Even though the theme of return migration is specific to Ezra–Nehemiah, the concept of social displacement appears throughout the Old Testament from the banishment from Eden, through ancestral journeys and multiple exiles from Samaria and Judah. Thus, the multivalent theology of Ezra–Nehemiah engenders a broader dialogue with the rest of the Old Testament.

This chapter explores the relationship between Christianity and ecology in Clare’s poetry, letters, and biblical paraphrases. Critics tend to secularize Clare’s writing and so overlook its biblical, religious, and metaphysical content. The chapter redresses this by assessing Clare’s early Christian faith, his relationship to Wesleyan Methodism and the Ranters, his distrust of organized religion, and his divine ecology as an expression of rural Christianity. Clare looks beyond pantheism and natural religion to identify an interwoven and sacred creation inseparable from the parish. As such, Clare valued Christianity as a ‘religion that teaches us to act justly to speak truth & love mercy’, a social and ecological politics embedded in prayer, mystery, scripture, and faith.

Early medieval charms invoke the service of the Visitation of the Sick through the use of liturgical elements central to that rite, as Chapter 4 argues. Charms import the singing of psalms, sprinkling of holy water, praying of anointing and healing formulas, imposing of hands, anointing of the body, and the chanting of antiphons and litanies. Once present in charms, these and other sacred practices serve as indices of the Visitation of the Sick. When allusions to the Visitatio Infirmorum are successfully recognized or evoked, charms invoke the liturgy. Because recognition proves crucial, the question of charm participants’ familiarity with the Visitation of the Sick leads us to assess the resonance of Visitatio references through the construct of a continuum. At one end we find charms containing references to the Visitation of the Sick that seem subtle in light of their brevity or context. At the opposite end we find charms with numerous, lengthy utterances based in the sacramental rite. Over all, associations with Christ’s healing and liturgical Unction are meant to transform faithful charm participants in their time of need.

The praying of psalms is the subject of Chapter 2. Psalms are frequently sung in charm rituals. They are carefully prescribed to help heal human and animal illness. Acute and painful diseases, such as diarrhea and carbuncles, are treated with psalms, as is fever. Even madness and “fiend-sickness” might respond to them, it was hoped. Psalms have great resonance for the English. They lie at the core of medieval liturgies, both monastic and public. They give hope to the suffering during the Visitation of the Sick. They were offered more generally as personal prayers and as penance. Chapter two establishes the petitionary nature of the psalms used in charm remedies. It demonstrates how psalms structure and organize charm performance with regard to other incantations. Psalms serve as practical prayers, the functionality of which arises out of each psalm’s generic form. They seek God’s assistance by asking the Lord directly or indirectly for aid. Psalms that use figurative language relevant to a charm’s objective employ metaphor and simile that act as vehicles for sympathetic magic. Charms render psalm incantations as powerful medicine for those in need.

This chapter proposes an assessment of the biblical figure of David as presented by Theodore Prodromos in some of his Historical Poems. David was often considered in Byzantine culture as the first and most important example of a Christian poet. The poet of the Psalms is depicted by Prodromos both as a source of inspiration for the persona loquens and as a role model for the emperor. This twofold representation is crucial to shed light on some of the poetic strategies used by Prodromos when dealing with Psalmic material in poems addressed to emperors. The chapter includes a close-reading of Prodromos’ Historical Poem 17, where a military victory of John II Komnenos is celebrated. In this long text, Prodromos systematically borrows verses from the text of the Psalms and adapts them in order to fit the occasional character of the poem. The analysis of the biblical hypotext as a literary source presented in the chapter provides new insight into the role that the biblical heritage could play within Byzantine authors’ canonical reference system.

Chapter 8 looks at Samuel in the theological context of the rest of the Scriptures: the Former Prophets or Deuteronomistic History, Chronicles, Psalms, Proverbs, Qohelet, and the New Testament.

Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury from 1093-1109, formerly of the abbey of Bec in Normandy, is here represented by an example of his more intimate writing, namely an exquisite short letter to his dear friend Gundulf, and by an excerpt from his great work, the Proslogion, an address to God in which Anselm meditates on the existence and nature of God and man’s relation to God in a Latin prose studded with Biblical references particularly from the Psalms.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

Thomas Wyatt lived in an environment where it was unwise, if not impossible, to speak one’s thoughts plainly. This chapter explores how Wyatt’s life at court, and his career as an ambassador, informed his tendency towards irony, obliquity, and indirection in his verse. As a close reading of his diplomatic correspondence demonstrates, Wyatt learned to speak in blank phrases, proverbs, and clichés, not just from his ambassadorial profession, but from contemporary writings on counsel, courtiership, and literary style. What is more, these influences seem to have inspired a theory of making in which, for Wyatt, the message of a poem is to be found, neither in its matter, nor in its form, but in its suggestive implications—in the sense of “grace,” to use his term, that the poem may evoke for its reader. By tracing the effects of this “grace” throughout Wyatt’s lyrics—and especially in poems such as “What Vaileth Trouth” and “They Fle From Me”—I argue that Wyatt anticipates later theories of aesthetic autonomy by shifting the reader’s attention away from the contingent materials of his poetry and towards the imaginative space that a poem may seem to open up.

