Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN

Series Editors:

David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson

MISERERE MEI

The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Clare Costley King’oo

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2012 by University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-268-08461-5

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu

For

KYELE

Contents

List of Figures

Abbreviations

Other Conventions

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Seven Penitential Psalms

On the Origins of a Genre

Penitential Hermeneutics

Doing Penance and Praying for the Dead

Overview of Miserere Mei

ONE

Illustrating the Penitential Psalms

King David, Sinner/Psalmwriter

Sexualizing Sin

Adultery, Catechesis, and Pedagogy

TWO

The Conflict over Penance

Reading Suffering in the Penitential Psalms

John Fisher and the Economics of Penance

Martin Luther’s Metanoia

THREE

Plotting Reform

Sir Thomas Wyatt among the Evangelicals

Richard Maidstone, Thomas Brampton, and John Croke: The Penitential Psalms as Common Property

Wyatt’s Paraphrase, David’s Conversion(s)

FOUR

From Penance to Politics

Repentance, Paranoia, and Consent in Elizabeth’s Prayer Book

John Stubbs, Theodore Beza, and the Importation of Genevan Exclusivity

FIVE

Parody and Piety

Move Over, David, or, George Gascoigne’s De Profundis

Sir John Harington’s Antipenitential Hermeneutics

Reappropriation in the Odes of Richard Verstegan

Afterword: A Brief Reflection on Discipline and Method

Appendix: John Harington of Stepney and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Figures

Fig. 1.1. Psalm 1. The psalter or boke of psalmes both in Latyn and Englyshe. [Trans. Miles Coverdale.] London: R. Grafton, 1540. STC 2368. Sigs. a1v to a2r. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark C.111.aa.30.

Fig. 1.2. The Penitential Psalms. The primer in English and Latin, after Salisburie vse. London: R. Caly, 1556. STC 16073. Sig. M6r. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark C.35.b.21.(1.).

Fig. 1.3. Illustration for 2 Samuel 11. The byble in Englyshe. [Paris: F. Regnault]; London: R. Grafton and E. Whitchurch, 1539. STC 2068. [Great Bible] Part 2, fol. 40v. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark G.12215.

Fig. 1.4. The Penitential Psalms. Horae, Dominican Use. Italy (Siena), ca. 1470. Used by permission of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. MS Lewis E 118, fol. 132v.

Fig. 1.5. The Penitential Psalms. Horae, Use of Dol and Rennes. France (Paris), ca. 1405. Used by permission of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. MS Widener 4, fol. 76r.

Fig. 1.6. The Penitential Psalms. Hore presentes ad vsum Sarum. Paris: P. Pigouchet for S. Vostre, 1498. STC 15887. Sig. k4r. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark IA.40335.

Fig. 1.7. Leaf from Horae. France (Rouen), [early?] sixteenth century. Used by permission of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. MS Lewis M11.10a.

Fig. 1.8. The Penitential Psalms. Horae, Use of Paris. France (Paris), early sixteenth century. Used by permission of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. MS Lewis E 97, fol. 68r.

Fig. 1.9. The Penitential Psalms. Orarium seu libellus precationum per regiam maiestatem & clerum latinè aeditus. London: R. Grafton, 1546. STC 16042. Sig. E2v. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark C.35.b.18.

Fig. 1.10. The Penitential Psalms. This prymer of Salysbury vse. Paris: T. Kerver for J. Growte [in London], 1532. STC 15978. Fol. 126v. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark C.35.a.14.

Fig. 1.11. The Penitential Psalms. Hore beatissime virginis Marie ad vsum Sarisburiensis ecclesie. Paris: T. Kerver for W. Bretton [in London], 1510. STC 15909. Sig. q1r. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark C.25.k.4.

Fig. 1.12. First sermon. John Fisher, This treatise concernynge the fruytfull saynges of Dauyd in the seuen penytencyall psalmes. London: W. de Worde, 1508. STC 10902. Sig. aa2r. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark G.12026.

Fig. 1.13. 2 Samuel 11. Biblia the bible. [Cologne?: E. Cervicornus and J. Soter?], 1535. STC 2063. [Coverdale Bible] Sig. hh2r. By permission of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. Shelfmark Fol. BS145 1535.

Fig. 1.14. Commandment against adultery. A necessary doctrine and erudition for any christen man. London: J. Mayler, 1543. STC 5175. [The King’s Book] Sig. N3r. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark C.21.a.13.

