This book is a fascinating exercise in bibliographical history. It traces the complex evolution during the sixteenth century of an extraordinary work, The whole booke of Psalmes, collected into Englysh metre by T. Starnhold and J. Hopkins (first published under this title in 1562). Beth Quitslund is to be commended for her willingness to ignore a long-established scholarly habit of scorning this book for its allegedly woeful poetry. Instead, she argues convincingly that we cannot afford to ignore a work that was published more frequently than any other during the early modern period (there were 150 editions during the reign of Elizabeth i alone). With great energy, Quitslund further demonstrates that no other text affords a comparable insight into the complexities of the English Reformation. The story is not entirely new, of course, but never before has it been presented and developed in such depth and detail. Quitslund traces three key phases in the history of the metrical psalter and expertly sets it into a series of contrasting contexts. First, Thomas Sternhold wrote a selection of verse Psalms during the late 1540s, presenting them to the young Edward vi both for his personal recreation and, crucially, to help guide and train the boy king in the ways of godly, Protestant governance. Second, the Protestant exiles of Mary's reign carried the new Psalms to Frankfurt, Wesel and Geneva where – with time on their hands – they expanded upon Sternhold's efforts and began to use the sacred songs not only in private recreation but also within public worship. Third, the exiles carried this practice back to England upon the death of Mary and congregational Psalm-singing swiftly established itself as a feature of divine service, despite the fact that the Elizabethan settlement did not require it. At each stage the number of Psalms that was included within published editions grew and the new additions carried the unmistakable marks of the precise environment within which they were written. Thus, the Whole booke of 1562 was an extraordinary patchwork rather than a unified whole. Quitslund displays an impressive ability to track the shifting contexts in the language used by the various authors. Sternhold, Hopkins, Whittingham and others chose their Psalms and composed their paraphrases in order to promote their particular objectives, and personal preferences for words such as ‘counsellor’, ‘chosen’ and ‘elect’ are persuasively presented by Quitslund as richly informative. She has made a highly distinctive and thoroughly stimulating contribution to Reformation history, though it should perhaps be pointed out that the crucial identity of the metrical Psalms as an unprecedented form of music is somewhat neglected (though Archbishop Matthew Parker makes the point on p. 252). Nor was I fully convinced by her argument that the tendency to disparage psalmody – as either puritanical or plebeian – only developed after 1600. It was certainly expressed more regularly during the seventeenth century than before but traces of anxiety can, I think, also be detected in the Elizabethan period.