In the Fellows’ Library of Winchester College are two books that were formerly owned by the diplomat and scholar, Richard Pace (c. 1483–1536). Pace is chiefly remembered today as a much-travelled ambassador in the early years of Henry viii.Footnote ¹ He was made a royal secretary in 1516 and dean of St Paul's Cathedral in 1519 but was frequently away from London and the court representing English interests abroad. His prominence, however, declined in the 1520s as a result of ill health and disfavour. In 1525 he was recalled from Venice suffering from fevers, insomnia and ‘flux of the bowels’.Footnote ² Two years later, Pace's efforts to involve himself in the royal divorce by secretly liaising with the imperial ambassador in London were discovered and he was sent to the Tower.Footnote ³ Confinement proved to be the last straw for Pace's health and by 1528 he was said to be mad, regularly falling into fits of rage and ‘renting and terringe his clothes’.Footnote ⁴ Despite his release from confinement in 1529, he never again returned to health and was gradually relieved of his remaining duties up to his death in 1536.

The two surviving books at Winchester, however, are both products of Pace's other career: his life as a humanist and biblical scholar.Footnote ⁵ As a young man, Pace had studied Latin and Greek at the universities of Padua, Bologna and Ferrara under the tutelage of Niccolò Leonico Tomeo and Paolo Bombace.Footnote ⁶ In the course of his life, he published translations of Plutarch and Lucian and corresponded with the leading scholars of the age, such as Desiderius Erasmus, whom he had met in Ferrara in 1507.Footnote ⁷ Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first survivor at Winchester is Erasmus’ Greek New Testament and notes, the Novum instrumentum (Basle 1516).Footnote ⁸ This may be the copy that Pace owned around 1517, when he wrote from Constance to commend and correct Erasmus’ efforts.Footnote ⁹ Pace was at that time composing his satirical declamation, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur (Basle 1517), which closely aligned him to the educational and religious ideals of Erasmus.Footnote ¹⁰

The second surviving volume, however, speaks to Pace's studies in the 1520s. The Psalterium in quatuor linguis hebraea graeca chaldaea latina (Cologne 1518) was another multi-lingual biblical text, edited by Johannes Potken.Footnote ¹¹ It was designed to resemble Agostino Giustiniani's Psalterium, hebraeum, graecum, arabicum, chaldaeum (Genoa 1516) and reproduced the Psalms in four parallel columns of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Ge'ez.Footnote ¹² Potken had become acquainted with the latter language through Ethiopian Christians in Rome and mistakenly believed this to be the authentic ‘Chaldean’ text, as opposed to the genuine ‘Chaldean’ (Aramaic) text reproduced in Giustiniani's edition. Both the New Testament and the psalter can be identified as Pace's thanks to a large black fore-edge inscription (‘R. Pace’) on their respective text-blocks. Their existence at Winchester has been noted twice in recent catalogues of the college by James Willoughby and Paul Quarrie; however, no extended discussion of either volume has subsequently been conducted.Footnote ¹³ Pace left little trace in his New Testament but he heavily annotated the psalter in his distinctive italic hand. Quarrie refers to these jottings as ‘linguistic study’, a rather vague formulation for what are in fact Pace's corrections of the Vulgate based on his reading of the Hebrew.Footnote ¹⁴ Pace had begun learning Hebrew around the year 1525 and appears to have worked on and off on the Psalms until his arrest in 1527.

It is unclear where or when Pace acquired the Psalterium in quatuor linguis. He did pass through Cologne twice in 1519, travelling to and from the Imperial Diet at Frankfurt which elected Charles v.Footnote ¹⁵ The year before, Thomas Lupset had informed Pace of books for sale in Paris, brought there by the renowned Greek scholar, Janus Lascaris.Footnote ¹⁶ However, Pace was first seen translating the Psalms in northern Italy. In February 1525 Pace was monitoring events around the town of Pavia in the company of Lupset and Reginald Pole.Footnote ¹⁷ Whilst anxiously awaiting the outcome of the battle, Pace, Pole and Lupset had all been in contact with their Paduan friend and tutor, Leonico.Footnote ¹⁸ Leonico, writing to thank Lupset for the latest news, ended one missive by expressing amazement at ‘the pious studies of Pace, who amidst the terrible disturbances … keeps his soul in such perfect peace, that he can occupy himself in translating the Psalms’.Footnote ¹⁹

Leonico, Lupset and Pole had all been concerned for Pace's health and the ambassador was recalled to England in November 1525.Footnote ²⁰ Pace retired to the Bridgettine House of Syon to recuperate and his Hebrew studies took on a new impetus.Footnote ²¹ While convalescing, Pace enlisted the help of the Cambridge scholar, Robert Wakefield, to teach him Hebrew, Aramaic and possibly Arabic.Footnote ²² Two years later, Gasparo Spinelli, the Venetian secretary in London, visited Pace at Syon and found the scholar ‘surrounded by such a quantity of books that for my part I never before saw so many in one mass’.Footnote ²³ Pace, Spinelli wrote, had ‘commenced correcting the Old Testament, in which, as likewise in the Psalms, he found a stupendous amount of errors’.Footnote ²⁴ These studies would soon reach the printer ‘and the work will assuredly prove most meritorious, and render him immortal’.Footnote ²⁵

