Introduction

This is a book about a book: The Whole Booke of Psalmes, collected into Englysh metre by T. Starnhold I. Hopkins & others: conferred with the Ebrue, with apt Notes to synge the[m] with al, Faithfully perused and alowed according to thordre appointed in the Quenes maiesties Iniunctions. First published under that title in 1562, it has been known since the Restoration as “Sternhold and Hopkins,” and since the 1696 publication by Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady of A new version of the Psalms of David as “the Old Version.” As those dates suggest, this was an extraordinarily long-lived volume, and the number of editions is even more impressive than its chronological survival: about 150 during Elizabeth’s reign, and close to 1,000 in total by the time it ceased publication in the nineteenth century.1 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Bishop William Beveridge asserted that it had been “printed oftener than any other book in England.”2 By any measure, it is an important anthology for both the history of printing and the history of English devotionality.