Memory and memorialization in the Psalmes of Mary Sidney,Countess of Pembroke

Gender and the history of memory

Memory has a history, and its ideological configuration frames the functions and perceptions of memory. In the early modern period memory is something more than a structure or a receptacle: it is also a discipline, a form of knowledge production, which can be trained, honed, and developed. The wide-ranging attention to memory and memorization in the period attests to its status as epistemology, as does its key role in education (Carruthers, 2008; Chedgzoy, 2007; Engel et al., 2016; Hiscock, 2011; Schwyzer, 2004; Sullivan, 2005). A disproportionate focus on the Theatre of Memory in some scholarship (Yates, [1966] 2001) obscures the highly significant memory techniques that form the fifth canon of rhetoric, but also underplays the extent to which memory and recall underlie almost all transactions in the period. Christopher Cannon’s point about the difficulty of comprehending much of the literary output of the medieval period without understanding that their reading was intensive (as opposed to extensive) might usefully be applied to the early modern period too (Cannon, 2013). The widespread practice of re-reading meant that many key texts were known “by heart” and rote-learning, far from being seen as a reductive or negative means of knowledge acquisition, was a highly valued form of information retrieval, crucial in a period where access to the written word was, for most people, limited and transitory at best. The recall of memorized texts is an under-explored intersection between the oral and the written, of paramount importance for both the dissemination of knowledge and the regulation of social interactions and exchanges. In a largely preliterate society, transactions depend for their validity on the capacity to recall accurately what was said to whom, about what. Many early modern disputes turn on faulty recall and disputed recollections, one of the many reasons why questions of contract are so critical to the framing of interpersonal relationships in the period (Kahn, 2004; Hutson, 2017).

Why, in a period so invested in developing methods of retrieval for written texts, is there a corresponding interest in, and emphasis upon, the techne of memory? One answer lies in the reconfiguration of classical rhetoric, and its gradual shrinkage to invention and style, leaving (in particular) memory and delivery largely at the level of theory, as a stylistic residue which marks a range of texts, including those not designed for oral performance. One example is Shakespeare’s prodigious interest in modes of repetition and doubling, copious forms of repetition, reiteration, restatement (McDonald, 2001), which is a response to the high degree of loss in oral transmission. Or equally, the concern of the Sidney Psalter with various forms of restatement, doubling, and reiteration functions partly as a way to imitate the modulations both of the Hebrew text and of the metrical versions so well known to contemporary readers. Another response to this question must acknowledge the partial nature of the turn to the written, and the multiple ways in which memorization continues to structure cultural and intellectual transactions. Much as we now recognize that the relationships between manuscript and print are anything but linear or sequential, so the relationships of memory and writing are complexly and increasingly intertwined, as the written or printed text is posited as the source of memory practices and (relatively) fixed texts become the standard by which effective memorization is measured. In other words, the written text becomes an objective, verifiable test for the efficacy of memory and recall, rather than a shared memory of an event, narrative, or agreement subject to negotiation, dispute, or counter-example. John Aubrey (2000) notes of the mother of the Earl of Danby, “I have heard my father’s mother say, that she had Chaucer at her finger’s ends” (p. 94): here the image for effective memorization is one that metaphorizes a textual encounter, the image being that of the physical hand navigating the printed text.

The more complex functions of memory are often carefully distinguished in early modern accounts from recall, or the narrative of past events. Roger Ascham (1570), in the Scholemaster, describes memory as “so necessarie for learning, as Plato maketh it a separate and perfite note of it self, and that so principall a note, as without it, all other giftes of nature do small service to learning” (p. 195). He underlines that within humanist pedagogy memory is an operation that enables learning, rather than being an end in itself, a position that he derives from Cicero’s (1967) De Oratore Book 2. Cicero argues that the aim of a good memory is that ability to “have all of your thoughts fixed in your mind, and your entire supply of words neatly arranged” (p. 220). This is closely related to the art of listening: “what they say is not just poured into your ears, but seems inscribed into your mind” (p. 220); “nature is the chief source of this asset” (p. 220). Once again, memory is seen as plastic, and as having a crucial role in the shaping of knowledge as well as in the preservation of information, a view that is foundational to the formation of individual responses to scripture post-Reformation.