In 1527 Pace too spoke of a grand project to correct the entire Old Testament from Hebrew, ‘if God will grant me life’.Footnote ²⁶ The only product of Pace's studies to reach the press, however, was a brief preface to a now-lost translation of Ecclesiastes: the Praefatio in Ecclesiasten recognitum ad hebraicam veritatem (London 1527).Footnote ²⁷ Any further pieces were prevented from publication by Pace's incarceration and the criticisms of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, who circulated a treatise rebutting the Praefatio in manuscript.Footnote ²⁸

Until now, the Praefatio is all historians have had to assess Pace's Old Testament work. Catherine Curtis once speculated that a Hebrew Bible (Soncino 1488) associated with Thomas Cranmer (now at the British Library) may have preserved some or all of Pace's work, since the blank pages of that copy contain unattributed sixteenth-century translations of various Old Testament books.Footnote ²⁹ However, a comparison of Pace's corrections to the psalter at Winchester with those in the Soncino volume show few similarities and, as Curtis admitted, the Soncino notes are not in Pace's hand.Footnote ³⁰ The psalter, then, contains the clearest window on to Pace's work as a translator. In its pages we catch the dean in the act of study, reflecting on rival biblical sources, the Church Fathers and collaborating with other readers. A broader set of contemporary theological concerns also emerges. Pace read the Psalms as a book of prophecy foretelling the coming of Christ and, though his corrections do not amount to a comprehensive theology of Psalms, they do show an interest in some of the themes at the heart of humanist contemplation of Scripture. It is the psalter's notes, then, and the light that they shed on Pace's approach to Psalm scholarship and theology which form the focus of this present article.

Pace began translating the Psalms at a time of renewed interest in the rival texts of the Old Testament. In the opening decades of the sixteenth century, several scholars had come to challenge the accuracy of the Vulgate Old Testament when compared to the Hebrew text.Footnote ³¹ Many of their complaints stemmed from the fact that the Vulgate had not been translated directly from Hebrew, but had been rendered from the Greek Septuagint. The latter was named after the seventy-two elders who had translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the reign of Ptolemy.Footnote ³² It had thus been composed before the time of Christ and, as a result, was traditionally considered to have been divinely inspired.

At the centre of a renewed study of the Hebrew Scriptures in Pace's time was the German scholar, Johann Reuchlin, who became a European cause célèbre for championing the language and Jewish biblical commentary.Footnote ³³ Reuchlin's improved Hebrew grammar had been printed in 1506 and was followed by several landmark works of Hebrew printing in Italy and the Empire.Footnote ³⁴ Multi-lingual texts, like the Psalterium in quatuor linguis, proliferated and Pace was well-placed to follow these developments. In the early 1520s he was in Venice as David Bomberg printed a second edition of the Rabbinic Bible and the Talmud.Footnote ³⁵ Back in England, the brothers of Syon had taken an interest in humanist scholarship and their library contained two Hebrew psalters, a concordance printed by Robert Estienne and Reuchlin's commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms.Footnote ³⁶ Richard Reynolds, one of the brothers, knew the language.Footnote ³⁷

Most importantly, Pace's Hebrew teacher, Wakefield, had taught and studied at several European universities and briefly succeeded Reuchlin as professor of Hebrew at Tübingen in 1522.Footnote ³⁸ Pace later described how Wakefield had shown ‘a wonderful facility in teaching [Hebrew]’, such that ‘in a few days, I was passing through the hateful boulders of grammars with ease and was climbing onto the higher things in which I achieved a great deal within a month’.Footnote ³⁹ Much of Pace's study with Wakefield presumably involved the works of Reuchlin and other humanists, since several editions of these works are known to have passed through Wakefield's hands.Footnote ⁴⁰

The evidence of the psalter at Winchester suggests that Pace may have exaggerated his competency in Hebrew and related languages. What follows does not provide a systematic account of Pace's knowledge of Hebrew. Rather it details his working method and some of the influences upon his translation, before considering the broader biblical and theological implications that spring from it. Pace usually stayed remarkably close to his sources. There is only one reference to Aramaic and none at all to Arabic. There are occasions when Pace departed from his various authorities or indicated an awareness of Hebrew grammar. Above Psalm ix.9 he correctly noted that the Hebrew verse used the particle lo and thus implied that the entire sentence was negative (though the Vulgate and Septuagint did likewise).Footnote ⁴¹ Pace's contemporaries generally understood Hebrew grammar by deploying the terms developed to learn Latin grammar. Unlike Latin, for example, classical Hebrew does not use a system of tenses for verbs, but employs two aspects – perfect and imperfect – which regulate whether an action has been completed or not.Footnote ⁴² In De rudimentis hebraicis, however, Reuchlin implied that the imperfect aspect was identical to the Latin future indicative and Pace translated it as such, though modern grammarians would disagree.Footnote ⁴³

