Genevan Psalter

The Genevan Psalter, also known as the Huguenot Psalter, is a 1539 metrical psalter in French created under the supervision of John Calvin for liturgical use by the Reformed churches of the city of Geneva in the sixteenth century. Before the Protestant Reformation a select group of performers generally sang the psalms during church services, not the entire congregation. John Calvin believed that the entire congregation should participate in praising God in the worship service, and already in his Institutes of the Christian Religion of 1536 he speaks of the importance of singing psalms. In the articles for the organization of the church and its worship in Geneva, dated January 16, 1537, Calvin writes: "it is a thing most expedient for the edification of the church to sing some psalms in the form of public prayers by which one prays to God or sings His praises so that the hearts of all may be roused and stimulated to make similar prayers and to render similar praises and thanks to God with a common love." For this reason he wanted to create a songbook of hymns based on the psalms in the belief that in this form these biblical texts would become more easily accessible to people. After being forced to leave Geneva in 1538, Calvin settled in Strasbourg, where he joined the Huguenot congregation and also led numerous worship services. It was in Strasbourg that he became familiar with the German versification of the psalms prepared by Martin Luther and others. Calvin shared these songs with his French congregation and also wrote some metrical versifications for them himself. Considering his own versions of the psalms not to be of sufficient quality, he turned to the French court poet Clément Marot, who had already versified most of the psalms in French during the first part of the sixteenth century. In 1539 the first edition of Calvin's psalter was published.

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Related concepts (7)

Metrical psalter

A metrical psalter is a kind of Bible translation: a book containing a verse translation of all or part of the Book of Psalms in vernacular poetry, meant to be sung as hymns in a church. Some metrical psalters include melodies or harmonisations. The composition of metrical psalters was a large enterprise of the Protestant Reformation, especially in its Calvinist manifestation. During the Protestant Reformation, a number of Bible texts were interpreted as requiring reforms in the music used in worship.

Hymn tune

A hymn tune is the melody of a musical composition to which a hymn text is sung. Musically speaking, a hymn is generally understood to have four-part (or more) harmony, a fast harmonic rhythm (chords change frequently), with or without refrain or chorus. From the late sixteenth century in England and Scotland, when most people were not musically literate and learned melodies by rote, it was a common practice to sing a new text to a hymn tune the singers already knew which had a suitable meter and character.

Psalms

The Book of Psalms (sɑː(l)mz or sɔː(l)mz ; תְּהִלִּים, Tehillim, lit. "praises"), also known as the Psalms, or the Psalter, is the first book of the third section of the Hebrew Bible called Ketuvim ("Writings"), and a book of the Old Testament. The book is an anthology of Hebrew religious hymns. In the Jewish and Western Christian traditions, there are 150 psalms, and several more in the Eastern Christian churches. The book is divided into five sections, each ending with a doxology, or a hymn of praise.