Fig. 1.15. The alphabet. The New England Primer. Worcester, MA: S. A. Howland (publisher); J. M. Shumway (printer and binder), ca. 1849. Page 13. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. Shelfmark N532 H864 1849.

Fig. 1.16. Detail from fig. 1.15.

Fig. 3.1. Title page. Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid. London: T. Raynald and [i.e., for] J. Harington (Harryngton in the imprint), 1549. STC 2726. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.54.156.

Fig. 3.2. From the dedication to Lord William Parr. Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid. London: T. Raynald and [i.e., for] J. Harington (Harryngton in the imprint), 1549. STC 2726. Sig. A1v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.54.156.

Fig. 3.3. The Penitential Psalms. This prymer in Englyshe and in Laten. London: [R. Redman, 1537]. STC 15997. Sig. P2v. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Shelfmark STC 15997.

Fig. 3.4. Prologue to the second Penitential Psalm. Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid. London: T. Raynald and [i.e., for] J. Harington (Harryngton in the imprint), 1549. STC 2726. Sig. B3r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Shelfmark Syn.8.54.156.

Fig. 4.1. Frontispiece with engraving of Elizabeth Regina. Christian prayers and meditations. London: J. Day, 1569. STC 6428. By permission of the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library. Shelfmark (ZZ) 1569.6.

Fig. 4.2. Illustration for Psalm 1 depicting David in prayer. Gallican Psalter with Calendar, Canticles, Litany, and Collects. Flanders (Bruges), ca. 1470. Used by permission of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia. MS Lewis E 182, fol. 7r.

Fig. 4.3. A meditation vpon the 102 Psalme. Theodore Beza, Christian meditations vpon eight psalmes of the prophet Dauid. [Trans. John Stubbs.] London: C. Barker, 1582. STC 2004. Sigs. F2v-F3r. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark 3090.aaaa.7.

Fig. 5.1. Title page with emblem of winged heart (and monogram IHS). Richard Verstegan, Odes. In imitation of the seaven penitential psalmes, with sundry other poemes. [Antwerp: A. Conincx], 1601. STC 21359. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark C.38.b.29.

Fig. 5.2. First two stanzas of Psalm 51, with melody. William Hunnis, Seuen sobs of a sorrowfull soule for sinne. London: H. Denham, 1583. STC 13975. Page 35. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark C.37.a.7.

Abbreviations

Other Conventions

Textual Note

For early works, I have silently expanded abbreviations and contractions. I have also removed double capitalization occurring at the beginning of sentences and updated obsolete characters (such as thorn and yogh, the long s, and ligatures). In general, however, I have kept modernization light.

Translations for Non-English Sources

Wherever possible, I give English translations for non-English sources (Augustine, Cassiodorus, Luther, and so on) from the standard versions. These translations are referenced in my notes. The remaining English renderings are mine.

Quotations and Translations from the Vulgate Bible

All quotations from the Vulgate Bible are taken from Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, edited by Bonifatius Fischer et al., and revised by Robert Weber. It should be noted that the Fischer/Weber edition includes two different Psalters translated by Jerome: the Psalterium Gallicanum and the Psalterium iuxta Hebraicum. I use the Psalterium Gallicanum, Jerome’s Latin version of the Septuagint Psalter, which circulated more widely than the Psalterium iuxta Hebraicum in the late Middle Ages. English translations of all Latin Vulgate Bible texts are from the Douay-Rheims Bible. I use the 1941 edition published by the Douay Bible House in New York, with the title The Holy Bible. Where necessary, I have amended this text from British to American spelling.

Psalm Numbers

There are two different systems for subdividing and numbering the psalms. The first is represented in the Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate Bibles and their derivatives, including the Douay-Rheims Bible. The second is found in the Masoretic Text (the standard Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible, compiled between the seventh and the tenth centuries CE) as well as in most Protestant Bibles. In this book, I use the system relevant to the literature in question in any given chapter. Thus, for the medieval period I follow the Vulgate, and for the Reformation period, I follow the Masoretic Text.

