This is the first book to look exclusively at English translations of the Penitential Psalms and hence represents a narrower focus than Hannibal Hamlin's excellent Psalm culture and early modern English literature (2004). As King'oo successfully argues, however, these Psalms form a particularly interesting group as their non-biblical ordering and intimate connection with penitential rites might have led one to expect that they would not have retained their popularity after the Reformation. King'oo argues that their continued importance means that they constitute ‘a site of theological, political, artistic, and poetic engagement across the many polarities that supposedly separate late medieval from early modern culture’ (p. 1). Instead of rejecting the Penitential Psalms reformers appropriated them ‘to develop their own theories of repentance’ (p. 19). The first chapter of the book looks at the increasing interest in the sexual nature of David's sin – from the end of the fifteenth century ‘illuminators and print illustrators alike turned from David's repentance to David's sin … [and] associate sin with sexual transgression’ (p. 48). Chapter ii compares commentaries on the Penitential Psalms by Fisher and by Luther, and looks at how Luther uses them to redefine ‘how penance should be done (or, more accurately, not done) in order to obtain divine forgiveness’ (p. 66). Literary scholars will be particularly interested by chapter iii, which performs a new reading of Wyatt's paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms and investigates what their specific appeal might have been for the Edwardian reformers who chose to print them (rather than any of the other versions in circulation). Chapters iv and v look at the social and political aims of various early modern translations, such as those in devotional manuals and those by George Gascoigne and John Harington. In the case of Harington, King'oo suggests that ‘the seven psalms – promulgated for centuries as superior models of self-examination, confession, and repentance – become devices for undercutting penitential hermeneutics, challenging confessional practice, and even articulating potentially seditious political dissatisfaction’ (p. 174). The discovery of continuities amidst the upheaval of the Reformation has been a major area of scholarship in recent years and King'oo ably demonstrates that the Penitential Psalms form yet another example of the way in which ‘the religious literature of the pre-Reformed past was not cast aside but rather gradually and complexly reshaped in Reformation England’ (p. 24).