My topic in this essay is the Psalms, but not the Psalter, and this essay addresses some very simple questions, in what may strike the reader as a rather elementary way: I’ll come to those questions in a moment. In the course of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Psalter, the text of the 150 psalms in Latin, often prefaced by a Calendar for the church year, gave way to the Horae or Book of Hours as the most commonly owned book of devotion among lay people. The replacement of the one by the other was never total, and Psalter-Hours incorporating both types of book went on being produced and used into the age of print, though in far smaller numbers than in the high Middle Ages. But it’s worth considering for a moment this transition. The reasons for the move from Psalter to Hours as the most favoured devotional aide for the laity are readily enough understood. The Psalter must always have been a difficult book for lay people to find their way around, and there is a good deal of obscurity about the ways in which lay people might have used it. For a start, in the later Middle Ages the Psalter itself, considered purely as a text, physically resembled no other book of the Bible, and presented unique problems of navigation for the lay (and indeed clerical) user.
The Bible had been divided into our modern chapter divisions in Paris at the start of the thirteenth century, to enable easy reference. But the Psalter, which was often excluded from otherwise complete bibles, was not numbered in this way, whether in the context of a whole bible or when it circulated as a separate book.1 Though the 150 psalms of course occurred in the Psalters in their numerical sequence, the psalms themselves were almost never individually numbered, and the layout of medieval psalters, geared towards liturgical recitation, militated against easy reference to individual psalms other than those which headed the traditional eightfold or ten-fold divisions of the Psalter.2 Separate books containing the psalms were presumably first produced for monks and clergy obliged to recite the daily office in choir. Such a book provided the owner with the core non-seasonal elements of the office. Psalms in these books were identified and distinguished from each other by the decoration, initial miniatures and often larger-scale script used in the incipit or opening verse of the psalm. The verse divisions, which of course were necessary for alternate recitation in choir, might be marked by points in the text or by the use of alternating red and blue letters for the opening words of each verse.
The body of the text as a whole was further divided with illuminated initials or miniatures at the opening of each liturgical division; that is, marking the opening of each block of psalms recited daily in the office of Matins: psalms 1–20 on Monday, where conventionally David was depicted playing his harp at the start of Psalm 1, Beatus Vir (Blessed is the man), 26–37 on Tuesday, pointing to his eyes at the start of psalm 26, Dominus Illuminatio mea (The Lord is my light), 38–51 on Wednesday, where he fights Goliath at the start of Dixi Custodiam (I said I will be careful), and so on. A few other psalms were singled out with special decoration in the same way – for example, psalm 109, Dixit Dominus (The Lord declared), the first psalm of Sunday vespers, and Psalm 50 , Miserere mei (Have mercy on me), recited every weekday in the ferial office of Lauds, and Psalms 117, Confitemini Domino (Praise the Lord), and 118, Beati immaculati (Blessed are the undefiled), which formed the text for the Little Hours of Prime, Terce, Sext and None. These pictorial markers would therefore enable the owner to find their place at the recitation of Matins and Vespers, though the antiphons, hymns and other seasonal elements would have to be supplied from elsewhere. There was no straightforward way of locating the psalms at Lauds since, unlike those at Matins, Vespers and the other hours, the Lauds psalms were not arranged in their numerical sequence. The liturgical function of the Psalter was signalled in the fact that most psalters included a calendar, the Old and New Testament Canticles used at Lauds and Vespers, and the Litany.
The utility of all this for priests and religious is obvious. Just how lay people employed them, however, is quite another matter. The likeliest use of the Psalter by lay people, where it was not straightforwardly talismanic, must have been to follow the office as it was recited or sung either in their parish or monastic church, or, in the case of specially wealthy patrons, by their domestic clergy: a few psalters included parallel verse psalters in French or English, as a crib to enable the lay user, non literatus in Latin, to understand what was being said. Additional devotional material, in the form of prayers and, in the more luxurious manuscripts, miniatures depicting biblical scenes, the Passion or the images and miracles of the Virgin and the saints, augmented the devotional value of the Psalter, and it seems clear that, for many owners, the pictorial decoration must have been a good deal more important than the text. Certainly lay participation in the full round of the daily office must have been rare, and a book in which it was so difficult to locate the text of favourite individual psalms, supposing that more than a tiny handful of lay people did have favourite psalms, clearly presented problems.