Acknowledgments

I could not have completed this study without the generous support of my home institution, the University of Connecticut. I am especially grateful to the University of Connecticut English Department for granting me a semester of research leave in the fall of 2009. This time away from my teaching and advising duties gave me a crucial opportunity to reinvigorate my project by looking afresh at the Penitential Psalms. Before that, a Junior Faculty Fellowship from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation, in the summer of 2007, allowed me to indulge in three months of reading nothing but Luther. I would have accomplished very little writing had it not been for the provision of carrel space in the Homer Babbidge Library on campus. Further material aid came from outside the university, in the form of a Northeast MLA Summer Research Fellowship, which funded a necessary trip to the United Kingdom in July 2010.

My research for this book benefited enormously from the assistance of many librarians, archivists, curators, imaging technicians, and permissions staff—on both sides of the Atlantic. I would like in particular to thank Lynne Farrington, John Pollack, and Daniel Traister (Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania); Richard Bleiler (Homer Babbidge Library, University of Connecticut); Steven K. Galbraith and Rebecca Oviedo (Folger Shakespeare Library); Joanne Kennedy, Joël Sartorius, and Joseph Shemtov (the Free Library of Philadelphia); Cornelia S. King (the Library Company, Philadelphia); Don C. Skemer (Princeton University Library); Colum P. Hourihane (Index of Christian Art, Princeton University); Jaclyn Penny (American Antiquarian Society); Nicholas Smith and Don Manning (Cambridge University Library); Gabriel Sewell and Clare Brown (Lambeth Palace Library); Justin Clegg (the British Library); and Phillipa Grimstone (Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge).

An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, and a portion of chapter 3 was published in Psalms in the Early Modern World. I am grateful to the Renaissance Society of America and the University of Chicago Press on the one hand, and Ashgate on the other hand, for permission to reproduce my work here in revised form. Full copyright information is given in my notes to the relevant chapters.

My interest in the Penitential Psalms first took seed when I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, and I owe thanks to my advisors—Peter Stallybrass, Margreta de Grazia, and David Wallace—not only for allowing me to follow up on my hunch that there might be something worth investigating (and writing about) in this esoteric topic, but also for helping me to understand the wider significance of my discoveries as they occurred. Though each member of my advisory committee had a profound impact on my growth as a scholar, Peter Stallybrass deserves special mention for directing me to important archives, as well as for demystifying the often peculiar practices of knowledge production in our field.

At Penn, I also received helpful suggestions from Professors E. Ann Matter, David M. Stern, and Margo Todd. In addition, I count myself highly fortunate to have been able to participate in the university’s med-Ren seminar—an experience that taught me to reexamine everything I thought I knew about medieval and early modern literature and culture. Lively conversations with my peers (including Jessica A. Boon, Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Marissa Greenberg, Miriam Jacobson, Stephanie A.V.G. Kamath, Michelle Karnes, Erika Lin, and Elizabeth Williamson) were formative, and I have recalled them often while working on the Penitential Psalms.

Many other minds must be thanked for their involvement in this book. Christel McNeill (a long time ago now) and Michaela Lowrie (more recently) both helped me to decipher Luther’s German, while Erica Gelser checked my first set of transcriptions from the near-impenetrable Weimarer Ausgabe (Weimar edition). Emily Greenwood answered a relentless onslaught of questions about Latin and Greek from afar. I am also grateful to Ty Buckman, Hannibal Hamlin, Scott C. Lucas, Anne Lake Prescott, Frederic Clarke Putnam, Beth Quitslund, Michael D. Reeve, and Nigel Smith for sharing their expertise along the way (and setting me straight where necessary, too). At the University of Connecticut, I have received sage counsel from my colleagues C. David Benson, Frederick M. Biggs, Wayne Franklin, F. Elizabeth Hart, Robert J. Hasenfratz, Brendan Kane, Gregory M. Colón Semenza, and Kathleen A. Tonry.

It was Jennifer Summit who first informed me about the ReFormations series. The series editors—David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson—encouraged me to see this project through to publication and guided me in shaping my book as a book; I am deeply indebted to them for their advice at every stage of the process. In addition, an anonymous reviewer wrote a judicious and extremely useful critique of my typescript. The acquisitions, editorial, and production teams at the University of Notre Dame Press oversaw all practical matters with great competence and grace. I would especially like to acknowledge Susan Berger, Rebecca DeBoer, Barbara Hanrahan, Stephen Little, Elisabeth Magnus, Wendy McMillen, and Kathryn Pitts for their assistance.

