Readers of Church History will perhaps be familiar with Clare Costley King'oo's first monograph, which won the Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2012. King'oo's study distinguishes itself among other excellent scholarly works on the Psalter (such as those by Hannibal Hamlin, Michael P. Kuczynski, and Rivkah Zim) for its carefully considered focus on the unique textual tradition of the Seven Penitential Psalms. King'oo compellingly demonstrates the Penitential Psalms' reflexive relationship to a changing religious climate through her thoughtful treatment of their circulation in books of hours, theological commentaries, political polemic, funerary rites, songs, and lyric poems. Given King'oo's training as a literary scholar, her attention to the Penitential Psalms' form, genre, language, and even the material texts in which they were available yields exciting interpretations of their nuanced revisions and their implied audiences. Miserere Mei, like other works in Notre Dame's Reformations series, adroitly rethinks the conventional distinction between the “medieval” and “early modern” periods and thus serves as an inspired example of a diachronic study. In the narrative that she patiently tracks, King'oo shows that the Penitential Psalms traditionally used in medieval worship were not suppressed by the Reformers but rather appropriated and resignified by them.

Chapter 1 (“Illustrating the Penitential Psalms”) examines late medieval and early modern books of hours with special attention to images of David's legendary penance (found more often in earlier books) and David peering at the naked Bathsheba (found more often in later books). King'oo works to “denaturalize the connection between the Penitential Psalms and images of David's voyeurism” (31) to consider more carefully this trope's development. Invoking Foucault, she explains this change as a part of a larger campaign, namely, the “organization of confession and other penitential practices around sin and sexuality” (52). King'oo's discovery that David's sin came to be coded as sexual fruitfully complicates her argument when she turns to explaining its illustration in the New England Primer, which was used to teach children in colonial America how to read. She describes the cultural contexts in which this suggestive image circulated, concluding that it was not perceived as inappropriate for “innocent children” until the 19th century. For its meticulous attention to the complicated textual history of David's penance in the Penitential Psalms and their associated illustrations, this chapter stands out as the strongest in an excellent book.

For its study of the Penitential Psalms' endurance in early America, the first chapter sets up how Miserere Mei will likewise appraise early modern revisions of these conventional medieval texts. Chapter 2 (“The Conflict over Penance”) analyzes two early sixteenth-century theological commentaries: John Fisher's This treatise concernynge the fruytfull saynges of Dauyd in the seuen penytencyall psalms (1504) and Luther's Die sieben Bußpsalmen (written in 1517, revised in 1525). In light of how Fisher uses the seven psalms to promote the penitential systems of the orthodox church, we might expect Luther to dismiss the psalms. Yet, Luther instead sees in them a heuristic opportunity to question traditional penance thus to revise it. Although Fisher and Luther were among the book's least surprising examples for case studies, their strikingly different approaches to the Penitential Psalms provided necessary context for understanding the tradition in which subsequent writers were working, which is King'oo's objective in the next three chapters.

In Chapter 3 (“Plotting Reform”), King'oo explains how Thomas Wyatt's posthumously published verse paraphrase of the psalms, Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid (1549), “extends the polemical thrust” (22) of Luther's translation. Her treatment of Wyatt is one nice example (of many) where King'oo challenges received notions of the Protestant Reformation, in this case the conservative nature Henrician reform. Indeed, the first printed edition of Wyatt's text was sponsored by a number of radical reformers, a fact that she attributes to how Wyatt's interpretation “challenges the traditional penitential system” (128) at a time when reform-minded individuals “desperately needed to shore up their religious and political power” (128). According to King'oo, Wyatt's David “converts not just from sinner to saint but also from conservative (or orthodox) to evangelical penitent” (98). Informed by Roland Greene's paradigm of “modes of apprehension,” King'oo shifts from the fictional mode exemplified by Wyatt to the ritual mode in Chapter 4 (“From Penance to Politics”), which focuses on John Day's Christian prayers and meditations (1569), a book intended for Queen Elizabeth's personal use, and John Stubbs' translation of Theodore Beza's Christian meditations upon eight Psalms (1582), a text meant for use in new ritual contexts thus to vitalize Reformed communities. In chapter 5 (“Parody and Piety”), King'oo looks at the sustained impulse to revise the Penitential Psalms, which is evident in lyric poetry and songs from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. George Gascoigne and Sir John Harrington are among the English poets who “had begun to experiment with Penitential Psalms as vehicles for the expression not just of piety, or even of polemic, but also of personal forms of politics” (158). In the second half of this last chapter, King'oo chooses a stimulating final example: Richard Verstegan's Odes. In imitation of the seaven penitential psalms (1601). In its discussion of Vestegan's adaptation of the psalms into songs for English recusants, a moment in their textual history that suggests their devotional “reappropriation” (23), the conclusion to King'oo's diachronic narrative strikes a provocative relationship to its origins.

In her meticulous research on the Penitential Psalms, King'oo presents her readers with broader insights into changing attitudes toward penance. The ambitious claim made in her book's introduction that “penance played a vital role in development of Reformation thinking” that was “at least as much as—and perhaps even more than” (24) the Eucharist's rings true for the reader of this thoughtful and deliberate study.