Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

Thomas Wyatt lived in an environment where it was unwise, if not impossible, to speak one’s thoughts plainly. This chapter explores how Wyatt’s life at court, and his career as an ambassador, informed his tendency towards irony, obliquity, and indirection in his verse. As a close reading of his diplomatic correspondence demonstrates, Wyatt learned to speak in blank phrases, proverbs, and clichés, not just from his ambassadorial profession, but from contemporary writings on counsel, courtiership, and literary style. What is more, these influences seem to have inspired a theory of making in which, for Wyatt, the message of a poem is to be found, neither in its matter, nor in its form, but in its suggestive implications—in the sense of “grace,” to use his term, that the poem may evoke for its reader. By tracing the effects of this “grace” throughout Wyatt’s lyrics—and especially in poems such as “What Vaileth Trouth” and “They Fle From Me”—I argue that Wyatt anticipates later theories of aesthetic autonomy by shifting the reader’s attention away from the contingent materials of his poetry and towards the imaginative space that a poem may seem to open up.

The mystic and hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349) claimed the authority to interpret biblical texts, to add his understandings of their meanings to the received and authoritative interpretations of the Fathers of the Church. This chapter takes up the question of how Rolle understood his own authority as an exegete and how his various explorations of this topic, across his many writings, in Latin and Middle English, compare to the theories of his contemporaries in Oxford and Cambridge, their understandings of how scholastic exegetical authority relates to the inspiration enjoyed by patristic interpreters and, ultimately, to the authors of the Bible itself. Rolle’s theoretical musings have much more in common with this scholastic material than has previously been appreciated, putting pressure on unfortunately persistent binaries of the devotional, affective or mystical, on the one hand, and, on the other, the scholastic or intellectual traditions of medieval Christianity.

By using a broad selection of ‘commentary discourse’, this chapter looks at the practice of reading, teaching and composing texts whose purpose is (partly) to explain older texts. Such commentaries, which can take various and sometimes unexpected forms, are of paramount importance for understanding the Byzantine intellectual and cultural framework of literary production, not only as a system of ‘authoritative mimesis’ but also as a system of ‘subversive anti-mimesis’. Thus, the chapter examines paraphrases of the Iliad, grammatical exercises such as the schede of Theodore Prodromos, lives of saints with integrated gnomologia, laudatory orations and novels, poetical treatises of political admonition (e.g. the anonymous Spaneas), scholia on ancient authors (like those produced by John Tzetzes on Aristophanes and Lycophron or by Eustathios on the Homeric poems), but also large-scale commentaries on Byzantine hymnongraphy (e.g. by John Zonaras on John of Damascus), philosophical and theological commentaries (Michael of Ephesos on Aristotle or Niketas of Herakleia on the Psalms). These texts represent different and yet interrelated discourses that highlight the key role of ‘commentary’ as a hermeneutic tool of and testimony to a broad spectrum of sociocultural and literary tensions within the longue durée of the Komnenian era.

The ‘Sidney psalter’ has attracted critical attention for the extraordinary metrical versatility displayed by Philip and (mostly) Mary Sidney in their complete set of psalm paraphrases in English. It has not however been discussed in the context of the neo-Latin metrical usage and experiment of the latter sixteenth century described in Chapter 2, although the Sidney psalter precisely reproduces in English the literary achievement in Latin of the major Protestant psalm paraphrases by George Buchanan and Theodore de Bèze (Beza). Of great devotional and literary importance for Protestants throughout Europe, these two collections were recognized immediately by contemporaries for their literary achievement, and Buchanan’s, in particular, was routinely cited until well into the eighteenth century. Taken together, they are crucial landmarks in the development of a Protestant Latin poetics, combining the literary achievement of humanism with a distinctively Protestant emphasis upon the literal meaning of the Hebrew Bible. This chapter describes the achievement and influence of these Latin works and sets out the evidence for their direct influence upon Mary Sidney in particular.

The debate about prosody in English, focused in particular upon the decorum of rhyme and the role of quantitative metrics, is a well-known feature of late Elizabethan literary criticism. But the intense interest in metrical matters at this period sits within, and emerges from, a geographically wider and chronologically precedent Latin phenomenon which has not been described. Vernacular poets engaged deeply with metrical questions because the contemporary use of Latin metre underwent very rapid change in the second half of the sixteenth century. Although it has passed almost unnoticed by scholarship, metrical creativity is one of the most astonishing features of the Latin poetry of this period. We cannot begin to appreciate the literary excitement caused by this poetry – and by its vernacular imitations, such as the remarkable metrical display of the Sidney psalter and Herbert's "Temple" – without understanding something of the music of Latin metre, and of the pace of Latin metrical innovation. This chapter offers a ‘big picture’ overview of Latin metrical innovation and experiment, as it reached and was received and taught in England, in the latter half of the sixteenth century

Simon Cheung discusses the scholarship surrounding the ‘wisdom psalms’, with an eye towards the varied proposals, as well as the grounds for and development of them over the last century. From this Cheung sets forth his own conception of wisdom psalms. They constitute ‘a family of psalms, with varying degrees of membership, that exhibit a wisdom-oriented constellation of its generic elements’. The core traits are likened to DNA, which can be more or less present, and mainly discerned in theme, tone and intention. ‘Wisdom psalms’, to some degree, then, feature wisdom, carry an ‘intellectual tone’ and a pedagogical intent, all of which Cheung inspects in Psalm 34:8–17. Overall, his approach may offer interpreters additional accuracy when considering wisdom and its influence within the Psalter.