These classically inflected ideas of memory rapidly made their way from the secular, educational context into the area of biblical reading and spiritual (self) education, and there was a wide range of guides and manuals devoted to helping pious Christians memorize scripture (Clapham, 1596; Lloyd, 1671). As Alec Ryrie notes, mnemonic aids had “an established place in the Protestant book market,” and these often focused on the Psalms, partly because of their central place in reformation thought and prayer, and partly because of “the mnemonic effect of music and repetition” (Ryrie, 2013: 278) which is most obvious in the Psalm settings designed for congregational singing, but is also, in transmuted form, a key characteristic of the Sidney Psalter. The Psalter was heard frequently in a liturgical setting: morning and evening prayer ensured that the entire cycle of Psalms was heard over a 30-day period, together with the various psalms and snippets of psalms used as collects, and which made their way into the liturgy itself. This was a factor here and is highly relevant to the composition of the Sidney Psalter too. As Brian Cummings (2011) notes, while the Psalter was not printed with the Book of Common Prayer until 1662, “its use was intrinsic to all previous versions” (p. 783). As Ryrie (2013) points out, memorizing was “an accepted minor sign of personal sanctity,” with the underlying expectation that scripture would “if planted in the heart … take root there” (p. 278). For some commentators, “there simply was no difference between memorization and internalization” (Ryrie, 2013: 279). Ezekiel Culverwell (1637), for example, in A ready way to remember the Scriptures, argues that “to fill the Head, and so the Heart, with much heavenly matter … is the best way to keep out idle thoughts” (p. A2v).

Memory, copying, and gendered identity formation

Work by critics such as Richard Halpern and Jonathan Goldberg, along with that of numerous historians of education, has alerted us to the ideological roles that are inaugurated via the institutionalized practices of copying, repetition, and rote-learning, all of them linked to memory (Blair, 2010; Goldberg, 1990; Halpern, 1991). These functions are not exclusive to educational institutions, but also appear in the kinds of texts designed to service those institutions, or to spread the cultural capital produced and exchanged there to different audiences—the aspiring middle class, tradesmen, merchants, and women. These practices are widespread within early modern culture, as a means of transmitting knowledge and information both cheaply and locally, an alternative (but intimately connected) mode of transmission and reproduction. At the root of copy culture in early modern England is the process of learning to write, and here we can see gaps and divisions opening up along gender lines. As Goldberg suggests, early modern educationalists concerned with the question of women’s education “never imagine that these skills will grant them a place of power in the world” (1990: 140), although literacy practices and female agency are intimately connected. Learning to write is often presented as a way of containing or re-inscribing these very limitations. As Goldberg notes, the kinds of “institutions” where women might learn to write were by definition “marginal,” but he does not consider the possibility of the autodidact woman, or of women being informally instructed within the home, as Mary Sidney was (1990: 137). The potential opened up by such textual activities, I suggest, requires a series of complex, careful ideological brakes on female agency. There is a gendered valence to the ways in which literate and pious women are often lauded for their memories: the troping of memory as reproduction and inscription is one way to contain the disruptive social potential of literate woman under the guise of spiritual and moral improvement. This alliance between repetition, memory, and women is one factor in the gradual marginalization of its more wide-ranging functions. To take one example, for Billingsley, the art of writing, by which he means the process of instruction through copying, is a technology that aids memory, specifically when writing is to be taught to women:

And if any Art be commendable in a Woman, (I speake not of their ordinary workes wrought with the needle, wherein they excel) it is this of writing; whereby they, commonly not having the best memories (especially concerning matters of moment) may commit many worthy & excellent things to Writing, which may occasionally minister unto them matter of much solace. (1618: C2r)

The contrast with needlework is telling since that involved a radically different relationship in terms of copying—the replication of patterns or visual symbols, and occasionally key texts—for “profit, pleasure … ornament,” as John Davies suggests (1631: A2r). The learning of needle craft is judged against the ease (or difficulty) of learning letters, namely, the practice of tracing over the letters of the copy-book until they are learned (remembered not just as a sign, but as mechanical, physical action):

And though our Country every where is fil’d

With Ladies, and with Gentlewomen, skil’d

In this rare Art, yet here they may discerne

Somethings to teach them, if they list to learne.

