Psalm reading and the lyric sequence in Renaissance England

This dissertation argues that daily reading practices emerging from the Protestant Reformation made the psalms a model for the lyric sequence during the first century of the form’s appearance in English, from 1560 to 1660. The Book of Psalms (or “psalter,” as it was interchangeably called) was Renaissance England’s most popular text, sung in every church service, read morning and evening in the home, and circulated in the era’s many printed bibles, liturgies, and stand-alone psalters. Proponents of English Reformation sought to give lay readers access to the 150 psalms of the psalter through reading methods that they prescribed in the commentaries and textual apparatus of these abundant printed editions. Archival research demonstrates that two methods of psalm reading competed for dominance: selecting psalms by present occasion or reading sequentially according to a liturgical calendar. This competition lent two distinct poles to the period’s collections of original sonnets and other verse forms, now known as “lyric sequences.” On the model of the psalms, the sequences addressed in the dissertation—A Meditation of a penitent sinner (1560), Spenser’s Amoretti (1594), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), and Herbert’s The Temple (1633)—present their poems as both discrete units answering to particular occasions and members of well-organized wholes unfolding over time. Although critics generally trace the formal features of the lyric sequence to the Italian poet Petrarch and his 366-poem Canzoniere (ca. 1327-68), the psalter provided Renaissance readers with an even more widespread collection of poems characterized by tension between part and whole. Attending to the English sequence’s specifically psalmic tension revises the form’s genealogy, showing how a 2,500-year-old ritual text shaped poetic practices still prevalent across the anglophone world today.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference