Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature

by Hannibal Hamlin

• ISBN13: 9780521832700
• ISBN10: 0521832705
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature examines the powerful influence of the biblical Psalms on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. It explores the imaginative, beautiful, ingenious and sometimes ludicrous and improbable ways in which the Psalms were 'translated' from ancient Israel to Renaissance and Reformation England. No biblical book was more often or more diversely translated than the Psalms during the period. In church psalters, sophisticated metrical paraphrases, poetic adaptations, meditations, sermons, commentaries, and through biblical allusions in secular poems, plays, and prose fiction, English men and women interpreted the Psalms, refashioning them according to their own personal, religious, political, or aesthetic agendas. The book focuses on literature from major writers like Shakespeare and Milton to less prominent ones like George Gascoigne, Mary Sidney Herbert and George Wither, but it also explores the adaptations of the Psalms in musical settings, emblems, works of theology and political polemic.

Table of Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Note on the text

Introduction

Part I. English Metrical Psalmody

1. 'Very mete to be used of all sortes of people': The 'Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalter

2. 'Out-Sternholding Sternhold': some rival psalters

3. The Psalms and English poetry I. 'Greece from us these Arts deriv'd': Psalms and the English Quantitative Movement

4. The Psalms and English Poetry II. 'The highest matter in the noblest forme': Psalms and the development of English verse

Part II. Case Studies in Psalm Translation: 5. 'Happy Me! O Happy Sheep!': Renaissance pastoral and Psalm 23

6. Psalm 51: sin, sacrifice, and the 'Sobs of a Sorrowful Soule'

7. Psalm 137: singing the Lord's song in a strange land

Conclusion

Appendix: Psalms 25, 51, and 137 (Coverdale translation).