As lay literacy grew, there was an obvious need for shorter and more user-friendly devotions better adapted to a lay lifestyle, and to lay reading capacities. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries more and more psalters were produced, which included, in addition to the psalms in numerical sequence, the Office of the Dead and the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin. Older psalters often had these items added, enabling the owner to recite these shorter and less demanding offices without the need for slow and confusing thumbing through the unnumbered psalms to find the right place. And as the market for cheaper devotional books for lay people widened and moved down the social scale in the course of the fifteenth century, for most prospective purchasers the Horae or Book of Hours came to supplant the Psalter altogether.
The Book of Hours, this comparative newcomer, was essentially an amplified anthology of psalms, built round the core texts of the Little Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Litany of the Saints with the seven Penitential Psalms and the Gradual Psalms, the Commendations (i.e. the immensely long alphabetic psalm 118/119) and the Office of the Dead, consisting of first Vespers (that is, Vespers of the preceding evening), Matins and Lauds only.3 By the end of the Middle Ages most Books of Hours contained a good deal else as well, but these are the texts which will be my main concern here.
The Book of Hours emerged as an independent text in the first decades of the thirteenth century, and most of the surviving examples from that time are luxury items made for wealthy owners. Luxurious manuscript Books of Hours continued to be produced well into the sixteenth century, but the production history of these books is one of widening appeal and availability. One or more copies of the Book of Hours were to be found in most aristocratic and gentry households by the later fifteenth century, and, with the spread of production-line cheap manuscripts especially from Flemish scriptoria, and emphatically with the invention of printing, they became familiar objects in many merchant and professional households too, and cheap examples were to be found even in the hands of artisans and small shopkeepers. Women formed a very high proportion of the owners and therefore presumably the users of books of Hours.4
And that brings me at last to one of my simple questions: like the Psalter, the Book of Hours was a Latin book and, despite its importance in lay piety, there appear to have been very few English versions of it produced in the Middle Ages. The users of Books of Hours must be presumed to have been in some sense literate in Latin, but it is not at all clear how many women, or for that matter lay men, would have had a sufficient grip even of the relatively simple and repetitious Latin of the Psalter to have read the psalms with any degree of ease or real comprehension. In what sense, therefore, did the users of these books know the psalms: how did they read them, and what devotional sense did they make of them?
There are two prior questions here, which are fortunately much easier to answer: what psalms might lay people know? And which and how many psalms were there in the Book of Hours? I shall concentrate here on Books of Hours for England, and in fact on Sarum Books of Hours – books giving the Office of the Blessed Virgin as performed in Salisbury Cathedral, the liturgical use which became the model for churches throughout much of late medieval England and indeed Scotland. These formed the bulk of those produced, here or abroad, for the English market.
The description that follows is necessarily complex, for which the reader’s patience is required. The Sarum Office of the Blessed Virgin differed significantly from that of the Roman rite, and included six fewer psalms. Its basic components included three psalms for Matins (in theory there were nine, but usually only the first nocturne was included in at any rate the cheaper manuscript books: the six psalms of the other two nocturnes were sometimes provided as supplements for use on alternate days in Advent). Then followed four psalms and an Old Testament canticle, Benedicite opera omnia (Bless the Lord all his works), for Lauds (the psalms for this hour being identical to Sunday Lauds in the Roman breviary), three apiece for Terce, Sext and None, five for Vespers (in the Sarum rite, for some reason, this hour contained the five breviary psalms for Vespers on Tuesdays, rather than those for Sunday, as in the Roman and most other uses), and four for Compline.
If you are good at arithmetic, and have followed so far, you’ll have grasped that this arrangement ought to have made a total of twenty-five in the Little Office of the Virgin. But because of the oddity of using the Tuesday Vespers psalms, instead of the Sunday Vesper psalms, for the evening office, there was an overlap of five with the psalms in Terce, Sext and None, some of which were duplicated in the Tuesday evening psalms, so there were in fact only a total of twenty separate psalms in that part of the book. The Office for the Dead had five psalms for first Vespers (Sunday and feast-day prayers began officially with the evening service of Vespers recited after sundown the previous day). There was a full complement of nine psalms for the three nocturnes of Matins, though the second and third nocturnes weren’t always said, and four psalms and a canticle were provided for Lauds: Terce, Sext, None, second Vespers and Compline were not provided in the Office for the Dead. That should have given eighteen psalms in all, but six of the psalms provided overlapped with parts of the Office of the Virgin, so there were just twelve additional psalms there in all.
