Psalm culture and early modern English literature
"Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature examines the powerful influence of the biblical Psalms on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. It explores the imaginative, beautiful, ingenious and sometimes ludicrous and improbable ways in which the Psalms were "translated" from ancient Israel to Renaissance and Reformation England. No biblical book was more often or more diversely translated than the Psalms during the period. In church psalters, sophisticated metrical paraphrases, poetic adaptations, meditations, sermons, commentaries, and through biblical allusions in secular poems, plays, and prose fiction, English men and women interpreted the Psalms, refashioning them according to their own personal, religious, political, or aesthetic agendas."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2004
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 2004
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xi, 289 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780521832700, 9780521037068, 0521832705, 0521037069
52429595
Introduction
pt. I. English metrical psalmody. "Very mete to be used of all sorts of people" : the "Sternhold and Hopkins psalter
"Out-Sternholding Sternhold" : some rival psalters
The Psalms and English poetry I : "Greece from us these arts deriv'd" : psalms and the English quantitative movement
The Psalms and English poetry II : "The highest matter in the noblest forme" : psalms and the development of English verse
pt. II. Case studies in Psalm translation. "Happy me! O happy sheep!" : Renaissance pastoral and Psalm 23
Psalm 52 : sin, sacrifice, and the "Sobbes of a sorrowfull soule"
Psalm 137 : singing the Lord's song in a strange land
Conclusion