ABSTRACT
A volume called ‘The Elizabethan Top Ten’ perhaps inevitably invites a popularity contest between the various kinds of print artefacts that it treats, and a corresponding variety in what ‘popularity’ means. By nearly any measure, the anthology of psalm paraphrases, hymns, and prose prayers known to Elizabethan and Jacobean English people as ‘the psalm book’ and to its late seventeenth-century opponents as ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’ is a strong contender for the palm, if not necessarily the poet’s laurel. The whole book of Psalmes, collected into English metre, by T. Sternhold, J. Hopkins and others (WBP) was among a handful of the most frequently printed titles, making its patent owners a fortune and regularly testing the Stationers’ capacity to control piracy. By the middle of Elizabeth’s reign it was used by virtually every English Protestant in public worship, and by many in household devotions. Although ubiquitous, the WBP was never specifically mandated for use by any national authority, which meant that it depended largely on custom for its continuance. Finally, for most of the Elizabethan period it seems to have been generally enjoyed and appreciated by an audience that included literati as well as artisans, and in the seventeenth century, when the critical reputation of its psalm paraphrases began to decline, it inspired an enormous number of alternative metrical psalters.