In addition, almost all Books of Hours included the seven Penitential psalms (i.e. Psalms 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129 and 142, Vulgate numbering) and fifteen Gradual Psalms (119–133), to be recited after the Litany, and towards the end of the Middle Ages many included the ten psalms of the Passion (21–30): but here again there were many overlaps. Finally, the Commendations included the whole of the very long psalm 118.
In all, therefore, and excluding these duplications, the Book of Hours included on average fifty-five psalms, or just over a third of the Psalter.5 These included many of the most beautiful psalms in the Psalter, and much of what was left out was no great loss, and in some cases very tiresome indeed – for example, the long and frankly tedious historical psalms used in the Matins office in the breviary, banging on for a hundred verses or so about smashing the Amalekites or wandering endlessly in the wilderness. But there were also a great many notable exclusions. Numbers alone don’t convey the issue here – but the psalms left out included 1, Beatus Vir (Happy is the man), 46, Omnes gentes plaudite (O clap your hands, all ye nations), 69, Deus in adiutorium (O God come to my aid), 88, Quam dilecta tabernacula (How lovely are your dwellings), 89, Domine refugiam factus (The Lord is my refuge), 90, Qui habitat in adjutorio altissimi (He who dwells in the shade of the almighty), 109, Dixit Dominus (The Lord Declared), 110, Confitebor tibi Domine in toto corde meo (I will confess the Lord with my whole heart), 112, Laudate pueri (Praise God, children), 113a, In Exitu Israel (When Israel went out of Egypt), 113b, Non nobis, domine (Not to us, Lord), 136, Super flumina Babylonis (By the rivers of Babylon), and many other psalms which were and would remain staples of Christian prayer.
These were notable omissions, not least because the devotional guides sometimes included even in liturgical psalters listing the benefits of reciting the psalms and directing the devout reader to the appropriate texts for specific religious needs or moods, frequently specified psalms which were simply not to be found in the Sarum Horae. One such guide, attributed to Jerome under the title De laude dei super psalterium, for example, directs the soul seeking true penitence to the two Domine exaudi psalms, and the soul seeking to express joy and hope to psalms 16, Exaudi Domine, 69, Deus in adiutorium, and 89, Domine refugium factus, none of which occurs in the Horae.6 And this may well be one of the reasons for the proliferation in late medieval Books of Hours of non-biblical prayers for special needs and occasions, as devotional creativity moved in to supply what was lacking from the limited range of psalms texts available.
In any case, locating individual psalms in a Book of Hours can never have been much easier than in the full Psalter. As we’ve seen, the psalms in Psalters were arranged in numerical order, though without numbers, and were subdivided into smaller blocks marked by a larger and more elaborate initial or illumination. The divisions within the Book of Hours were of course into the eight liturgical hours themselves (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline), and so the user of these books must invariably have read the psalms in the clustered sequences provided by the liturgical hours, rather than as discrete items. Indeed, although the earliest surviving set of vernacular directions for the use of the Book of Hours by laywomen, Ancrene Wisse, insisted on the desirability of reciting each of the hours as near as possible to its correct liturgical timing, in practice many lay people, like most priests, will have read several hours, and in some cases the whole of the Little Office, as a single daily recitation. So John Sheppey, Bishop of Rochester, preaching at the funeral of Lady Cobham in 1344, told his hearers that ‘on no day would she willingly come down from her chamber to speak with any stranger, until she had said Matins and the Hours of Our Lady, the Seven Psalms and the Litany, almost every day’.7 Lady Margaret Beaufort similarly recited the whole of the Office of the Dead and the Commendation psalm 118 as a single devotional act every day, but, in contrast to Lady Cobham, she recited Matinsand Lauds of the Virgin at the proper time in the morning after her chaplain had recited these offices in full from the breviary, and in the same way Vespers of Our Lady at the appropriate time in the evening, after Vespers of the day had been recited.
