The psalter is the only book of the bible that survived more or less intact as a constituent part of late medieval breviaries and antiphonals. In the breviary, noted or otherwise, the other biblical books are more widely dispersed and much abbreviated; in the antiphonal, while a psalter usually came to be incorporated, the other books are not represented at all beyond the briefest passages. The integrity of the psalter is explained by the way it was used in the Divine Office, while the details of its arrangement and annotation were the result of an increasing concern for liturgical precision, particularly among the compilers of secular Uses.

The early history of the Latin psalter is a familiar one. It was a translation from the Greek, itself a translation of a Hebrew version that differed in some ways from what became the standard ‘Masoretic’ text. What is referred to as the ‘Hebrew’ numbering of the psalms is a product of the Masoretic arrangement, but it is not the numbering traditionally used in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. According to Hilary of Poitiers, the Greeks were the first to number the psalms, and theirs is the numbering adopted in Greek and Latin psalters and bibles. Even when St Jerome translated the psalter directly from the Hebrew, he (or the manuscripts representing his translation) retained the Greek numbering.

The division of the psalms into verses is even more significant for performance. Again the Hebrew numbering, or rather the numbering derived from the Masoretic punctuation, differs from the arrangement of verses in the Greek and Latin translations. The Hebrew numbering has gained importance as a means of reference, but it is of no significance for the singing of the psalms in Greek or Latin. It was adopted in the Sixto/Clementine Latin bibles, although these latter retained the liturgical versification in their paragraphing; it is also the numbering found in modern (non-liturgical) editions of the Septuagint. The liturgical verses are not normally (if ever) numbered in medieval psalters, and not often in modern Latin ones. The traditional versification is foreshadowed in the early complete Greek bibles, where a single line was usually sufficient to represent what later became a complete verse, or one half, or one third of a verse.