From Court to Community: Francis Seager's Certayne Psalmes and the Popularization of Mid-Tudor Scriptural Verse

ABSTRACT Although previous scholarship has characterized Francis Seager’s metrical psalm paraphrase collection Certayne Psalmes select out of the Psalter of Dauid, and drawen into Englyshe Metre (1553), as a text designed for courtly audiences, the work is best understood as one designed to bring God’s word in compelling form to common men and women. New evidence for Seager’s background and career reveals his evangelical commitments and his focus on common audiences, attitudes shared by his text’s publisher William Seres. To attract common audiences, Seager selects psalms that speak particularly to the experiences and hopes of those of the lower classes, and he cast his psalm paraphrases as works to be communally sung rather than silently read, granting to them a form that allows their messages to travel beyond any individual owners of his work to all who might gather to sing or hear sung his psalms.