Lady Margaret had unusual leisure for such devotional refinements, and it seems likely that most users of Books of Hours used the psalms as Lady Cobham did, in large conglomerated recitations of more than one of the liturgical Hours at a time, a practice which left little opportunity for the ruminative absorption of the full meaning of individual psalms. So the treatise on ‘The Maner to live well’ which features as a catechetical item in many printed Books of Hours in the 1530s advises the reader each morning, ‘When you have arrayed you, say in your chamber or lodging, Matins, Prime and Hours if ye may. Then go to the church...’8 And even Lady Margaret must have cut corners: to turn the daily recitation of the Dirige and Commendations together into a manageable part of an already crowded devotional schedule she and her chaplains must have galloped through the verses.
And in any case, we cannot remind ourselves too often that these were Latin texts being used for the most part by people who were literate in Latin only in the sense that they could pronounce the words written before them, but who must only rarely have had a detailed grip on their meanings. John Fisher tells us that Lady Margaret’s Latin was hazy: ‘Ful often she complained that in her youth she had not given her to the understanding of latyn wherin she had a lyttell perceyvynge specially of the rubbryshe of the ordynall for the saying of her service whiche she dyde wel understande.’9 What Lady Margaret ‘did well understand’ here, note, is not the psalms, for more than a ‘little perceiving’ would be needed for that, but the rubrics for the recitation of the psalms in proper order. And that search for the ability to steer round a Latin book so as to be able to use it properly without penetration of the word-by-word meaning of the individual psalms confronts us everywhere in the meagre sources we possess for assessing lay comprehension: the detailed instructions for the recitation of the Little Office in Ancrene Wisse is entirely devoted to instructing the ladies concerned in the appropriate bodily gestures and posture which accompany each text, keyed to untranslated tags and cues from the beginning of the psalms and hours.10
Two centuries on, a monk of Syon compiled the English Myrroure of our Lady, an explanation of the Briggetine breviary for the benefit of the aristocratic ladies from whom were drawn the choir nuns of the Briggetine order. The author explained that
Forasmuche as many of you, though ye can synge and rede, yet ye cannot se what the meaning therof ys: therefore to the only worschyp and praysyng of oure lorde Iesu cryst and hys moste mercyfull mother our lady and to the ghostly comfort and profit of your soules I have drawen youre legende and all your service in to Englysche, that ye shulde se by the understandynge therof, how worthy and holy praysyng of our gloryouse lady is contente therin, and the more devoutly and knowingly synge yt and rede yt and say yt to her worship.11
The author of the Myrroure did not translate the psalms for his nuns, referring them instead either to the translation made in the early fourteenth century by Richard Rolle for the recluse Margaret Kyrkby, an anchoress who had no Latin, or to the book of psalms in the so-called Wycliffite English Bible ‘if ye have lysence therto’.
But it was not of course intended that the sisters should recite the psalms in English. English translations of scripture, as Christopher de Hamel has argued, were never thought of by medieval Catholics as being in themselves holy scripture. Holy Scripture was the Latin text of the Vulgate, its words a divine given, sanctified by use in the liturgy, and having a power and virtue in the very sound and shape of the words which no vernacular rendering could fully transmit or rival.12 Medieval celebrations of the virtues of the psalms, like the De Laude Psalmorum attributed to Augustine and often included at the beginning of Psalters, understood the power of the words of the psalms objectively, almost, we might be tempted to say, magically:
Canticus psalmorum corpus sanctificat, animam decorat, invocat angelos in adiutorium, effugat demones, expellet tenebras, efficit sanitatem homini peccatori ... delet pecata ... sicut sol illuminat, sicut aqua mundificat ... Deum ostendit, diabollum offendit, iocundatem illicitatem extinguit ... os purificat, cor laetificat, turrem in caelo aedificat, hominem clarificat, omne malum occidit.
(The singing of psalms sanctifies the body, adorns the soul, calls angels to our aid, drives out demons, scatters the darkness, brings healing to sinful man, washes sin away, illuminates like the sun, washes like water ... points towards God, affronts the devil, extinguishes unseemly levity, cleanses the mouth, gladdens the heart, builds a tower into heaven, enlightens a person, slays all evil.)
