Shoreham Psalter

The Shoreham Psalter stands among the significant pre-Wycliffite Middle English efforts to render the Psalms into the vernacular. Its scope is limited to the Psalms, translated from Latin, taking a Latin Psalter as its base text with the Vulgate as its predecessor or base translation. Such work belongs to a broader medieval pattern in which the Psalter, the most heavily used book of the Bible in liturgy and private prayer, was among the first portions of scripture to be given an English dress for readers who lacked Latin. In philosophy the work is vernacular and devotional, and it is best categorised as a fresh translation or devotional rendering rather than a revision of earlier English versions. As a distinctive point, its attribution and the exact boundaries of its corpus are not always certain, a common condition among anonymous or loosely transmitted medieval English biblical texts.