{"id":72311,"date":"2013-02-05T08:38:43","date_gmt":"2013-02-05T13:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=72311"},"modified":"2013-02-12T10:56:13","modified_gmt":"2013-02-12T15:56:13","slug":"study-of-seven-psalms-earns-professor-literary-acclaim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2013\/02\/study-of-seven-psalms-earns-professor-literary-acclaim\/","title":{"rendered":"Study of Seven Psalms Earns Professor Literary Acclaim"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Clare<\/a>
Clare Costley King’oo, associate professor of English, with her book Miserere Mei, which earned the 2012 Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature. (Sean Flynn\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During her years as a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, Clare Costley King\u2019oo found herself drawn to a collection of dusty volumes in Penn\u2019s Van Pelt Library. Little did she know that these obscure archives would ultimately lead her to write a book that would earn the 2012 Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature.<\/p>\n

The book, Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England<\/i> (University of Notre Dame Press, ReFormations series, 2012), was selected as the work that \u201ccontributed most to the dialogue between literature and the Christian faith\u201d during 2012.<\/p>\n

King\u2019oo,\u00a0an associate professor of English, received the award at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in Boston last month. Previous winners include literary critic Northrop Frye and creative writers Umberto Eco and Madeleine L\u2019Engle.<\/p>\n

King\u2019oo\u2019s work was cited for combining \u201ca meticulous study of a small body of scriptural texts with an illuminating exploration of their reception and influence over the course of centuries.\u201d<\/p>\n

King\u2019oo educates her readers lucidly and advances scholarship in striking ways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Miserere Mei<\/i>, King\u2019oo examines the critical importance of the Penitential Psalms in England between the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 17th century. These seven biblical prayers, which express the individual\u2019s sorrow for sins committed and ask for God\u2019s forgiveness, are still part of Christian religious observances today. The book takes its title from Psalm 51, which begins in Latin \u201cMiserere mei,\u201d or \u201cHave mercy on me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Psalms have had a profound influence on Western culture, and inspired a wealth of creative and intellectual work during the period covered by King\u2019oo\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

James Simpson, co-editor of the University of Notre Dame Press ReFormations series, says of Miserere Mei, \u201c<\/i>The project is perfectly designed and expertly executed. King\u2019oo educates her readers lucidly and advances scholarship in striking ways.\u201d Simpson is chair of the English department at Harvard University.<\/p>\n

Dusty beginnings<\/b><\/p>\n

The book had its genesis when King\u2019oo, then a graduate student, began exploring some bound volumes of microfilm printouts of early English books on the shelves of a \u201cclosetlike space\u201d in the library at the University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost scholars go to modern editions of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton,\u201d she says. \u201cI was looking at representations of Bibles, prayer books, and catechisms in the form they were originally circulated.\u201d<\/p>\n

As she browsed these materials, the Penitential Psalms kept showing up, in various forms. \u201cThey seemed ubiquitous in early modern printing,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot only were they reproduced (sometimes with quite sexy illustrations) as prayers for repentance in the primers, but they were also expounded in sermons and commentaries, dilated in meditations, translated and paraphrased in verse, and converted into song,\u201d King\u2019oo notes in her book. That led her to question just why these psalms received so much attention.<\/p>\n

The project called for her to acquire language skills in Latin, Middle English, and 16th-century German, and took her to rare book and manuscript collections in the U.S. and the U.K., including the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, where she had earned her undergraduate degree.<\/p>\n

What emerged over the decade that followed is a study that illuminates the history of Christianity and religious plurality; the history of books and material texts; the periodization of Western culture; and even the history of sexuality \u2013 because, as King\u2019oo observes, most instances of repentance in the Christian tradition have to do with sexual transgressions.<\/p>\n

The central psalm (No. 51 in the Protestant tradition), and the one that gives the book its title Miserere Mei,<\/i> is traditionally associated with King David and his adulterous liaison with Bathsheba. \u201cThis is the quintessential Penitential Psalm,\u201d says King\u2019oo.<\/p>\n

A pivotal place in history<\/b><\/p>\n

The Penitential Psalms took on special significance during the Reformation, when the early Protestants separated from the Catholic Church. At that time, penance and repentance were hotly debated terms, says King\u2019oo: \u201cWhat we see over the long haul is a shift from penance \u2013 which usually involves an act of atonement, such as fasting, or wearing sackcloth and ashes, or reciting the Penitential Psalms \u2013 to repentance, which in a Protestant congregation would be understood as a change of heart or mind, a turning away from sin toward God.\u201d<\/p>\n

These different meanings became polarized into over-simplified polemical positions that characterized the Catholic Church as being more about works and the Protestant Church as more about attitude.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why the Penitential Psalms are so interesting,\u201d says King\u2019oo. \u201cThey are one of the major sites where this debate takes place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book also has implications for how cultural and literary epochs are defined. King\u2019oo\u2019s study led her to challenge conventional notions of when the modern era began, and of the Reformation as an intellectual watershed. Through her project on the seven psalms, she says, she came to understand that \u201cthe modern world emerged from very subtle shifts from what came before, and from rewriting and reappropriations rather than cataclysmic change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Additionally, the Penitential Psalms hold a pivotal place in the book culture of the period, and the evolution of how books were made and circulated. In her book, King\u2019oo discusses the processes of copying, editing, illustrating, printing, and marketing, and the vast amount of labor that went into reproducing these seven short biblical prayers.<\/p>\n

Implications for the digital age<\/b><\/p>\n

Although the focus of her study is centuries-old, she says it also holds relevance for the digital generation. \u201cWe can ask the same questions of the digital world as we do of the world in which print technology emerged, and what that did for how theological concepts were understood,\u201d she says. \u201cWhat will digitization do for the way we understand any intellectual concept, not just theology?\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, she hopes digital works will not completely replace print materials, remembering those musty volumes that first drew her attention to this important group of psalms.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t have embarked on this project without contact with that ghostly archive,\u201d she says. \u201cWe see things differently when we can\u2019t touch the page or inhale the dust!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clare Costley King’oo’s scholarly work on a group of biblical prayers earned the 2012 Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":72251,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2076,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[43],"class_list":["post-72311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-08 11:09:11","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72311"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72352,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72311\/revisions\/72352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/72251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72311"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=72311"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=72311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}