Thanks to the Praefatio, historians have had an idea of Pace's place in the burgeoning humanist study of Hebrew and his surviving psalter helps to confirm the picture.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the former Pace described his method of biblical translation. ‘I place first’, he alleged,

The need to better understand those Hebrew idioms led Pace to consult the commentaries of David Kimhi, Rashi and the Targumim.Footnote ⁴⁶ The latter were Jewish scriptural translations and paraphrases written in Aramaic on the Old Testament books.Footnote ⁴⁷ These often provided a word-by-word translation of the Bible into Aramaic and were a valuable guide to difficult passages.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is likely that Wakefield introduced Pace to these sources since he is known to have studied a variety of Jewish manuscripts and commentators.Footnote ⁴⁹ A striking example in Pace's psalter of the sheer variety of his sources is his notes on Psalm cxviii (cxix). Commenting on the Vulgate's use of ‘avaricia’ in verse 36, Pace noted that: ‘baẓa is not only that noun “avarice” in Hebrew but also means “fraud”, “sham” and “injury”’.Footnote ⁵⁰ All three alternatives are drawn from Reuchlin's De rudimentis hebraicis.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet, in the same place, Pace also noted that ‘the Chaldean Targum interprets it as “riches”, others as the “love of riches”. The LXX put υπερηφάνιαν, that is, arrogance’.Footnote ⁵² Pace, however, left the word unchanged.

Though Pace recorded Jewish commentators and sources in the margin, it is not always readily apparent what status they were being afforded in the translation process itself, beyond the listing of alternatives for individual words. On reaching Psalm cxiii (cxiv).7, Pace observed at the head of the page that the Hebrew text contained the word ḥuli but that Rabbi Salomon, that is Rashi, had indicated that the final letter, yod, was redundant and had no grammatical value. Thus ‘“ḥol” should be read, not “ḥuli”’.Footnote ⁵³ Furthermore, Pace pointed out that ḥol, ‘according to Rabbi Salomon, is not a verb in this place but a noun: meaning “creator” so that the sense is: “in the presence of god, the creator of the earth”’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such a reading would have contradicted the Septuagint's use of the verb σαλεύω (to shake) and the Vulgate's movere (to stir or agitate). In the margin next to the phrase, however, Pace disregarded Rashi's point and instead wrote down the verb ‘contremescit’, which he derived from another source: St Jerome. The passage reveals how closely Pace stuck to his sources, for later translators like Sebastian Münster, with a greater independent knowledge of Hebrew, recognised that ḥuli was in fact an imperative (against both Rashi and Jerome) and thus translated it as ‘contremesce’ (‘shake!’).Footnote ⁵⁵

Pace's most important source for understanding the Hebrew psalter, however, was St Jerome. Though the Vulgate was commonly attributed to Jerome, a number of scholars in the period began to cast doubt on his authorship.Footnote ⁵⁶ The saint's writings had catalogued the Vulgate's errors in detail and he had also advocated for Christians to return to the ‘hebraica veritas’ rather than rely on the Septuagint. Jerome had even made an independent translation of the Psalms from the Hebrew – the Psalterium iuxta hebraeos – which survived, despite its omission from the Vulgate.Footnote ⁵⁷ Jerome was thus the cultural icon for biblical humanists like Pace who adopted the saint's language and arguments to justify their own methods.

Many of Pace's corrections to the Vulgate column of his psalter mirror Jerome's wording in the Psalterium iuxta hebraeos, and he likely translated with the saint's work open beside him. Discussing Psalm ii.12, for example, Jerome had explained that the line's verb could be read as either ‘to kiss’ or ‘to worship the son’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Pace dutifully recorded ‘osculamini vel adorate filium’ by the verse.Footnote ⁵⁹ Jerome's writings were also a valuable encyclopaedia of the biblical world. Pace justified inserting a reference to Cappadocia in Psalm cxix (cxx) by pointing out that ‘in Hebrew, Meshek is a word that signifies Cappadocia according to some’, above which he wrote ‘Jerome’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Occasionally, however, Pace did take exception to Jerome's translations, such as his rendering of galmi in Psalm cxxxviii (cxxxix).14 as ‘informem’ (unformed), preferring ‘embryonem’ (embryo).Footnote ⁶¹