And as this Booke, some cunning workes doth teach,

(Too hard for meane capacities to reach)

So for weake learners, other workes here be,

As plaine and easie as are A B C. (Davies, 1631: A3v)

The association between copying and memory, as Billingsley indicates, is not simply a matter of mutually reinforcing training, but one where memory will function, via the medium of writing, as a kind of repository less of materials to be used, than of ideas that the virtuous woman will identify with, in which she will see herself reflected, and upon which she will model her conduct. Copying—and by extension memorizing—aims at the reinforcement of virtuous, exemplary female conduct. In this sense, Goldberg’s (1990) comment that “[w]omen are the most recalcitrant site for the formation of memory that copying envisages” (p. 139) is very insightful, for it implies that the ongoing process of copying itself takes the place of the copious or productive memory, consigning women to the circular repetition of the same ideological injunctions. In this view, she is condemned always to copy and never to imitate. While Goldberg alerts us to the class hierarchies that “the circuit of copy” (p. 139) reproduces, it is clear too, that through this relationship between copying, memory, and virtue (namely, that female virtue consists in the repetition of worthy models/practices/texts), a gender hierarchy is being reproduced as well. And it is not just Billingsley who rehearses this connection in early modern writing manuals; it is present in Vives (2000) too, as I discuss in more detail below. John Davies of Hereford, himself hardly opposed to the idea of female authorship, notes that women are taught the italic hand (which he calls Roman) rather than secretary, creating a gendered relationship that he acknowledges to be culturally constructed:

[w]omen … are perswaded that the dull set Romane is the womans right hand, but nothing lesse; for women naturally have as much facility in joining, and are as nimble handed in all manuall qualities … as men. Many of them are Poets, and indite in verse as well as prose with rare commendation: then in their composition, should they use to take up the pen at every letter, they had need to have good memories, lest their invention should be lost ere they could record it with their pen. (1631: B2r)

Davies’ comment makes a fascinating connection between the speed and fluency of the writing hand, and the capacity of writing to capture thought, an insight that casts the identification of the italic hand (as opposed to secretary) with women’s handwriting in rather a different light. The point being made here, of course, is that women do not have good memories, and thus do lose their invention, hence the cycle of copy itself depends upon a prior construction of woman—in this case, a biological/somatic construction with the bulwark of humoral medicine.

Memory as exemplarity

The recent reinvigoration of the field now designated as memory studies coincides with another wholesale technological shift in how we store, access, and retrieve information, information that would once have been committed to memory (or at least to paper) but is now stored in digital formats. This is one of the framing contexts for a range of projects exploring memory, alongside a perception that key events, often seen to be definitive of emergent modernity, are passing out of “living memory” (a phrase that itself deserves interrogation) and into the archive. These conditions might also be seen to prevail (in some form) at various junctures in early modern Britain too. The habitual engagement with the past to the end of illuminating present issues or concerns requires a head-on confrontation with the vicissitudes of textual and historical memory. The process of recall requires a motivated intervention in the material traces of the past, a selective appropriation of the inherited record, and a recognition of its partial, contingent nature through the accretive insights of humanism, textual, and biblical scholarship. As the Renaissance starts to move to the remembrance of real historical agents as exemplars for the living, the functions of memory come under renewed scrutiny. Not only is the effective functioning of example dependent upon an act of recall and the shortening of the distance between “then” and “now,” the good functioning of memory appears as a sign of, or metaphor for, female intellectual virtue. It turns up with surprising frequency in texts seeking to praise literate women for their moral actions, almost as tropological within accounts of memory as the tale of Simonides. Katherine Philips’ powers of recall are noted by John Aubrey: “when she was little [she] tooke Sermons verbatim” and “wrote out verses in Innes, or Mottos in Windows, in her Table-booke” (2000: 243, 244). Edward Rainbowe (1649) commends Susanna, Countess of Suffolk for her ability to recall sermons verbatim, such that on Mondays she would write down the previous day’s sermon “so perfectly that little was wanting in the very words wherein it was delivered”. Questions relating to the past and its multiple functions in the representation and configuration of the present inevitably press on questions that are central to daily life, and touch on key intersections: individual/collective, identity/community, real/imaginary, interior/exterior. Memory, in particular, raises questions about ownership, about interiority, about self, and its constitution in time, space, and place. What kinds of functions might memory have in the age of print, and what are the effects of the growing consciousness of print even among those who were unable to access it? What is at stake when a gentry woman such as Margaret Hoby listens to a sermon of three hours’ duration, returns home, eats dinner, and then engages in “writing out” the sermon, or the heads of it? Is this an act or a process? Is it remembering the content or argument of the sermon that is at stake, or the activity of remembering itself? Why are prodigious acts of memory valued at all? Hoby herself often deploys the language of store-house and reuse so familiar from humanist training and pedagogy when writing of her pious exercises and refers to the overlapping but distinct forms of literate copying and textual transformation delineated by the co-existence of the multiple forms of memory-oriented text she produced: her “Journee” (Hoby, 1998: 210), meditations written into her book; “recorde,” notes written into her “testament” (28); or the writing out of sermons, or sermon notes (a topic to which we will return), often in to “my sarmon book” (40). Is it the case that the functional parts of acts of memory like this evaporate at the point at which writing is done, and the record retrieved and stored, perhaps for future use? Does the written record substitute for, or displace, memory? Or is it a means for a more fruitful and complex engagement with what is stored in the memory? There are many further examples that commend women’s textual engagement through the figure of the prodigious but ostentatiously non-selective memory, but John Donne is unusual in his scepticism in the face of extraordinary feats of memory:

