “Domenico Galli e gli eroici esordi della musica per violoncello solo non accompagnato,” Rivista italiana di musicologia 34 (1999): 231–307. Benedetto Marcello modeled his Estro poetico-armonico (in eight volumes, 1724–1726), a collection of works for one to four voices based on Psalms 1–50, on what he believed were the compositional principles behind ancient Hebrew song, hoping thereby, as he explained in the introductory matter, to endow “ailing” modern sacred music with the strength “to move passions and affections” (1:2); see Harrán, “The Hebrew Exemplum as a Force of Renewal in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought: The Case of Benedetto Marcello and his Collection of Psalms,” in Giger and Mathiesen, eds, Music in the Mirror (as above), 143–94. 148

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Epilogue: How Does David’s Lyre Relate to Psalms? I will sing to the Lord with a lyre, with a lyre and a voice of song. (Pss. 98:5)

David’s lyre had the power to “put demons to flight,” as Saint Basil was quoted, at the beginning, to have said of psalms. The two were conceived there as analogous in their curative potential. But the lyre plays a more substantive role in psalms as an instrument for penetrating deeper content. “My mouth will speak words of wisdom and in my contemplation I will achieve understanding. I will lend my ear to the examples [of the wise] and play on my lyre [to prompt an explanation of] the riddle” (Pss. 49:4–5). On the basis of these verses, and still another, “I will remember my playing at night when I speak with my heart and my spirit searches [for meaning]” (Pss. 77:7), the Amoraim, or early Jewish scholars who codified the teachings of Oral Law in the Talmud, appear to have relayed the following midrash, or parable, about David and his lyre:153 Rabbi Chana bar Bizna said after Rabbi Simon the Pious: “A lyre was hanging over the bed of David, and when midnight came, a North Wind blew upon it and it would play of itself, and David would sit and busy himself with Torah until the break of dawn.” […] Rabbi Isaac bar Rabbi Adda said: “What verse could be cited [as proof]?” [The one that reads] “Awake, my honor,154 awake, psaltery and lyre; I will awaken the dawn [with my playing].”155

The lyre played of itself when the North Wind, or holy spirit, blew upon its strings. Its song inspired David to study Torah in order to reach the understanding needed to play his own song, as manifest in the various psalms that he and other psalmists composed to praise God. Judah Moscato, the leading rabbinical scholar in late sixteenth-century Mantua, expanded on the above midrash in a kabbalistically charged sermon entitled “Sounds for contemplation on a lyre” (after Pss. 92:4).156 Conceiving David as 153 Talmud Bavli (Babylonian Talmud) (completed around 500 C.E.), ed. Adin Steinsaltz, 43 vols (Jerusalem: Ha-machon ha-yisra’eli le-firsumim talmudiyyim, 1962– 2008), Berakhot (Blessings), 3b–4a. 154 In the sense of “my soul”: on their equation, see Gen. 49:6. 155 Pss. 57:9. 156 In Hebrew, higgayon be-khinnor. Higgayon is from the verb la-hagot, meaning to utter sounds (words, pitches) and, further, to reflect on them, hence song and its underlying rationale. The sermon is the first of 52 preached by Moscato and printed in his Sefer nefutsot Yehudah (Book of the Dispersed of Judah) (Venice: de Gara, 1589), 1a–8a. For the same midrash in the writings of the aforementioned kabbalist Abulafia, see Idel, “Music and Prophetic Kabbalah,” in Yuval Studies of the Jewish Music Research Centre, 4, ed. Israel Adler with Bathja Bayer (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press of Hebrew University, 1982), 150–169, esp. 153–5. On Moscato as an indirect source for Kircher’s Musurgia universalis and his Oedipus aegyptiacus, on which above, see Giuseppe Veltri in conjunction with

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“arranged and ordered in ratios of music,” he tells us that the North Wind “would blow on his soul, which thereby would be strengthened to emit its intervals with extra-special pleasantness so that the lips of David might deliver praise and songs and words of Torah according to the noble holy spirit prevailing upon him.”157 In saying “Awake, my honor,” David, according to Moscato, was saying “Awake, my soul,” which, as a lyre, “is prepared to receive the efflux of the divine spirit. It empowers [him] to awaken the dawn158 in a voice of hymns and praises.”159 The poet’s lyre is tuned to a higher instrument and “by moving a string on one of them, the string complementing it, on the second instrument, awakens to its sound.”160 When David closed Psalms 150 with the words “Let the whole spirit praise the Lord, Hallelujah!” (verse 6), his intention was to “indicate the awakening of the spirit from the harmonies of music to rise to a superior mental level for offering abundant praises.”161 He used his lyre to confer via psalms with his Maker.

Gianfranco Miletto, “Mathematical and Biblical Exegesis: Jewish Sources of Athanasius Kircher’s Musical Theory,” in Veltri, Renaissance Philosophy in Jewish Garb: Foundations and Challenges in Judaism on the Eve of Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 129–43, esp. For an edition and translation of Moscato’s sermon on music, see Judah ben Joseph Moscato, Sefer nefutsot Yehudah (The Book of the Dispersed of Judah), in Judah Moscato, Sermons: Volume One (with his first ten sermons), ed. Gianfranco Miletto and Giuseppe Veltri in conjunction with Giacomo Corazzol, Regina Grundmann, Don Harrán (Sermon 1), Yonatan Meroz, Brian Ogren, and Adam Shear (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2011), 63–123 (English), 11–25 (Hebrew pagination; Hebrew). 157 Sefer nefutsot Yehudah, 4a–4b. 158 “To awaken the dawn” in the sense of “to greet the dawn” after the lucubrations of nightly study. 159 Sefer nefutsot Yehudah, 4b. 160 Ibid., 4a. 161 Ibid., 3a.

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PART 4 Generic Innovation

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Chapter 12

Reading her Psalter: The Virgin Mary in the N-Town Play

1

Penny Granger

It can sometimes seem as though it was the sixteenth century which first made religion accessible to ordinary laity. It was then that the first legal versions of scripture in the vernacular appeared, along with participative vernacular liturgy and, of particular relevance here, metrical versions of the psalms for all to sing. However, several recent writers have shown that the “great divide” between medieval and early modern culture is less marked than has been generally supposed. In particular among vernacular versions of scripture and drama in England, the mystery plays—cycles of Biblical and para-biblical stories performed in English, largely by amateurs—survived in performance until the 1570s, overlapping with the new development of a professional, London-based theatre, while in parts of mainland Europe the amateur tradition of putting on religious plays in the streets continues to this day. In the Middle Ages, too, the scriptures, and the psalms in particular, were at least selectively available in the vernacular during the fifteenth century and even earlier. Versions of Scripture in English, then, form an important link between the medieval and early modern worlds.2 Late medieval translators of and commentators on the psalms include the mystic Richard Rolle, and Dame Eleanor Hull who translated a commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms from Old French into Middle English. Dame Eleanor also translated Magnificat: a rare instance of a medieval woman translating a text originally attributed to another woman—the Virgin Mary.3 It is the Virgin Mary’s use of psalms that is the focus of this essay, in a medium 1 An earlier version of this article was read at the Performing Piety: Practising Belief symposium at Queen’s University, Belfast, in October 2004. I am grateful to participants, to Sarah Salih, and especially to Daniel Wakelin and the editors of this volume for suggestions for its improvement. 2 See, in particular, James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, Oxford Literary History vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Sarah James, “Debating Heresy: Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Theology and Arundel’s Constitutions” (Cambridge: Unpublished PhD Diss., 2004). James suggests that not only was Arundel’s success patchy but vernacular drama was probably considered too ephemeral to matter. 3 Eleanor Hull, The Seven Psalms, ed. Alexandra Barratt, EETS o.s. 307 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Magnificat is in Women’s Writing in Middle English, ed. Alexandra Barratt (London and New York: Longman, 1991), 230–231.

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that introduced vernacular liturgy to a wide range of ordinary people: the midfifteenth-century dramatic text known as the N-Town Play.4 The N-Town Play is a sort of anthology: it consists of a cycle of plays telling the scriptural story from creation to doom, on to which have been grafted two passion plays and two hagiographical plays about the Virgin Mary. It is generally agreed that its dialect suggests that its scribes came from the south-west border of Norfolk, yet nothing is known about where, by or for whom, or even whether it was performed. But what sets it apart from the other surviving cycle plays, largely from Northern cities such as York, is its liturgical content. The N-Town Play includes some 50 sung Latin items, plus a dozen or so paraphrased parts of services including three canticles, and short vernacular prayers. And not only that, but much of the liturgical material is actually set down in, and therefore part of, the play text, not merely signalled in a stage direction. So if the play itself is an anthology of drama, it contains within it an anthology of liturgy which— calling to mind the Russian doll image—includes an anthology of psalm-texts relevant to their new context within the play. Examples include the funeral psalm 114 (Vulgate 113) “Exiit Israel,”5 sung in procession by the apostles as they take the Virgin’s body to the sepulchre (41/369–70); the Purification pageant, which is almost wholly liturgical, includes part of psalm 48 (47), sung in Latin and followed by a vernacular paraphrase (19/136a–44). Just as liturgists have always looked to the psalms for inspiration, so the play author used the psalms, not only sung “straight” in Latin, but quoted directly from and alluded to within the play text in both Latin and English. And most significantly, as in the two examples just cited, psalms in the play seem to cluster around appearances by the Virgin Mary. The prominent role of the Virgin Mary in the N-Town Play reflects her preeminent position in late-medieval East Anglia: the pilgrimage route to her shrine at Walsingham passed through the town of Thetford which has been cited as a possible “home” for the play. The N-Town Mary is a role-model, particularly for women: not only a focus for, and channel of, devotion, but an educated, literate woman who teaches her audience. She was certainly an avid reader if evidence from late medieval and renaissance iconography is anything to go by. The Archangel Gabriel’s annunciation greeting “Ave” (“hail”) could well be translated as “put down that book and listen to me.” The many iconographic examples of the Virgin reading at the moment of annunciation include a mid-sixteenth-century window in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, and the central panel of the fifteenth-century Merode Altarpiece by Robert Campin.6 In Hans Memling’s “Donne Triptych,” the From a line in the Banns: “A Sunday next […] In N-town”; (Proclamation/525, 527). The N-Town Play Cotton Vespasian D. 8, ed. Stephen Spector, 2 vols, EETS s.s. 11–12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). All quotations from the play are from this edition: references given as pageant/line(s). Middle English spelling generally has been lightly modernized. 5 The incipit was altered by the scribe from “In exitu Israel.” 6 New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1956 [56.70]. 4

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infant Jesus turns to reach out for an apple being held out to him by an angel, while his other hand rumples the pages of his mother’s book.7 It is not difficult to see where Mary acquired the reading habit. Her mother, St. Anne, is also frequently painted not only reading a book herself, but also teaching her daughter; these images are frequently found illustrating feast days of St. Anne in Books of Hours. Paintings of the Madonna and Child often depict her with a suckling baby in one hand and a book in the other—an image that will have struck a chord with multi-tasking mothers down the ages. That the Virgin Mary and her mother should be shown with books particularly towards the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, when lay literacy was being promoted, is no coincidence: both women—Mary par excellence—were exempla for both male and female laity to emulate. Moreover, as is not always the case with, for example, images of prophets or evangelists, Anne’s and Mary’s books are almost always open. But what was it that Mary is so often seen reading? Nicholas Love’s Mirror has it that at the Annunciation, Gabriel found Mary in hire privy chaumbure that time closed and in hir prayeres, or in hire meditaciones peraventur reding the prophecy of Isaie, touching the Incarnacion. (p. 23/14–16)8

The word “peradventure” (“perchance”) suggests educated guesswork on the part of the author: the script is not fixed, either theologically or iconographically, but his use of the word also insinuates the suggestion into the reader’s mind that she was reading Isaiah. Love’s principal source, the late thirteenth-century Meditationes Vita Christi, ascribed (wrongly) to St. Bonaventure, is silent on the matter. And Love has ignored a clue to Mary’s reading-matter in his previous section: even when a child in the temple, she was In the wisdome of goddes lawe: most kunning. In mekenes: most lowe. In the song and the salmes of david: most convenient and semelich. In charite: most graciouse. In clennes: most clene and in alle manere vertue: most perfite. (p. 21/ 35–9)

In this list of superlative qualities, Mary’s knowledge of the psalms is singled out for special mention, the only book of Scripture to be specifically identified. Meanwhile, the East Anglian poet John Lydgate hedges his bets: in his Life of Our Lady he reports that in psalmes, and in holy prophecye To loke and rede, she founde most delite (I/428–9)9

The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors, London, National Gallery, no. 6275. Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Edition,

7 8

ed. Michael Sargent (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2004). 9 A Critical Edition of John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, ed. Joseph A. Lauritis et al., Duquesne Philological Series 2 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961).

