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This chapter explores the origin and chronology of the offertories through examination of their lyrics. Many offertory lyrics depart from the Roman psalter, perhaps suggesting an origin outside Rome. An examination the psalmic lyrics indicates that they are extensively modified from the biblical sources. The centonization suggests that the respond lyrics were created to be sung with verses and that verses were, in many cases, part of their original conception. An examination of certain nonpsalmic offertories in the context of the Old Hispanic and Milanese repertories yields new evidence of non‐Roman origin. Most nonpsalmic lyrics are based on Old Latin sources rather than the Vulgate, suggesting a pre‐seventh‐century origin. Finally, the chapter considers the nonpsalmic offertories outside of the core Romano‐Frankish repertory. Most are based on Old Latin sources, suggesting a pre‐Carolingian origin.

Evagrius believed that the spiritual benefits of chanting the psalms went beyond the calming effect of psalmody on the passions. The soul is in continuous warfare against demons that employ logismoi (tempting thoughts) to prevent humans from praying or perceiving God. The Book of Psalms is a valuable weapon that provides models of spiritual progress, as well as a means by which prayer and contemplation may be attained. Evagrius recommends the practice of psalmody in the Praktikos, Antirrhetikos, and De oratione. Psalms in the Antirrhetikos and antirrhetic texts in the Scholia on Psalms are discussed.

Evagrius believed that that Book of Psalms afforded a vision of the whole creation, including the daily struggles of the praktike, as refulgent with divine meaning. The psalter can serve as a training ground for the Christian contemplative, a kind of workshop in which the gnostikos learns to perceive the divine logoi in the events of salvation history recounted in the psalms. This chapter examines the dynamic relationship between praktike and theoretike, and suggests a reciprocal relationship between spiritual progress and biblical exegesis.

Chapter 7 discusses two periods of visual exegesis. The ninth to fifteenth centuries. Christian illumination sometimes illustrates these psalms together to create an extended Christian story (Utrecht , Harley, Eadwine and Paris Psalters); occasionally an anti-Jewish stance appears (the Byzantine Khludov and Theodore Psalters); often a supercessionist emphasis emerges (the Windmill and Gorleston Psalters, with Jesse trees). Jewish visual exegesis meanwhile is more aesthetic than theological (Parma Psalter and Kennicott Bible). The twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Here we find more interpretation in Jewish illustrations, although the images are usually found alone, without citing the psalm (Chagall’s two sketches, with the Torah binding both psalms together; Berger’s mystical imagery, with a mutual Temple theme; Davis’ portrayal, for a Jewish calendar, of the ‘Blessed Man’). Christian art, which traditionally has felt more at liberty to ‘paint the text’, continues to illustrate each psalm alongside the text (Wagner, Jessing, and the Saint John’s Bible).

This chapter examines the evidence of sound in prayer via the large corpus of prayerbooks, especially the new genre of Books of Hours and Psalters. Largely the province of art historians, it argues that through their verbal and visual programs, these books have much to say about the complicated role of sound in prayer. It begins by exploring the written discourse for the role of sound, especially the voice, in prayer acts, via several contemporary writers. It then offers a detailed analysis of the variety of signs for sound in prayerbooks, suggesting that these sights of sound functioned as positive instruction, and also as warning about sonic distraction, for those who prayed from them.

This chapter follows the would-be monk from the day of his arrival at the monastery, seeking admission, to his profession, which usually took place at the end of the first year. It describes his tonsuring and clothing in the habit and the period of probation during which he listened to regular readings of the Benedictine Rule and received instruction in the customs and daily routine of the house. He was expected to memorize the Rule and psalter and to begin his studies, academic as well as spiritual, under a monk master.

This chapter explores the link between familial and religious devotion by comparing a sibling relationship enacted in poems by and about Mary Sidney Herbert, co-author of Renaissance England’s influential Sidney-Pembroke Psalter, to hagiographic sources reporting on the love between mothers and daughters in early Syriac Christian texts. While in the Syriac context, the accounts of mothers and daughters reveal Christians responding to the urbanization of asceticism by joining familial and ascetic bonds, the renewed biblicism in sixteenth-century England inspired poetry preoccupied with the relational dynamics of authorship, translation, and prayer. The chapter further explores the ways that these varied accounts of spiritual relationships might shed light on the relationality of pedagogy and the transformative potential of relationships between teachers and students.

Chapter 8 focuses on musical interpretations. Jewish examples include a reconstruction of Jewish cantillation of Psalm 1 by Mitchell, and, in the twentieth century, compositions for performance outside the synagogue (Weiner’s Yiddish version of Psalm 1 and Bernstein’s use of Psalm 2 in Chichester Psalms). Christian compositions are more prolific , especially from the sixteenth century onwards. Liturgical compositions include those by Merbecke, Tallis, Beale, and Elgar, and metrical psalms by Sternhold and Hopkins, Lawes, Tate and Brady, Watts, and Charles Wesley. Non-liturgical compositions include those by Schütz, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Twentieth-century liturgical examples include those in the Gelineau Psalter, Psalm Praise and Rachmaninov’s All Night Liturgy; modern compositions for the concert hall include Williams (Psalm 2) and Goodall (Psalm 1). The more secular musical ‘performance’ of both psalms, independent of either faith tradition, has made them more universally known.

This section surveys Edwards’s approach to the shape of Sunday meetings, including his commitment to their participatory character and his understanding of the place of psalmody, hymn-singing, and praise in the life of the gathered congregation. He is prepared to jettison old forms of psalm-singing in order that the unity of the congregation is fostered, for example, through the hymns of Isaac Watts, because the congregation can give expression to unity when pursuing harmonious parts. Abolishing the traditional church calendar and highlighting Sabbath day exercises among Puritans gave attention to the value of work as well as the benefits of rest and the goal of praise in the great heavenly Sabbath. His operational ecclesiology was eschatological, not merely primitivist.

Jonathan Edwards engaged the Psalms in his Bible study, in the pulpit, and in the corporate worship of the church. This chapter sets Edwards in the context of the history of biblical interpretation, the history of preaching, and the history of worship, focusing on how Edwards broadly engaged the interpretive, homiletical, and liturgical issues related to the Psalter in his day. As Enlightenment-era thinking raised new ideas about the Bible, Edwards embraced the new learning in biblical interpretation while holding firmly to the divine inspiration of the Psalms. As the new learning questioned the connection of the Psalms with the New Testament, Edwards nonetheless preached the gospel boldly from the Psalms. And as some moved to marginalize the Psalter in worship as insufficiently explicit of Christ, Edwards paved a moderate path by encouraging the use of new hymns while defending the central place of psalms in worship.

During the religious wars in France (1562-1629), concerns over violence and spirituality increased, and chansons fell out of favor, particularly those setting lascivious poetry. This era ushered in new repertoires of chansons spirituelles, vernacular translations of the psalms, and a fad, in the 1580s, for settings of a new primer: the Quatrains of Guy du Faur de Pibrac. This chapter examines these trends in music publishing and the role of printers in directing them, concentrating in particular on Guillaume Boni’s Les Quatrains du Sieur de Pybrac (Paris: Le Roy & Ballard, 1582). Boni’s modally-ordered collection stands out as a pedagogical text, particularly given its light-handed textures, the popularity of Pibrac’s Quatrains among teachers, and the didactic potential of its modal exempla, but it also provokes questions about mode and its relevance to polyphony in the sixteenth century.