An Artificer of this Citie brought his Childe to mee, to admire as truly there was much reason of the capacitie, the memory, especially of the child. It was but a Girle, and not above nine yeares of age … wee could scarse propose any Verse of any Booke, or Chapter of the Bible, but that that childe would goe forward without Booke. I began to Catechise this childe; and truly, shee understood nothing of the Trinitie, nothing of any of those fundamentall points which must save us: and the wonder was doubled, how she knew so much, how so little. (Simpson and Potter, 1956: IV, 203–204)

The striking feature of this account is Donne’s unease at her lack of understanding; more usually, the simple fact of repetition, and hence the implied homology between repeater (or copier) and text is sufficient testament to exemplary virtue.

Edward Rainbowe’s funeral sermon on Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery, printed in 1677 (she died the previous year), can stand in for many representations of the relationships between female identity, agency, and memory. He speaks of her “Prime and Elegant Wit, well seen in all humane Learning, and afterwards devoted to the study of Divinity” (Rainbowe, 1677: 38), and her capacity for discourse with the whole social spectrum. This conversational skill is seen to depend upon learning, and the capacity to access such learning through memory:

she would frequently bring out of the rich Store-house of her Memory, things new and old, Sentences or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors, and with these her Wall, her Bed, her Hangings, and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in the time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make their descants on them. So that, though she had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a Library. (Rainbowe, 1677: 40)

Two key ideas are brought together here. First, the commonplace of the memory as a “store-house,” as a receptacle, or spatial metaphor for the operations of memory for the purposes of retrieval, one that derives ultimately from rhetorical and ars memoria techniques. It is significant that what Clifford is represented as memorizing are “Sentences, or sayings of remark,” sententiae or adages of the kind promoted by Erasmus and humanist educators as a mode of organizing disparate knowledge into usable units. This is also a compelling example of the ways in which adaptations of pedagogical methods can be found in non-institutional sites, even in the intimate space of the chamber. The second key point is the moral efficacy of memory, namely, that what Clifford learns and stores up is of ethical value in the process of constituting a moral, virtuous self within a powerfully gendered household economy. This assertion is strengthened here by the positioning of these sayings in the bedchamber so that instead of focusing on the body and its adornment, as might be expected in that location, Clifford is concerned with the cultivation of exemplary morality through the exercise of memory. The purpose of reading that “which she had read or learned out of Authors” is expressly to find moral sayings and, in turn, as the sermon on the text of Proverbs 31 makes clear, to act as an exemplar of pious and moral femininity (see Clarke, 2015a). This is of a piece with moralists’ recommendations that women engage in copying to the end of fixing moral precepts firmly in the mind, as Vives recommends in Book I of The Education of a Christian Woman:

When she learns to write, do not have her imitate idle verses of vain and frivolous ditties, but rather some grave saying or a wise and holy sentiment from the holy Scriptures or the writings of philosophers, which should be copied out many times so that they will remain firmly fixed in the memory. (2000: 71, emphasis added)

Rainbowe represents Clifford through the figure of Solomon, substituting scriptural knowledge for material wealth: “The Sayings of Wisdom, which he determines to be more precious than Rubies, these were strewed about her Chambers” (1677: 40). Clearly, the role and function of memory was central to Clifford’s efforts to establish her right to inherit her ancestral lands, and much of her textual activity was directed to this end (Malay, 2015). The famous Great Picture she commissioned for Appleby Castle is also an extended meditation on familial and textual memory, linking past, present, and future in a single conceptual continuum. Her familial and moral identity is bound up with questions of the past and recall, particularly in connection with place, as her monument to the exact spot at which she last saw her mother testifies.