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Lydgate goes on to say that Mary, on reading the prophecy of Isaiah concerning the birth of Christ, prayed that she might live to see the event (I/430–4). That Psalms were an important part of Mary’s education is borne out by several iconographic representations of Anne teaching her daughter which show them reading the psalms. This choice of reading-material is not surprising in itself, as there is widespread evidence that the Psalter was commonly used as a reading primer.10 Nicholas Orme makes the point that late medieval artists tended to portray the Holy Family as “living in the style of wealthy people,” so Mary’s education both fitted in with that picture—as exemplified by her portrayal in the Merode altarpiece, with books in fine bindings—and encouraged mothers to teach their own children to read.11 Probably the finest iconographic example of Mary reading psalms with her mother is in a fifteenth-century window in All Saints’ Church, North Street, York, which shows them reading psalm 143 (142): “Domine exaudi orationem meam auribus percipe obsecrationem meam” (“Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my supplications”) (Figure 12.1). Mary’s stylus points to the word “Domine”: in time she is to become the handmaid of the Lord. Likewise, in the fourteenth century altar frontal, originally from East Anglia and now in the Musée de Cluny, Paris, Anne is pointing to the word “rex” in the text “Audi filia et vide et inclina aurem tuam, quia concupit rex speciam tuam” (“Hearken, o daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear, for the king greatly desires they beauty”), a variant of psalm 45 (44) 11–12.12 The Fitzwarin Psalter image shows the book open at psalm 1.17: “Domine labia mea aperies” (“O Lord, open thou my lips”); in addition to this being the opening versicle of the Office it is, as Wendy Scase comments, a witty pun for someone who is learning to read.13 All of these psalms are in a sense “meta-psalms”: they not only form prayers themselves, but at the same time comment on the very process of praying; they also have in common a typological dimension. It is significant that the Virgin Mary should read and pray the psalms—not only are they an educational tool but having learnt to read them she finds out that they are about her. But the implied question is why should fifteenth-century Christians follow her example and use the psalms as an aid to prayer? See Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 242–6; and Susan Groag Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture,” Signs 7 (1982), 756. 11 Orme, Medieval Children, 244–5. 12 For more on the Cluny altar frontal see Christopher Norton et al., Dominican Painting in East Anglia: The Thornham Parva Retable and the Musée de Cluny Frontal (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987). 13 Wendy Scase, “St Anne and the Education of the Virgin: Literary and Artistic Traditions and their Implications,” in Nicholas Rogers, ed., England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford: Watkins, 1993), 93. The Fitzwarin Psalter is Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS lat. 765; the image, on fol. 7, also includes Joachim and donor. 10

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Fig. 12.1

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St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary (All Saints’ Church, North Street, York). Reproduced by kind permission of the Priest-in-Charge and PCC. © Allan B. Barton.

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The N-Town Play has some answers, in a speech by the Virgin Mary herself that not only corroborates but develops the iconographic tradition in a unique fashion, not least because the speech is a soliloquy. Throughout the rest of the play, and in iconography generally, there are always others in the picture, but in this scene she is alone with her Psalter. Here, she not only reads, prays, and is steeped in the psalms, but she explains why. The scene occurs in the originally separate part of the play devoted to Mary’s largely legendary early life, immediately after the “chaste” marriage of Mary and Joseph but before the Annunciation. Joseph goes off to look for somewhere for them to live, while Mary stays behind; while he is gone, she says, she will read the Psalter. Between them, Joseph and Mary exemplify Walter Hilton’s “mixed life”: one active, the other contemplative.14 Alone on stage, Mary says: Now, Lord God, disspose me to prayour That I may sey the holy psalmes of Davith, Whiche book is cleped the Sautere, That I may preise thee, my God, therwith; Of the vertues therof this is the pigth [essence]; It maketh soules fair that doth it say; Angeles be stirred to help us therwith; It litenith derkeness and puttith develys away. The song of psalmes is Goddys deté [song], Sinne is put awey therby. It lerneth a man vertuesful to be, It fereth mannes herte gostly [inspires spiritual awe]. Who that it useth custommably, It clarifieth the herte and charyté maketh cowthe [acquaints it with charity]. He may not failen of Goddes mercy That hath the preisinge of God ever in his mouthe. O holy psalmes, O holy book, Swetter to say than any ony [honey], Thu lernest hem love Lord that on thee look, And makest hem desire thinges celestly. With these halwed psalmes, Lord, I pray the specialy For all the creatures qwike and dede, That thu wilt shewe to hem thy mercy, And to me specialy that do it rede. I have seid sum of my Sawtere and here I am At this holy psalme indede. Benedixisti, Domine, terram tuam. In this holy labore, Lord, me spede. (10/429–56)

14 See Walter Hilton, Epistle on the Mixed Life, in English Mystics of the Middle Ages, ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 108–30.

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The play’s modern editor notes that this part of the scene is not in the sources;15 added by the author, it reflects contemporary iconography portraying the Virgin studying her Psalter, and puts an exhortation to reading and prayer in the mouth of one of the principal characters not only in the play but also in people’s devotional lives. In this and other scenes Mary is seen to follow such diverse writers as Langland, Wyclif, and Rolle, all of whom taught the relevance of the psalms to one’s daily life.16 Her N-Town soliloquy is a dramatic meditation as only Mary can do it: she the chief mediatrix between God and humanity. The speech continually switches register as does the language of the psalms themselves: by their very nature, psalms demand to be performed, even when read silently to oneself. Mary seems to be taking both clerical and lay roles, as teacher and pupil, but always as exemplar. She begins by asking God to prepare her for meditation, but then explains to the audience the title by which the Book of Psalms is popularly known. As in the passage from Nicholas Love’s Mirror, David, the author of the psalms, is mentioned; the particular significance of this is that Jesus is described in scripture as the son of David (Matt.1:1). Mary addresses God again (“That I may preise thee”), but immediately the focus changes, and the rest of the first stanza and the whole of the next are devoted to teaching the audience why they should read—and sing—the psalms. The tone here is didactic, and in a style resembling prose, though gentler than some of the overt sermonizing to be found elsewhere in the play, from priestly figures such as John the Baptist (26/125–64). The language of the third stanza becomes more aureate, in what fifteenthcentury poets considered to be high style. Mary begins by addressing not God nor even David but the Psalter itself: “O holy psalmes,” before she turns to prayer, including herself “specialy.” The play editor compares Mary’s reference to honey with Ezekiel 3:3 (“Then I ate [the scroll]; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey”17), though he omits to mention the several references to honey in the psalms themselves (e.g., Pss 19:10 (18:11) and 119 (118):103). The modern editor does draw attention to similar references to sweetness in The Myroure of Oure Ladye and in Richard Rolle’s Psalter, comparisons provoking the suggestion that either could have been the source for Mary’s N-Town speech. Both these works acknowledge their debt to St. Augustine. The Myroure, a fifteenthcentury manual, was written for the Brigittine community of nuns at Syon; it contains a long exposition of the importance of reading the psalms.18 The passage begins:

Spector, Commentary, 430. See Michael P. Kuczynski, “The Psalms and Social Action in Late Medieval

15 16

England,” in The Place of Psalms and the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages, ed. Nancy van Deusen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 192. 17 New Revised Standard Version. 18 Henry Blunt, ed., The Myroure of Oure Lady, EETS e.s. 17 (London: 1873), 36–7.

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These songes and psalmes ar writen in the psalter boke whiche ar saide, and songe in the service of holy churche, oftener than any other boke of holy scripture for diverse causes.

It goes on to give a long list of reasons, including the historical link with Jewish worship; the example of David as a penitent sinner; and that the psalms provide more material for prayer than any other book of scripture: “in few wordes they conteine moche mystery, and grete sentence.” It also explains that “the propertye of these psalmes devoutly songe is to drive away fendes, and all evil spirites,” a phrase that resonates particularly with N-Town. The exposition concludes that every man, woman, and child will find material to educate and to delight them in the psalms. Rolle’s Prologue begins: Grete haboundance of gastly [spiritual] comfort and joy in god comes in the hertes of them that says or singes devotly the psalmes in lovinge of Jesu Crist. (p. 3)19

There are several similar resonances in Rolle’s Prologue and the Virgin Mary’s N-Town speech. He says, for example, that psalms “drope swetnes in mannes saule”; that saying the psalms “chases fendis. excites aungels til oure help. it does away sinne.” Rolle also refers back to the significance of singing—Mary’s “Goddes deté” (ditty)—describing the Psalter as a “boke of ympnes [hymns] of Crist.” Most significant in Rolle’s Prologue is his reference to the Psalter as an enclosed garden, and a “paradise ful of all appils.” Not only is the enclosed garden (in Latin “hortus clausa”) a common metaphor for the Virgin Mary, but she is also the antithesis of Eve who ate the apple in the Garden of Eden.20 The N-Town Gabriel, greeting Mary, says “this name Eva is turned Ave” (11/219); his farewell speech includes the epithet “Goddes chawmere and his bowre” (11/316). Rolle’s phraseology suggests that the overt connection, made through the N-Town speech between the Psalter and the person of the Virgin Mary, is no coincidence. What is important here, though, is not speculation on whether either Rolle or the Myroure is likely to have been the source for Mary’s speech, but that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries people were writing in English about the significance of the psalms not only within public worship but more particularly in private prayer. It is firmly within this Augustinian tradition that the N-Town Virgin Mary’s speech can be understood. In the final stanza of her speech, Mary speaks directly and conversationally to the audience before quoting the opening verse of psalm 85 (84), in Latin. A particular feature of late medieval writing is that Latin quotations are often followed by vernacular paraphrase. Here, though, Mary follows the Latin verse not with a translation but with a prayer, ‘in this holy labore, Lord, me spede’. It is liturgically significant that Mary quotes from psalm 85, as it is traditionally performed in the liturgy at the end of the Trinity season and the beginning of Advent, looking Richard Rolle, The Psalter, ed. H.R. Bramley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1884). Cf. the painting by Memling, mentioned above.

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forward to the birth of Christ. Verses from it were used as versicles and responses, first in the Offices and then in the Book of Common Prayer. The psalm is also approximately half-way through the Psalter. Mary says that she had read some of her Psalter21 and reached this verse; presumably even someone unsurpassed in their study of the psalms would not have been able to get that far through the book in such a short time, so her comment seems to indicate that she was following either her own systematic daily program or a set lectionary. According to Love’s Mirror Mary had established a rule of life while serving as a temple virgin: that fro the morn tide in to the terce of the day: she gaf hire alle to prayeres, and fro terce in to none: she occupied hire bodily with weving werke. And eft fro none she went not fro prayers. (p. 21/29–32)

A stanzaic Life of St Anne contained in the late-fifteenth-century Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle in Norfolk includes two verses which follow the same tradition, setting the Virgin Mary’s reading and prayer life within a quasimonastic context: And this was the right rewle, that Oure Lady kept. For, as a wise woman, her wil was to werk. Whan tyme was, sche waked, whan tyme was, sche slept. But every day be the morwen, sche went to the kirk. And ther sche made her preyoures til forforth dayes, And afterward, she went unto weving werk, And ‘at’ aftyrnoon, sche gede agen, as the boke sayes, To her preyeris and her bedes, til it was derk. (p. 213)22

This kind of rule of life was not uncommon among well-to-do and educated women, who had the time and ability to follow such a pattern. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a significant number of non-monastic laity followed a daily pattern of private devotions. For example, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, rose at seven in the morning to hear matins and low mass in her room, while Lady Margaret Beaufort was up at five o’clock to hear four or five masses before breakfast. The rest of their devotional day was spent in private prayer, reading, meditations, and services, including evensong,23 in their chapels.24 Martin Stevens 21 This must refer to the book owned by her, not what was commonly known as “Our Lady’s Psalter” (cf. 13/156A). That is the Rosary, so called because it includes the same number of Hail Marys as psalms in the Psalter. See Spector, Commentary, 406. 22 The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle, ed. Louis Cameron, Garland Medieval Texts 1 (New York and London: Garland, 1980). 23 The term “Evensong” was by the late fifteenth century synonymous with Vespers; post-Reformation Evensong is an amalgam of Vespers and Compline. 24 See C.A.J. Armstrong, “The Piety of Cicely, Duchess of York: A Study in Late Medieval Culture,” in Douglas Woodruff, ed., For Hilaire Belloc: Essays in Honour of his 72nd Birthday (London: Sheed and Ward, 1942), 73–94; 79–81; and Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 174–5.