Chapter 1 traces the wide dissemination of versions of the vernacular psalms, including those preserved in English primers, considering evidence supplied by the manuscripts themselves as well as wills and bequests. It suggests that any attempt to distinguish absolutely between ‘public’ liturgical prayer and ‘private’ acts of devotion is problematized by the existence of so many versions of the translated psalms. The circulation of abbreviated and paraphrased renditions (both prose and verse) of the psalms indicates that there was a hunger for a brief, digestible version of the Psalter among religious and lay readers. Translations of the Seven Penitential Psalms were particularly popular, and were often accompanied by selections of basic catechetic teaching in English. However, no less than five translations of the complete Psalter also survive, demonstrating a sustained interest in the vernacularization of this central biblical text.

This chapter develops the concept of holy writing by examining letters delivered from heaven, gold writing, and the sanctity of inscription. From the New Minster Charter to the Eadwine Psalter, Chapter 6 asks how modern readers can trace the inherent spirituality and joy of medieval manuscripts—their methods of production, appearance, and use. Close examination of the post-Conquest story of St Wulfstan’s youthful delight in manuscripts reveals the importance for medieval readers of the oculi mentis, the ‘eyes of the mind’—a perceptive form of reading that made spiritual writings accessible and wondrously so. Accessing the potential of holy texts and connecting with them also meant having oneself set into manuscripts, like Books of Hours, or envisioning the potentiality of space for the demonstration of delight through vibrant display of skilful writing.

The rise of Humanism led to the creation of secular music based on texts in vernacular languages. In this chapter, the various national genres are surveyed: French chanson (both vers mesurée and program chanson), German Lied, Psalter, Frottola, madrigal, and the derivative larger forms of Intermedium and Madrigal Comedy. Individual composers highlighted include Claude le Jeune, Jakob Arcadelt, Cypriano de Rore, Luca Marenzio, Don Carlo Gesualdo, and Adriano Banchieri.

Angels were believed to play a very real part in the lives of human beings, and the Bible supported the notion that God regularly assigned angels as guardians over the souls of the living. This chapter explores the way that the relationship between the individual and their angelic assistant came to be reconsidered over the course of the Anglo-Saxon period. A discontinuous but surprisingly rich body of evidence shows that doubts about the power and potency of guardian angels became widespread in Anglo-Saxon culture after the end of the ninth century. Homilists and theologians began to complicate earlier understandings of guardian angels, turning to new ideas inspired by biblical apocrypha. Some theologians came eventually to reject the notion that angels could offer meaningful protection for the soul, and echoes of their ideas are preserved in the most famous piece of Old English literature, the epic poem Beowulf.

The chief aim of Chapter 4 is to reassess the impact of both local and more universal reform efforts to clericalize the practice of penance in communities of Benedictine nuns during the central Middle Ages. According to the prevailing historiography, various reform efforts over the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries effectively charged priests with hearing nuns’ confessions. Yet, as this chapter shows, study of the extant prayer books and psalters, produced by or altered for nuns’ use, demonstrates that they served as confessors not only for their consorors but also for visiting pilgrims and laity affiliated with their communities. Several of these prayers are adaptations of mass-texts traditionally said by priests within the context of the Mass and would have cast the women who recited them in markedly sacerdotal roles and even recognized their performance of ministries around the altars of their churches, including handling the eucharistic vessels and consecrated elements.

This chapter demonstrates how figural inferiority shapes visual representations of Passion scenes in which dark-skinned Jews attack Jesus. These portrayals emerge in a period when accounts of the Passion increasingly emphasize Jesus’s suffering at the hands of his Jewish enemies. Scholars have explained English psalter illuminations of dark Jews as participating in negative patristic associations of the “Ethiopian.” This chapter argues that dark colors connoting death and damnation provide another explanatory context. The author considers representations of the damned and of devils portrayed as blue, gray, and brown to interpret images of similarly toned Jews in thirteenth-century psalters. In attacking Jesus, whose sacrifice secures redemption from eternal death, the Jews bring upon themselves not only the curse of a servile life, but also the damnation of the soul that leads to everlasting death. The images embody the Jews’ spiritual abjection as infernal: not only hellish, but inferior.