Miserere Mei

In Miserere Mei, Clare Costley King'oo examines the critical importance of the Penitential Psalms in England between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. 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. Miserere Mei explores these numerous transformations in materiality and genre. Combining the resources of close literary analysis with those of the history of the book, it 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 are often said to separate late medieval from early modern culture.Miserere Mei features twenty-five illustrations and provides new analyses of works based on the Penitential Psalms by several key writers of the time, including Richard Maidstone, Thomas Brampton, John Fisher, Martin Luther, Sir Thomas Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and Richard Verstegan. It will be of value to anyone interested in the interpretation, adaptation, and appropriation of biblical literature; the development of religious plurality in the West; the emergence of modernity; and the periodization of Western culture. Students and scholars in the fields of literature, religion, history, art history, and the history of material texts will find Miserere Mei particularly instructive and compelling.

“King’oo provides a careful and multi-disciplinary history of this group of psalms during the years before and following the English Reformation. . . . Using tools from the scholarship of history, art, literature, and theology, King’oo has written a fascinating study. With its superb scholarship and carefully reasoned arguments, this book is recommended for academic libraries supporting graduate programs.” —Catholic Library World, “The discovery of continuities amidst the upheaval of the Reformation has been a major area of scholarship in recent years and King’oo ably demonstrates that the Penitential psalms form yet another example of the way in which ‘the religious literature of the pre-Reformed past was not cast aside but rather gradually and complexly reshaped in Reformation England.’” —Journal of Ecclesiastical History, “The interdisciplinary approach used by Costley King’oo is one of the book’s great strengths: we study manuscripts, early printed works and illustrations; Bible commentary, paraphrase and translation; lyric poetry, political parody and devotional song. . . . [This book] will have a broad appeal to scholars of the Bible (and the psalms in particular), scholars of art history and religious history, literary scholars and those interested in early modern sexuality.” —The History of Women Religious, “King’oo lays out a concentrated argument for the centrality of the Penitential Psalms and what she calls a ‘penitential hermeneutic’ in both late medieval and early modern culture. . . . The monograph makes a solid case for the need for further study in this area.” —The Medieval Review, “A fascinating and impressively composed monograph. . . .  King’oo’s study is at its finest and most compelling in her analysis of individual adaptations of the Penitential Psalms, where close reading merges richly with attention to historical context and textual details.” —Comitatus

Clare Costley King'oo is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut.