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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2021
Layouts and paratexts of Elizabethan prose psalters advocate two competing reading methods: reading sequentially according to the church calendar or selecting psalms by occasion. Marked psalters and bibles, however, show that Elizabethan readers often disregarded printed prescription, practicing either method, or both, as they chose. To capitalize on reader independence, printers eventually produced texts that encouraged comparative reading across multiple translations, culminating in the two-text psalter of the 1578 Geneva Bible. This episode in the history of devotional reading demonstrates the tendency of Elizabethans to slip the confessional categories into which their own texts, and later historiography, would place them.
Research for this article was supported by an Exchange Fellowship from the Huntington Library with Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and a Dissertation Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center. An early version was presented to a panel sponsored by the “In Readers’ Hands” research group in 2018, and I am grateful to its organizers and audience. For careful and insightful readings, I would like to thank Thomas Fulton and the reviewers and editors at RQ.