And so on.13 It was the ipsissima verba of the psalmist – as it were, his original Latin – which worked these transformations and purifications, ex opere operato. The function of biblical translations, therefore, was to enlighten the layperson to the riches embedded in the Latin text, so that they might return to that text with an enhanced perception of its worth and wealth. As Rolle had said in the prologue to his translation, his intention was not to substitute English for Latin, but so ‘that thei that knawes noght Latyn, by the Inglis may cum tille many Latyne wordes’.14
Rolle too believed that the very sound of the psalms brought objective good: he takes up the very wording of De Laude Psalmorum to insist that ‘the sange of psalmes chaces fendes, excites aungels tille our help, it dose away synne, it qwemes [pleases] God, ... it dose away and destroys noy and angere of saule and makes pees bytwix body and saule.’ But he envisaged all this as effected by the elevation of the minds and hearts of the holy women for whom he wrote, who should come to the psalter with a heightened devotional awareness of their content, so that the singing of psalms ‘rayses tham to contemplative lyf and ofte syth in to soun and myrth of heven’.15
There was therefore a tension in the use of the psalms by lay people in the late Middle Ages, a tension which appears not to have troubled them, but which is troubling to modern perceptions. On the one hand, there was the practice of the recitation of sequences of half-understood Latin psalms in emulation of the monastic choir offices. This form of recitation approximated to other ascetical or devotional practices, such as the making of pilgrimage journeys, or the recitation of the rosary or other pious formulae, where conscious meaning was not the primary consideration, but rather the sanctification of time and the offering of the self to God by the lengthy repetition of words of power or, as medieval English men and women would have said, of vertu. That way of thinking about the psalms, as a continuous text to be recited for calculable spiritual benefit, was embodied in another psalm text almost invariably found in late medieval Books of Hours, the so-called ‘Psalter of Saint Jerome’, a catena of verses drawn from the whole Psalter, though not from every individual psalm, and not in numerical sequence. Jerome’s psalter, which probably originated as a substitute for the bulky office-books or breviary for priests or religious travelling, or otherwise impeded from fulfilling the canonical requirement of reciting the office, was largely penitential and supplicatory in character. In the form normally included in the Book of Hours, it carried a rubric promising salvation for those who recited it, and it is notably lacking in passages from the historical or doxological psalms. Its tone is urgent, and the psalm verses which make it up are reduced to an incantatory appeal for divine favour.16 And of course a major part of the point of Jerome’s psalter was not simply that it distilled the essence of the Psalter, and formed an adequate substitute for the whole. In that respect it resembled another routine but much shorter inclusion in the Book of Hours, the so called ‘St Bernard’s Verses’, a catena of seven verses from the psalms, beginning Illumina occulos meos ne unquam obdormiam in morte (Enlighten my eyes lest at any time I should fall asleep in death) and, as that suggests, of a similar supplicatory character to St Jerome’s Psalter. St Bernard’s verses often carried a legend explaining that St Bernard had learned from a devil that there were seven verses in the psalms which if recited daily would ensure salvation.17 The devil refused to disclose which verses, till Bernard threatened to recite the entire psalter every day: and to prevent this greater good, the devil told all. The recitation of these seven verses therefore recapitulated the entire Psalter, another indication of a way of thinking about the recitation of the psalms as a task to be got through to bring about a specific good.