The mystic and hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349) claimed the authority to interpret biblical texts, to add his understandings of their meanings to the received and authoritative interpretations of the Fathers of the Church. This chapter takes up the question of how Rolle understood his own authority as an exegete and how his various explorations of this topic, across his many writings, in Latin and Middle English, compare to the theories of his contemporaries in Oxford and Cambridge, their understandings of how scholastic exegetical authority relates to the inspiration enjoyed by patristic interpreters and, ultimately, to the authors of the Bible itself. Rolle’s theoretical musings have much more in common with this scholastic material than has previously been appreciated, putting pressure on unfortunately persistent binaries of the devotional, affective or mystical, on the one hand, and, on the other, the scholastic or intellectual traditions of medieval Christianity.

By using a broad selection of ‘commentary discourse’, this chapter looks at the practice of reading, teaching and composing texts whose purpose is (partly) to explain older texts. Such commentaries, which can take various and sometimes unexpected forms, are of paramount importance for understanding the Byzantine intellectual and cultural framework of literary production, not only as a system of ‘authoritative mimesis’ but also as a system of ‘subversive anti-mimesis’. Thus, the chapter examines paraphrases of the Iliad, grammatical exercises such as the schede of Theodore Prodromos, lives of saints with integrated gnomologia, laudatory orations and novels, poetical treatises of political admonition (e.g. the anonymous Spaneas), scholia on ancient authors (like those produced by John Tzetzes on Aristophanes and Lycophron or by Eustathios on the Homeric poems), but also large-scale commentaries on Byzantine hymnongraphy (e.g. by John Zonaras on John of Damascus), philosophical and theological commentaries (Michael of Ephesos on Aristotle or Niketas of Herakleia on the Psalms). These texts represent different and yet interrelated discourses that highlight the key role of ‘commentary’ as a hermeneutic tool of and testimony to a broad spectrum of sociocultural and literary tensions within the longue durée of the Komnenian era.

The ‘Sidney psalter’ has attracted critical attention for the extraordinary metrical versatility displayed by Philip and (mostly) Mary Sidney in their complete set of psalm paraphrases in English. Ithas not however been discussed in the context of the neo-Latin metrical usage and experiment of the latter sixteenth century described in Chapter 2, although the Sidney psalter precisely reproduces in English the literary achievement in Latin of the major Protestant psalm paraphrases by George Buchanan and Theodore de Bèze (Beza). Of great devotional and literary importance for Protestants throughout Europe, these two collections were recognized immediately by contemporaries for their literary achievement, and Buchanan’s, in particular, was routinely cited until well into the eighteenth century. Taken together, they are crucial landmarks in the development of a Protestant Latin poetics, combining the literary achievement of humanism with a distinctively Protestant emphasis upon the literal meaning of the Hebrew Bible. This chapter describes theachievement and influence of these Latin works and sets out the evidence for their direct influence upon Mary Sidney in particular.

The debate about prosody in English, focused in particular upon the decorum of rhyme and the role of quantitative metrics, is a well-known feature of late Elizabethan literary criticism. But the intense interest in metrical matters at this period sits within, and emerges from, a geographically wider and chronologically precedent Latin phenomenon which has not been described. Vernacular poets engaged deeply with metrical questions because the contemporary use of Latin metre underwent very rapid change in the second half of the sixteenth century.Although it has passed almost unnoticed by scholarship, metrical creativity is one of the most astonishing features of the Latin poetry of this period. We cannot begin to appreciate the literary excitement caused by this poetry – and by its vernacular imitations, such as the remarkable metrical display of the Sidney psalter and Herbert's "Temple" – without understanding something of the music of Latin metre, and of the pace of Latin metrical innovation. This chapter offers a ‘big picture’ overview of Latin metrical innovation and experiment, as it reached and was received and taught in England, in the latter half of the sixteenth century

Simon Cheung discusses the scholarship surrounding the ‘wisdom psalms’, with an eye towards the varied proposals, as well as the grounds for and development of them over the last century. From this Cheung sets forth his own conception of wisdom psalms. They constitute ‘a family of psalms, with varying degrees of membership, that exhibit a wisdom-oriented constellation of its generic elements’. The core traits are likened to DNA, which can be more or less present, and mainly discerned in theme, tone and intention. ‘Wisdom psalms’, to some degree, then, feature wisdom, carry an ‘intellectual tone’ and a pedagogical intent, all of which Cheung inspects in Psalm 34:8–17. Overall, his approach may offer interpreters additional accuracy when considering wisdom and its influence within the Psalter.