12 - Alexander Hume’s Hymnes, or Sacred Songs

Summary

THIS chapter offers the first full critical reading of a much overlooked but significant contribution to Scots Calvinist poetry, Alexander Hume's Hymnes, or Sacred Songs, wherein the right vse of Poesie may be espied, a collection of verse and prose which was printed in Edinburgh in 1599. It demonstrates that the Hymnes is a carefully designed collection of a minister's writings, its sequence of prose and poetry precisely crafted and structured to explore the identities, roles and relationships of the ‘Godly’ poet and his reader, in terms both of delineating a method of private piety and of drawing the reader into a sense of community with other members of the faithful elect. By exploring Hume's collection in depth, the chapter also promotes a more complete understanding of the sophistication and complexity of Scottish devotional poetry at the turn of the seventeenth century, a period on which there is a growing body of scholarship but which remains less well-understood than later seventeenth-century religious writing. Recent work on seminal Reformation writing in Scotland including The Gude and Godlie Ballatis, on poetic and artistic masterpieces by Protestant writers such as Elizabeth Melville and Esther Inglis, on the growth of neo-Latin literature, and on post-Reformation music has done much to expand our knowledge of creative responses to the Reformation in Scotland by the turn of the seventeenth century. Much of this work has been directly facilitated by Professor Roger A. Mason's illumination of Scottish Reformation culture, particularly on the prominent and prolific figures of John Knox, George Buchanan and Andrew Melville. His work on these individuals and the intellectual connections between them, and more generally on Reformation historiography, provides essential context for my re-examination of the Hymnes, or Sacred Songs, its pastoral purpose and literary context. In particular, Mason's work has frequently considered the emergence of the ‘new Protestant self-image’, an important concept for understanding Alexander Hume's exploration of voice, self and identity in the Hymnes, or Sacred Songs. In his essay ‘Usable Pasts’, Mason reminds us of the significance of Arthur Williamson's earlier scholarship on the anxious mental world of early Reformation Scotland and its ‘tortured complexity’, a particularly pertinent piece of advice for any reader of Hume's Hymnes.