ABSTRACT
The central question about Certayne Psalmes chose[n] out of the Psalter of David, and drawe[n] into Englishe Metre by Thomas Sternhold grome of ye kynges Maiesties Roobes is: why? Why, that is, should a mid-level civil servant not known as a poet take it into his head to write versifications of scripture? Having done so, why did he go so much further than most court poets, and have them printed? Why, for that matter, did the English metrical psalter begin not in the Edwardian Church, but the Edwardian court? Looking at Sternhold’s possible models for psalm versification only makes his efforts seem more unusual. None of the other collections of vernacular metrical psalms and hymns circulating in London or around the court in the 1530s and 1540s is a particularly close model for Sternhold’s. It is likely, if not certain, that he knew of Wyatt’s paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms and Coverdale’s Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes. Rivkah Zim has argued that he may have heard about or even seen a copy of Marot’s psalms through Nicolas Denisot, a French humanist and former member of the royal household of François I who resided in England from 1547 to 1549, serving for much of that time as tutor to the Duke of Somerset’s daughters.1 But there is little similarity between Sternhold’s translation and any of these predecessors besides the fact of collecting some portion of the Psalter into verse which could be sung. Sternhold was up to something new.
