Psalm Paraphrases Research Articles

Micheline White English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625. Edited by Micheline White. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. xii+252 pages.

Micheline White English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625. Edited by Micheline White. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. xii+252 pages.

Поздний Сумароков как переводчик псалмов

In the present paper those of Sumarokov's psalm paraphrases are analyzed which he published in 1774, three years before his death. Special attention is devoted to a group of ten texts which he marked as “exactly as in Hebrew” and which he wrote in free non-rhymed verse. In these ten texts he shows an unexpected philological concern with closeness to the Hebrew original. Not knowing Hebrew himself, he mentions using a German translation of the Hebrew original. But which one did he use? The answer: he used the translation of the theologian Johann Michaelis (1612–1674).

Suffering and Scholarship: The Contexts of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey's Ecclesiastes

Surrey's partial translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes seem to have offered him a more sustained, ambitious, and complex encounter with a biblical text than his better known psalm paraphrases. It may be seen as having been conceived within the fractured field of humanist paraphrase and theological interpretation; his work lies generically across the broken ground where humanist and evangelical encounters with the text radically reshaped and contested the ultimate message of this obscure and recalcitrant biblical book.

Clément Marot and religion. A reassessment in the light of his Psalm paraphrases. By Dick Wursten. (Brill's Studies in Church History, 44.) Pp. xiii+439. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2010. €129. 978 90 04 18456 5; 1572 4107

Clément Marot and religion. A reassessment in the light of his Psalm paraphrases. By Dick Wursten. (Brill's Studies in Church History, 44.) Pp. xiii+439. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2010. €129. 978 90 04 18456 5; 1572 4107 - Volume 63 Issue 4

Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603. Beth Quitslund. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. x+322.

<i>Beth Quitslund</i>, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603<i>The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603</i>. Beth Quitslund. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. x+322.

Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s “The Deserted Wife”

Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson (1737–1801) was one of the most prolific and notable poets in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. From her youthful romance with William Franklin; to her account of her trip to Great Britain, which was circulated among elite Philadelphians; to her friendships with John Dickinson, Jacob Duche, Francis Hopkinson, Milcah Martha Moore, Benjamin Rush, William Smith, and Annis Boudinot Stockton, Fergusson’s life was filled with wit, sociability,serious reflection,and nearly constant literary production. Most of her poetry remains in manuscript, although many letters to and from Fergusson were edited by Simon Gratz and published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1915 and 1917. Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the William Smith Papers at the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Record Center contain the bulk of her writings. Among this work are letters, petitions, psalm paraphrases, an epic versification of the story of Telemachus, odes to the seasons, devotional poems, a versification of John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, comments on Benjamin Rush’s medical inquiries, and neoclassical poetry on all manner of topics. The Deserted Wife is unusual among Fergusson’s oeuvre...

Gautier de Coinci and the Translation of Exegesis

This paper examines the way in which Gautier de Coinci (d. 1236) asserts the vernacular as an appropriate vehicle for a clerical reading of his Miracles de Nostre Dame. Like Eructavit, the Old French paraphrase of Psalm 44 which frequently appears in manuscripts with the Miracles, Gautier’s Miracles is an example of what has been termed by Morgan Powell as “vernacular exegesis.” Gautier characterizes translation as the means by which even a lay reader may understand this vernacular work in an exegetical fashion. Indeed, for Gautier, translation manifests the three levels of Scriptural exegesis—historical, allegorical, and tropological—as described by Hugh of Saint-Victor (d. 1141). Gautier clearly translates the methods and aims of Scriptural exegesis for mixed audience of clerical and lay readers, encouraging Marian devotion and the singing of (Gautier’s own) Marian lyrics. More importantly, Gautier’s translatio of exegesis suggests that even the very act of translation is exegetical in nature.

Flower symbolism and the cult of relics in medieval Serbia

Flower symbolism and the cult of relics in medieval Serbia

Penitential Bookends: John Fisher and Thomas Sternhold interpret Psalm 6

The sermons on the Penitential Psalms delivered by Bishop John Fisher to the household of Henry VII's mother, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond (published 1508), and the complete collection of Metrical Psalm paraphrases by royal courtier Thomas Sternhold (published 1549) serve as convenient penitential psalm ‘bookends’ to the reign of Henry VIII. This article examines the continuities and discontinuities in penitential psalms interpretation bracketed by these two works, and proposes that the harsh lines often drawn between mediaeval scholasticism and humanism, and between orthodox and evangelical interpretations of the Psalms are far less rigid and impermeable than has hitherto been suggested.

Le Te Deum de Jacques Morel et le Concert spirituel d'Alexandre de Villeneuve comme exemples de divertissements sacres

In his « Discours sur la musique d'Eglise » (1706), Lecerf de La Vieville stated that the « music intended for gods, that he [Lully] put onto his theatre [stage], like sacrifices and invocations, shows us some admirableexamples of the exact observance of our rules. Let them be obeyed in the motets of our churches [... they] will make Christians pray excellently, » thus inciting composers to model their motets on Lully's operatic divertissements. In 1757, Jacques Lacombe further added that French « should be employed » in motets sung at the Concert Spirituel, because « listeners could follow the subject of the poem with ease and judge more clearly the appropriateness of the expression that the musician gave to the words, » as if the well-known operatic topoi used in grands motets since La Vieville's time-such as Jean-Joseph Cassanea de Mondonville's Venite exultemus-were not sufficient enough to make the words understood to those ignorant of Latin. Lacombe's criticism may even have urged Mondonville to write what have been thus far thought to be the first « motets francais » (i.e., oratorios sung in French): Les Israelites a la Montagne d'Oreb (1758) and Les Fureures de Saul (1759). This story however needs revision in the light of Jacques Morel's 1706 setting of a French translation of the Te Deum, and of the I e r Concert spirituel (1727) that Alexandre de Villeneuve composed on Simon-Joseph Pellegrin's French paraphrase of Psalm 96. In both cases, the French verses can easily be compared to contemporaneous dramatic libretti calling for the usual operatic features, thus strongly suggesting that the two musicians and their poets devised their motets as genuine sacred divertissements akin to the French oratorios of a later period.