One of the chief reasons for studying Jerome in the Renaissance was also to gain access to snippets of other early versions of the Old Testament previously gathered in Origen's Hexapla. In the Hexapla, Origen had compiled several versions of the Old Testament, namely a Hebrew text, the Hebrew transliterated into Greek and the Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion and the Septuagint. However, the text was lost to scholars of the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶² Armed with the testimony of Origen and Jerome, however, Pace could justify his own efforts at correction. As he argued in the Praefatio, ‘St Jerome, citing Symmachus and Aquila hundreds of times, prefers them to the Septuagint, just as Origen likewise sometimes prefers Aquila.’Footnote ⁶³

Pace can be seen contemplating these various versions in his corrections to Psalm cxxvi (cxxvii).Footnote ⁶⁴ At the foot of the page, Pace paraphrased a passage from one of Jerome's letters listing a variety of alternatives for the Vulgate's use of ‘filii excussorum’ (‘the children of them that have been shaken’) in verse 5: ‘Jerome, the epistle to Marcella: Where we have “filii excussorum”, Aquila has “filii pubertatum”. Symmachus and Theodotion, “filii iuuentutis”. The Sixth edition, “exacuti sensus”. From which it is clear that the Christian people are understood by the young.’Footnote ⁶⁵

Remarkably, another contemporary annotator, writing a neat secretary hand continued this quotation (see Figure 1), recording Jerome's interpretation of ‘panem doloris’ (‘bread of sorrows’, Psalm cxxvi [cxxvii].3).Footnote ⁶⁶ This hand is unidentified but the similarity of purpose suggests it was done at Pace's direction.Footnote ⁶⁷ Likewise, besides Psalm l (li).6 a third contemporary hand recorded that Reuchlin had proposed ‘formatus sum’ (I was formed) as an alternative to the Vulgate's ‘conceptus sum’ and Pace in turn edited the line to give the former.Footnote ⁶⁸ In all likelihood, then, Pace was not working alone, but correcting his psalter in the presence of others. There were certainly plenty of candidates to help. Pace had begun translating in the company of Lupset and Pole. In Venice, the Signoria provided a space on the island of Santa Maria Maggiore, perhaps in its Benedictine monastery, which was known to house sick dignitaries and possessed a beautiful library.Footnote ⁶⁹ At Syon, he was joined not only by Wakefield but Jan Crucius, a Greek scholar from Louvain.Footnote ⁷⁰

Figure 1. Psalterium in quatuor linguis Hebraea Graeca Chaldaea Latina, Cologne 1518, sigs x6v-ÿ1r, WCFL, A19 Bk164. Reproduced by permission of the Warden and Scholars of Winchester College.

Pace's marginalia in the psalter likely reflect different layers of reading in Italy and England and they were almost certainly not finished translations. Several Psalms have no corrections and at times Pace merely recorded multiple variants in the margin. What is clear, however, is that much of the material gathered in the psalter was used in the Praefatio. Despite its claim to be a preface to a new translation of Ecclesiastes, the majority of Pace's remarks were in reality drawn from the Psalms and many of his changes to the psalter mirror comments in the printed tract.Footnote ⁷¹ That in turn suggests that the majority of the psalter's notes were compiled before the Praefatio was printed in 1527.

Pace's sources and methods reveal how his engagement with the Masoretic text was heavily informed by his reading of the Fathers, Christian Hebraists and even Jewish commentators. Yet his faith in the hebraica veritas was not shared by all, even like-minded humanists.Footnote ⁷² John Fisher, responding to the Praefatio in 1527, believed that Pace was misguided in favouring the Hebrew text above the Septuagint. For one thing, Fisher pointed out, the Septuagint was cited multiple times in the New Testament.Footnote ⁷³ The Apostles, then, must have approved of the Greek version as opposed to the Hebrew, regardless of what Origen and Jerome had later proposed.

Pace devoted a fair amount of space in the Praefatio to answering this question. He discussed, for example, the quotation of Psalm viii.2 in Matthew xxi.16 which was drawn from the Septuagint and uttered by no less of a figure than Christ himself.Footnote ⁷⁴ Pace explained that ‘Where Christ says: “Out of the mouths of infants and sucklings, you have perfected praise [perfecisti laudem]”’, translating the Septuagint's κατηρτίσω αἶνον, the Hebrew line appeared to disagree, reading yissadta oz, “you have founded strength [fundasti fortitudinem]”.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Rather than contradict Christ, Pace went to remarkable lengths to resolve the difference and show that there is ‘no discrepancy between Christ, the Septuagint and the Hebrew’.Footnote ⁷⁶ For one thing, ‘the verb καταρτίζω does not really mean “perficio” but “apto” and “aptare” can rightfully be said “fundare”, because to establish is nothing else than to prepare well and to build one thing from another’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, the Septuagint text may have become corrupt over time, for ‘if someone should change the accent from αἶνος into αἰνός which means “powerful (validum)”, then it would have the same meaning as “oz” has in Hebrew’.Footnote ⁷⁸