In the Great Picture, the Countess of Cumberland is represented with her hand resting on the Book of Psalms, and throughout her diaries, Anne Clifford turns to verses of the Psalms to express herself at moments of severe emotional crisis, often revisiting or repeating key texts, and combining them with dates, times, and places as ways of creating a kind of navigable emotional archive (mother’s death and memorial). Micheline White sees in the portrait of Lady Margaret a visual allusion to the van der Passe portrait of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (2011: 116), an intriguing evocation of the memory of a forebear and kinswoman, particularly in the middle of the Civil War (it was commissioned in 1646), through the specific ligature of the Book of Psalms, with its heavy associations with spiritual crisis, exile, and providentialism. For Anne Clifford too, knowledge of and allusion to the Psalms is very powerfully associated with the figure of her mother, thus underlining the notion of inheritance—spiritual and material—through the female line. The connection between Clifford and the memorization of scripture is frequently inscribed in materials that celebrate her example and promulgate her virtue. In Lanyer’s poem “The Description of Cookham” in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), her feminocentric paradise is marked by the singing of Psalms, presumably from memory:

With lovely David you did often sing,

His holy Hymnes to Heavens Eternall King.

And in sweet musicke did your soule delight,

To sound his prayses, morning, noone, and night. (Woods, 1993: ll.87–90)

While Lanyer’s aim is clearly to create an idealized creative community of exemplary women for her spiritual poem, the bringing together of the Countess of Pembroke, Margaret, Clifford and Anne Clifford through the medium of the Psalms in the interpretive framework of the volume powerfully suggests the iterative and memorial functions of this ideologically and culturally central text (see Molekamp, 2013).

The Psalter as memory practice

The Book of Psalms holds a very particular place in the early modern conceptualization of memory and its functions, mastery of its patterns of repetition frequently being held up as a sign of exemplary spiritual and moral conduct. The psalms themselves are complex acts of remembrance, not only of spiritual suffering but also of moments of exile and reconciliation (e.g. Ps 137), resonances compounded by the application of specific psalms to moments of personal and political crisis. To evoke, cite, or repeat a psalm is often metonymic in its effects, the textual locus only being the point of origin. The Book of Psalms is the ultimate iterative text, designed not so much to be read through (although the narrative arc of the psalter has generic affinities of various kinds, particularly with epic) but read over (Cannon, 2013). It has a linear logic (compounded by the Geneva bible’s innovation of verse numbers as well as chapter numbers), but also functions cyclically and typologically, both within the book itself and more broadly within the Bible as a whole. The Psalter’s dynamic is one of praise and celebration alongside its repeated moments of despair and introspection, and Mary Sidney’s decade-long commitment to the metrical version points both to the problematic gendering of the Psalter (an open “I” persona implicitly assumed to be male; a powerful context that positions women as readers and reciters but not originators of verse or versions of the Psalms; and in the case of the Sidney Psalter, a bifurcated model of collaborative authorship which has conventionally placed Mary Sidney in the secondary role, at least as far as invention is concerned) and to its effort to realize Philip Sidney’s memory poetically.