Yet this form of pious recitation, for all its mechanistic overtones, was increasingly located within a devotional ethos which valued affectivity and understanding interiority over the fulfilment of ritual requirements. Fifteenth- century writing about the psalms draws on the body of writing and thinking about the vertu of the recitation of the psalms which I have discussed, recognizing the objective power of the pronunciation of the words, yet emphasizing even more their ability to elevate and sanctify the understanding. As the author of the Myrroure wrote, once again directly paraphrasing De Laude Psalmorum,
for in few wordes they conteyne moche mystery & grete sentence more then other scrypture. For as saynt Austyn sayeth. All that the olde lawe. All that the prophetes / & all that the gospel & the new lawe bydde & ordeyne is conteyned in these holy psalmes / & therfore he sayeth the syngyng of them pleasyth god moche / for al that is in them / longeth to hys worshyp / ... what degre or age or condycyon that he be of Eche man & woman and childe yonge & olde / may fynde in these psalmes that shall teche hym / & that shall delyte hym. For psalmes he sayth comforteth the heuy / & tempereth them that ar mery / they appese them that ar wrothe / & they refreshe the pore / they warne the riche to knowe themself and not to be prowde / & so they gyue able medycyne to all that receyue them.18
This exalted view of the effects of praying the psalms was of course being expounded to women vowed to contemplative life. So my next simple question is: is there any sign that this is how ordinary users of Books of Hours in late medieval England thought about and used the psalms? I think the answer to that question is, yes and no. I want to suggest that there are signs of growing lay engagement with an attentive focus on the detailed meaning of the psalms, but that this engagement was highly selective, focusing on a small number of psalms of a particular type, and therefore by-passing the bulk of those recited in the course of saying the little office. This was a perception which was borne in on me a couple of years ago when I examined the printed Sarum Book of Hours and Psalter, bound as one book, which Thomas More had with him in the Tower in the months before his death, and in which, famously, he made many annotations.19 I imagined that I was familiar with the book from using the excellent Yale University Press facsimile. What the facsimile had not prepared me for was the very noticeable staining and wear on the pages of More’s Horae containing the Litany of the saints, suffrages and the seven penitential psalms: it was clear that More (or a later owner) had turned these pages far more heavily than any others in the book.
In this, of course, he was characteristically at one with the devotional fashions of his age. The bestselling religious book of Henry VIII’s reign was John Fisher’s exposition of the seven penitential psalms, published at the behest of Margaret Beaufort, who ‘much delighted’ in the sermons from which the book derived, and other expositions of one or other of the penitential psalms, for example that by Savonarola on the Miserere, retained popularity into and beyond the Reformation. The growth of a prosperous lay readership for pious literature, focused as their devotional life in general was on penitence and supplication, provided an interpretative framework for the penitential psalms. The extraordinary popularity of Fisher’s book, which first appeared in 1509 and ran through seven editions till the break with Rome, demonstrates the appetite among the Tudor laity for just this sort of exposition.20
It is no great surprise, therefore, to find that the seven penitential psalms were almost certainly those most often resorted to, and presumably reflected on, by More in his last months.21 There are no annotations of the psalms occurring in More’s Horae. He did make marginal additions in the day hours, but these form an original prayer and are unrelated to the psalms alongside which they occur. Scrutiny of the copious annotations in his Psalter, bound at the back of his Book of Hours, however, yields some striking results. Here More had evidently worked his way through his Psalter, pen in hand, annotating verses as they struck him, sometimes with a mere word or two of interpretation – spes et fiducia, contra demones (hope and trust, against demons), and the like – sometimes with more substantial glosses, some of them intensely moving, in the light of the circumstances in which they were made, as in his annotation against the first verses of psalm 83, Quam dilecta tabernacula (How lovely are your dwellings): ‘The prayer either of a man who is shut away in prison, or of one lying sick in bed, yearning to go to the church, or of any faithful man who hopes for heaven’.
More did not make it through the whole Psalter, and the annotations cease altogether after psalm 105. In all, he placed some sort of annotation against 177 verses. What is striking is that overwhelmingly he chose to annotate psalms which do not occur at all in the Book of Hours, or which, if they do, do so either in the penitential Office of the Dead, and express corresponding sentiments, or occur in the book as part of the two popular penitential gatherings of psalms – the penitential psalms proper, or the psalms of the Passion. More comments on only nineteen psalms which also occur somewhere in his Book of Hours, in contrast to the fifty-nine he annotated which are not represented there at all. He also consistently commented more copiously on this latter category than on the annotated psalms which also occur in the office, and, strikingly, only seven of the verses he annotated occur in psalms found in the Little Office of the Virgin. The overwhelming majority of the annotations therefore are on psalms of a penitential and supplicatory character, which More would not have encountered in reciting the hours, and in general he shows a striking lack of interest in psalms primarily devoted to celebration and praise.
