ABSTRACT
The Book of Psalms was thought to be the most varied of poetic models, encompassing all metrical forms, genres, and modes. In commissioning the Bay Psalm Book, the Puritan leaders of New England consciously chose to assert their particular theological beliefs to the world, and especially to Britain. The Bay Psalm Book should be seen as an exemplary text of immigration: an instance of transatlantic self-fashioning, articulating a new, colonial identity within Anglo-American Protestantism. Although figures like anagrams call attention to the materiality and complexity of textuality, the Bay Psalm Book glosses over the intricacies involved in translation, insisting on simple faithfulness to the original as resolving such issues. During the Renaissance, translation was conceived of as an activity not simply striving towards complete synonymity of source and target product, but rather as a creative act of cultural appropriation: claiming a text or resource as one's own.
