ABSTRACT
From the middle of the sixteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, singing the psalms in a verse paraphrase was high on the list of ordinary devotional activities among nearly all English-speaking Protestants. By the middle of Elizabeth's reign, the most frequent occasion for psalm singing was public worship: before and after Morning and Evening Prayer, before and after sermons, and, in at least some places, during the administration of the Lord's Supper. The adoption of the metrical psalms for congregational singing in England, however, together with the Calvinist justifications for metrical psalmody in public worship, changed the ways that many devotional writers thought about and prescribed the private use of singing psalms. Without either the liturgical function of metrical psalms in Continental Protestant Churches or a strong tradition of lay devotional song in English Catholic practice, the most obvious context for metrical psalmody was indeed amusement.
