Calvin and the Psalter

When John Calvin set out to produce a French psalter, he knew he couldn’t do it alone. Today, Stephen Nichols tells us about the many people who contributed to creating French editions of the Psalms for singing.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. On this episode, we are talking about Calvin and the Psalter. The Reformation and the Reformers reformed all aspects of the Church and of Church life. We think of Luther as the father of hymnody, and there in the German reformation producing hymns in the German language for people to sing in their worship of God. And Luther also produced a German Psalter. Well, inspired by that, Calvin set his sights on producing a Psalter for the French people. Calvin, as you know, got to Geneva in 1536, and on January 16, 1537, Calvin and Guilhem Farel produced for the city council there at Geneva what they called the “Articles on the Organization of the Church and its Worship.” In there, Calvin addresses this very point of singing the Psalms. He writes, “It is a thing most expedient for the edification of the Church to sing some Psalms in the form of public prayers by which one prays to God or sings his praises so that the hearts of all may be roused to make similar prayers and to render similar praises and thanks to God with common love.”

Well, that resulted in the production of the Strasbourg Psalter in 1539. You might recall that in 1538, both Calvin and Farel were kicked out of Geneva, and so Calvin went to Strasbourg. And while he was there, of course, he preached to the French refugees that were in, at the time, what was a German city of Strasbourg. And there Calvin set to work on the Psalter. He was joined by Clemont Mero, and Mero provided twelve Psalms, Calvin provided six, and that was the publication of the first Psalter. In 1541, Calvin was invited back to Geneva, and in the next year, 1542, and in the year after that, 1543, more additions of the Psalter were added. And at this point, Theodore Beza steps in. He was joined by the musician Louis Bourgeois, who redid many of the melodies and composed many new melodies for the Psalter, including the famous tune, the “Old Hundredth.” This is the tune for the hymn, “All People that on Earth do Dwell.” So, you might recognize that tune composed by Louis Bourgeois.

Well, between this early work of Calvin and others and Beza, who himself contributed thirty-four Psalms to this new edition. They together published in 1551, a very much enlarged Psalter with eighty-three Psalms. Eleven years later, 1562, two years before Calvin’s death, after more people were working on it, a complete Psalter is published. All one-hundred and fifty Psalms. One figure in particular, supervised the publication of the project. Not the writing of the texts for the Psalms, and not the composing of the tunes, but the actual publishing and printing of the Psalter. He was Antoine Vincent, and he employed forty-five different printers. And in the year 1562 alone, Vincent and his small army of printers printed somewhere between thirty thousand and fifty thousand copies of the Psalter. And in the years following 1562, many, many thousands more copies of the Psalter were printed.

The Psalter was very influential among the Reformed Churches in the sixteenth century and even down to the Church today. Well, there's a whole additional history to the English Psalter. It actually started two years before Calvin's production of the Psalter in Strasbourg. It started in 1537, but once Calvin's Psalter and the Geneva Psalter got rolling, it had quite an influence on the English Psalter. But alas, that history awaits a future episode. But for now, that's Calvin and his company of theologians, musicians, and even printers who produced the Genevan Psalter. And I'm Steve Nichols and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.