Bay Psalm Book

Bay Psalm Book. The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (1640), familiarly called the Bay Psalm Book, was the first book published in Anglo‐America, which underlines the importance that singing played in Puritan devotion. The Massachusetts clergy undertook the project because they judged the current most popular Psalter, Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins's Whole Book of Psalms (1562), an insufficiently literal translation of the Hebrew, and Henry Ainsworth's more accurate Book of Psalms (1612) problematic because of the author's separation from the Church of England. Thomas Welde, John Eliot, and Richard Mather penned most of the verses, while John Cotton wrote the preface. A consensus that the text warranted artistic improvement led Henry Dunster, president of Harvard College, and Richard Lyon to publish a revision, differently titled, in 1651.

The Bay Psalm Book played a central role in both public services and domestic devotions for over a century, since Puritans sang psalms to praise God, comfort the afflicted, admonish the wicked, urge sinners to Christ, and vivify their sense of heaven's imminent glory. Some scholars derogated the poetry's quality, calling attention to its forced rhymes and the inverted order of phrases, but its “singsong” cadences aided memorization, a useful means for increasing worshipers' participation in an age when books were scarce and many individuals could not read. The volume lost favor in the mid‐eighteenth century as congregations' musicianship improved and ministers accepted scriptural paraphrases as liturgically sound; still, the twenty‐seventh (and last) New England edition appeared as late as 1762.
See also Bible, The; Colonial Era; Literature: Colonial Era; Puritanism.

Bibliography

Zoltán Haraszti , The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book., 1956.
Charles Hambrick‐Stowe , The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth‐Century New England, 1982, pp. 111–16.

Charles L. Cohen