Davidic psalm and Horatian ode: five poems of George Buchanan

This article which has grown out of a short paper given to the Swansea conference of the Society of Renaissance Studies in 1996, amplified and developed at the suggestion of Sarah Alyn Stacey, its organizer1 studies five of the psalm paraphrases of the Scottish humanist George Buchanan (1506-82), 'easily the leader among poets of his age' ('poetarum seculi sui facile princeps'), as he was called in the first complete edition of the paraphrases in 1565/6 and often thereafter. There are perhaps few writers whose critics over the centuries have reached so readily for such an accolade; happy is the man whom posterity constructs through the words of his printer's blurb. It would be a brave, indeed foolhardy, person (even in today's atmosphere of league tables and evaluation of scholarship) who tried to argue in detail for Buchanan's primacy among the hundreds of his British and European contemporaries who wrote verse, but the case would be somewhat easier to maintain in the restricted area of psalm paraphrase, one of the many areas in which Buchanan's writing made a distinctive contri bution. Not that the endeavour of paraphrasing the psalms into classicising Latin verse was short of practitioners: at least one hundred have been identified.2

Hamlet and Surrey's Psalm 8

This article shows that Hamlet's "quintessence of dust" speech (2.2.298–2.2.308) is motivated by the first twenty-five lines of the Earl of Surrey's paraphrase of Psalm 8, while Hamlet's return to the topic of human nature in the soliloquy "How all occasions do inform against me" (4.4.32–4.4.39) is modeled on the latter half of that paraphrase. Surrey's Psalm 8 is shown to have been written in the Tower in December 1546 or January 1547 as Surrey was reconciling himself to his impending execution. The article then takes up Surrey's poem "The stormes are past these cloudes are overblowne," said by Surrey's son to have been his father's last composition. Two allusions in this poem are explained as references to Surrey's treason conviction. Finally, several of Hamlet's remarks just before and after the "quintessence of dust" speech are shown to come from three adjacent lines of "The stormes are past."

Valentine Greatrakes, The Irish Stroker; Miracle, Science, and Orthodoxy in Restoration England

The Spacious Firmament on high And all the blue aetherial sky And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great original proclaim. Th’ unwearied sun from day to day Doth his Creator’s power display And publishes to ev’ry land The work of an Almighty hand. What though in solemn silence all Move round the dark terrestrial ball; What though no real voice nor sound Mid all their radiant orbs be found: In reason’s ear they all rejoice And utter forth a glorious voice For ever singing as they shine ‘The hand that made us is Divine’. Despite its pre-Copernican cosmology, Addison’s well-known paraphrase of the nineteenth psalm perfectly expresses a whole religious world picture, the essence of that rational apologetic for Christianity which was evolved in England in the second half of the seventeenth century. For this school of thought the beauty, elegance and order of the universe were the chief evidences of the existence, wisdom and benevolence of God. Behind that serene conviction, however, lay a great unease. The world of law which Newton so wonderfully displayed to an admiring age was purchased at the cost of an increasingly remote deity.

Some Versions of Milton's Psalm Paraphrases

Some Versions of Milton's Psalm Paraphrases

Notes on the Composition and Reception of George Buchanan's Psalm Paraphrases

Notes on the Composition and Reception of George Buchanan's Psalm Paraphrases

Herbert and Crashaw: Two Paraphrases of the Twenty–Third Psalm

HROUGHOUT the history of English literature, poets have written verse-paraphrases of passages from the Bible. Many of these are confined to several verses or a psalm, but others include complete books such as Job, the Song of Solomon, or Isaiah. reasons behind such paraphrases are as varied as the poets who wrote them. Some were dissatisfied with the prevailing versions of the Bible and wished to give more accurate translations to the public. They believed that the portions of the Old Testament originally in Hebrew poetry lost too much in the prose versions. Others were interested in metrical paraphrases which could be chanted or sung in worship services. psalms were most frequently paraphrased, since they could either be used in worship or give the poet opportunity to express his own religious fervor in the words of the Scriptures. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, psalm paraphrases were written by many famous poets including Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, George Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney, Francis Bacon, John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw. Many of these paraphrases are perfunctory treatments which lack originality and enthusiasm. If the poet attempted to be too literal, his paraphrase lacked imagination; however, if he aimed for originality, his final poem often became so free that it moved outside the realm of paraphrase. George Herbert's The Twenty-Third Psalme and Richard Crashaw's Psalm 23 are two of the best seventeenth-century paraphrases, and they illustrate the variety possible in this genre. Herbert's paraphrase remains close to the scriptural source, yet reveals poetic imagination. Crashaw's is much longer, expanding into seventy-two lines; but his poetic treatment falls within the limits of paraphrase. By definition, paraphrase is not a literal translation but a rephrasing in which the poet is free to build upon the original by developing images more fully provided he does not lose sight of the basic structure and intent of his model.

The French Sources of Thomas Stanley's Paraphrases of Psalms 139 and 148

The French Sources of Thomas Stanley's Paraphrases of Psalms 139 and 148

A Paraphrase of the 137th Psalm, Alluding to the Captivity and Treatment of the Welsh Bards

A Paraphrase of the 137th Psalm, Alluding to the Captivity and Treatment of the Welsh Bards