ABSTRACT
Studying The Whole Booke of Psalmes is made easier by the convention, begun in the Anglo-Genevan metrical psalters, of indicating each individual paraphrase’s author by his initials. At the same time, it is clear that neither the printer nor the authors themselves were jealous of credit for any particular items, because the attributions were from the beginning of Day’s patent treated very casually. Indeed, rather than being systematically corrected in later editions, some attributions were changed in one edition only to revert to the original 1562 ones in the next, and by the late 1570s a large number of new errors had become entrenched. Altogether it looks like the author function in this volume was never really intended as a way of distributing literary honors. “T. Sternhold” was in the early 1560s more like a brand name, and “J. Hopkins” must have rapidly acquired the same status once it took its place on the title page.