In the psalter, too, Pace preferred the Hebrew to the Septuagint, even when the New Testament disagreed with the Masoretic text. In Acts ii, for instance, St Peter quotes Psalm xv (xvi).8–11 from the Septuagint as evidence of Christ's divinity. Pace even noted this fact at the head of this page in the psalter.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, he made a series of minor changes to the passage in order to better reflect the Hebrew phrasing, rather than preserve the exact text with apostolic sanction.Footnote ⁸⁰ Pace's notes on Psalm xiii (xiv) had a similar purpose. The Vulgate of Pace's time included three extra verses (5–7) which were present in neither the Septuagint nor the Hebrew but had been interpolated from Romans iii in the early Christian era.Footnote ⁸¹ Pace excised the verses while recording that ‘the following three verses are not in the Hebrew’.Footnote ⁸² Some caution, however, must be observed in considering the notes in the psalter, for there remain some outstanding discrepancies upon which Pace's views are unclear.Footnote ⁸³ As he noted in the Praefatio, whilst a learned linguist might be able to fix many inconsistencies between the Greek and Hebrew Old Testament, it may be impossible to entirely harmonise the two.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, whilst Pace was markedly favourable to the Hebrew against the Septuagint, it is fair to say that the full implications of this position were not entirely resolved.

Such a thorough rejection of the Septuagint may have emerged from Pace's conversations with Wakefield, for the latter was also adamant that the Greek text was corrupt and that Hebrew was a divine language which preserved ‘the same kind of prepon, propriety, and celestial idiom as God uses when he speaks’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Only a theologian learned in Hebrew, Wakefield believed, could accurately approach the divine.Footnote ⁸⁶ While Wakefield flirted with the cabbalistic theories of Reuchlin and Pico, however, Pace's own theological thinking was informed by his deep affinity with the Erasmian and Italian humanists with whom he had lived and worked.

Few books of the Bible have taken on such a broad range of devotional, liturgical and theological significance as the psalter. ‘Who indeed has not written on the Psalms?’, Erasmus once complained.Footnote ⁸⁷ For Pace, the Psalms were far more than a case study in biblical transmission. In England, both Fisher and John Longland discussed various Penitential Psalms, the sequence most regularly called upon in times of tribulation.Footnote ⁸⁸ Erasmus had begun expounding the Psalms in 1515 as a book of moral instruction but by the time of his death his discussions had shifted to reflect on the emerging religious division throughout Europe.Footnote ⁸⁹ Though on the surface Pace was simply correcting the Vulgate in his psalter, a detailed look at several of his translations reveals a set of deeper theological and devotional subtexts for his work.

Perhaps the most important facet of Pace's interpretation of the Psalms was their relevance to Christ. Among medieval and early humanist exegetes there was an increasing emphasis on reading the Psalms, particularly the Messianic Psalms quoted in the New Testament, as literal prophecies of Christ's birth, death and resurrection.Footnote ⁹⁰ For humanist commentators, such as Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples, this reading was often justified by an appeal to the literal sense of Scripture, as opposed to the other senses deployed in medieval exegesis (allegorical, tropological and anagogic).Footnote ⁹¹ Pace similarly was adamant that ‘no secret in the scriptures can be constructed, unless it should be founded upon a proper understanding of the simple letter and according to the letter of the law and the mystery of the gospel’.Footnote ⁹² That statement, however, belied the fact that text and doctrine were not always in perfect agreement.

In the Praefatio, Pace explained much of the language of the Old Testament in relation to Christ. The sacrifices seen in the Old Testament should be compared with Christ's in the New, since ‘if we could not compare the old sacrifice with the new, the new would plainly lose its great power of demonstration’.Footnote ⁹³ He likewise noted that, strictly speaking, the name Jesus was not to be found in Hebrew, but derived from the words yesha, yeshua and teshuah, ‘all of which do not mean “saviour” but “salvation”’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Pace probably had in mind Isidore of Seville, whose Etymologies had proposed that ‘the Hebrew word “Jesus” is translated “σωτήρ” (saviour) in Greek, and “salutaris” (healer) or “salvator” (saviour) in Latin’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Pace singled out these same Latin and Greek words as misleading since Hebrew ‘does not have such endings for nouns [i.e. agent nouns], which are in Latin “-or” or in Greek “-ήρ” as σωτήρ and salvator, for such things are expressed [in Hebrew] through participles’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Rather than leave his observation there, however, Pace sought to understand the differences in the grammars of Latin, Greek and Hebrew through a rhetorical lens:

Pace thus sought to set his linguistic analysis within a Christological one, whereby fidelity to the Hebrew could be construed as fidelity to Christ.

