One of the most popular books in sixteenth-century England was The Whole Book of Psalms (WBP), first published in 1562. This metrical psalter was published more often and in greater numbers than nearly any other book in early modern England – as often as the English Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, both of which were often bound with copies of the WBP. There could have been 220,000 copies of the WBP in circulation by 1603 – one book for every eighteen inhabitants of England and Wales – and perhaps as many as a million copies produced by 1640.Footnote ¹

Understanding the importance of this new critical edition of the sixteenth-century Whole Book of Psalms requires a brief historiographical foray. Since the 1970s, English Reformation scholars have debated the speed and scope of the English Reformation. How and why did England become Protestant? Was the conversion a period of rapid reform demanded by a discontented laity,Footnote ² or a top-down imposition of Protestantism on a reluctant laity who were practising a robust form of traditional Roman Catholicism at the parish level?Footnote ³ Following a series of intense initial debates between traditionalist and revisionist historians, with both sides generally accepting that the majority of the English people had become Protestant in some sense of the word by the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth I, discussions in the late 1990s and early 2000s tended to turn their attention to the process by which the widespread conversion from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism occurred. English Reformation scholarship became increasingly interdisciplinary, as historians, English literary scholars, musicologists and others (collectively known as ‘post-revisionists’) have attempted to understand how Protestant ideas were communicated to the public.Footnote ⁴ Close reading of mass-produced forms of media, among them ballads and other forms of ‘cheap print’, along with studies of popular reading, have proved to be fruitful ways of examining the religious, cultural and political changes of sixteenth-century England and challenging the binaries of ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ genres, and oral and literate culture.Footnote ⁵

For many years, the WBP had been neglected by scholars, its poetry and music regarded as nothing more than doggerel. Post-revisionist attention to the experience of the common person resulted in a great deal of attention to the WBP and other facets of metrical psalmody in print and practice.Footnote ⁶ And yet, despite the nearly 500 years since its first publication and the concentrated scholarly attention paid to it since 2000, a critical edition of the WBP has never been published until now. It is not difficult to understand why: the task is monumental. The Elizabethan WBP was reprinted, usually multiple times, in multiple formats, and with different selections of paratextual materials, nearly every year between 1562 and 1603. Nearly 150 editions survive. Several rounds of revisions (of varying degrees of scope) to text, paratext and musical contents were undertaken, only some of which persisted. Poor typesetting (compounded by the occasional well-meant but erroneous compositors’ editing that further muddled the texts and music) posed a serious problem for users of the WBP, one that increased as the sixteenth century went on. With such editorial difficulties, where would a project of producing a critical edition even begin? Into this breach stepped the English literary scholar Beth Quitslund, who edited the WBP's texts, and musicologist Nicholas Temperley, who edited the psalter's music. Quitslund established herself as perhaps the foremost expert on the WBP with her 2008 monograph, The Reformation in Rhyme; Temperley was the first scholar to devote serious musicological attention to the WBP, beginning with his lauded Music of the English Parish Church in 1979, and returning to the WBP throughout his career, most notably in the Hymn Tune Index in 1998 and in a 2015 article.Footnote ⁷ Their task took ten years, and the critical edition has been eagerly anticipated (and, in this scholarly sphere, frequently footnoted as ‘forthcoming’). It was worth the wait.

With nearly 150 editions published in Elizabethan England in existence, from the first edition in 1562 to Elizabeth's death in 1603, and a vast array of variant readings, periodic systematic revisions and erroneous typesetting, Quitslund and Temperley very sensibly chose to employ a single edition as their copy text. A 1567 folio edition (unusually beautifully produced, and therefore typeset with greater care than most) was selected as the main text, ‘corrected where necessary, and supplemented with one tune and one additional psalm text’ (I, p. xv). In a paper given at the Sixteenth-Century Society discussing her editorial practice in creating this critical edition, Quitslund described her choice of the 1567 folio as copy text: this relatively early edition was ‘the first edition under the book's stable title that contained the stable and normally-ordered collection of forematter, psalms, hymns, and prayers. This meant a volume that was easily recognizable as a common “complete” form of the book for the first half of Elizabeth's reign, after which the range of contents became more variable.’Footnote ⁸ (Meanwhile, the musical editions of the tunes were each collated from a different selection of editions, not based on the 1567 folio.) With the goal of ‘foreground[ing] the book's instability’, the WBP critical edition also makes variant readings intentionally, even obtrusively, visible. The set of collated editions examined for variant readings is made up of thirty-six editions from 1556 to 1602, selected as those ‘that best represent the evolution of the texts and tunes, as well as the sheer range of variation in the WBP's texts over the Elizabethan period’ (I, p. xv).

In the critical edition, the material for each psalm or hymn is presented in largely the same order as in the WBP itself (plus the many editorial additions): psalm title (Latin incipit, psalm number and the initials of the versifier), prose argument, tune reference or score for the tune (if the latter, a list of tune sources is then provided), psalm text with marginal notes, and then the editorial apparatus: the abridged prose argument found in other editions, text sources and variants. The editorial apparatus is, as Quitslund freely acknowledges, extremely ugly, but also extremely effective in communicating the instability and change that so characterised the WBP. All texts are given in modern British English but with modern American punctuation. Music notation has similarly been modernised. The marginal glosses alongside psalm texts provide definitions for obsolete words, making the sense of this occasionally archaic language immediately clear to modern readers.

