Women, Place, and the Psalms

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women in England encountered the biblical psalms as they moved through the spaces where they lived, worked, and prayed. As the psalms became more widely available in English, and translations, paraphrases, and versions proliferated, women encountered them in the relative privacy of the closet, as well as in the communal, shared spaces of households and churches. Two powerful sixteenth-century versions of Psalm 54 speak from very different places: the prison and the country house. These sites of production, signifying the writer’s position in the contested social, political, and theological culture of the time, produce different meanings for the psalm. One version appears at the end of the print publication, The First Examination of Anne Askew in 1546; another in the manuscript collection of psalm translations written by Mary Herbert (née Sidney), Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), which was completed by 1599. Anne Askew (c. 1521–1546) appears to speak from a dangerous place, in prison as a heretic and in need of refuge; Herbert from the safety and privilege of her country house. This entry situates these versions in a broader landscape of women’s encounters with the biblical psalms, showing how the psalm texts themselves can be seen as sites of production for women, providing them with textual and performative spaces from which to write and speak.