“Delyght in the holy songes of veritie”: mid-tudor scriptural verse—words, music, and reception

Abstract

The idea for this special issue of Reformation arose at the panel “Teaching Reformed Belief: Music, Verse, and Lay Spiritual Formation in Sixteenth-Century England,” which took place at the 2019 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Toronto. Organized by Anne Heminger, the panel brought together two musicologists (Heminger and Samantha Arten) and a literary scholar (Scott Lucas) to present new work on the music and verse of the enormously popular genre of mid-Tudor metrical scripture paraphrase. The panel proved to be a stimulating and thought-provoking success, as musicologists on the panel and in the audience gained new perspectives on the genre from the approaches of literary analysis, and literary scholars in attendance learned much about the important and often understudied musical contexts in which so many authors of vernacular biblical verse placed their scriptural paraphrase. Discussions of the subjects raised by the panelists lasted well beyond the session itself, and soon talk with Reformation editor Mark Rankin (who was in the audience for the panel) turned to the possibility of expanding the panel’s approaches in a special issue of this journal. The timing was and remains auspicious for new interdisciplinary investigations into mid-Tudor scriptural verse paraphrase, since much excitement has been generated by the 2018 release of the long-awaited critical edition of the Elizabethan Whole Book of Psalmes (1562), the most important text of the entire English metrical scripture movement. This publication brought together in interdisciplinary collaboration literary scholar Beth Quitslund and musicologist Nicholas Temperley. Their meticulous and expert edition of verse (Quitslund) and music (Temperley; supplied both as text and as recorded performance) of this enormously popular and influential psalter offered new pathways of exploration of the Sternhold and Hopkins metrical psalter, particularly for the many scholars in various fields who tend to focus only on their own disciplines’ specific practices and areas of interest. Of course, much excellent scholarship on the music and verse of mid-Tudor metrical scripture has already been published over previous decades, including Nicholas Temperley’s The Music of the English Parish Church (1978) andHymn Tune Index (1998); Rivkah