This chapter examines the dynamics of the notion of peregrinatio in Augustine’s thought, with particular attention given to its use in the Enarrationes in Psalmos. It uses Derrida’s reflections on metaphor to explore the rich regression of images in peregrinatio. Augustine uses the concept, literally denoting the status of a resident alien, to express the affective dynamics of a Christian living away from their home in the heavenly Jerusalem: their sense of misalignment in the world, but also their sense of joy in the very transience of their existence. For no one can be a peregrinus without having a home from which he has traveled, and to which he looks forward to returning. Derrida’s phrase the “destinerrancy of desire” perfectly captures this Augustinian notion.

Books and boxes were found in close proximity; before bookshelves, chests were the most obvious place to store books, and the physical features of a bound book often made it visually analogous to a box. The material and tactile connections between book and box play into common metaphors of the book as a receptacle for textual riches, and the chapter brings together responses to the book as box-like object from Erasmus to early seventeenth-century English Protestants, from humanist treatises to portraits. In considering literary and visual encounters with the codex, discussion focuses on the significance of external surfaces, such as gold, blackness, and embroidery, in the fashioning of these inherently box-like objects. While reformers insisted on the Word of God as the only vehicle of truth, they could not escape the fact that it had to be contained in books, unavoidably material receptacles with insides and outsides that could shape and inscribe each other. Protestants remained sensitive to the metaphorical potential of an object with insides and outsides, and this chapter demonstrates that the identity of the ‘book’ was more complex than 'sola scriptura' suggested.

Chapter 6 offers summary reflections on the conclusions and contributions of the present work, including its findings for the study of the royal palms, the study of Syro-Palestinian inscriptions, Hebrew Bible theology, and the history of Israelite religion. In addition to proposing a new analytic for royal psalms (i.e. psalms of defeat), the book adds depth and specificity to previous scholarship on the theology of the royal psalms. It draws in sharper silhouette the animating commitment of royal psalms: Yhwh’s loyalty to his one individual client king. The book also calls attention to the non-narrative and lyric qualities of inscriptions, and it emphasizes the rhetorical centrality of their closing curse sections. For the study of Hebrew Bible theology, the present work holds up the important and distinctive theological offer of royal psalms. Historically, Levantine memorial inscriptions reflect an earlier engagement with Neo-Assyrian royal ideology and its monuments than scholars have argued heretofore, and a deeper indigenization.

This second chapter of Part I continues the thread of the preceding chapter, with a focus on the case of the Edomites. Using both texts and archeological data, it treats the role of the Edomites in the biblical narrative, from Genesis to the fall of Jerusalem. It concludes by reflecting on the implications for theories of the Pentateuch’s formation.

This chapter examines the significance of compunction for Christianity in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. It argues that the feeling of compunction was intertwined with the experience of paradisal nostalgia and an outpouring of tears. After briefly considering the portrayal of the emotions in patristic literature and the emergence of compunction in the Psalms, this chapter introduces the history of emotions as a field of research, arguing that the performativity of hymns paves the way to understanding emotions in Byzantium as embodied and liturgical phenomena. Finally, it foreshadows how this book will show that hymnody evoked scriptural stories, inviting the faithful to enter into the sacred drama of salvation unfolding before them and feel liturgically.

This chapter maps how students moved, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, between church and schoolroom, and the purposes religious music-making served in these contexts. It focuses on students’ performance of psalms, especially how particular performance practices (processing two-by-two) and the selection of psalms with moralizing texts inculcated potentially unruly children into the Protestant faith through bodily discipline and the act of communal singing. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the “Easter Psalms” sung at the Spital Sermon by children from the school at Christ’s Hospital as a multisensory event. Religious speech, music, and the display of the children’s bodies in their characteristic blue uniforms worked together to solicit charitable donations for the school and to demonstrate their piety, a performance practice that continues to this day. However, the potential for disruption, for something to go awry, for the script to be overturned is ever present, then and now.

Chapter 4 addresses the deceitfulness of violent speech. The psalmist reflects deep anxieties about the persistent scheming of the wicked. According to many psalms and proverbs, scheming is the constitutive quality of violent acts. More than the swinging club or shooting arrows of the wicked, it is their speech that occupies many biblical writers. I suggested that in poetic and wisdom texts, scheming is often considered part of the act of violence itself. The preoccupation with scheming reflects how biblical writers thought about the problem of violence (it is deceitful and often begins with speech). I argued that scheming was not simplistically prior to ‘real’ physical violence. Rather, it described a form of violence that afflicted the godly, and was something from which the petitioner sought protection. The concern with scheming enemies also reflects a desire for divine intervention before violence achieves its full effect. Finally, the concern with the enemy’s verbal scheming highlighted the re-expressibility of violent acts. They could be re-enacted in prayer as a provocation for God to act.