Miles Coverdale and the Englishing of Luther’s Geistliche Lieder

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the prosody of the earliest English psalms printed with music, Miles Coverdale’s Goostly psalmes and spiritual songes (ca. 1535), a musical, devotional verse collection that was banned by 1546, while his prose psalter simultaneously became the definitive version for the English Church. It aims first to document the material, rhetorical, and prosodic details of a book neglected in histories of English verse and produced by a major figure in Tudor reform and biblical translation efforts, and through this close attention better to understand the possible motivations behind its production and factors contributing to its eventual fate. In so doing, it also reconsiders the place of Goostly psalmes in the history of the development of musical psalmody and prosody in England, here by contrasting it against the regular, syllabic metrics of the “Sternhold and Hopkins” psalter, to see what its detailed inclusion in that story can clarify.