Psalms have long held a special place in the Judeo-Christian tradition and nowhere more so than among Reformed Christians. Their incorporation into the Reformed liturgy transformed ordinary people's participation in the life of worship and served to define Protestant identity in the francophone world. The common view was that Reformed Protestants sang psalms at worship, in the home, and at work. By the early 1560s, Clément Marot and Theodore Beza had produced a French metrical translation of all of the psalms. Marot was among the greatest French poets of the sixteenth century. Beza was a preeminent Reformed theologian and important poet in his own right.

Max Engammare has prepared an exemplary critical edition of the 1562 Psalter, originally published at Geneva in a record breaking print run of thirty thousand copies. Although Marot and others had previously published French language psalters, this was the first complete edition of all 150 psalms along with the Song of Simeon. The present volume is the first modern critical edition of the text. Beyond making the 1562 Psalter widely available, the great virtue of this edition is the critical apparatus. The text is meticulously annotated. In addition, Engammare offers a lengthy introduction that analyzes prior, but incomplete sixteenth-century Reformed psalters as well as the language and poetics of Marot and Beza. He has appended an exhaustive list of sources, references, and textual variants as well as an invaluable glossary of unfamiliar terms. The resulting edition is a model of its kind.