This critical edition of the WBP presents its text, in modernised spelling, with the many variants from the large (but still a small percentage) list of collated editions given as endnotes to each psalm. Line breaks are not preserved, however, because the larger folio editions unusually presented the metrical psalms in fourteener couplets rather than the more common quatrains. More importantly, this 1567 edition introduced a number of line variants that were not repeated in most later editions of the WBP, and which are not found in this critical edition. Other printing errors have been tacitly corrected at the editors’ discretion. In her presentation to the Sixteenth-Century Society, Quitslund said, ‘The resulting text verbally reproduces the copy text except when its reading is idiosyncratic in the context of the early Elizabethan editions.’Footnote ⁹ In short, this critical edition reproduces the 1567 folio edition, except where it does not. It therefore requires a great deal of trust in editors Quitslund and Temperley. Yet the care with which they approached their task, their clear attention to detail and the foregrounding of the editorial apparatus makes it safe to trust their judgement.

It is still worth noting, however, that this critical edition does not present the WBP as it was ever actually printed. No single WBP edition contained the exact reading given in Volume 1 (even disregarding the vagaries of Elizabethan spelling). It is more accurate to say that this critical edition contains an idealised WBP: the Whole Book of Psalms shown in its best light. Quitslund and Temperley state, from the outset, that they do not intend their critical edition to tackle thorny questions of intentions by authors or printers. Their extremely useful guide ‘How to Use this Edition’ opens: ‘The primary goal of this edition is not to recover the authors’ intentions’ (I, p. xxv). And yet, in attempting to recover (construct?) an idealised WBP, they must naturally make many assumptions about intent.

The supplemental material included in this critical edition is astonishing in its breadth, depth and quantity. Several prefaces in the first volume offer useful guidance for understanding the critical edition of the WBP itself, including the aforementioned guide ‘How to Use this Edition’, which introduces the text and the tunes, lays out editorial conventions, explains tune references and tune variants, and, to assist in reading and performance, offers a pronunciation guide to Elizabethan English and some practical considerations in singing the psalms according to contemporaneous practice. Meanwhile, the entire second volume consists of supplemental material: an extensive (166-page) ‘Historical Essay’ that offers the most comprehensive and detailed study of the WBP ever produced, and eight lengthy appendices. Several of these appendices are fully-fledged critical editions in their own right. These include a critical edition of the WBP's parent texts, Thomas Sternhold's 1549 Al Such Psalmes and variants from Sternhold and John Hopkins's 1549 Certayne Psalmes. Another appendix gives critical editions of six paratextual items often included in various WBP editions as prefatory or closing material. Temperley gives us an appendix detailing the greatly revised WBP tunes found in five editions dating from 1586, and another examining all other tunes found in any WBP edition through 1603 that did not appear in the 1567 copy text plus the ‘common tunes’ that appeared in some of the harmonised collections of WBP tunes, as well as the ‘nonsense tunes’ due to typesetting incompetence. And if this were not enough, the WBP critical edition also comes with supplemental audio materials online: recordings of twenty-nine psalms and hymns from the WBP, along with other metrical scriptural paraphrases, anthems, other relevant materials and programme notes.

Some scholarship (particularly in the realm of book history) will still require recourse to facsimiles on Early English Books Online (or visits to libraries and archives), not least because this critical edition fully modernises these primary sources. No original spellings, punctuation or music notation are given anywhere in the critical edition, despite the huge range of supplemental content offered by the appendices and extensive editorial apparatus. One wonders, however, just how many volumes it would take to reproduce original spellings or music notation in any comprehensive form. The few of us whose research depends on original typeface can (and will) continue to refer to images of the original editions; meanwhile this critical edition makes the WBP available to a much wider audience.

The construction of its audience, however, is the one slightly uncertain aspect of this editorial project. In music-historical circles, it is often useful to distinguish between scholarly editions, intended for an audience of fellow academics, stuffed full of editorial apparatus to prove our work and allow other scholars to build upon it, and performing editions, meant to make the music available to and easily usable by performers and amateurs, usually without an obscure editorial apparatus that uses unintelligible abbreviations, and often including musical features that make performance possible (such as setting subsequent verses of a strophic song as text underlay). Scholarly editions of early music usually make a point of maintaining or at least showing some indication of original notation (incipits that show original notation for the first note or first measure are a good example). In some ways, this critical edition, with its modern spelling and music notation, and its marginal glosses defining obsolete words, is a highly necessary means of making this psalter comprehensible outside academia, bringing its popular and highly influential scriptural versifications to light again for lay audiences. And yet the heft of these two volumes, the prominent editorial apparatus and the price make this critical edition fairly inaccessible to a non-specialist audience. This WBP critical edition attempts to achieve the goals of both performing and scholarly editions: making the WBP's texts easily understandable to modern audiences while also demonstrating the editors’ work and allowing scholars to see changes as tracked over a selection of other editions.

These small quibbles aside, this critical edition of the WBP is a much-needed and painstakingly detailed contribution to the fields of English Reformation scholarship and to early music. Any complaints about supplemental material left out of these two volumes feel foolish in view of the editorial materials provided. It is a fitting final entry in Nicholas Temperley's long and illustrious career, and we can be glad that he lived to see such a significant edition published.