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The 2011 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: From the Sheephook to the Scepter: The Ambiguities of David's Rise to the Throne*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Anne Lake Prescott
Anne Lake Prescott*
Affiliation:
Barnard College, Columbia University
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Abstract

King David's rise from tending sheep to governing Israel impressed Renaissance writers, not least the poets and clergymen who found a model in his musical “psalmograph.” Yet ambiguities nestle in allusions to his career. Though many stressed that his ascent was thanks to divine election and not to ambition or guile, the fact remained that David did not inherit his scepter. Europe, though, was for the most part ruled by those with dynastic claims, and it had a class system in which literal shepherds should know their place, even if the Bible asserts that the valleys shall be exalted and the mountains made low. Comments on kings and bishops as shepherds, on shepherds as kings, and on David's upward career are fascinating to trace precisely because their social and political context can give them the energy of a concealed ambivalence.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , Spring 2012 , pp. 1 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

This version of my talk has been slightly modified to suit the respectabilities of print, and I have added a little that the pressures of time had precluded but that readers might enjoy. Some material on which I draw was collected in the decades before older texts’ physical appearance provoked fresh scholarly interest, so some quotations may not accurately reproduce an original's use of italics. I have also modernized j/i and u/v. I cite psalms according to the Hebrew-Protestant count. I thank Ann E. Moyer and The Renaissance Society of America's board for inviting me, and the RSA's now-retired Laura Schwartz for her cheerful encouragement.

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