In times of religious change, struggle, and revolution, music has real consequences. Historian Diana Butler Bass (A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story [New York: HarperCollins, 2009], 170) refers to singing as one of the popular practices that “enabled people to experience the church's liturgies in powerful new ways.” Singing, not only speaking, is a way of publicly expressing emerging religious beliefs, as well as shaping devotional habits.
For this reason alone, Beth Quisland's assessment of Tudor metrical psalters is an important guide to a neglected resource. Yet this volume is not valuable only for students of early modern church music. Quisland's astute analysis also opens vistas with significant consequence for other areas of Reformation studies, including Tudor polemical literature, the history of printing, political and social history, and popular devotional practice.
This is the first full-length study of one of the most popular books of Elizabeth I's reign: The Whole Booke of Psalmes. Quisland's study rescues this volume from the contempt it gained from seventeenth-century High Church Anglicans and restores it to its instructive and increasingly valued devotional role in Tudor life and faith. With over 150 Elizabethan editions, this metrical psalter and its predecessors were “some of the best-selling evangelical literature” and provided many of the “best-known translations of scripture” (5).
One of the most historically revealing aspects of Quisland's critical analysis is the complex process she details in her first two chapters on the making and rephrasing of the metrical psalms during Edward VI's reign. Whether as instruction for the young king, as a courtly exercise, as expressing the values of commonwealth men like Robert Crowley, or as an evolving barometer of religious reform, Quisland's narrative provides new insights into the making of Edwardian religious policy. Thomas Sternhold's Certayne Psalmes evolves from serving as a royal teaching tool to a highly popular vehicle for teaching the king's subjects. In private devotional use, the metrical psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins serve as prayers and primers for the newly reformed faith. Rather than being employed in Edward's reign for congregational singing, these texts were primarily read in congregations or for private devotion.
In the next two chapters, Quisland focuses on the development of metrical psalms details by the Marian exiles. English congregations in exile, influenced by Continental usage, began regularly singing metrical psalms. In Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Zurich, or Wesel, there is evidence of metrical psalmody and other singing, some of it drawing upon Lutheran hymnody. Such singing evoked and helped define a Protestant identity. English congregations in exile became attached to psalm singing. Additionally the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of 1556–1560 reframed many psalms to express attitudes of penitence, consolation, and anti-papist proclamation.
The final two chapters in this volume explicate Elizabethan incorporation of singing psalms. John Day's 1562 publication of The Whole Booke of Psalmes became a runaway best seller. Quisland details the complex bibliographic genealogy of this compilation which draws upon a variety of sources. Over half of the psalms included were composed for Elizabethans and additional music and prayers were added. She aptly describes this volume's presentation as “a finished collection of diasporic Protestantism tailored to Elizabethan circumstances” (195). With over 220,000 copies produced by the end of the reign, Day's Whole Booke of Psalmes was a devotional staple for both congregations and households.
One of the great strengths of this very well-written and researched volume is a structure guided by posing central questions at the start of each chapter. In asking why psalm singing was “embraced by virtually all of the English Church” (239), Quisland's response underscores the impact of core leaders seeking further reform—including Marian exiles who became bishops and Privy Council members during the first part of Elizabeth's reign—as well as a public evangelical enthusiasm. Psalm singing, for example, was a component of celebrations following the defeat of the Spanish Armada. In all, Quisland restores and enhances a positive reputation to The Whole Booke of Psalmes. She also illuminates a widespread devotional practice that evolves both from the Edwardian court downward and surfaces upward in popular practice.
Excellent appendices, including detailed authorial information on each metrical psalm, attest to Quisland's skills in textual analysis. The Reformation in Rhyme provides new critical assessment of a central body of devotional literature with broad significance for Reformation studies.