My biggest thanks are reserved for my family. My parents, Rea Costley and Alan E. Costley, have contributed to my academic efforts in countless ways ever since I decided—before I had made it through primary school—that I wanted to be a professor. Miserere Mei may be the first tangible return on their investment to date. (Mum, if I had inherited your talent for languages, I would have been able to complete this much sooner; Dad, I’m sorry it’s not about plasma diagnostics.) My sister, Helen Anderson, and her husband, Alex Anderson, have offered me hospitality on multiple occasions, making the London libraries relatively accessible to a resident of New England. My husband, A. Kyele King’oo, and our son, Edward Kibo King’oo, have endured my evening and weekend disappearances with indefatigable patience. Kyele has also been my toughest, and thus my most valuable, interlocutor and critic. This book is dedicated to him, with much love and gratitude.

Introduction

The Seven Penitential Psalms

This book charts the rich and, at times, tumultuous history of the seven Penitential Psalms in England in the late medieval and early modern era. During this period, the Penitential Psalms inspired an enormous amount of creative and intellectual work: in addition to being copied and illustrated in Books of Hours and other prayer books, they were expounded in commentaries, imitated in vernacular translations and paraphrases, rendered into lyric poetry, and even modified for singing. It is the task of Miserere Mei to explore these various material and generic transformations. Combining the resources of close literary analysis with those of the history of the material text, this study reveals not only that the Penitential Psalms lay at the heart of Reformation-age debates over the nature of repentance but also, and more significantly, that they constituted a site of theological, political, artistic, and poetic engagement across the many polarities that supposedly separate late medieval from early modern culture.

The Penitential Psalms are the seven psalms numbered 6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, and 142 in the Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate Bibles; and 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143 in the Hebrew Masoretic Text (as well as in the majority of Protestant Bibles). The convention of according these psalms heightened significance as a subset of the Book of Psalms and associating them with repentance belongs entirely to what Harry P. Nasuti has termed the interpretive community of western Christianity.¹ This tradition did not originate in ancient Judaism, nor has it ever been embraced by the Eastern Orthodox Church.² Yet within Western Christendom it boasts an impressively long life, emerging in patristic times and enduring among theologians to this day.³

Miserere Mei examines the fate of this resilient tradition in England, in an era when the seven psalms held great sway over the religious and the lay alike—roughly from the end of the fourteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century. In terms of vernacular literature, then, this study stretches broadly from the Middle English metrical paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms by Richard Maidstone (composed in the late 1380s or early 1390s) to the early modern English odes, or songs, based on those same psalms by Richard Verstegan (first published in 1601). Yet this book also focuses more narrowly on the fortunes of the Penitential Psalms in the mid- to late sixteenth century, when the sequence became caught up in Reformation controversy. The objective of this endeavor (that is, of the simultaneous adumbration of both a longer and a shorter history of the Penitential Psalms) is not to insist upon the much-invoked opposition between late medieval and early modern modes of expression. Rather, it is to highlight how certain Reformation and post-Reformation habits of reading and writing derive directly from (and may depend crucially on) important pre-Reformation antecedents.

To put it plainly, the Penitential Psalms are of significance precisely because they survived—because they made it through the turbulent years of the mid-sixteenth century as a unit, and continued to bear meaning in a range of contexts (not just religious but also social and political, artistic and poetic), even after undergoing intense reevaluation. Prior to the Reformation, these psalms served both as important prayers of repentance and as valuable petitions for the souls of the dead. Deeply embedded in liturgical and devotional practice, and virtually indispensable to the Latin Church’s economy of salvation, they could easily have been jettisoned from post-Reformation culture. Yet in the decades following the upheaval of the Reformation the Penitential Psalms were not cast away but instead adopted, adapted, and appropriated—in some cases radically so. Indeed, the literary, cultural, and material history of England in the period of the Reformation bears witness to a remarkable eruption of activity around the Penitential Psalms, as the series was translated, paraphrased, contested, fragmented, set to music, copied, printed, marketed, smuggled across the Channel, and so on.

The list of English individuals who engaged explicitly with the Penitential Psalms between the first years of the Reformation and the end of the sixteenth century includes, but is not limited to, figures as diverse as John Croke, Sir Thomas Wyatt, John Day, John Stubbs, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, William Byrd, and William Hunnis. (There is also some evidence that Edmund Spenser produced a rendition of the seven psalms, though, unfortunately, this particular adaptation appears to be no longer extant.)⁴ Reworking the sequence in ways that were sometimes subversive, sometimes reactionary, these translators, poets, printers, courtiers, and choir masters refashioned a Western religious convention that was approximately one thousand years old at the time when they made their claims upon it. Miserere Mei tries to get at both how (or in what specific forms) and why (or to what ends) they might have done so.