Another telling example was his annotation of Psalm ii.12. The Vulgate had followed the Septuagint for this verse, rendering the opening phrase as ‘apprehendite disciplinam’ (embrace discipline). However, as Jerome explained, nasheku-var presented the translator with a series of choices.Footnote ⁹⁸ The verb nashak is literally ‘to kiss’ but often applied more figuratively, in Jerome's account, to signify ‘to worship or adore’. Var was more problematic for ‘it has various meanings in their language’ such as son, wheat, elect and pure. Jerome's preference was ‘adorate pure’, that is, ‘worship purely’, though he saw no harm in Christians understanding the many alternatives.Footnote ⁹⁹ Pace, in contrast, wrote ‘osculamini vel adorate filium’ (kiss or adore the son) by the verse, suggesting that he was keen to use a knowledge of Hebrew to heighten the Messianic overtones of the psalm. The argument was intimately connected to Pace's wider promotion of the Hebrew text against the Septuagint. As he contended in the Praefatio, the Septuagint translators had actually obscured these prophetic readings, ‘as they did [for] the 26^th Psalm, placing “illumination”, in the place of “light”. For in the Hebrew it is “the lord is my light”, as Christ says of himself in the gospel: “I am the light of the world”’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Pace corrected his psalter accordingly. The Vulgate's use of illuminatio in Psalm cxxxviii (cxxxix).10, for example, was changed to lux.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Nevertheless, there were several occasions where Hebrew proved less supportive of Pace's Christocentric agenda. The language of Psalm xxi (xxii), by example, was often related to the events of Christ's death and resurrection. The Vulgate translation (following the Septuagint) rendered Psalm xxi (xxii).18, for example, as a blatant reference to the crucifixion (‘They pierced [foderunt] my hands and feet’). Yet the Masoretic text for this passage is without a verb and literally reads: ‘Like a lion, my hands and my feet.’ Pace faithfully translated the line as ‘Sicut leo, manus meas et pedes meos’, a version which removed any obvious reference to Christ whilst also contradicting his favoured source, Jerome.Footnote ¹⁰²

Issues of overlapping textual authority and Christ's presence in the Old Testament have resonated throughout Christian history. However, Pace was also translating at a time of escalating religious division, some of which was focused on the correct interpretation of certain Psalms. Martin Luther twice lectured on the psalter and found its stark representation of the relationship between man and God amenable to his radical understanding of faith and justification.Footnote ¹⁰³ R. Gerald Hobbs has shown how the likes of Martin Bucer and Conrad Pellican also brought an evangelical bent to their study of Hebrew and the Psalms.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Pace was no evangelical. In 1521 he was involved in the burning of Luther's books at St Paul's and he translated Fisher's anti-Lutheran sermon for the occasion into English.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ By 1527, however, Pace's confidence that an investigation of the errors of the Vulgate and Septuagint would ‘provide a manifest opportunity to the learned to investigate the truth’ was perhaps not shared by all in England, especially John Fisher, whose reaction to Pace's views has already been noted.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Pace's psalter shows next to no engagement with Luther or others embroiled in the Reformation disagreements of the 1520s. In Psalm xxxi(xxxii), ‘virtually the battle-hymn of the Lutheran republic of the spirit’, Pace seems to sidestep the passage most attractive to Luther – ‘Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute sin’ (xxxi.3) – substituting ‘sin’ (‘peccatum’) for Jerome's preferred ‘iniquitatem’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ That is not to say, however, that Pace was unconcerned with themes of sin and justification. Above Psalm cxviii (cxix) Pace summarised two traditional explanations of verse 83, which was rendered cryptically in the Vulgate: ‘Since I am made like the skin in frost [sicut uter in pruina].’ At the head of the page, Pace noted Arnobius’ view that sin makes one, ‘empty on the inside and shrivelled on the outside’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Jerome, too, ‘truly explains it thus: we will be like the skin in the frost which the love of sin makes cool in us’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Pace remained interested in these views despite also recognising that the Greek and Latin versions of the line conflicted with the Hebrew, where the line read as ‘the skin in smoke’, presumably because the image of a smoke-stained skin might equally apply to man's sinful nature.

A similar motive might be detected in Pace's use of the transliterated Hebrew word for man, adam, in the psalter, in place of the Latin hominum. Where the Vulgate of Psalm x (xi).5 reads ‘His eyes gaze upon [respiciunt] the poor man, his eyelids examine [interrogant] the sons of men [filios hominum]’, Pace's version has ‘the eyelids shall approve of [probabunt] the sons of adam’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ At first glance, the change may simply reflect Pace's desire to emphasise the original Hebrew. However, in the context of a God judging the actions of mankind, it is reminiscent of St Paul's comparison of Adam and Christ in Romans v. Paul's suggestion that Adam's sin led to the spiritual death of mankind before the coming of Christ restored grace recalls Pace's comparison of Old and New sacrifices in the Praefatio. Pace's friend, Erasmus, was particularly fond of the contrast when discussing the Psalms. ‘Those who have modelled themselves on Christ and fled from sin will enjoy immortality’ whilst ‘those who have followed the devil and the old Adam … will be condemned to eternal punishment.’Footnote ¹¹¹