The Sidney Psalter self-consciously combines public and private remembrance and is indebted both to acts of memory (remembering, recall, reworking, rewriting) and to a process of memorialization—the latter engagement has formed a key theme in recent criticism of the Psalter (Alexander, 2006b; Clarke, 2011; Hiscock, 2011). Both key elements are achieved through the stylistic and tropological device(s) of repetition—at the level of the single word (ploce, metanoia, chiasmus) and at the level of extended figures, and most famously, at the level of metrical patterning. One of the many things that distinguishes the Sidney Psalter from its predecessors and analogues is its distance from either the content or the usage of the liturgical Psalter. For many critics, these differences are key factors in Mary Sidney’s decision not to circulate it in print (see discussions by Clarke, 2015b: 300–303; Hamlin, 2015; Kinnamon, 2015) because it transgresses certain ideals about the use to which scripture might be put and because its commitment to poetic invention undermines its Protestant allegiance (see Greene, 1990). These evaluations mistake or overlook the role of memory and memorization in both the production and the reception of the Sidney Psalter. Its power and effectiveness lie precisely in the fact that readers of the Psalm versions would have fixed firmly in their memories the Coverdale/Great Bible versions, to which the variations and re-workings of the Sidney Psalter bear a fugal relationship, theme and variation, or cover version. The tracking of these multiple and formally complex variations depends fundamentally on having the standard, communally shared texts firmly fixed in the memory, most likely in the form of the Sternhold-Hopkins Psalter (to which Donne implicitly compares the Sidney Psalms, “So well attired abroad, so ill at home” and “And shall our church, unto our Spouse and King/More hoarse, more harsh than any other, sing?”) (Hamlin, 2009: 4, ll. 38, 43–44). These earlier versions and translations are the aural palimpsest that underlies the entire endeavor. The Psalter as a whole has a deep-seated and particular relationship to memory, but the body of the text itself reveals a stylistic investment in the activities of memory, encoded at the level of style and form. Many of the Psalms use repetition and restatement in semantically important ways, and overall they might be seen as a kind of template for certain kinds of mnemonic techniques, which the Countess of Pembroke is at pains to retain in her versions. The Psalter is also important as a working example—using a deeply familiar set of intertexts—of the full panoply of tropes and figures of repetition, used as poetic examples in celebration of her brother’s precedent.

Psalm 119, for example, is an alphabetic acrostic, one discrete text for every letter of the Hebrew alphabet, each consisting of eight verses. The Countess of Pembroke uses four stanzas for each letter, alliterating the opening word: C “Confer, O Lord”; E “Explain, O Lord”; Q “Quit and clear from doing wrong”; and so on (Hamlin, 2009: 229, 231, 240). Each section uses a different stanzaic form. This is not a feature of Coverdale’s version—the form of the Psalms encountered in the Book of Common Prayer—where each section is keyed to the Latin text and the eight-verse structure is retained, while the acrostic is ignored, nor of the Sternhold-Hopkins Psalter. ¹ Psalm 111, similarly, is an acrostic in the Hebrew text, a pattern which Mary Sidney preserves; it is also a poem that is self-reflexive about the acts and processes of praise:

At home, abroad, most willingly I will

Bestow on God my praise’s utmost skill:

Chanting his works, works of unmatchèd might,

Deemed so by them, who in their search delight. (Hamlin, 2009: 217, ll.1–4)

Clearly, Mary Sidney is intrigued by the formal challenge presented here, but it is nonetheless fascinating that she specifically preserves a feature that was well known for its memory-jogging powers, when none of her sources do so. In the Hebrew text, Psalms 112 and 145 are also acrostics, as are 9, 10, 25, 34, and 37. In the translation, the latter group would have been rendered by Philip Sidney who does not use acrostics at any point. Psalm 117 acts independently of the sources, but again reveals an interest in memory devices: here is Coverdale’s version:

O praise the Lord, all ye heathen: praise him, all ye nations. 2 For his merciful kindness is ever more and more towards us: and the truth of the Lord endureth for ever. Praise the Lord. (Cummings, 2011: 581)

In manuscript A of the Sidney Psalter (the presentation copy, taken as copy-text in most editions), the Psalm is rendered:

P raise him that aye

R emains the same:

A ll tongues display

I ehova’s fame.

S ing all that share

T his earthly ball:

H is mercies are

E xposed to all,

L ike as the word

O nce he doth give,

R olled in record,

D oth time outlyve. (Hamlin, 2009: 224, ll.1–12)

This appears to owe relatively little to the Sternhold-Hopkins (1584) version, “O All ye nations of the world/prayse ye the Lord always” (p. 323). Manuscript B (copied by Woodforde from one of the Countess’ working copies) reveals that the acrostic design was the impetus for the patterning of the poem, as it is clearly set out although the lines are still in process:

