This volume explores the diverse ways in which the Book of Psalms profoundly influenced medieval English literature and culture, through a series of connected overviews and special case studies. A number of recent studies have highlighted the Psalter's reception in Early Modern English (and wider European culture), while three monographs by contributors to this volume offer focused studies of the Psalter in individual periods of medieval English literature: Jane Toswell's The Anglo-Saxon Psalter, Annie Sutherland's English Psalms in the Middle Ages: 1300–1450and Michael P. Kuczynski's Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England. But as yet no single study has sought to offer a comprehensive survey of English responses to the Book of Psalms from the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to the cusp of the Reformation. By bringing work by experts on both Old and Middle English literature into dialogue, this volume breaks down the traditional disciplinary binaries of pre- and post-Conquest English, late medieval and Early Modern, as well as emphasizing the complex and fascinating relationship between Latin and the vernacular languages of England. In order to encourage the reader to make connections both across and within these various periods and languages, the book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, with three sections designed to offer a variety of perspectives on the Psalms and medieval English literature.

Section I (Translation) focuses on the development of English psalm translation from its beginnings in Old English interlinear glosses in Latin psalters through the multilingual psalters of the Anglo-Norman era to the stand-alone vernacular psalters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Concentrating on the Psalter as a book, this section charts the emergence of English as a scriptural language in the medieval period.

Section II (Adaptation) considers how medieval English prose and verse writers draw on the Psalms as a source of literary inspiration. Demonstrating how the Psalter could be adapted and redeployed within the context of medieval worship and prayer, it begins with a discussion of the first adaptation of the entire Psalter into English verse, before turning to a consideration of the development of the abbreviated psalter tradition. This section also addresses the wider influence of psalmic language and imagery on Old English praise and lament poetry, and on Middle English alliterative verse.

Anglo-Saxon poets composing in both Old English and Latin knew that the Psalms were originally songs set to music and so thought of David as both a poet and musician. The Psalms contain many references to singing and the playing of musical instruments (e.g. Pss. 32.2–3, 97.5–6, 150.3–5), and patristic commentaries which treat the Psalms as songsof praise and lament uttered (for the most part) by David/Christ were well known to the Anglo-Saxons. As Jerome puts it in his Preface to the Chronicle of Eusebius:

However, in his own translations of the Psalter, which were to become the most widely used versions in the Middle Ages, Jerome employs the medium of prose rather than verse. Despite the frequent appearance of rhetorical (and indeed poetic) devices such as alliteration, homeoteleuton and polyptoton, Jerome's prose style lacks the inherent musicality of the original Hebrew verse, a fact which Bede acknowledges in his stylistic treatise De schematibus et tropis during his discussion of paromoen(alliteration):

The Psalter or Book of Psalms, originating in the traditions of Jewish communities of Syria, Egypt and Babylon in the eleventh to fifth centuries BC and known in Hebrew as Tehillim[‘songs of praise’], was to become the foundation of medieval Christian thought and practice. Central to the Psalter's enduring appeal is its brevity: as the fourteenth-century English hermit Richard Rolle observes, it condenses the essential ‘lare’ [‘teaching’] of the entire Bible into a series of short poems which could be learnt by heart.4As such, the Psalter became the most highly prized, frequently copied and widely used of all books of the Bible; its ancient songs of individual and communal lament and praise, traditionally attributed to King David, were translated from their original Hebrew first into Greek and Latin, and thence into many European vernaculars. Finding expression both in prose and verse, psalm glosses, translations, commentaries and adaptations were used for both private and communal worship by generations of medieval European men and women. The Church Fathers provided educated medieval Christians with the tools to understand these often enigmatic and complex texts both literally and allegorically: for example, as a bridge between the Old and New Testaments; as prophecies; as expressions of the hopes and fears of David, Christ and the reader; and as a space where the voices of David, Christ, the Church and the individual Christian could could mingle. So Augustine of Hippo, in his commentary on Psalm 85, writes: