Bredehoft claims the Old English
Metrical Psalter was produced sometime during the tenth-century Benedictine Reform and plausibly argues "the reuse or citation of The Metrical Psalms in four separate contexts would seem to suggest that this work was widely known and felt to be authoritative" (43).
With over 150 Elizabethan editions, this
metrical psalter and its predecessors were "some of the best-selling evangelical literature" and provided many of the "best-known translations of scripture" (5).
Toswell, "The translation techniques of the old English
metrical psalter, with special reference to Psalm 136." English Studies 75:5 (1994): 393-407, 393.
The Reformation in rhyme; Sternhold, Hopkins and the English
metrical psalter, 1547-1603.
Surrounded by the magnificence of the human voice, one can understand that it was music, in particular the
metrical psalter, and not the pessimistic dogma of predestination, that was the secret of Calvinism's success.
Sacred English gradually became dispersed out of the liturgy alone into discourses such as the
metrical psalter and the devotional lyric.
The Scottish
Metrical Psalter is present in what we are told is a rare edition (printed at Edinburgh in 1575).
Argumentis et Latina Paraphrasi illustrati, ac etiam vario carminum genere latine expressi, which was published in both the Latin version and an English translation by Anthony Gilbie in London in 1580.(1) John Rathmell showed that Sidney's sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, used Gilbie's translation in composing her part of the
metrical psalter, Psalms 44-150.(2) But there is evidence that she also used the Latin version, as a comparison of the two versions with the texts of her Psalms will prove.(3)
Turning to the Low Countries, the author again discusses the background of Latin hymns before tracing the development of vernacular psalmody in the work of the Antwerp printer Simon Cock, who was responsible for the first complete
metrical psalter, the Souterliedekens, which in turn influenced the work of Jan Utenhove, whose early metrical psalms were issued in London during the reign of Edward VI.
In the English church the task of providing a complete
metrical psalter, to be sung by the community, was carried out by a team, with Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins as main contributors (Al such Psalmes of Dauid [1549]).