P raise, praise the Lord, All that of lowest sphere

R eside on any side

A ll you I say

I n Countries scattered wide. (Hannay et al., 1998: 294–295, ll. 1–4)2

Just as important as these obvious signs of interest in mnemonics is that fact that the text always carries within it (in performance, in repetition) the remembered traces of what it displaces/varies/imitates as well as the Psalms being acts of remembrance in themselves, incorporating ideas of exile, loss, and the memory of God’s presence. As Emma O’Donnell has argued,

the liturgical community that recites the psalms is transformed through the liturgical engagement with the text which awakens in the community a depth of religious experience that goes beyond the purely textual content of the psalms. (2013: 2)

The self-conscious movement away from liturgy and from ritual and toward poetics has formed a significant strand in criticism on the Psalms, a position presented most convincingly by Roland Greene (1990), whose analysis focuses on those Psalms paraphrased by Philip Sidney. If, however, the purpose is solely poetic, why commit to the paraphrase of the entire cycle of psalms? Other poets who treated the texts primarily as poems tended to focus their attention on a limited number of specific psalms (e.g. Wyatt, Lok). The commitment to paraphrasing the entire cycle presupposes the importance of patterning, as well as pinpointing the iterative potential inevitably contained in the liturgy itself, where morning and evening prayer facilitates the monthly recitation of the complete Psalter, whether undertaken at church or in the household.

The temporal dynamic involves a constant oscillation between past and present, although often in the Psalter memory’s limitations are explored alongside its benefits. In Psalm 77, a cry to God for help, the speaker calls to God in the midst of despair:

All comfort fled my soul;

   Yea, God to mind I called,

   Yet calling God to mind

   My thoughts could not appease …

… At length with turnèd thought

   Anew I fell to think

   Upon the ancient times

   Upon the years of old:

     Yea, to my mind was brought,

   And in my heart did sink,

   What in my former rhymes

   Myself of thee had told. (Hamlin, 2009: 145–146, ll. 9–12, 25–32)

Here, the cycle of remembering self-reflexively brings the speaker back to the Psalm text itself, setting up the process of recall as one of repeated departure and return, as a key element in an iterative mode of meditations upon God. Time here is experienced liturgically, not chronologically, and arguably the very complex and precise metrical schemes and usage of formal patterns are a way to reinscribe the powerfully aural features of liturgy at the level of the written text. A handful of the Sidney Psalms were set to music but the evidence we have of their reception suggests that the metrical versions were experienced primarily textually rather than aurally, although the aural context seems to be omnipresent (Alexander, 2006a; Prescott, 2015: 291–292). Poetic performance displaces and builds upon liturgical performance, which is always to be understood; these acts of remembering and rehearsal have a powerful valence in relation to Mary Sidney’s representation and careful manipulation of the Sidney Psalter as a means for the memorialization of her brother Philip and his legacy (Clarke, 2001)

The Psalms and poetic memorialization

Much of the Countess of Pembroke’s activity in the decade following her brother’s death was devoted to what one might designate a form of positive mourning, one that used memory (and its corollary, loss) constructively as a way of negotiating a set of new relationships to the public and literary world. Andrew Hiscock has followed the lead of many Sidney critics in suggesting that Mary Sidney saw her role primarily as securing her brother’s legacy and actively keeping his key projects and beliefs in the public domain (Hiscock, 2011). That there were a number of individuals battling over the literary body of Sidney perhaps only compounds Mary Sidney’s careful management of questions of memory and memorialization, something that is powerfully acknowledged in Spenser’s highly complex representation of Pembroke as mourner-in-chief through the ventriloquization of her voice in “The Doleful Lay” (Clarke, 2001). As Hiscock suggests, “Pembroke was clearly intent upon preserving such an interpretive community for the circulation of Sidney’s memory” (2011: 142). As Pembroke’s battles with both Greville and Spenser suggest, she was highly conscious of the nature of memory, and the need to take direct control of it by textual means if by no other:

Pembroke did not promote the inviolable authority of memory, rather there emerges a persistent acknowledgement that bids for cultural narrativization are vigorously competitive, always in process and painfully subject to amnesiac social pressures. (Hiscock, 2011: 162)