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comments that the Virgin Mary’s speech on the psalms “reveals what true learning is and how it must be used.” He also points to her use of aureate style, “meant to project the register of a well-spoken, enlightened person.”25 Her evident learning and the use of this register locates her with Margaret Beaufort and her ilk. Medieval iconography of the Annunciation tends to reflect the fifteenth century shift in emphasis from praying either extempore or from memory to using a book from which to read, pray, and meditate: Mary was an important example to be followed, so she had to be seen as literate at a time when lay literacy was growing.26 Interestingly, all the Middle English mystery cycles are silent on what Mary was doing when Gabriel visited her. In N-Town the Parliament of Heaven occurs between the Psalter scene and the Annunciation, so it may be that she is still alone, meditating on the psalms, when Gabriel appears.27 There are some specific dramatic parallels: for example, the Middle Dutch Eerste Bliscap van Maria specifies that she “leit en leest” (l. 2012 s.d.); literally “lies and reads.”28 So here we have an educated young woman, whose knowledge and devotional use of the psalms was unsurpassed; who, immediately before she received the news that she was to be the human agent of divine salvation, was indeed meditating on the psalms. But the N-Town Virgin Mary does not use the Psalter just as a means of quiet meditation: she also performs the psalms, singly and in groups, dramatically and liturgically. An important scene involving the Virgin Mary and psalms in dramatic movement occurs earlier in the play, when she is admitted to the temple as a threeyear-old child. Here, she recites and interprets for herself in the vernacular the opening verses of each of the fifteen Gradual Psalms, 120–134 (Vulgate 119–33, described there as canticum graduum), as she ascends the fifteen steps into the temple.29 This Presentation scene is arguably the most taxing episode in the whole of drama in terms of credibility and staging. Indeed, in presenting the episode, N-Town is unique in English vernacular drama, reflecting its particular focus on Mary and her life.30 If not in drama, the scene is frequently depicted in visual 25 Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 219. 26 For more on this, see Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240–1570 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). 27 If “place and scaffold” staging was intended here, Mary at her prayer desk would be on one scaffold with the Parliament on another. 28 The first in a cycle of seven plays (five now lost) celebrating the joys of the Virgin Mary; they were performed in the Grote Markt in Brussels for well over a hundred years from the mid-fifteenth century. Die Eerste Bliscap van Maria en Die Sevenste Bliscap van Onser Vrouwen, ed. W.H. Beuken, (Culemborg: Willink, 1973). 29 On the possible sources, see Spector, Commentary, 441–3. The Gradual psalms were traditionally recited when ascending the temple steps in Jerusalem, and thus associated with making an actual or spiritual pilgrimage. 30 Continental plays including this episode include the Eerste Bliscap, ll. 1655– 1755; for others see Lynette Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 90–91.

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iconography, though Mary is not usually portrayed with a Psalter in her hand (climbing the steps while reading from a book would, in any case, be a hazardous business, even for an adult). One particularly interesting example is on the St. Anne Altarpiece, made at around 1500 by a Brussels artist for the Carmelites in Frankfurt (Figure 12.2). It shows Mary at different stages, with her parents depicted almost as donors—which of course they are, though of their daughter, not of the painting. The inclusion of the temple scene in the N-Town Play brings together the two “gradual” traditions—steps (Latin gradus) and psalms—and underlines N-Town’s particular focus on the performance of psalms by the Virgin Mary. Each of the fifteen psalms is treated as follows; the formula is in reverse order to, say, Rolle’s commentary, perhaps to suit the context: The thridde is gladnes in mende in hope to be That we shall be saved all thus. I am glad of these tidings ben seid to me, Now shal we go into Goddes hous. Letatus sum in hiis que dicta sunt mihi: in domum Domini ibimus. (9/110–13a)

The second half of the verse is a close vernacular paraphrase, word for word, of the first line of the psalm which follows, in Latin.31 Mary may have quoted the Latin line herself, but it is more likely that it was sung by a temple choir, possibly off-stage. Psalms were known by heart, at least in monastic communities where the whole cycle was sung weekly, so the Latin incipit was all that was necessary for identification; the practice of Latin incipits was carried forward into the Book of Common Prayer Psalter. So Mary begins—as most small children would—by counting each step and the psalm that goes with it; she then applies the teaching of the psalm to her personal life. Young children are like sponges: they absorb, and can recite back, an enormous amount of material. But if this three-year-old girl could recite, expound, and translate, while climbing steps—and the play text has the bishop marvelling at the scene (10/162–7)—then either the whole thing was mediated through divine inspiration or it formed part of her mother’s teaching, perhaps beginning with rote-learning and looking at the pictures in the open Psalter, before she could actually read the words. This scenario ties in with account in the Golden Legend, an influential anthology of saints’ lives, of St. Elizabeth of Hungary who had visions of the Virgin Mary, and used the psalms as an aid to prayer even as a small child, before she had learnt to read. The Suffolk writer Osbern Bokenham describes Elizabeth’s use of psalms thus in his Legendys of Hooly Wummen:

31 Peter Meredith has drawn attention to the N-Town author’s practice of close literal translation in “The Direct and Indirect Use of the Bible in Medieval English Drama,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 77 (1995): 61–77.

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The Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the Temple, from St. Anne Altarpiece. Copyright: Historisches Museum Frankfurt/Main.

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thou she of lettrure no kunning had, Yet ful often-time she wold use To han [have] a sauter open beforn her sprad [spread], Where-in she made her for to muse. (ll. 9577–80)32

The tradition of the ascent of the 15 temple steps, representing a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, being associated with the Gradual Psalms, representing 15 steps to virtue, may be traced back to Bede.33 As a whole, the Presentation scene in the N-Town Play portrays the Virgin Mary as a type of a cloistered nun, leaving her parents to join her spiritual home; the psalms play a major part in an essentially liturgico-dramatic celebration. This is not the place to examine the effects of liturgy incorporated into drama; suffice it here to note that N-Town provides, mainly through the Virgin Mary, an ideal vehicle for teaching of and about faith in general and the psalms in particular.34 Not only reading but performing the psalms, then, is clearly an integral part of the life of the N-Town Virgin Mary. She even describes the canticle Magnificat (Luke 1: 46–55) as a “holy psalme” (13/81) and a “psalme of prophesye” (13/127), reflecting the English habit of appending the canticles to the end of the Psalter. Magnificat is performed at the Visitation in a macaronic duet between Mary and Elizabeth to form the centerpiece of that part of the play.35 Their antiphonal performance is quasi-liturgical; Mary seems also to think liturgically, commenting that Magnificat is said “every day amonge us at oure evesong” (13/130), the office of which she, through it, is the centerpiece. Here she performs the canticle in Latin, using it as proof of her literacy and status; in the later Assumption pageant she quotes from it in English. And not only is Magnificat itself a protest song, but literacy means power. Botticelli went a stage further, painting the Virgin as a figure not just of lay literacy but of female authorship: she is writing the canticle Magnificat as the child Jesus tries to grab the pen from her hand.36 So, as in Botticelli’s painting, in the N-Town Play the Virgin Mary is positioned as an authority figure, even—dare one say it—a priestly figure: a powerfully prayerful person by and through whom the canon of psalms and canticles is affirmed. Both Magnificat and the Gradual Psalms were key features of pre- and postReformation lay devotions. The Gradual Psalms were said on their own or, as with Magnificat, within the Little Office of the Virgin which itself formed the central 32 Bokenham, Osbert, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS o.s. 206 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). 33 See Peter Meredith, ed., The Mary Play from the N. Town Manuscript, 2nd edn (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1997), 94. 34 For a full account of this, see my The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009). 35 For more on Magnificat, see my “Devotion to Drama: The N-Town Play and Religious Observance in Fifteenth-Century East Anglia,” in Christopher Harper-Bill, ed., Medieval East Anglia (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005). 36 Magnificat Madonna, Florence, Uffizi Gallery, inv. 1890 n. 1609.

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section of a Book of Hours. In England, the liturgical changes brought about by the Reformation were less radical than in mainland Europe. Latin continued to be the language of formal prayer in England until the Act of Uniformity was passed and the first Book of Common Prayer published, both in 1549. Within that process, psalms remained a constant as indeed they have remained universally so. As psalms are central to pre-Reformation monastic and domestic liturgy they are also central to Reformed liturgies. In the 1960s in the Church of England the Eucharist took over from the Offices as the staple of public worship and, except in choral foundations, Evensong is now an endangered species, with Matins more or less extinct. But in the Eucharist, psalms are both a distinct part of the liturgy in their own right, and source texts for prayers and hymns. Thus there has been a continuity of psalms serving both institutional and individual religion from the Middle Ages to the present day.37 Just as the Reformation in England affected the liturgy, it also affected the drama, but in a similarly less draconian way than some have supposed. Important work on this subject has been published within the last decade by Richard Emmerson and Paul Whitfield White, challenging the view put forward more than 50 years ago by Harold Gardiner in Mysteries’ End and restated by Eamon Duffy as recently as 2005.38 White’s thesis that Tudor suppression of the plays was “capricious, sporadic, and selective” is coupled with wide-ranging evidence that plays were adapted, and new ones written, to cope with their changing context; his examples include an anonymous Resurrection play which, like N-Town before it, has the Jewish High Priests Annas and Caiaphas identified as Catholic bishops. However, in the newly written plays traditional Marian epithets, which abound in N-Town, are absent. Both White and Emmerson make the point that the last recorded performances of the civic cycle plays were well into the sixteenth century: York in 1569, Chester in 1575, and Coventry—where it is likely that the young Shakespeare would have seen them—in 1579, while an unsuccessful attempt was made to perform Towneley in 1576.39 Since there are no records of the N-Town For more on pre- and post-Reformation liturgy see John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 38 Richard K. Emmerson, “Eliding the ‘Medieval’: Renaissance ‘New Historicism’ and Sixteenth-Century Drama,” in James Paxson et al., eds, The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998), 25–41; Paul Whitfield White, “Reforming Mysteries’ End: A New Look at Protestant Intervention in English Provincial Drama,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 121–47; Harold C. Gardiner, Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400– 1580, 2nd edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 579–83. 39 White, “Reforming Mysteries’ End,” 127–34, 138, 150. See also Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at the University of Cambridge, 29 April 2005 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 13–14. 37

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Play ever having been performed, either as a whole or in its constituent parts, any theories as to its post-Reformation fate can be only speculative, and one is simply thankful for the preservation of the manuscript. Its Last Supper pageant survives, unlike that of York; the only hint of possible Reformation controversy comes in an alternative text for the end of the Visitation pageant omitting a speech by Contemplacio that refers to indulgences (13/147–74; 13/147A–185A), indicating that this was a “live” issue when the manuscript was assembled.40 Emmerson criticizes the Revels History of Drama in English for emphasizing the demise of medieval drama rather than its continuity, suggesting that a good place to start to study the “discontinuity within continuity” would be the Chester Cycle: it has a Tudor text and was staged several times between 1521 and 1575.41 There is a sense in which medievalists have only themselves to blame: in stressing that “their” drama is important in its own right rather than being a pale anachronism either emerging from Latin liturgical drama or preceding the might of Shakespeare, an opportunity has been lost to see medieval drama within a continuum of English theater. Not least, the psalms again provide a link: direct quotations and allusions appear in several of Shakespeare’s plays. For example, in Henry V (IV viii 129), the king orders the singing of not only Te Deum but also “Non nobis” from psalm 114 (113)—in thanksgiving to God and homage to the mystery plays. And Hamlet’s Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow? (III iii 45–6)

recalls psalm 51(50).7: “Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.”42 This indicates that Shakespeare was as familiar with the psalms as were the authors of the N-Town Play. As we have seen, in late medieval England psalms were not only central to liturgy and devotions, religious and secular, but also important as material for teaching children to read. Further, it has been attested, from the evidence of wills, that psalms were the most characteristic form of female reading in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century they were regarded as no less important as a medium for enriching the spiritual lives of all Christians. Psalms continue to be used in worship and devotion by Catholics and Protestants of all denominations, The date 1468 appears in the manuscript at the end of the Purification pageant; it was probably transcribed between then and the early sixteenth century (“Introduction,” xvi). 41 Emmerson, “Eliding the ‘Medieval,’” 33, 40. 42 Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 215–17. A complete list of biblical and liturgical references in Shakespeare may be found in Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999, repr. 2002). On Shakespeare’s debt to the medieval, see Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, ed. Curtis Perry and John Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Methuen Drama, 2010). 40

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both in their original form and through psalm-based hymns and prayers. The likely audience for late medieval and early modern drama such as the N-Town Play would have included women and men from all strata of society. But particularly if, as has been suggested,43 the play—either in whole or part—was designed for performance in a gild, those who performed in it or formed the audience would have been the sort of upwardly mobile, aspirational people to whom an upper class, educated Virgin Mary would have been especially attractive. Her character also fits in with what appears to have been a ‘monstrous regiment’ of strong East Anglian women such as Alice Chaucer, Anne Harling, and the patrons of Bokenham’s collection of Hooly Wummen. In the hands of the N-Town Virgin Mary the psalms, meditated on and performed, become a showpiece. Not just the Archangel Gabriel but the Psalter itself gives the Virgin the authority to issue a three-dimensional invitation to the audience to pick up the book, emulate her learning and join her in her devotions, and stay faithful to her son in death.

43 By Peter Meredith, Mary Play, 10–12; Meredith points out that there is no concrete evidence for such a performance.

Chapter 13

The Pre-Hispanic Poetics of Sahagún’s Psalmodia christiana John F. Schwaller

In 1536, don Carlos Ometochtzin, the native ruler of Texcoco, one of the Spaniards’ first allies, was arrested on charges of idolatry and apostasy, and tried before an Inquisitorial court convened by the Bishop of Mexico, Fr. Juan de Zumárraga. Although don Carlos had been baptized and had overtly embraced Christianity, he had not given up the old ways. He had a large collection of images which he had hidden. He worshiped them and practiced some of the old rites before them. His arrest, and eventual conviction and execution, sent shock waves through the colony.1 The Franciscans had invested considerable effort in the conversion of the native leaders. Basing themselves upon the European experience they reasoned that if the native leader converted to Christianity, as had Constantine of the Roman Empire, the lesser rulers and commoners would follow. Because of this they established schools for the sons of the native nobility, first in Texcoco and later in Mexico City. Yet don Carlos, upon whom such energy had been lavished, was not what he seemed. Rather than being an example of the Christian ruler, he was a hidden pagan. There were several results of the trial of don Carlos. The friars were chastened in their appreciation of how quickly the conversion would take. The popular protest over the execution of don Carlos, eventually led to the exclusion of the natives from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. The whole experience convinced the friars that the natives were in fact neophytes. Even those natives in closest contact with the friars, and the most developed in the faith, could be hiding loyalty to the old gods. The trial also provided for the entrance on to the scene of the friar who would in many ways determine the future course of the conversion and the friars’ response to it, Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún. Fr. Bernardino had not been in

1 The documents related to the trial are printed in Proceso inquisitorial del cacique de Texcoco, ed. Luis González Obregón (Mexico: Archivo General de la Nación, 1910); the first modern study of the trial is Richard Greenleaf, Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536–1543 (Washington: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1961), 68–74. A more recent analysis can be found in Patricia Lopes Don, “The 1539 Inquisition and Trial of Don Carlos of Texcoco,” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 88 (2008): 573–606.

