ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on John Austin's office hymns, which helped to introduce post-Reformation English worshippers to the notion that original compositions could form part of collective devotion, and brought the turns and introspections of the religious lyric into the semi-public domain. As a Catholic writing for a Catholic audience, Austin sometimes fell foul of censorship; nevertheless, his work appealed to a variety of Protestant audiences after minimal adaptation, and helped prepare the ground for the flowering of nonconformist English hymnody in the eighteenth century. The Blackloists were a loose association of mid-seventeenth-century Catholic intellectuals, especially well-known for their readiness to make terms with the Cromwellian government. The chapter challenges the hegemony of metrical psalms, and Wither's preface contains some suggestive qualifications: he protests that he does not wish to have the hymns thought Part of the Churches Liturgie' perhaps a sign that they were principally intended for private devotion.