By specifically adopting a model of collaborative authorship, Pembroke asserts her direct links with Philip and effectively merges her authority with his. Far from being a (gendered) way of effacing her contribution, this is a highly presumptuous assertion of her unique access to his legacy and the primacy of her capacity to memorialize both man and work (see Pender, 2011). Pembroke positions herself (not Frances Walsingham) as the literal heir, the one responsible for paying the deceased’s undischarged debts, which in “To the Angel Spirit” take the form of a gift, the completion of what is not finished: “when to this account, this cast-up sum,/This reckoning made, this audit of my woe,/I call my thoughts” (Hamlin, 2009: 9, ll. 43–45). The text is presented as an incomplete garment, or shroud, which Pembroke patches: “This finished now …/ The rest but pieced, as left by thee undone” (Hamlin, 2009: 8, ll. 23–24). This strategic deployment of the humility topos is a necessary deference in the face of the divine text, but masks an ambitious attempt on Mary Sidney’s part to reproduce the effects of her brother’s corpus of poetry in order to bring him to mind, and to celebrate his legacy. The two-volume Clarendon edition reveals the degree to which Mary cites, echoes and poetically re-members, Philip’s work. The rhetorical force of these poetic interventions depends upon, and aims to assert, the text’s status as a multi-layered act of memory and memorialization: through the invocation of Philip Sidney, through the inference that his legacy lives on (in the form of Mary Sidney’s own writings), and through the coded allusions to Philip Sidney’s own poetic, political, and spiritual example:

To which these dearest off’rings of my hearts,

 Dissolved to ink while pen’s impressions move

 The bleeding veins of never dying love,

I render here: these wounding lines of smart,

 Sad characters indeed of simple love,

 Nor art nor skill which abler wits do prove,

Of my full soul receive the meanest part. (Hamlin, 2009): 10, ll. 78–84)

Not only is the Psalter an act of homage and remembrance to Philip Sidney, it is also an extended meditation on the complexities of authorship. The framing context, as explored in the dedicatory poems, is the authorizing precedent of Sidney himself, coded here through the conventions of elegy and through carefully calibrated generic and poetic allusions to Sidney’s work (Beilin, 1987; Clarke, 2001; Fisken, 1989; Goldberg, 1997; Hannay, 1990). The memorial function of the Psalter has been much to the fore in Sidney criticism of late as Gavin Alexander’s summary suggests: “her own writing … chose to occupy the threshold of Sidney’s death and afterlife … and to concern itself with death and dying” (2006a: 81). The content of the Psalter has a strong preoccupation with affliction, loss and comfort, but the reworking of the substance of the Psalms into specifically poetic artifacts by way of its heavy investment in poetics, in style, in rhetorical tropes and figures also allies the enterprise with a quite different strain in poetic memorialization, namely, the idea of the Sidney Psalter as an act of poetic memory, or a verse memorial. It is a poignant truth that the subsequent history of the reception of the Sidney Psalter bears out Pembroke’s success in giving poetic embodiment to her brother’s memory (Clarke, 2016). This model draws upon a Horatian precedent, one that is held up repeatedly as a model justifying poetic endeavor in early modern culture. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55 is perhaps the most famous articulation of this topos, but the sentiment was commonly expressed, as Drayton does in Idea 44:

And though in youth my youth untimely perish

To keep thee from oblivion and the grave

Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish,

When I entombed, my better part shall save;

 And though this earthly body fade and die,

 My name shall mount upon eternity.

Verse is here conceived of as a monument, a means of securing the afterlife of a loved individual, of a poetic style, and of the poet himself. There are multiple statements throughout the Psalter that suggest the capacity of poetry to transcend time, an impulse that is particularly profound in the case of divine poetry. Unlike her own great legatee George Herbert, Pembroke has an unwavering belief in the capacity of poetry to do what she believes it should: “With skillful song his praises sing /On sacred throne, not knowing end” (47, 15–16). Psalm 49 is used by Mary Sidney as a way of asserting the authority of the multiple voices of her text, a demand for an audience to listen to what the Psalter articulates (see Clarke, 2007):

World-dwellers all, give heed to what I say,

 To all I speak, to rich, poor, high, low:

 Knowledge the subject is my heart conceives,

 Wisdom the words shall from my mouth proceed,

 Which I will measure by melodious ear

 And riddled speech to tuned harp accord. (Hamlin, 2009: 93, ll. 1–6)

Critical, I have suggested, to Mary Sidney’s self-articulation as a poetic of the divine, is her indebtedness to memory practices, and to the role of learning by heart in subject formation, where the subject of her own literary output is the memorialization of the enduring poetic and spiritual figure of her brother.