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New Spain too long, but he had learned Nahuatl quickly and well, and was chosen to be one of the official court interpreters for the trial.2 Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, an active missionary throughout his career, arrived in New Spain in 1529, just after the first wave of Franciscan missionaries. On several occasions he worked at the Colegio de Santacruz Tlatelolco one of the leading schools run by the Franciscans for the acculturation of the sons of the Nahua nobility. He also served in various rural parishes, the most important of which was Tepepulco. At some time around 1547 Sahagún began collecting data about the life, culture, and history of the Nahua. In these efforts, Sahagún became the intellectual heir of much of the ethnographic tradition of the Franciscans who had preceded him in Mexico. His investigations ultimately resulted in the writing of many different types of works, each with a specific purpose and aim. The unifying vision behind the multifaceted production of Sahagún was the creation of a corpus of materials to assist missionaries and parish priests in the conversion of the natives.3 Sahagún felt that better trained missionaries would be able to overcome the serious disadvantage of dealing with an alien culture and language. His experience in the trial of don Carlos of Texcoco, and service in the evangelization of the rural areas of New Spain had demonstrated to him that the conversion in the first twenty years had been incomplete, to say the least. Beyond producing simple didactic works, such as grammars, dictionaries, and confessional guides, Sahagún wished to more fully equip and arm the missionaries with works outlining the preColumbian belief systems to assist the parish priests in identifying vestiges of the old ways, the better to eliminate them. As part of this Sahagún produced several works of immediate use to his fellow missionaries. These included collections of sermons, a collection of native hymns recast to celebrate the saints and feasts of the Christian calendar (the Psalmodia christiana), the translation of the Epistle and Gospel readings for the Sunday mass into Nahuatl, and a commentary on these readings. These works, taken as a whole, have been characterized as a “doctrinal encyclopedia.”4 Scholars have gained much insight into Sahagún’s overall plan through investigation of the Psalmodia christiana and the editorial history of that work, the only piece to be printed during his lifetime.5 The Psalmodia pertains to a very prolific period in Sahagún’s life. It was composed sometime around 1564, along with several other pieces of the doctrinal

Luis Nicolau d’Olwer, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, 1499–1590, translated by Mauricio Mixto (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), 17–18. Nahuatl is the language of the peoples commonly called the Aztecs. They were members of a larger cultural group of peoples known as the Nahua. 3 D’Olwer, Sahagún, 6–7. 4 D’Olwer, Sahagún, 41. 5 Arthur J. O. Anderson, “Sahagún’s ‘Doctrinal Encyclopaedia,’” Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl, 16 (1983): 119–22. 2

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encyclopedia, and some of the major work on the Florentine Codex.6 Specifically, Sahagún noted that in 1564 he was working in the Colegio de Santacruz Tlatelolco. There, he realized that a different type of book was needed than the catechisms and doctrinal treatises that had been so popular up until that time. He was also not so much interested in writing a narrative history of the early conversion, as in creating a more humanistic work. By 1564, after over forty years of labor in the evangelization of the Nahua had resulted in only spotty success. While most of the natives were nominally converted, some friars, such as Sahagún, perhaps because of his superior skills in the language and his keen ethnographic eye, perhaps because of his experience in the trail of don Carlos of Texcoco, had concluded that the evangelization was far from being a success. The conversion efforts to that point had only been partially effective. Consequently new efforts were required for new times. Rather than relying on essentially Spanish devices translated into Nahuatl to convert the Indians (such as catechisms, confessional guides, and other medieval devotional pieces, many of which had already been completed), Sahagún began to create a new type of work. These works would be based in the native tradition, composed in Nahuatl, yet destined to convert the natives to Christianity. The classic example of this is the Psalmodia Christiana. The Psalmodia Christiana was the only work of Sahagún to be published in his lifetime (1583). The work consists of songs written in Nahuatl to celebrate the feasts of the Church calendar, including those of many important saints, such as St. Francis, St. Dominic, the Evangelists, and many others. In his introduction to the modern edition of the Psalmodia, Arthur J.O. Anderson, notes that the songs were probably first composed in 1558–1561 during Sahagún’s residence in Tepepulco.7 They were later edited and polished in 1564 when he had returned to Tlatelolco, using his four native assistants. For nearly 20 years the songs circulated in manuscript until they were finally published in 1583. The function of these compositions is of the highest importance. Among the religious orders involved in the evangelization, the Franciscans tended to be the most indulgent regarding the use of pre-Columbian traditions and their adaptation to Christian ends, providing that they had been suitably cleansed of pagan influence. Many of the early chronicles tell of the natives’ pleasure in singing and dancing in both their own native religious celebrations and later in a Christian context. What Sahagún did was to take this tradition in general, and perhaps some of the songs in particular, and adapt them to Christian worship. 6 The Florentine Codex is a 12-volume encyclopedia of Nahua thought, culture and history compiled by Sahagún in a bilingual format, in Nahuatl and Spanish. For a modern edition, see Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles Dibble, ed. and trans., 13 vols (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982). 7 Bernardino de Sahagún, Psalmodia christiana (Christian Psalmody), edited and translated by Arthur J.O. Anderson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993), xv–xvi.

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Sahagún explained his motives in his Prologue to the work. He noted that the natives had customarily sung songs of various types in the worship of their ancient gods. With the arrival of the Spanish many attempts had been made to force the natives to abandon these songs and sing only songs of the Christian faith. Yet in most instances the natives returned to singing their old songs and canticles. In order to facilitate the abandonment of the old songs, Sahagún offered up these songs as replacements for the old.8 Although the collection of songs is called Psalmodia Christiana, in the “Prologue to the reader” Sahagún described these songs not as psalms but as cantares.9 Nevertheless, throughout the work itself, each song carries the heading of “psalm.” Everyone involved in the project called the collection a psalmodia (psalmody). A psalmody is quite simply a collection of psalms. The psalm as an art form is distinguished by being a song in praise or worship of God. Consequently, while Sahagún had mixed feelings on the issue, nonetheless, he did entitle the whole work as a psalmody. By choosing this path, Sahagún sought, on the one hand, to compare his work in some regards with the best-known psalmody, the biblical book of Psalms. In the sixteenth century the book of Psalms was known variously as the Psalter or Psalmody.10 Nevertheless, each individual song could not be compared, per se, with the biblical Psalms. On the other hand the work, taken as a whole, could be considered roughly on a par. As will be seen, some of the poetic structures he employed fit both into the native tradition and into the biblical Hebrew tradition. The structure of Sahagún’s work served a liturgical end. He organized his psalms around the celebrations of the liturgical calendar, although he chose to follow the calendar year, rather than the liturgical year, by beginning his work with the canonical celebrations of the month of January. Structurally, then, his work differs markedly from the biblical book of Psalms. Similarly there are far more songs in the collection than in the biblical book. These psalms also differ from their biblical homologues by praising not only the Lord God but also the saints and various ecclesiastical holidays, such as Septuagesima Sunday. In fact the book opens with “psalms” on the sign of the cross, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Salve Regina, followed by songs regarding the Ten Commandments, the five commandments of the Church, the seven sacraments, and the blessings of paradise. In the main part of the work, Sahagún presented several psalms on each topic. For example for the feast of Saints Phillip and James he presents six psalms, each; for Saint Anthony of Padua, five; and for Saint Hippolytus, patron saint of Ibid., 6–9. A cantar is a short poetic composition put to music for singing. 10 In Spanish these terms were psalterio and psalmodia. Modern Spanish writes 8

9

them as salterio and salmodia. They come directly from the Latin and Greek equivalents, psaltērion – psalterium and psalmōidia and psalmodia. The earliest printed definition of psalmodia in Spanish, from the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language dictionary in 1734 defines the word as “The collection of the one hundred and fifty Psalms of David.”

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Mexico City, only four. Structurally, and in terms of content, this psalmody differs dramatically from the biblical model. In his translation and analysis of the Psalmodia, Arthur J.O. Anderson considers the poetic style of the Psalms in terms of the pre-Columbian poetic tradition. Basing himself on the work of Angel María Garibay, path breaking scholar of Nahuatl literature, Anderson identifies the following characteristics of Nahua poetic style: Frequent diphrases (paired similes or metaphors: in atl in tepetl, “the water the hill,” meaning a town). Frequent paired or repeated parallel terms, phrases, clauses, and statements, producing a specific meaning. Use of connector words to bind together a series of possibly differing ideas. Use of the refrain Use of particles, sounds, or interjections, possibly nonsense syllables (like “hey nonny nonny” or “fa, la, la, la” in English) Common symbolism: flowers, precious metals, precious stones, birds and butterflies, etc.11

Frances Karttunen and James Lockhart have elaborated on some of these themes, and looked closely at the structure of pre-Columbian Nahuatl poetry. They have concluded that the unique and irreducible feature of the poetry is the verse. Across various collections and in various formats, the verse remains largely intact. Moreover, one of the most common features is the paired verse, where two lines are inextricably linked. The image they present of Nahuatl poetry is not so much a linear development of a thought or idea, but rather a group of verses all of which elaborate on a theme or idea.12 This reinforces the notion of parallelism expressed in the second of Garibay’s points. The two largest collections of Nahua poems date from the period following the conquest, although scholars have assumed that the poetry contained in them reflected the pre-conquest poetic tradition. While some poems obviously reflected Christian intrusions, the vast majority seem to remain faithful to the older tradition. These two collections are known as the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España (Poetry of the Lords of New Spain) and the Cantares mexicanos (Songs Ibid., xxvi–xxvii, adapted from Ángel María Garibay, Historia de la literatura Nahuatl, vol. 1 (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1971), 65–73. Anderson describes each of these features in brief in his Introduction to the Psalmodia. The discussion presented here goes far beyond the limited material in his work. 12 Frances Karttunen and James Lockhart, “La estructura de la poesía Nahuatl vista por sus variants,” Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl, vol. 14 (1980): 16–22. 11

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of the Mexicans).13 The poetry contained in these two large collections generally dates from before the conquest as part of an oral tradition. It was not copied down into European script until the middle of the sixteenth century, and probably prior to about 1580. There are numerous other sources that contain smaller and larger collections of Nahua poetry, most also dating from before the conquest although generally copied down in the sixteenth century. Lastly, there are also other numerous prose documents written in the sixteenth century that reflect the literary style of the period prior to the conquest. It is this whole corpus of materials upon which scholars can draw to compare works written in the post conquest period with the earlier native paradigms. A cursory examination of the Psalms in the Psalmodia demonstrates that the songs written by Sahagún were in fact a hybrid. While ostensibly Christian in theme, they clearly retained some of the literary devices of the ancient poetry and song. There are some elements which have a striking similarity to pre-Columbian forms. For example part of the psalm to St. Thomas Aquinas has a striking similarity to Sahagún’s version of the creation of the moon. In the song to St. Thomas, Sahagún writes14: In oc iouia, in aiamo tintli cemanoac, iuh tlatlilli, iuhca dios itlatoltzi.

When all was yet darkness, before the world began, such was the commandment, such was the Word of God.

Compare this to the description of the creation of the sun and moon by the gods assembled at Teotihuacan15: Mitoa, in oc iooaian, in aiamo tona, in aiamo tlathui.

It is told that when yet it was darkness, when yet no sun had shone, and no dawn had broken.

