“The Sidney Psalter” and the early modern translation of Psalms

Abstract

The article investigates the literary, political and religious relevance of The Sidney Psalter, the translation of the biblical Psalter initiated by Philip Sidney and completed, after his death in Flanders in 1586, by his sister Mary Sidney. From a religious point of view, the work testifies to the centrality of the Psalms in English Protestant culture and to the Sidneys’ intention to become the promoters for a more markedly reformed turn in the English church. From a literary and political point of view, on the other hand, it recounts the nationalistic desire to compete with the already existing verse translations of the Psalms – in English, in Latin and in the main European languages – in order to attest to the wide range of solutions offered by the English idiom (an issue already at the centre of national culture since the time of Henry VII and crucial in English Petrarchism in all its phases). The aim was in fact to offer the most refined and rich poetic translation of the Psalms that had ever appeared in the English language. Nor should we forget the role that the translation of the Psalms played in the defence of poesy from Puritan hostility to which Philip Sidney would dedicate himself with his treatise The Defense of Poesy, which uses the biblical Psalter as incontrovertible proof of the divine legitimacy of poetry.