The Psalms have experienced a recent revival of interest among scholars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Clare Costley King'oo's Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England is an innovative contribution to this revival, for two reasons. First, unlike many studies, which take up either medieval or early modern Psalm translations, this book bridges the gap between two cultural periods. Second, it focuses attention exclusively on the most important subset of the Psalms: those seven devoted to David's penance for his sins of homicide and adultery, after he was rebuked by the prophet Nathan in the second book of Samuel (2 Kgs 12). This group, isolated first by Cassiodorus (sixth c.), became a template for individual prayer throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Moreover, as Costley King'oo explains, during the early modern period especially, the seven Penitential Psalms figured prominently as well in discussions of ecclesiological and social reform.

Costley King'oo's approach is interdisciplinary, involving art history, sacramental theology, and political ideology. Her analysis, in chapter 1, of a shift in early modern psalters from illustrations of David in penance to David at sin, gazing on a naked Bathsheba from his window, suggests how previous scholars have overlooked some obvious developments in the material textual record across three centuries. In clarifying these developments, Costley King'oo is occasionally unsubtle. Some of the Renaissance woodcuts of Bathsheba that she examines (e.g., Fig. 1.13, p. 57) are experiments in managing the problem of depicting the female nude according to true perspective rather than cartoonishly, as in medieval drawings, not examples of prurience. Her overarching thesis in chapter 1 can dull the edge of a more acute interpretive point that she might have turned to better advantage.

Costley King'oo's argument strengthens, however, in chapters 2 through 5, where she considers the exegeses and paraphrases of the Psalms and parodies of figures as diverse as John Fisher, Luther, Erasmus, Wyatt, and Gascoigne. She is at her most erudite while arguing for the persistent centrality of the Penitential Psalms to Protestantism, despite its turn away from the sacrament of penance toward a doctrine of justification by grace. Her trenchant analysis of Luther's exploration of metanoia or radical spiritual conversion in Die sieben Bußpsalmen (1517) enlivens what has become a cliché of Davidic mimesis, organized around the psalmist's status as archetypal penitent, in some recent studies of the Psalms. Her revisionist account of Wyatt's English adaptation of Aretino's Italian meditation on the Penitential Psalms clarifies that, “whereas in the ritualized paraphrases [of the Middle Ages] the Penitential Psalms require identification and self-effacement on the part of those who read or hear them, in Wyatt's fiction they beg for interpretation and analysis instead” (119). An appendix (193–97) resolves, definitively, a bibliographical conundrum surrounding the publication circumstances of Wyatt's paraphrase.