Clearly the two passages are strikingly similar, although not exactly parallel. It was, however, this type of elevated discourse in Nahuatl that would resonate with the natives as proper for holy songs of praise. In general, what appears most common is that Sahagún consciously drew upon the older poetic tradition in composing his psalms. The Romances are held at the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas, Austin, item G59, in the Garcia Icazbalceta collection. The Cantares are held by the Biblioteca Nacional of Mexico. The Cantares are available in a facsimile edition published in 1994. Both are available in English translation, although flawed by the curious reading which the translator made of several key terms: John Bierhorst, editor and translator, Ballads of the Lords of New Spain: The Codex Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009) and John Bierhorst, editor and translator, Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). 14 Sahagún, Psalmodia, 78–9. 15 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 7, Chapter 2, 4–5. 13

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The most widely recognized poetic devise of the Nahua was the diphrase (Spanish difrasismo). This device was central to Nahuatl discourse. Many very common words were in fact diphrases. The ubiquitous example is the word for town or city, altepetl, which in fact consists of two independent words, atl and tepetl (water, hill), which when combined or placed serially created the third meaning of city. The beauty of the devise is that the combined word, altepetl can be used, as can the two underlying words, with the same meaning. Moreover, when grammatical modifications are made to the word, they can be made either to the composite word or to both of the component words. For example “my town” can be naltepeuh16 or nauh notepeuh.17 The diphrase is ubiquitous in Nahuatl. Nevertheless, it appears sparingly throughout the Psalmodia, although there are dozens of instances of the use of altepetl, such as in the second psalm for the celebration of St. Augustine. The song talks of the saint and his mother: “They were living in a city named Thagaste.”18 Curiously, a few lines later, speaking of the saint’s residence in Carthage and Milan, Sahagún uses the Spanish word in the Nahuatl version of the poetry: “in umpa uei ciudad, itocaioca Carthago… in uei ciudad, itocaoica Millan,” “in a major city, a place named Carthage… a spacious city, a place called Milan.”19 In the first psalm for the feast of Easter, Sahagún wrote: “softness, warmth arrives,” in describing the arrival of spring. The internal structure in Nahuatl is that of the diphrase: “oacico in iamaniliztli, in totonillutl.”20 In this construction the two juxtaposed concepts (softness and warmth) lead to the feeling of spring. This can be compared to a rather opposite allusion made in the Cantares mexicanos. Referring to the brevity of life and the certainty of death, the poet says: “Comes the snow, the ice. Brief is the warmth.” The impression of cold, solitude, and abandon is expressed with the diphrase “in itztec y ye cecec,” “the snow, the ice.” The word for warmth that follows (“onnetotonilotoca “) is at its root the same word used for warmth in the Psalmodia, “totonia.”21 Sahagún also uses the form of the diphrase to create new meanings. One of the obstacles faced by the missionaries in their attempt to Christianize the Nahua was the lack of certain terms such as “sin.” In the second psalm for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, Sahagún presents a diphrase to use for the notion of sin: “the nitrous water, the dirty water,” “in tequisquiatl, in tlaelatl,” which he further defines as “original sin,” “pecado original.”22 In general, no[my] + altepe [town] + uh [special possessed ending for this type of word]. Literally “my water, my hill.” no [my] + a [water] + uh [special possessed ending

16 17

for this type of word] no[my] + tepe [town] + uh [special possessed ending for this type of word]. 18 “umpa altepetl ipan nemia, itocaioca Tangar.” Sahagún, Psalmodia, 264–5. 19 Ibid., 266–7. 20 Ibid., 108–9. 21 Bierhorst, Cantares Mexicanos, 282–3. “Totōnīa” is a verb meaning to heat something. The non-active form is totōnīlō– which then takes a singular absolutive ending –tl, to created the notion of warmth. 22 Ibid., 352–3.

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however, the term most widely used to describe the Christian notion of sin was tlatlacolli, a misdeed.23 In the Nahua poetic tradition the use of water metaphors is quite common, as in the diphrase for city, “the water, the hill.” Another common diphrase was the description of a battle field as “the water, the burned” or as “the divine water, the burned.”24 This diphrase appears frequently in the poetic literature, especially in the “Songs of War” (Yaocuicatl). Extolling the virtues of battle the poet sings: “Rouse yourself where flood and blaze are spreading…” (ximoyollehuayan manian teoatl tlachinolli). This could also be translated as “Rouse up your heart to where the battlefield spreads out.”25 Such is the power of the diphrase in that it allows a double interpretation of the phrase in which it appears, either using the metaphorical meaning or the literal meaning of its parts. The use of parallel or paired words and phrases is also an extremely common devise in Nahuatl poetry. The use of these words and phrases allows the author to create an overwhelming sense of what is being described, by multiple metaphors and similes, in essence piled on top of one another. According to Garibay, at least three variants exist in Nahuatl poetry. Drawing upon existing theories of Hebrew poetics, Garibay focuses on the three most commonly identified types of parallelism.26 The synonymous variant presents two parallel phrases or sentences, relying on synonyms. The antithetical variant has the second sentence or phrase in a diametrically opposite form. Lastly the synthetic allows for mere juxtaposition to create the allusion, or through the building up of an image through manifold images.27 The Psalmodia has examples of all three types of parallelism. With regard to the synonymous variant, a small example can be found in the last psalm to the Apostles peter and Paul. In this example the blood of the martyrs, specifically the blood of Peter and Paul is compared to the bright red feathers of two tropical birds, the roseate spoonbill and the red spoonbill28: In tlazoezotzin, in quimonoquilique, in ipampa tlaneltoquiliztli, iuhquinma teuquechol, tlauhquechol pouhtoc, in ompa Roma.

Their precious blood, which for the Faith in Rome they shed, Like the roseate spoonbill, the red spoonbill, is esteemed.

Louise Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Dialogue in SixteenthCentury Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 28–34, 214. 24 “In atl, in tlachinolli” or “in teoatl, in tlachinolli.” Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, preliminary study by Miguel León Portilla (Mexico, 1970), f. 8v. 25 Bierhorst, Cantares Mexicanos, 142–3. Second translation by Schwaller. 26 There is a large bibliography on the centrality of parallelism to Hebrew poetics. James L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) and Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985) both deal with the importance of parallelism. 27 Garibay, Historia, vol. I, 65. 28 Sahagún, Psalmodia christiana, 190–91. 23

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The names of the two species of spoonbill in Nahuatl are quite evocative. The roseate spoonbill in Nahuatl is literally the “divine spoonbill” while in Nahuatl the red spoonbill is literally the same in English, “red spoonbill.” The translation by Anderson, nevertheless, does not honor the Nahuatl syntax, which is quite complicated. A closer syntactical translation would be: Their precious blood, it was shed, for the Faith, like the roseate spoonbill, the red spoonbill it fell, there in Rome.

Thus in the original Nahuatl, the synonymous parallelism is made between “their precious blood” and “like a roseate spoonbill,” and “the red spoonbill it fell.” As will be seen later, feathers are one of the common Nahuatl metaphors for something precious yet delicate and perishable. A fascinating example of synonymous parallelism from the pre-conquest tradition comes from the Song of Temilotzin in the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España collection. In this song Temilotzin sings of the benefits of friendship, making comparisons with precious feathers.29 Ye nihualla, antocnihuan in, noconcozcazoya, nictzinitzcamanya, nictlauhquecholihuimolohua, nicteocuitlaicuiya, nicquetzalhuixtoilpiz in icniuhyotli. niccuicailacatzoa cohuayotli in tecpan nicquixtiz an ya tonmochin.

Already I come, to you all my friends I come wearing jewels. I spread trogon [feathers]. I stir up the roseate swan feathers I wrap it with gold I tie up the friendship with quetzalhummingbird [feathers] I sing wrapping the assembly. At the palace I already leave all of ours.

The beauty of this selection is quite complex, and highly illustrative of Nahuatl poetics. Obviously the lines all begin with the same syllable “nic-.” This is the first-person subject marker and the third-person object marker. The exceptions are the first two phrases, which are also in the first person. The first phrase involves an intransitive verb (hualla, to come), which takes no object; the second (cozcazoa, to adorn oneself with jewelry) is reflexive, and thus the subject is the object. Simply all the phrases are cast in the first person, which is not all that remarkable. What is remarkable is that the poet has chosen to use a rather elegant construction in which not only is there the object marker, as required by Nahuatl grammar, but he has also inserted the actual object into the verb. In the third line, there is the verb “nictzinitzcamanya.” The “nic-” is the first-person subject marker and the third person object marker; “-tziniztca-” is the word for a trogon, a type of tropical 29 Brigitta Leander, In xochitl in cuicatl- Flor y canto: la poesía de los aztecas (Mexico: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1972), 106–7.

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bird with brilliant lustrous plumage; “mana” is the verb stem which means to spread something out flat, and by extension a metaphorical meaning of making an offering, presumably by spreading it out in front of an altar or image. The fourth line contains the same word for roseate spoonbill as seen in the psalm to Saints Peter and Paul, but the author here chose to translate it as a “roseate swan.” In each of the following verbs, the poet has included the object within the verb structure. This is an uncommon procedure and heightens the complexity of the discourse and elevates the overall tone. Thus these phrases which on the surface seem to be largely synonymously parallel, in terms of their deeper structure are significantly parallel in that that the verb of each phrase, and in Nahuatl a verb can contain all the elements of a sentence, follows the same rather arcane construction. This use of synonyms to carry the poetic impact of the poem is also found in the Biblical antecedents upon which Sahagún also based his work. For example in Genesis 49:11 one finds: He washes his clothes in wine, his robes in the blood of the grape.

In the second half of the selection, the poet has chosen to use the metaphorical description of wine, “blood of the grape.”30 Thus, Temilotzin in the Romances uses a long series of highly complex metaphors for the concept of preciousness, just as the Biblical poet has used a metaphor for wine. The antithetical parallel is quite common among pre-conquest Nahuatl poetry because it juxtaposes two notions that can be considered antithetical in order to create a new reality. Within the Psalmodia it is a bit less common, although the internal structure of the Psalms lends itself to the variant, since most lines are divided into two halves, which structurally can be parallel, antithetical, or merely explanatory.31 In the tenth psalm in celebration of Saint Dominic an example of antithetical parallelism appears. In describing the opening of the saint’s tomb after his death, the miraculous condition of his body caused this response: “The pleasant smell that issued from God’s beloved Saint Dominic’s body was not like earthly pleasant odors; it was heavenly.”32 Another example, from the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, describes her role in preparing the way to heaven for the faithful: “I do not abandon you; I only go to prepare [a place] for you beloved priests.”33 In the original Nahuatl the parallelism is more striking since the same root verb is used in both clauses, cauilia: “namechnotlalcauilia” and “namechnotlacencauililitiuh.” Example from Alter, The Art, 16. Biblical quotation from the New Jerusalem Bible. This corresponds closely to Hebrew poetics as described by Kugel, The Idea, 2–12. 32 “In auiaializtli, in itech quizaia in inacaiotzi in Itlazo in Dios in sancto Domingo, 30 31

amo iuhqui in tlalticpac auiaializtli, ca ilhuicacaiutl.” Sahagún, Psalmodia, 228–9. 33 “Amo namechnotlalcauilia, ca zan namechnotlacencauililitiuh, tlazoteupisque.” Sahagún, Psalmodia, 250–51.

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A simple example of the antithetical parallel in the pre-Columbian tradition comes from a poem written by Cacamatzin, one of the few poets known by name. This poem is part of the large collection of the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España.34 Ach zan ninomati. Mochi conitohua. Am in anel in tlatohua tlalticpac.

Possibly, I only know myself. Everyone goes about saying it. But on earth no one says the truth?

The antithetic parallel of this fragment consists in the juxtaposition of the word for speaking or saying, “itohua.” In the middle phrase everyone is saying it, and in the last phrase the veracity of the statement is called into doubt. But the beauty of the poem is that even the truthfulness of the initial concept, “I only know myself,” is called into question, especially since the poet introduces the phrase with two mildly contradictory words, “ach,” meaning possibly or simply implying doubt, and “zan,” meaning only and being a word that emphasizes the uniqueness of the statement. Unfortunately in English the placement of the “only” tends to either state that “only I know myself,” meaning others do not, or “I only know myself,” meaning that I know myself but that I do not know others. In Nahuatl the “only” spreads to the whole statement implying its uniqueness. Antithetical parallelism is found most commonly in the book of Proverbs. There the examples abound, in that one line introduces a concept, while the second frequently turns it on to its head in a contradictory manner. The combination of the two lines, then gives a moral or teaching, full of wit, that is characteristic of the book. For example, Proverbs 11:1, from the collection attributed to Solomon: A false balance is abhorrent to Yahweh, a just weight is pleasing to him.

In this case the two lines closely parallel each other. One describes the error filled path of deceit and trickery, the second the virtuous path of fairness and justice.35 The synthetic variant of parallelism is much more difficult to document, since it involves a parallel statement that slightly modifies, expands, or changes the initial statement. On the other hand, much of Nahuatl poetic discourse involves the repetition with slight variation of a theme or image, and thus taken broadly, this variant could be considered the most common of all. Take for example this sentence from the fourth psalm for Saint Martin of Tours. According to the psalm by Sahagún, after St. Martin’s popular acclamation as bishop, the local clergy deprecated him saying, “He is small. He is very poor. He is unworthy of being honored.” While in English it looks like a synonymous parallelism, in the original

Leander, In xochitl in cuicatl, 150–51. Translation by Schwaller. Example from Alter, The Art, 168. Biblical quotation from the New Jerusalem Bible. 34 35

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Nahuatl it is synthetic: “Ca tepiton, ca cenca motolinia, camo mauiztililoni.”36 Rather than being strictly parallel, each phrase is slightly different in its structure. It is not based on synonyms but rather the repetition of simple statements, varied each time. Perhaps a better translation, to demonstrate this effect, would be, “Indeed he is small. Indeed he goes about very much being poor. Indeed he is not someone to be honored.”37 In the Nahuatl, each phrase has different grammatical structure from the one before, although each is introduced by “ca” or its negative equivalent “camo,” each one builds on the central theme of the unsuitability of the saint. The first psalm to St. Sebastian exhibits a similar use of the synthetic parallelism. In describing the saint, Sahagún stated: “This saint was a very noted nobleman, an exalted nobleman, a highborn nobleman, and he was very good of heart.” Again in the Nahuatl the internal structure is more visible: “Inin sancto, cenca uei pilli, tecpilli, tlazopilli, auh cenca qualli in iollo.”38 The Nahuatl word pilli means a noble person. Here Sebastian is thrice described as noble: “a great nobleman, a lordly nobleman, a beloved nobleman, very good of heart.”39 In this manner, each description builds on the previous to create the overarching impression of high nobility, not just by birth, but to his “very good heart,” “cenca qualli in iollo.” Examples of synthetic parallelism are not infrequent in the pre-conquest poetic tradition. A very beautiful example, not unlike those seen in the Psalmodia, comes from within a historical account of the city-state of Cuauhtitlan, located to the immediate northwest of modern-day Mexico City. In the history of the city a song from the cycle of myths surrounding the great culture hero-god Quetzalcoatl appears. The song was one taught to him by Ihuimecatl, a legendary magician40: Quetzal quetzal nocalli Zacuan nocallin Tapach nocallin Nicyacahuaz.

