On Mount Sainte-Geneviève a sort of Job of the Middle Ages, for the space of thirty years, chanted the seven
penitential psalms on a dunghill at the bottom of a cistern, beginning anew when he had finished, singing loudest at night,
Chapter 3 compares two different commentaries on the first
Penitential Psalm (6) written by two Renaissance thinkers.
Reciting a
penitential psalm (sigu) is always connected with days 6, 16, 26, and 28.
So it is proclaimed in the Psalm we intone at every High Mass, in the
Penitential Psalm of David, the Asperges me: "With the water of the hyssop cleanse me and I shall become whiter than the snow.
During Lent and Advent I would recite the beautiful
penitential Psalm 51 ("Have mercy on me, O Lord").
Opting to bypass breadth of study, however, Goodblatt goes for depth (for very good reasons which are explained in chapter one), restricting her assessment of Donne's Hebraism to his sermons on the
Penitential Psalms 6 (chapter two) and 32 (chapter three) and the sermons on the
Penitential Psalm 38 and the Prebend Psalms (chapters four and five).
Although usually identified as a
penitential psalm, Psalm 130 is also clearly a song of hope.
Art historian Katharina Urch provides a penetrating and informative perspective on court painter Hans Mielich (1512-1572), whose insufficiently recognized miniatures embellish and illustrate the so-called
Penitential Psalm Codex (Bavarian State Library Mus.
Duffy notes that literate members of all social classes are known to have possessed primers, which included the
penitential psalms, (The Stripping of the Altars, 209-32).
In the Septem Psalmi of 1538, Macrin presents the seven
penitential psalms in Aeolic verse.
Psalm 51, Miserere mei Deus, one or the seven
penitential psalms was sung or recited at Lauds on the three days of Holy Week and in the Office of the Dead'.
The translation or reinterpretation of traditional models is also explored in Patricia Demers' reflections on 16th-century women's translations and commentaries on the
Penitential Psalms, particularly Psalm 51 or the Miserere, as well as in Renee-Claude Breitenstein's study of Madeleine and Georges de Scudery's Femmes illustres ou les harangues heroiques.