I’m aware, of course, that More was a theological sophisticate who read and wrote Latin as easily as he did English. In that sense he can hardly be considered a representative Tudor devotee. But if More was atypical in his intelligence and education, his devotional outlook and his practice of piety strike me as close in most respects to those of the professional classes from which he and his father came. So the evidence of More’s Hours and Psalter suggests to me that there were at the end of the Middle Ages two very different ways of using the psalms. The first of these was liturgical, in the ordinary course of recitation within the office, where the interpretation of the psalm was not personal but ecclesial and Christological, and governed by the framework of the other texts in the Hours. The second was a more interiorized, reflective reading of psalms which fell outside that context. In fact, many of More’s annotations follow traditional Christological or ecclesial lines of interpretation, and I have commented elsewhere on the strikingly small number of his annotations which can be convincingly related directly to his own personal circumstances as a man imprisoned and under threat of death for treason – most of what he wrote could have come from any standard Tudor devotional treatise.22
There is no room here to flesh this argument out in detail, but if what I am suggesting is correct, it provides further reason for rejecting the suggestion of John Bossy, Jonathan Hughes, Colin Richmond and others that the praying of the psalms in the Book of Hours in the late Middle Ages was both the sign and in some sense the cause of a spiritual individualism, which eroded communal and parish religion, and encouraged, in Hughes’s words, ‘the egocentric and abrasive expression of social hostility’.23 Most people will have prayed the psalms rapidly, without close comprehension of the precise meaning of the Latin. A growing devout minority did focus on the sense of the words they recited, but they did so primarily in relation to small groups of psalms understood as lamentations for the passion of Christ, or as expressions of the devotee’s own penitence and longing for forgiveness. They read these psalms in a culture which related penitence and forgiveness directly and powerfully to the ascetical and sacramental discipline of the Church – as any reader of Fisher’s bestselling devotional exposition of these psalms can see: that is, personally but precisely not individualistically.24 There is not the slightest support in More’s annotations, for example, for Jonathan Hughes’s claim that the late medieval devotee read the penitential psalms as ‘egocentric confessions of a worshipper who confesses to God a sense of isolation and being at odds with the world, persecuted by his enemies’: this is simply not the mood encountered in More’s comments on the words of the persecuted man in psalm 37: ‘A meek man ought to behave like this in tribulation, neither speaking proudly nor responding in kind when spoken ill of, but blessing those who curse him, and suffering gladly, for the sake of justice if he has deserved it, or for God’s sake if he has deserved no evil.’25
The case of More is, I repeat, atypical of lay users of the psalms. There can have been few other early Tudor Englishmen who wrote as fluently and idiomatically in Latin as they did in English, and More’s comprehension of the Latin text of the psalms was certainly superior to that of the vast majority of the clergy. But his devotional taste is another matter, and seems fairly representative of the literate laity at large. And for them, the majority of lay users of the Psalter, comprehension was a matter of a sliding scale of familiarity with imperfectly understood texts, whose words had power not because of their power to convey sense precisely, to express emotion directly, to edify or instruct persuasively, but because they were words of power, sanctified by their revealed status and perhaps even more by their mysterious deployment in the liturgy. For many lay people, therefore, the use of the psalms was as an exercise of piety which had as much or even more in common with penitential exercises like fasting and pilgrimage, or rote devotional activities like saying the Rosary, than with the considered absorption of a piece of vernacular text in the hands of a modern reader. By the mid-1530s in England, after the break with Rome, Books of Hours, themselves entirely Catholic in content, were appearing with full English translations. The Latin text quickly moved from centre-page with translations in the margin, to the main text presented in English, with the Latin now consigned to the margins. There was to be no reversal of this trend, even under the Catholic Mary, when the restored Catholic regime issued official Books of Hours in which full English translations dominated or even entirely replaced the traditional Latin text.
Within a generation, of course, lay experience of the Psalter for all but a handful of English men and women would be transformed by the singing of metrical English psalms. The bilingual psalms in the Books of Hours of the 1530s therefore straddle the tectonic plates of a huge and seismic rift in Christian piety. They represent the divide between two devotional worlds, two radically different understandings of Christianity, and two vastly different experiences of prayer.