ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the doctrinal designations aside, as inherently polemical insofar as each of them is, to a varying degree, committed to the articulation of viewpoints contentious in their contemporary context. It focuses on their specific and pointed deployment of quotations from the Psalms in bolstering their claims for the devotional, theological and biblical validity of the English vernacular. The chapter explores the use that these tracts make of the Psalms in this context is unsurprising. In the long and tortuous medieval history of biblical translation into English, the Psalms had always occupied a very particular place. The most widely circulated and influential of the complete translations was the mid-fourteenth-century English Psalter and commentary of Richard Rolle, hermit of Hampole. The prominence of the Psalms in polemic advocating the availability of scriptural and devotional material in English is explicable, by historical exigency. It was also referenced in the anonymous fourteenth-century English Prose Psalter.