Pace was thought to be near death on his return from Venice in 1525 and his decision to place the Scriptures at the heart of his recovery in Italy and then at Syon was undoubtedly also a devotional response to a crisis as well as a scholarly one. On two previous occasions bouts of ill health and overwork had led to periods of literary activity at Constance and Rome.Footnote ¹¹² Even in health, he could be found diligently exploring the Vatican library or aiding Lupset and Pole in their searches for early Greek texts.Footnote ¹¹³ He also had the example of several Italian acquaintances who had explored lives of ascetic, contemplative and devotional revival. Pietro Bembo and Gasparo Contarini's relationship with the Camaldolese hermits whilst students at Padua is well known and may have involved some study of Hebrew.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Certainly Bembo went on to own a remarkable Hebrew library.Footnote ¹¹⁵ John Colet, Pace's predecessor at St Paul's, had retired to the Charterhouse at Sheen late in life to contemplate the Scriptures.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Pace's close friend, Pole, was also an enthusiast for the psalter, studying it with the Hebraist Jan van Kampen and the evangelical Marcantonio Flaminio in the 1530s and 1540s.Footnote ¹¹⁷

As a resident of Syon, Pace could not have ignored the significant role that the psalter's verses played in the liturgy and daily devotion of the brothers and sisters. Richard Whitford, another friend of Erasmus living at Syon, called upon the Psalms to explain the nature of worship. A picture of prayer, Whitford suggested, could be found ‘in the thyrde psalme … I cryth to our lorde with my voyce and he herde me from his holy hyll’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Pace's version, aware of the Masoretic text's use of anah (to answer), makes the interchange between God and the person praying more explicit: ‘Voce mea ad dominum clamabo et respondebit mihi de monte sancto suo’ (I will cry to the Lord with my voice and he will answer me).Footnote ¹¹⁹ These emotive, prayerful aspects take on an added import when we recall that humanists often interpreted the Bible as a form of holy rhetoric. Erasmus argued that the Psalms forced the reader to ‘open the eyes of our minds’ and tugged ‘at the ears of our heart’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Wakefield presented the learning of Hebrew in a similar way. It was the language of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit.Footnote ¹²¹ Each of its words was ‘full of spirit and life … alive, animated, fiery, barbed and full of spiritual wisdom’ such that it ‘shakes the minds of its audience out of lethargy and drowsiness’.Footnote ¹²² Pace was tapping into a sense, so prevalent among humanists, that scholarship, even technical philological scholarship, could enrich the spiritual life of the believer.

There are hints that Pace's interest in rhetoric and devotion shaped his responses to certain Psalms. Pace left Psalm cxviii (cxix)'s famous call to praise the Lord's justice seven times a day (verse 164) untouched, but he heavily altered verses 171–4. ‘My lips will copiously pour out [copiose effundant] a hymn … My tongue will speak [loquetur] your eloquence … and your law is my delighting [oblectationes meae].’Footnote ¹²³ In these verses there is a close alignment of prayer to God with rhetorical and Erasmian ideals. The lips are speaking copiously. The tongue will no longer ‘proclaim’ (‘pronunciabit’) the Lord's eloquence, but actually ‘speak’ it. Pace's decision to supply an additional adverb copiose with his translation of the Hebrew verb nava (to flow) was particularly suggestive.Footnote ¹²⁴ This was a nod towards Erasmus’ highly influential concept of copia, whereby the speaker cultivated an abundant style, rich in allusion and meaning.Footnote ¹²⁵ Wakefield, in a related vein, proposed that Hebrew was more ‘copious’ and that a single Hebrew word had many more meanings than those in other languages.Footnote ¹²⁶ By drawing on such a term, Pace clearly aligned the Hebrew text with contemporary rhetorical theories. Moreover, he did so in a way which powerfully connected the prayerful discourse of the Psalm with the literary modes of his time.