My house is of quetzal feathers My house is of yellow birds My house is of coral I must leave it.

Again, while the English translation makes it appear to be strictly synonymously parallel, in Nahuatl the variations of the words and grammatical structure tend to make it synthetic. The images, almost intimate, of the house, create a sense of preciousness. The tag line of the stanza then breaks with this feeling and creates a tone of remorse. In the following selection from a poem of war, the synthetic parallelism makes reference to the two orders of Nahua knights, the order of the jaguars (ocelot) and of the eagles41: 36 Sahagún, Psalmodia, 330–31. Anderson translates as “He is small. He is very poor. He is unworthy of being honored.” 37 Translation by Schwaller. 38 Sahagún, Psalmodia, 46–7. Anderson translates as: “a very noted nobleman, an exalted nobleman, a high-born nobleman, and he was very good of heart.” 39 Translation by Schwaller. 40 Brigitta Leander, In xochitl in cuicatl, 238–9. Translation by Schwaller. 41 Ibid., 186–7. Translation by Schwaller.

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Here the eagle becomes a man Here the ocelot already speaks in Mexico.

As in so many other cases, the English translation sets up a much closer parallelism than in the original Nahuatl. The poetic devise used here allows the animals that represent the two orders of knights to be personified. The implication is that the warriors take on the attributes of the patron animals, while the poem itself speaks to the animals taking on the attributes of men. The end result is a beautiful image of the Nahua warrior as identified through the patron animals. Biblical scholars continue to debate the different types of parallelism used in the Psalms. One type frequently mentioned, but not included in Garibay’s study of Nahua poetry, is the stair-like parallelism, whereby a theme is repeated, changing slightly each time to build a complex image. An example can be found in the first psalm for the feast of St. James, the Apostle, each line begins with a command42: Ma onquiza, ma oncaoani…. Ma iximacho, ma mocaqui…. Ma onmotta, ma teispan tlalilo…. Ma iecteneualo in itlazoEspada….

Let the fame,… be diffused, be remembered…. Let the works, … be known, be heard…. Let it be seen, let it be shown…. Let his precious sword be praised….

Numerous other examples can be cited, but this one serves well, since in nearly every line it is actually a double exhortation, “Let it be known, be heard.…” And each line is exactly parallel in construction with the others. Unfortunately it is very difficult to make the English translation manifest the same parallelism. A comparable example of stair-like parallelism will be considered later with examples of the use of the refrain. The use of connector words to bind together different ideas or concepts is present in the Psalmodia as a standard feature of the language. The most common, and nearly ubiquitous, connector word was “auh,” which can mean “and” or “but,” depending on the context. It is used with great frequency at the beginning of a metrical / poetic line in many series in the Psalmodia. One such series comes from the fifth psalm to Saint Mark, the Evangelist43:

42 Sahagún, Psalmodia, 200–201. The full quotation is: “Ma onquiza, ma oncaoani, ma ueca actimoteca in itenio in imauizio, in itlaço in Dios, in Sanctiago Apostol./ Ma iximacho, ma mocaqui, ma onmauiçolo in itlachiual, in inechicaual, in vei tiacauh in toCapitan,/ Ma onmotta, ma teispan tlalilo, inic cuecueiuca in itlatqui cauallo tlaçotlatquio, cenca mauiçauhqui./ Ma iecteneualo in itlaçoEspada, in cenca pepetlacatiuh, inic tlauitectiuh, in qui[n]xaxamatztiuh in itoaoa.” “Let the fame, the glory of God’s beloved Saint James the Apostle be diffused, be remembered, be spread far abroad./ Let the works, the courage of the peerless valiant warrior, our captain, be known, be heard, be honored./ Let it be seen, let it be shown that the harness of his white horse most marvelously shimmers with [its] precious fittings./ Let his precious sword be praised, which glistens brightly as it strikes about, as he puts our foes to flight.” 43 Ibid., 126–9.

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Auh in iquac oquimonequilti totecuio Dios… Auh ca intencopa oilpiloc…. Auh in iquac teilpiloia oquicalaquique… Auh in imuztlaioc, iquechtla oquilpilique… Auh in iehoanti tlateutocanime….

And when God our Lord required…. And at their word he was arrested…. And when they put him into prison And the next day they bound him …. And the worshippers of idols….9

The Feast of St. Mary Magdalene provides another example of the use of connector words to link parallel descriptors. This example describes a series of events related to the life of the saint and her place in the communion of saints. What is interesting about this series is that each line begins with “When” (In iquac) and ends with the name of the saint: When our Jesus Christ our Lord was risen, He first showed Himself to His beloved Saint Mary Magdalene. When Jesus Christ our Lord ascended into Heaven, it happened in the presence of His beloved Saint Mary Magdalene. When the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles, He descended also upon Saint Mary Magdalene.44

In the corpus of pre-conquest poetry, there are many examples of the use of connector words in creating extended meanings. From the collection of the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España comes this example45: In zan tictlazotzetzelohua in motechpa ye huitz in monecuiltonol ipalnemohua in izquixochitli cacahuaxochitli zan noconnelehuiya zan ninentlamatia

Only you lovingly shake it [make it rain] from you already comes our prosperity, he through whom all things live, the popcorn flowers, the cacao flowers. I only went along desiring it I only despaired of knowing where to go.

The connector word “in” is extremely common in Nahuatl. On the one hand it normally functions as the definite article and can be translated as “the.” On the other hand, it can also be used to introduce dependent clauses. In some contexts, as the introductory particle to dependent clauses, it can be translated as “that.” But in most other environments it simply does not correspond to a word in English. Nevertheless, through its use as a clause initiator, it provides for a sense of continuity, linking the disparate parts of this poem to create the overall sense of the search for destiny. The last two lines are introduced by “zan,” which literally means “only.” This word too is frequently difficult to translate, since as a conjunction it creates the sense of uniqueness in the clause that follows it.46 As a result, in English, the only would tend to define the action of the clause. Ibid., 200–201.

44

Leander, In xochitl in cuicatl, 100–101. Translation by Schwaller. Karttunen and Lockhart consider the presence of “zan” as a possibly rhythmical marker and not a word at all, “La estructura,” 26. 45 46

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Refrains were common poetic devises in Nahuatl poetry in the pre-conquest tradition. Much of the poetry that has persisted to the present day from before the conquest came from a song tradition, in which one might expect refrains, which also assisted as memory devises for the singer. There is, however, a relative lack of refrains in the Psalmodia. The closest approximation can be found in the eighth psalm celebrating Saint Dominic. In this example the refrain serves to introduce each line of the psalm, rather than come at the end of each line or stanza. The refrain is “God’s beloved Saint Dominic, in all the time he lived on earth,” “Yn iehoatzi in itlaço in Dios in sancto Domingo, in isquich cauitl tlalticpac omonemiti.” Then each line has a separate conclusion: “changed the lives of many sinners,” or “stopped the mouths of many heretics and he taught them that they should accept the true Faith.”47 In the pre-conquest tradition, there are numerous poems with refrains. One of the most haunting is the “Sad Song” of Nezahualcoyotl, in the collection of the Romances. Nezahualcoyotl was perhaps the most famous, and perhaps most prolific, poet of the pre-conquest era, and king of the city state of Texcoco. His name means “Hungry Coyote.” This is one of his most famous poems48: My heart hearts a song, I begin to cry. Already I know myself. We go among flowers. We will leave the earth here. We are loaned to one another. We go to His house. Put on me a necklace of varied flowers. They are in my hands, Garlands flower on me. We will leave the earth here. We are loaned to one another. We go to His house.

Cuicatli quicaqui In noyol nichoca: Ye nicnotlamati Tiya xochitica Ticcautehuazque tlalticpac ye nican Titotlanehuia O tiyazque ichan. Ma nicnocozcati nepapan xochitl Ma nomac on mani Ma nocpacxoxhihui. Ticcautehuazque tlalticpac ye nican Zan titotlanehuia O tiyazque ichan.

The refrain here, “We are loaned to one another. We go to His house,’ is the theme of the poem, that earthly life is transitory and that we are not given to one another but only loaned to one another through friendship. The first three lines of the second stanza also demonstrate the use of the stair-like parallelism in that each sentence is a command beginning with the word “ma.” Taken as a whole they develop a picture of the poet in contact with the delicate and precious items of earthly existence. Pre-conquest poetry, as noted, was an oral tradition. Most of the poems were set to music or had rhythm accompaniment. One of the features of the pre-conquest poems is the use of nonsense syllables and what seem to be either ejaculations to accompany the songs or perhaps a type of rhythmic notation. Some of these nonsense syllables are like the “fa, la, la, la” in traditional English song. Sahagún, Psalmodia, 226–7.

47

Leander, In xochitl in cuicatl, 138–9. Translation by Schwaller.

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Nevertheless, this feature is entirely missing from the Psalmodia, possibly because Sahagún did not conceive of the songs being accompanied in the old manner, and possibly because he himself did not understand the notation system. Nearly every poem from the Romances collections includes these notations. Sometimes they are freestanding, sometimes literally imbedded in the line. Here is another selection attributed to Nezahualcoyotl49: Xochipetlatipan toconyaiculiohua in mocuic in matlatol nopiltizin oo tiNezahualcoyotzin Ahuayya yahui yya yye Ohuayya ya Ohuaya Ohuaya

On a mat of flowers You go painting it Your song, your speech My honored prince You Nezahualcoyotl

In this example the rhythmic words (marked in bold, italic, underline) both stand alone, as in the last two lines of the poem, but are also embedded into the words of the poem. In some instances they are simple intrusions, as in the second line when the “ya” is inserted in the middle of the verb. In other instances while being intrusive, they also change the word, based on the rules of Nahuatl phonetics. In the third line, the second word, “your speech,” would normally be “motlatol.” Here an intrusive “a” has been inserted. Being a stronger vowel it replaces the “o” completely. On the other hand, “my song” should be “mocuica,” and the “a” has been suppressed, one assumes for rhythmical purposes.50 The last of the other common figures of pre-Columbian poetry to be considered was the use of metaphors of flowers, birds, and precious stones to indicate divinity and preciousness. While the total repertoire of these in the Psalmodia is extensive, especially images of flowers, generally it is on a par with the song cycles documented in the Cantares or the Romances. Some clear examples can be found in the use of flowers. The first selection is a part of the Psalms for the celebration of Easter51: In teuiutica in tijollosuchitl, in ticacalosuchitl, in telosuchitl, in titlapaltecomasuchitl, in tipiltzi sancta Iglesia, in ticiuatl xipapaqui, ximotlamachti In teuiutica tisuchitototl, in telotototl, in ticentsontlatole, in tiuitzitziltzi, in ie amuchinti in amipilhoa in dios, in amangeloti xioalmouicaca, xiciaoalotimaniqui in toteuitoal

You divine talauma, popcorn flower, magnolia, red solandra flower, you daughter of the holy Church, you woman: be happy, be joyous. You divine orioles, you grosbeaks, you mockingbirds, you humming birds, all you sons of God, you angels; come, circle around the courtyard of our church.

Garibay, Poesía Nahuatl, vol. 1, 49. Translation by Schwaller. For as fuller discussion of the non-lexical rhythmic material inserted in traditional Nahua poetry see Karttunen and Lockhart, “La estructura,” 22–9. 51 Sahagún, Psalmodia, 112–13. 49

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This compares rather closely to songs from the Pre-Columbian tradition. By way of direct comparison, the following is a stanza from a song performed before the great prince Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco52: Ma xicyahuelintzotzona moxochihuehueuh ticuicanitl ma izquixochitli man cacahuaxochitli ma ma onmoyahua ontzetzelihui ye nica huehuetitlano man tahuiyacani ya çan ca xiuhquechool tzinitzcan tlauhquechol oncan oncuican tlatohuaya y xochitl ai paqui

Beat your flower drum beautifully, singer. Let there be popcorn flowers, cacao flowers. Let them scatter, let them sprinkle down beside the drummer. Let us have joy. There! The turquoise swan, the trogon, the roseate swan is singing, warbling, happy with these flowers.