The ensuing sections lay down the necessary foundations for this investigation. First I look into the original selection of the seven Penitential Psalms from the Psalter, while also tackling the issue of the genre of these prayers from a form-critical viewpoint. Then I explain the significance of Augustinian hermeneutical practices to the establishment and maintenance of the series. Next I delineate the various liturgical and devotional purposes to which the seven psalms were put in the centuries between the patristic era and the Reformation. Finally, I provide an outline of Miserere Mei as a whole and address further some of the ways in which this project might contribute to current scholarship.

On the Origins of a Genre

The origins of the Penitential Psalms—when the grouping came about, who instigated it, and why—cannot be pinned down with absolute certainty. In the late Middle Ages one custom held that the seven Penitential Psalms were selected out of the Psalter by Saint Augustine.⁵ This belief, which is almost certainly erroneous, likely resulted from a provocative statement in a short fifth-century Vita (Life) of Augustine by Possidius, bishop of Calama.⁶ Possidius writes of Augustine that in the days of his final illness he had the Davidic Psalms, the few that were written about penitence, transcribed for his benefit and placed on the wall opposite him so that, lying in bed, he would gaze upon them and weep copiously and continually.⁷ The problem for literary historians is that while Possidius indicates that Augustine recognized certain psalms as exceptionally effective for penitential purposes, he does not specify which psalms these were, or even how many of them Augustine picked out. Moreover, there is no evidence from any of Augustine’s own writings—not even from his extensive expositions of the psalms themselves—that the bishop of Hippo ever considered the seven Penitential Psalms of later tradition to function as a group.

Though the Penitential Psalms were probably not selected out of the Book of Psalms by Augustine, the genesis of the series may nonetheless have been motivated by the saint’s deathbed contrition, especially as it is narrated by Possidius: for the consolidation of the sequence of seven texts seems to have occurred in the century or so immediately following Augustine’s death (which occurred in the year 430). While it is fairly common for early patristic commentators to class specific psalms, and particularly Psalm 50, as penitential in nature, the first explicit reference to the seven Penitential Psalms as a set appears in Cassiodorus’s mid-sixth-century Expositio Psalmorum (Explanation of the Psalms).⁸ In this treatise Cassiodorus provides an exposition of every psalm in the Book of Psalms. But, as he proceeds, he makes a point of highlighting each of the penitents’ psalms, while also delineating several thematic connections between them. Moreover, on two separate occasions he provides a complete list of the Penitential Psalms. At the beginning of his commentary on Psalm 6, Cassiodorus invites his audience to remember that this text is the first of the penitents’ psalms and gives the numbers for the remaining psalms in the group.⁹ He then itemizes all seven of the Penitential Psalms again at the end of his commentary on Psalm 142, where he notes that with this psalm—the last in the sequence—the affliction of the suppliants and the course of their blessed tears are brought to a close.¹⁰

Given such unambiguous statements, it is tempting to point to Cassiodorus as the inaugurator of the grouping; but because the theologian expects his audience to recall an established tradition, it would appear instead that the seven psalms must have been associated with penitence for some time prior to the composition of his commentary.¹¹ Regarding the question of beginnings, then, the conclusions of modern scholarship are necessarily limited. It seems reasonable to assume that the Penitential Psalms were selected out of the Book of Psalms at some point between Possidius’s Vita of Augustine and Cassiodorus’s Expositio Psalmorum—that is, between the middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century. But the precise moment of origin, and the identity of the originator (or, perhaps, originators), cannot be established with certainty.

Unlike the fifteen Gradual Psalms (the other significant subset of the Book of Psalms), the seven Penitential Psalms do not constitute a consecutive series in the Psalter.¹² What, then, do they have in common? Why were they grouped together in the fifth or sixth century? And what has held them together from that time until today? These questions are not as easy to answer as one might imagine, largely because, while they are in essence questions about genre, they cannot be answered satisfactorily by pointing to the inherent formal qualities of the seven psalms alone.

