Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. By Clare Costley King'oo. Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 2012. xix + 283 pp.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England . By Clare Costley King'oo . Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame , 2012. xix + 283 pp.Book Reviews and NotesReaders of Church History will perhaps be familiar with Clare Costley King'oo's first monograph, which won the Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2012. King'oo's study distinguishes itself among other excellent scholarly works on the Psalter (such as those by Hannibal Hamlin, Michael P. Kuczynski, and Rivkah Zim) for its carefully considered focus on the unique textual tradition of the Seven Penitential Psalms. King'oo compellingly demonstrates the Penitential Psalms' reflexive relationship to a changing religious climate through her thoughtful treatment of their circulation in books of hours, theological commentaries, political polemic, funerary rites, songs, and lyric poems. Given King'oo's training as a literary scholar, her attention to the Penitential Psalms' form, genre, language, and even the material texts in which they were available yields exciting interpretations of their nuanced revisions and their implied audiences. Miserere Mei , like other works in Notre Dame's Reformations series, adroitly rethinks the conventional distinction between the and periods and thus serves as an inspired example of a diachronic study. In the narrative that she patiently tracks, King'oo shows that the Penitential Psalms traditionally used in medieval worship were not suppressed by the Reformers but rather appropriated and resignified by them.Chapter 1 (Illustrating the Penitential Psalms) examines late medieval and early modern books of hours with special attention to images of David's legendary penance (found more often in earlier books) and David peering at the naked Bathsheba (found more often in later books). King'oo works to denaturalize the connection between the Penitential Psalms and images of David's voyeurism (31) to consider more carefully this trope's development. Invoking Foucault, she explains this change as a part of a larger campaign, namely, the organization of confession and other penitential practices around sin and sexuality (52). King'oo's discovery that David's sin came to be coded as sexual fruitfully complicates her argument when she turns to explaining its illustration in the New England Primer , which was used to teach in colonial America how to read. She describes the cultural contexts in which this suggestive image circulated, concluding that it was not perceived as inappropriate for innocent children until the 19th century. For its meticulous attention to the complicated textual history of David's penance in the Penitential Psalms and their associated illustrations, this chapter stands out as the strongest in an excellent book.For its study of the Penitential Psalms' endurance in early America, the first chapter sets up how Miserere Mei will likewise appraise early modern revisions of these conventional medieval texts. Chapter 2 (The Conflict over Penance) analyzes two early sixteenth-century theological commentaries: John Fisher's This treatise concernynge the fruytfull saynges of Dauyd in the seuen penytencyall psalms (1504) and Luther's Die sieben Buspsalmen (written in 1517, revised in 1525). …