The repertoire of flower images in the Psalmodia is significant, not unlike the pre-Columbian song cycles. Images of birds and feathers are less common in the Psalmodia than in the pre-Columbian repertoire. Taken as a whole, the use of these images and metaphors clearly would have struck a chord in the listeners to Sahagún’s psalms, making them recall the older poetic tradition. Within the Psalmodia, Sahagún’s purpose is clear: he wished to use traditional song forms with a heavily revised and Christianized vocabulary, and thereby modify them to further the work of evangelization. He chose to accomplish this through a hybrid poetic form. He called the works “psalms,” but on the surface the works he composed seem to have more in common with traditional Nahua song than with the biblical tradition. Nevertheless, in the use of parallelism Sahagún clearly drew upon some biblical examples. One scholar has posited that the title Psalmodia was chosen to gain publication for a project which if it had carried another title might be rejected.53 This confusion is clearly seen in the letters that introduce the original work. One of the consultants who read the work prior to its receiving permission to be published, refer to it as a “psalmodia de cantares,” a psalmody of songs. Sahagún, himself, as noted earlier, refers to them as cantares, or songs. It is quite possible, then, that Sahagún might not have received permission to publish a simple collection of songs in Nahuatl, but when characterized as psalms, they took on a legitimacy otherwise lacked. Song and dance were important features of pre-conquest religious expression. By ignoring or suppressing these forms of expression, the early missionaries could well have hindered the ultimate acceptance of Christianity. Sahagún recognized the incomplete nature of the conversion up until his time, and also understood, better than most, the more intricate nature of Nahua beliefs as well as enjoyed a fluency in their language. As a result he was able to combine pre-conquest poetic forms with Christian didactic works to create a hybrid, the Psalmodia, that would bridge the cultural gap between the Europeans and the Nahua. John Bierhorst, Cantares Mexicanos, 190–91. Translation is by Bierhorst. Louise Burkhart, “Sahagún’s Psalmodia and the Latin Liturgy,” in John F. Schwaller, (ed.) Sahagún at 500 (Berkeley: Academy of American Franciscan History, 2003), 105. 52 53

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Sahagún sought to approach the conversion of the Nahua from what scholars today might characterize as cross cultural. While he recognized the utility of works such as catechisms and confessional guides, he sought to achieve a deeper and more lasting change among the natives by adapting their traditions to Christianity. He inserted Christian doctrine and beliefs into traditional art forms, such as song, in order to more completely convert the native to Christianity. In the Psalmodia one can see the vestiges of the pre-Columbian verse forms upon which the new Christian songs were built. Yet one can also appreciate the Christian models upon which Sahagún also drew in creating his work.

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Index Note: An ‘n’ following a page number indicates a footnote; ‘t’ indicates a table; ‘f’ indicates a figure.

Austin, William 88 Avila, Juan de 175–7, 180, 187; see also Audi, filia (Avila)

Accession Day 191–2, 202, 210 aesthetics 117–18, 129 Ainsworth psalter 124–6, 128, 130, 132 Alamanni, Luigi 10 Algonquins 1–3 Allison, Richard 84–5, 94–6, 100 Alter, Robert 194 Ambrose 178 Anderson, Arthur J.O. 317, 319 Anderson, Judith H. 138 Andrewes, Lancelot 10–11 angels 268–9 Anne, Saint 301, 303f anthems 63, 69–70, 112–13 Arcangelo of Borgonovo 264–5, 268 Arenzana, Manuel 4 Aretino, Pietro 9–10, 156 Asclepiades 284 Ashwell, Mary 111 auctor 166–8 Audi, filia (Avila); see also Psalm 44 audience of 182 confessor-penitent relationships in 186–7 gendered language and clerical authority in 183–5 inversions in 185–6 and Jerome’s Letter 22 180 organization of 181 popularity of 179 purpose of 179 and Song of Songs 183–4 spiritual agency in 188 theme of listening 181 audience 62, 69–74 Augustine 178

Babington, Gervase 230–31 Bach, Johann Sebastian 4, 23 Bacon, Francis 86 Barthes, Roland 88–9 Basil, Saint 257 bass viol 96 Bassano Lanyer, Aemilia 93 Bay Psalm Book and aesthetics 117–18, 129 and common meter 126–9 and community 2–3 compared to Ainsworth psalter 124, 126, 128, 130, 132 compared to Sternhold and Hopkins psalter 124, 126–8, 130 “fidelity” of translation vs. “poetry” in 117, 120–21, 129 and New England colonial identity 115–16, 124 notation in 130–31 and singing education 14 visual layout of 121–3 Beaufort, Margaret 307 Bembo, Antonia 236 Bentley, John 72 Bentley, Thomas 201–3, 207 Berardi, Angelo; see also Miscellanea musicale (Berardi) and counterpoint 292–3 Documenti armonici 282 and Kabbalistic explanation of music’s power 258, 280–82, 289 and sources of Kabbalistic knowledge 262–73 Bergvall, Åke 198–200 Bernard of Clairveaux 180 Bèze, Théodore de 21, 43, 83

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Bible Algonquin translation of 1–2n2 Douai 67–9 English translations of 15–16 Geneva 220–21 Biblical exegesis authority of translation of vs. paraphrase 140–42 literal vs. allegorical models 145–6 Bilinkoff, Jodi 183 Bokenham, Osbern 309, 311 Book of Common Prayer 12–13n33, 16, 67–9 Book of Psalmes with the New English Translation, The (Leusden) 1 books, printed 13, 94, 109, 121–3, 308 Botticelli 311 Bourgeois, Loys 22, 43 Brathwaite, Richard 14 Bray, Roger 12 Brennan, Michael 224–5 British Library MS Add. 10337 111–14 British Library MS Add. 15117 100, 102–9 Brown, Raymond E. 195 Browne, William 227–8 Brucioli, Antonio 6–7, 9 Bucer, Martin 21 Burney, Charles 95 Butler, Charles 97–9, 102, 114 Butterworth, Charles C. 69–70 Byrd, William anthems 63–4, 69 and Geneva Psalter 63 and Paget 64 Psalm usage of 74–5t Psalmes, Sonets, & songs of sadnes and pietie 65–6 Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets . . .fit for Voyces or Viols 65 recusancy of 63–5 Songs of sundrie natures 65 use of Penitential Psalms 62, 66 works owned by recusant households 70–74 Cacamatzin 325 Cain, Thomas 198–200, 213 Calvin, John 20–21, 42, 124 Calvinist Psalter 43–4

Campensis, Johannes 138–39, 147–8 Campion, Edmund 63 Cantares mexicanos 319–20 Carrillo, Sancha 179 Cartagena, Teresa de 178 Castiglione, Baldessare 98–9 Catholic-Protestant divide 10–11, 25–6; see also recusancy Cave, Terence 50 Caxton, William 169–70 Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of David (Wyatt) composition of 155–6 headings for narrative prologues of 166–8 penance in 169–71, 171–4 publication of 160, 165 Reformation agenda furthered by 162, 164–5 scholarly readings of 156–8 Chandieu, Anthoine de la Roche de 51 chansons spirituelles 44–5 Chapman, George 118–19, 140 Chéron, Elizabeth Sophie collaboration with brother 237 and gendered language 239 and publication of Essay de pseaumes . . . 236 translation compared to Sidney’s Psalm 8 239, 241 Psalm 50/51 251, 253–4 Psalm 68/69 241–2, 244–5 Psalm 120/121 247–9, 251 Psalm 129/130 254–5 Psalm 136/137 245, 247 Chéron, Louis doubleness of vision in work by 255 emigration of 236–7 illustration work of 236–7 Psalm 8 238f, 240f Psalm 41/42 249, 250f Psalm 50/51 251, 252f Psalm 68/69 243f Psalm 120/121 247 Psalm 136/137 246f religion of 236 Choice Psalmes put into musick, for 3 Voices (Lawes) 112 Christian, Margaret 192

Index Christine de Pizan 8–9 Cinquante pseaumes (Goulart) contents of 56–9t as contrafacta 40–41 Goulart’s goal in creating 42 organization of 49–52, 60t origins of 38–40 preface of 53–6 as sacred space 47–53 and tradition of spiritual contrafacta 44–5 Clifford, Anne 96 Coeurdevey, Annie 47–8 Collinson, Patrick 191 common meter 126–7 confessor-penitent relationships 186–7 contrafacta 40–42, 44–5 Costley, Clare 10 Cotton, John 83, 116 Council of Trent 27 counterpoint 292–3 Coverdale, Miles on advantages of paraphrase 138 historical context of translations 153–4 ignorance of Biblical languages 137, 139 psalters produced by 15–17, 138 translation of Psalm 137 148–52 use of Campensis’ paraphrase 138–9, 143 on women as psalm singers 89 Cozzolani, Chiara Margarita 28 Cranmer, Thomas 12–13n33 Crim, Keith R. 195 Cromwell, Anne 109–11 Crowley, Robert 221 cultural energy, circulation of 199f Cummings, Brian 165 Dahood, Mitchell 148 Daniel, Evan 192 Daniell, David 21 David’s lyre 257–8, 260–61f, 282, 294–5; see also Berardi, Angelo; Miscellanea musicale (Berardi) Davies, John 208, 210, 227 Day of Doom (Wigglesworth) 129n44 demons 272–3 Denny, Edward 226

379

“Le Departir” (Lasso) 48 devotional texts 183; see also Audi, filia (Avila) Díaz, Mari 179 Dixon, John 207 Documenti armonici (Berardi) 282 Donne, John 219, 224, 226–8, 235 Dorenkamp, J.C. 130 Douai Bible 67–9 Dowland, John 11 Duffy, Eamon 312 Dunster, Henry 126 Eaton, J.H. 194 Edyall, Henry 72 Eliot, John 1–3 elite access to music 83–4 Elizabeth I. See also Faerie Queen, The (Spenser) Accession Day service 191–2, 202 and circulation of cultural energy regarding 199f model for Spenser’s apotheosis of 196 Royal Supremacy of 197, 208–9 sacral monarchy of 193, 200, 215 “two persons” of 214 and Virgin Mary 203–6 Emmerson, Richard 312–13 Erasmus 144, 154 Essay de pseaumes et cantiques mis en vers . . . (Chéron) 236–55; see also Chéron, Elizabeth Sophie; Chéron, Louis Ethiopia 4–5 Eusebius 201 exile 12 Faerie Queen, The (Spenser); see also Elizabeth I Elizabeth I as Belphoebe (born of virgin) 211–13 divine paternity of 200, 203–6 as Gloriana/Christ in 201–3 as “mediatrix” 199 as Prince of Peace in 207–8 as Sapience in 208–11 as Una in 207–10 Fer, Philibert Jambe de 43

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Ferguson, Jamie 15 Ferrar, Nicholas 12 Fisher, John 10–11 Flores, Alfonso 40 Floyd, Hugh 100 form-criticism 194 Freedman, Richard 21 Fruen, Jeffrey P. 210–11 Gabrieli, Giovanni 24 Gaffurius, Franchinus 262–3, 267–8 gardens as spiritual spaces 306 Gardiner, Harold 312 Garibay, Angel María 319, 322 Ge’ez language 4–6 gender 183–6, 235–6, 239 Geneva Bible 220–21 Geneva Psalter 21–3, 42, 63 Gilby, Anthony 228 Golding, Arthur 223 Goodblatt, Chanita 232 Gordon, Bruce 21 Goudimel, Claude 22–3, 43 Goulart, Simon; see also Cinquante pseaumes (Goulart) and Lasso 40–41 and music as sacred space 47–53 on proper context for Psalmic music 44 as Protestant spiritual writer 38 and spiritual potential of music 42 spiritual sonnet 48–9 Thrèsor d’Orlande de Lassus 41–2 Gradual Psalms 308–9, 311–12 Greenblatt, Stephen 10, 157 Greene, Roland 222 Gruber, Mayer 232 Guéroult, Guillaume 44 Gunkel, Hermann 193 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 313 Hamlin, Hannibal on authorship of Psalms 7n15 on English metrical Psalms 232 on Psalm 137 11–12 on Sternhold and Hopkins psalter 19, 124 on translation of Psalms 220 Handel, George Frideric 25 Hardin, Richard 214

Harington, John 160, 162–4, 166, 226, 229–31 Harington Russell, Lucy 229 harmonization 22–3, 25–6 Harvey, Gabriel 213 Heale, Elizabeth 10, 157–8, 173 Hebrew music 28–9 Henry V (Shakespeare) 313 Hilton, Walter 304 Hoby, Margaret (Dakins Devereaux Sidney) 92 Hooker, Richard 86, 191 Hooper, John 18 Howard, Henry 157 Hunnis, William 222–3 Hunter, David 183 immaculate conception 205 immigration 115, 121, 123 incest 203–4n35 Inquisition 315 instruments 96–7, 99 Ives, Simon 109–10 Jerome 141–2, 178, 180 Jerúsalem, Ignacio 27–8 Jewish mysticism; see Berardi, Angelo; Miscellanea musicale (Berardi) Johnson, Lynn Staley 204 Jones, G. Lloyd 230 Jones, John 93–4 Joye, George 159–60 Kabbalists; see Berardi, Angelo; Kircher, Athanasius; Miscellanea musicale (Berardi) Karttunen, Frances 319 Kerman, Joseph 66–7 King, John N. 204, 207 Kinnamon, Noel 223 Kircher, Athanasius; see also Musurgia universalis (Kircher) Oedipus aegyptiacus 279–80 rejection of Kabbalistic explanation of music’s power 280, 282–3, 288–9 Knowles, Melody 231–2 Knox, John 210 Krier, Theresa 207–8 Krummel, D.W. 132n52 Kytson, Thomas 73–74