In fact, ever since the establishment of modern biblical form criticism by Hermann Gunkel and Sigmund Mowinckel in the first decades of the twentieth century, it has been evident that the coherence of the sequence of the Penitential Psalms relies only in part on the intrinsic formal characteristics (such as theme, structure, tone, or affective technique) of the seven individual prayers. Although the principal goal of form criticism in relation to the Psalter was always to uncover the ways in which different types of psalms were deployed in the worship of ancient Israel, Gunkel and Mowinckel (and their colleagues) advanced their project initially by privileging formalist over historicist methods of analysis. And in taking this approach, they came not only to uncover some significant structural variation among the seven psalms traditionally grouped together as the Penitential Psalms but also to challenge the designation of penitential for a number of the texts in the series.¹³

From a form-critical perspective, the seven Penitential Psalms all differ from one another in several ways. The most obvious odd man out, however, is Psalm 31. Written largely, though not completely, in the past tense, this psalm gives an account of a spiritual conversion. The psalmist (or speaker of the psalm) explains that once, when he found himself terribly troubled (he was groaning so much that his bones started to waste away), he acknowledged his sin and received divine forgiveness. Now he rejoices in his absolution and, somewhat didactically, urges others to follow his example—both by pursuing righteousness for themselves and by joining him in praise of the God who delivered him. While this psalm certainly foregrounds the theme of penitence, form-critical analysis suggests that in ancient Israel it would likely have been considered either a psalm of thanksgiving or a psalm of wisdom—or a combination of both.¹⁴

In contrast to Psalm 31, the six remaining psalms in the sequence are composed predominantly in the present tense. These are not particularly happy psalms. Indeed, the psalmist protests about, and begs for respite from, a host of unbearable hardships. Not only does he suffer from a wide range of physical problems (sickness, weakness, weariness, disability, or old age), but he is also burdened with emotional distress (he bows low with mourning or succumbs to fits of weeping) and is subject to one or another kind of social alienation (his closest friends and relations have abandoned him and/or he finds himself surrounded by his worst enemies). Modern form-critical scholars generally concur that these prayers would have been understood, in the setting of early Israelite worship, primarily as individual psalms of lament.¹⁵

But the degree to which any of these petitions for divine aid would have been comprehended not just as a psalm of lament but also as a psalm of penitence depends upon the degree to which the psalmist first rationalizes his abject circumstances as the result of his own iniquity and then attempts to do something about it. In form-critical terms, it depends upon how much of the psalmist’s complaint is also a confession, a plea for forgiveness, or an expression of a desire to turn from wickedness to righteousness.¹⁶ And the psalms of lament are far from consistent in this regard.¹⁷ Indeed, on the basis of these criteria, one might imagine the six laments as lying along a continuum, with Psalms 50 and 37 at one end (highly penitential), Psalms 6 and 101 at the other (barely, if at all, penitential), and Psalms 129 and 142 somewhere in between.¹⁸

In those laments at the highly penitential end of the scale, the psalmist not only posits a direct connection between his misfortune and his sin but also explicitly confesses his iniquity and expresses a longing to make amends and/or to receive God’s forgiveness. Psalm 37 exemplifies this tendency. Here the psalmist draws a triangular association between his physical pain, his transgressions, and God’s anger: There is no health in my flesh because of thy wrath: there is no peace for my bones, because of my sins.¹⁹ Thus, while he complains about his wretched condition, he also intimates that he might actually deserve to suffer. Later in the psalm, he even announces an intention to own up to his sin and receive punishment for it: For I am ready for scourges: and my sorrow is continually before me. For I will declare my iniquity: and I will think for my sin.²⁰

In those psalms at the barely penitential end of the scale, however, the psalmist does not attempt to explain his dire situation by reference to a theology of divine retribution. When, in Psalm 101, for instance, he complains that he has been left to wither away, alone and surrounded by his foes, he fails to admit to any iniquity on his own part. He does indicate that he is subject to the full force of God’s wrath. But he makes no suggestion to the effect that this bitter treatment is justified. Instead, he gets close to accusing the divinity of handling him in an arbitrary fashion, exalting him one minute and abandoning him the next: For I did eat ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping, he laments, adding, Because of thy anger and indignation: for having lifted me up thou hast thrown me down.²¹ This psalm, then, leaves open the rather terrifying possibility that the psalmist suffers at the indiscriminate (or, at least, the inscrutable) whim of the divine.

In sum, an analysis of the seven Penitential Psalms based on form-critical