English Psalter

Attributed to the fourteenth-century English hermit and religious writer Richard Rolle, this Psalter stands among the major pre-Wycliffite Middle English prose translations of the Bible. Its scope is confined to the Psalms, rendered from Latin, with the Latin Vulgate Psalter serving as its base text and its predecessor translation. The version is best described as a fresh translation accompanied by commentary: it circulated with extensive exposition alongside the biblical text, a format that suited private devotion and instruction at a time when vernacular scripture was largely mediated through such glossed forms. Its translation philosophy remains close to the Latin, following the source construction rather than idiomatic English, and is devotional in character. Widely copied in the later Middle Ages, it survives in numerous manuscripts, some of them subsequently adapted by other hands, and it occupies an important place in the tradition preceding the Wycliffite Bible.