Index Langland, William 8 Lanyer, Aemilia 226–7 Lasso, Orlando di 11, 40–41, 47–8, 50 Lawes, William 112–13 Le Jeune, Claude 51 Legenda Aurea (Caxton) 169–70, 309 Legendys of Hooly Wummen (Bokenham) 309, 311 Leusden, John 1–3 Lewalski, Barbara 197 Life of Our Lady (Lydgate) 301–2 Lifschutz, Ellen 157 literacy 301, 311, 313 Little Gidding 12–13 liturgical music; see also music; psalters; specific composers; specific works accessibility of 17 ancient inheritance of 23–4 early tunes for 18 gulfs bridged by 24 Italian influence on 26 and medieval plainchant 18 motets 29, 106 and polyphony 27n78 range of compositional styles 19–20 regulation of 27 Lobwasser, Ambrosius 23 Lockhart, James 319 Lollard Bible 15n38 London Museum MS 46.78/748 110–11 Louis XIV 29 Love, Nicholas 301 lute 97, 99 Luther, Martin 20, 120, 159 Lydgate, John 301–2 Lyon, Richard 126 McCabe, Richard 206 McClennen, Joshua 196 Magnificat 311–12 manuscript collections 70–74, 109–11 Marcello, Benedetto 28 Marot, Clément 21, 83 Massachusetts Bay colony 2, 115–16, 124, 133–4; see also Bay Psalm Book Mateer, David 65 Mather, Cotton 2–3n6, 119–20, 133–4 Mather, Increase 2–3 Matter, E. Ann 184

381

Matthew, Thomas 16 Merbecke, John 18 Messianic Scriptures 195, 198 Mews, Constant 183 Mezmure Daweet 4 Mezmure Kristos 5 Mildmay, Grace (Sharrington) 92–3, 97 Miller, David Lee 204 Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, The: A Reading Edition (Love) 301, 307 Miscellanea musicale (Berardi) compared to Musurgia universalis (Kircher) 274–5 Kabbalistic charts 261f and Kabbalistic explanation of music’s power 258–62 and music as metaphor 284–5 and music of the planets 285–6 and spirit theory 283–4 strings of David’s lyre according to Kabbalists 258–9 Moffet, Thomas 226 monarchy, sacral; see sacral monarchy Montmeja, Bernard de 51 Montrose, Adrian 213 morality 42, 80–81, 85–8 Morley, Thomas 87, 97–8 Morris, A.M.E. 117n10, 121, 127 Moscato, Judah 294–5 motets 29, 106 Mulcaster, Richard 85–6 Music; see also liturgical music guidelines for performance 97–9 influence of Psalms on development of early modern 24–5 Kabbalistic explanation of power of 257–8 medical explanation of power of 275–6, 279, 283–4 as metaphor 284–5 and planets 262–4, 267, 285–6 power of 42, 85–7 music reception history 62 music theory 290–91 “Musica serva Dei” (Wither) 79 musica speculativa 283–92 musical notation 14, 130–32 musical reforms of 1720s 133–4

382

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Musurgia universalis (Kircher) compared to Miscellanea musicale (Berardi) 274–5 enneachords 277–8 medical explanation of power of 275–6, 279 as source for Berardi 273–4 Myers, Jacob 193–5 Myroure of Oure Lady, The 305–6 mystery plays; see N-Town Play mystical literature 175–6 Nahuatl language, and Psalmodia Christiana (Sahagún) 317 Nahuatl poetic tradition antithetical parallelism 324–5 collections 319–20 connector words in 327–8 and diphrases 321–2 metaphors in 330–31 nonsense syllables in 329–30 parallelism in 322–4 refrains in 329 stair-like parallelism 327, 329 synonyms 324 synthetic parallelism 325–7 water metaphors in 322 Najara, Israel 4 Neville, Cecily 307 Nezahualcoyotl 329, 331 Norton, David 119n15, 221 Norton, Thomas 119 Noue, Odet de la 45 N-Town Play 300, 304–6; see also Virgin Mary nuns, musical activities of 28 nuptial spirituality 176, 182, 184–5; see also Audi, filia (Avila) Oedipus aegyptiacus 288–9 Oedipus aegyptiacus (Kircher) 279–80 Ometochtzin, Carlos 315 Orme, Nicholas 302 Othello (Shakespeare) 80, 100 Overbury, Thomas 94 Paget, Thomas 64, 72 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da 27n78 Palissy, Bernard de 46–7

paraphrase 138, 144–6, 152–4; see also translation Parker, Matthew 196–7, 221, 224 Parr, William 160, 162–4, 166 Paston, Edward 70–72 penance 171 Penitential Psalms; see also Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of David (Wyatt); Chéron, Elizabeth Sophie Brucioli’s translation of 6–7 Byrd’s use of 62, 66 and Catholic-Protestant divide 10–11 historical context of, during Reformation 158–9 influence on literature 7–10 instrumental versions of 11 Pepys, Samuel 111, 113 performance practices 132–3 Petrarca, Francesco 7 Petre, John 72 Pevernage, Andreas 41 Pico della Mirandola 264, 266, 268, 272 Piers Plowman (Langland) 8 Pineaux, Jacques 45 plainchant 18 planets 262–4, 266–7, 285–6 Plática Tercera (Avila) 187 Poèmes chrestiennes 48–9 polyphony 27n78 Portrait of Lady Henry Cavendish (née Lady Grace Talbot) (anon.) 89–92 Potken, Johann 5–6 Praetorius, Michael 257 Praise of Musicke, The (anon.) 77, 84, 92 prayer closets 81 Prester John 5–6n11 Proclus 271 Proverbs 325 Prynne, William 89 Psalm 8 239–41 Psalm 16 89 Psalm 23 127–9 Psalm 39 113 Psalm 44 175–6, 178–81, 185, 188 Psalm 46 111 Psalm 50/51 251–4 Psalm 51 8, 102–6 Psalm 62 23

Index Psalm 68 112 Psalm 68/69 241–5 Psalm 85 306–7 Psalm 97 226 Psalm 104 47 Psalm 109 (Vulgate) 27–8 Psalm 120/121 247–9, 251 Psalm 129/130 254–5 Psalm 130 11, 106–9 Psalm 136/7 245–7 Psalm 137 11–12, 143, 147–53 Psalm 149 26 Psalm 150 29 psalm singing 13–14, 77, 83, 92–3 Psalmes (Sidney) contemporary readers’ views on 226–7 poetic form vs. sacred function of 219–20, 221–4 on public vs. private use of 224–5 as religious instruction 229–30 as Word of God 229, 233 Psalmes, Sonets, & songs of sadnes and pietie (Byrd) 65–6 Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets . . .fit for Voyces or Viols (Byrd) 65 Psalmes and Hymns (Watts) 119–20 Psalmes of David in Meter (Allison) 94–6 Psalmodia Christiana (Sahagún); see also Sahagún, Bernardino de composition of 316–18 and diphrase poetic device 321–2 as evangelical tool 317, 331 organization of 318–19 as poetic hybrid 320 psalmody 44, 318; see also liturgical music; psalters Psalms; see also specific Psalms; types of Psalms authorship of 7n15 and development of musical forms 24–5 English translations of 9–10 Ge’ez (archaic Ethiopian) translations of 4–6 Gradual 308–9, 311–12 gulfs bridged by 3, 24 Italian translations of 6–7, 8–10 “lining out” of 132–3 and literacy 313

383

memorization of 13–14 metrical 15–17, 83, 220 mutability of 4 parallelism in 327 performance practices of 132–3 poetic form vs. sacred function of 222–4 and religious practice 12–13, 306–7 and Virgin Mary as reader of 301–2, 304–5 Psalter (Rolle) 305–6 Psalterium David et Cantica aliqua 6 psalters. See also liturgical music; specific titles Ainsworth 124–6, 128, 130, 132 Calvinist 43–4 Coverdale 15–17, 138 French 21 Geneva 21–3, 42, 63 German 20 and harmonization 22–3 Sternhold and Hopkins 18–19, 70, 124, 126–8, 130 Publications; see books, printed Purcell, Henry 25 Quitslund, Beth 10 Radbertus, Paschasius 178 Randall, Catharine 46 Ravenscroft, Thomas 25–6, 86, 97–8 Raynald, Thomas 160, 164 Rebholz, R.A. 157 Receivers; see audience recusancy 63–5 Rees, Owen 70 Reformation agenda furthered by Certayne psalmes . . .(Wyatt) 160, 162, 164–5 effects on drama 312–13 effects on liturgy 312 and Harington 162–4 and Parr 162–4 and Penitential Psalms 158–9 reforms; see musical reforms of 1720s religious practice 12–13 Reynes, Robert 307 Rienstra, Debra 223 Rogers, Elizabeth (Fayre) 111–14

384

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Rogers, John 16 Rolle, Richard 305–6 Romances de los señores de la Nueva España 319, 323–5, 328 Rosenroth, Christian Knorr von 266 Royal Psalms 193–202, 212 Royal Supremacy 197–8, 208–9, 214; see also Elizabeth I sacral monarchy 193, 198, 214–15; see also Elizabeth I Sahagún, Bernardino de 316–17; see also Psalmodia Christiana (Sahagún) Salve Rex Judaeorum (Bassano Lanyer) 93 Samuel, Thomas Walda 5 Sandys, George 112 Scase, Wendy 302 Scheper, George L. 205 Schütz, Heinrich 24 Sefirot; see also Miscellanea musicale (Berardi) definition of 259 different worlds of 270 in Miscellanea musicale (Berardi) 267f in Oedipus aegyptiacus (Kircher) 281f Sewall, Samuel 133 Shakespeare, William 80, 100, 313 Shell, Alison 12 Shuger, Debora 214–15 Sidney, Mary; see also Psalmes (Sidney) artistic achievement of 227–8, 232 and clothing metaphor 222–3, 225 contemporary praise of 232–3 musical arrangements of translations by 99–109 piety of 227–8, 232 political commentary of 237 scholarship of 228, 230–33 translation compared to Chéron’s Psalm 50/51 251, 253–4 Psalm 68/69 241–42, 244–5 Psalm 120/121 247–9, 251 Psalm 129/130 254–5 Psalm 136/137 245, 247 as transmitter of sacred text 222 Sidney, Phillip 84, 116, 220, 239, 241 snakes 268 Song of Songs 178, 183–4 Songs of sundrie natures (Byrd) 65

Speculum Virginum 183 Spenser, Edmund; see Elizabeth I; Faerie Queen, The (Spenser) spirit theory 275–6, 279, 283–4 spiritual spaces 46–7, 80–81, 306 Spirituali 6n12 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre 39 Staley, Lynn 157 Sternhold and Hopkins psalter 18–19, 70, 124, 126–8, 130 Stevens, Martin 307–8 Strong, Roy 208 Stubbes, Phillip 87 Swarland, John 100 Sweeper, Walter 228 Talbot, Grace 89–92 Targoff, Ramie 17, 117 Taylor, Edward 121 Temperley, Nicholas 19 Thomas of Villanuova 282 Thrèsor d’Orlande de Lassus (Goulart) 41–2 Translation; see also Bible Biblical 119 conflicting 16th-century views on 140–42, 145 as creative act 118–19 definition of 121n27 gap between original and 220 gender of Psalmic voice in 235 Jerome on 141–2 Luther on 120 as metaphor for immigration 121, 123 and poetry 221 Puritans’ views of 120 Tyndale’s defense of English Bible 142 word-for-word vs. paraphrase 144 Tufts, John 14 Tyndale, William 15, 142, 145–6 typology 196, 214 Udall, Nicholas 144 “Upon the Tomb of the most Reverend Mr. John Cotton” (Woodbridge) 123n30 Valdez, Juan 6n12 van der Woude, Joanne 2

Index Virgin Mary 203–6, 300–305, 307–9, 311 virginal (keyboard) 99 Waddington, Raymond B. 9, 158 Walker, Greg 158, 165 Walpole, Henry 63 Watts, Isaac 119–20 Weber, Alison 177 Wells, Robin Headlam 211 Wescott, B.F. 154 Weston, William 64 White, Paul Whitfield 312 Whole Book of Psalmes (1621; Ravenscroft) 86 Whole Book of Psalms Faithfully Translated into English Meter, The. See Bay Psalm Book Wigglesworth, Michael 129n44 Wilbye, John 73 Wilson, Elkin Calhoun 200, 205–6 Wither, George 7n15, 79, 196 Women; see also Audi, filia (Avila); Virgin Mary

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and class boundaries 92–4, 96 devotional lives of 307 education of 81–2, 231 morality of 80, 81, 88 music arranged for 94–5 musical activities of 28, 78–80 musical conduct for 98–9 and nuptial spirituality 182, 184–5 as Psalm readers 313 psalm-singing of 77, 92–3 Spenser’s view on 210 Woodbridge, Benjamin 123 Wright, Thomas 87 Wroth, Mary 230 Wyatt, Thomas 9–10, 155–6; see also Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of David (Wyatt) Wyclif, John 15n38 zero 245 Zodiac 269f Zohar 266–8