Pace's corrections of the Psalms also show a consistent emphasis on praise. In Psalm cxxxvii (cxxxviii)1, 2, 5, Pace excised all instances in which the Vulgate used the verb confiteri (to acknowledge or confess), replacing them with laudare (to praise).Footnote ¹²⁷ The cumulative effect was to emphasise the joyous aspect of the Psalm. This was certainly supportable from both the Greek and the Hebrew, since the verbs ἐξομολογέω and yadah can rightly be rendered as confess, acknowledge or praise.Footnote ¹²⁸ Indeed Wakefield used the many meanings of yadah as an example of the richness of Hebrew.Footnote ¹²⁹ Jerome and most translators into Latin, however, had favoured confiteri.Footnote ¹³⁰ Pace was likely aware that the Book of Psalms, that is Sefer Tehillim in Hebrew, literally translated as the ‘Book of Praises’. Certain Christian commentators had also highlighted the role of praise. Athanasius argued in his Epistle to Marcellinus on the Psalms (a text translated by Reuchlin) that the text taught the reader ‘how one must praise the Lord and by speaking what words we properly confess our faith in him’.Footnote ¹³¹ Yet it seems more probable that Pace's changes to Psalm cxxxvii (cxxxviii) were influenced once more by the Fathers and his fellow humanists. Jerome had been concerned to mitigate the negative connotations of confiteri. As he explained in his Homily on Psalm 74 (75), sometimes the ‘expression “confitebimur” [we will confess] does not signify repentance, but rather, give praise or thanks’.Footnote ¹³² Erasmus, too, discussing Christ's use of ἐξομολογέω in Matt. xi.25, suggested that the Greek text was closely related to the ‘quality of Hebrew speech for “I praise” or “I give thanks”’.Footnote ¹³³

The notes in Pace's psalter were only part of a larger project and its chance survival ought not to skew our overall perspective of Pace's intentions. The Book of Psalms is perhaps unique for its sheer variety of devotional, theological and scholarly matter. However, Pace was also translating Ecclesiastes, a book that was often chosen for its relative brevity and its lack of doctrinal importance.Footnote ¹³⁴ Pace's notes in the psalter are also incomplete with no comments at all on Psalms cii (ciii)–cviii(cix). Yet, as this survey has shown, Pace's attention to Hebrew provoked an array of questions on the uneasy relationship of biblical texts, traditions and theology, questions which place him at the heart of the humanist investigation of the Bible and its meaning.

Pace's studies were abruptly ended in 1527. Having weathered the criticisms of Fisher, he had tentatively returned to London and to court. Henry viii's quest for a divorce put a premium on those with a knowledge of Hebrew and it was Pace who recommended Wakefield to the king as an interpreter of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.Footnote ¹³⁵ Unlike Wakefield, however, Pace's allegiances were with the queen. In the midst of the divorce negotiations, Pace offered to meet the imperial ambassador.Footnote ¹³⁶ When his overtures were revealed, Pace was sent to the Tower in October. His books and papers were seized and searched for incriminating material.Footnote ¹³⁷ Inigo de Mendoza, the ambassador in question, was concerned for Pace's mental health even prior to imprisonment but the latter's confinement led to total collapse.Footnote ¹³⁸ The following year Pace was pronounced beyond recovery by his relative Thomas Skevington.Footnote ¹³⁹

There is no evidence that Pace had access to his psalter in the Tower or at the abbey of Beaulieu to which he was later moved. In 1528 Skevington and another relative, Thomas Pace, were making efforts to reclaim the dean's possessions from Thomas Wolsey, though it is unclear whether they had any success.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ At present, it is uncertain how two of his books ended up at Winchester College, though his family did have strong connections to the city.Footnote ¹⁴¹

When Pace was formally released from confinement in October 1529, the imperial ambassador noted that he might make a return to the court, ‘unless his mind should again become unsettled’.Footnote ¹⁴² Pace even wrote to Erasmus not long afterwards, though the letter is now lost.Footnote ¹⁴³ The lack of later correspondence or mention in imperial dispatches may confirm that Pace was unable to return to political or scholarly prominence. In his last years, very little is said of the dean, despite his lingering on until 1536. He was absent from the convocation of 1529.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In 1534, when the dean and chapter of St Paul's swore perpetual allegiance to Henry and Queen Anne, Pace was not amongst the signatories.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ On the eve of Pace's death in 1536, Thomas Cromwell had adjutors appointed to the deanery of St Paul's noting that,

Perhaps in time other discoveries will illuminate Pace's later years. Despite his personal misfortune, however, the discovery of his notes in the psalter at Winchester places Pace at the centre of a rich world of collaborative scholarship and devotion in the 1520s. In its pages, we can see Pace at work, comparing the Latin, Hebrew and Greek texts and drawing on the witness of biblical humanists, Jewish sources and the Church Fathers to aid his efforts. For Pace, the Psalms were primarily a prophetic text, foretelling the coming of Christ. However, they also resonated with his personal and devotional context. Pace had begun to translate the Psalms to keep his mind at peace. In the humanist vision of Scripture as holy rhetoric he found a language to praise and pray to God. A better understanding of Pace's place in the study of Hebrew and the Old Testament is not only important for his own biography, or for those with whom he worked such as Reginald Pole and Robert Wakefield. It also reflects on the broader fault lines emerging in early sixteenth-century Europe over the sacred Scriptures and their interpretation in the light of differing texts and traditions. The loss of Pace's papers and his spectacular fall from grace ought not to obscure the scale of this achievement, even if it was soon eclipsed by the likes of Sante Pagnini, Sebastian Münster and Leo Jud.Footnote ¹⁴⁷