From Pious Poems to Protestant Hymns

Cult, culture and the psalms of Clément Marot

Calvinist churches and congregational psalm-singing are so closely bound together that it is hard to imagine the one without the other, and the psalms of Clément Marot sit at the origin of that connection. The difficulty is that the connection is regularly mistaken for an origin. Marot's psalms did not come out of the Protestant church, issus de Calvin. They came from the evangelical circles around Marguerite de Navarre, the King's sister. They were pious poems, and courtly ones, long before they became Protestant hymns — and they never stopped being read and sung outside the Reformed world afterwards.

The chronology alone should give pause. Marot's first attempts antedate the rise of Calvinism by almost a decade: Calvin was still a student at Bourges when Marot translated his first psalm. What follows is a summary of the argument; the full version, with the evidence and the apparatus, appeared as a chapter in Music and Religious Education in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2023).

Psalm 6, around 1530

The first psalm Marot translated, as far as we know, is Psalm 6, in a small booklet of four folios with three woodcuts, in gothic type, of which a single copy survives in Seville. Everything about it places it in the tradition of devotional literature. It is announced as “the first of the seven psalms” — the penitential ones, prayers for Lent, for sickness, for the approach of death — and every French stanza is preceded by the opening words of the familiar Latin. It looks like a miniature breviary.

Two things make it something else as well. The name on the cover is not that of a cleric or a theologian but of a court poet, celebrated for his chansons and rondeaux, and identified as valet de chambre du Roy. That goes some way towards explaining the almost secular idiom of the translation: God is addressed as Sire. It is a devout prayer and a courtly poem at once — read it aloud and you can hear it.

And then the phrase on the title page: translaté … au plus pres de la verite Ebraicque, as close as possible to the Hebrew truth. It reads like a slogan, and in a sense it is one; but it places this little devotional booklet squarely in the world of the biblical humanists, who expected the renewal of the church from a return to the sources. A traditional pious poem has become a forward-looking experiment.

What “the Hebrew truth” meant

Every psalm Marot translated, from the first to the last, carries some reference to the Hebrew truth or the Hebrew language — and modern readers routinely misread it. We take it for a philological claim. In the early sixteenth century it was primarily a theological one: the Hebrew truth is the Christian truth, demonstrated from the original text. David prophesied Christ; that was the working conviction.

Marot was a poet and not a scholar. He did not read Hebrew, and whatever Hebrew learning lies behind his verse reached him through others. Versifying a psalm, however, means making interpretative decisions on every line, and for that he needed help. He found it, in all probability, in Martin Bucer's vast Latin commentary on the psalms of 1529 — a scholarly landmark, well received across Christendom before its author's name became a liability. Bucer gives each psalm a free translation and a summary (argumentum), then an explanatio familiaris in which the text is gone through word by word and the possible readings, Christian and Jewish alike, are weighed in a surprisingly non-partisan spirit.

Marot certainly used Bucer's arguments to construct his own summaries; in the difficult passages he generally follows him, and some of his more daring renderings reflect suggestions made by the medieval rabbis Bucer discusses at length — David Kimhi and Abraham Ibn Ezra, both champions of the plain historical sense over allegory. One consequence is worth noting: the reference to Christ becomes indirect, typological rather than prophetic. The many revisions Marot made in later editions show a translator who took the job seriously and kept learning while he worked.

A project, and a patroness

The atmosphere of these translations is that of the évangéliques, the loose reform-minded movement in France whose common denominator was the hope of revitalising the church by returning to biblical essentials — promoting renewal rather than attacking abuses, and trying not to break with the official church. Marguerite de Navarre was its sponsor and, in bad weather, its protector.

One of that movement's practical contributions was the production of seminal texts in French: Lefèvre d'Étaples translated the Bible and compiled model sermons; Marguerite published devotional tracts. Her loyal secretary and personal poet could hardly stay behind. In 1533 Marot contributed substantially to a small prayer-book, Le Foy d'ung chrestien, putting the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Ave Maria and some table prayers into French verse; in the same year the same printer, Antoine Augereau, reissued Marguerite's Miroir de l'ame pecheresse with Marot's Psalm 6 appended.

All of these are pious poems, mostly prayers, meant for private devotion — a breviary for lay readers. Under Marguerite's aegis the versification of the psalms grew into a project, which continued in 1535 under the auspices of Renée de France at Ferrara. Marot said as much himself, in an epistle written from Ferrara: “Ou que me faiz chanter en divers sons / Pseaulmes divins, car ce sont tes chansons.” After his return from exile in December 1536 he seems to have gone on working in silence, while the poems circulated in manuscript.

Published as literature

When the first collection finally appeared in print in 1541, it appeared as literature. The psalms are not divided into numbered stanzas as we expect them to be; each is rendered in a different metre. The Trente Pseaumes (Paris, Étienne Roffet, 1541) is dedicated to the King of France — not to any emerging Protestant community, some of whom were by then already singing them. The Cinquante Pseaumes of 1543, though printed in Geneva without place or printer's name, is addressed to the Dames de France, the ladies of the court. In the liminary epistles Marot places his translations firmly inside the King's cultural programme, and applauds the royal lecturers.

In Marot's own account, translating these venerable texts was simply part of the job of a poet attached to such a court: unlocking the ancient literary treasures for the French. That is how his contemporaries took it. After his death in 1544 the psalms became part of his Oeuvres — printed separately, or added to the section in which his translations of the classics were gathered. There David, who surpasses Orpheus, keeps company with Ovid, Virgil, Musaeus and Petrarch.

Calvin annexes the poems

Meanwhile the poems had been travelling, in manuscript and in clandestine printings. They reached Strasbourg, where the small francophone refugee community heard their German neighbours singing psalms in the vernacular and had no hymnbook of their own. Calvin, banished from Geneva and appointed pastor there in 1538, collected what French versifications he could find and even tried his own hand at two of them. Thirteen of the psalms he could lay hands on were Marot's, and in 1539 the Strasbourg printer Johann Knobloch published Aulcuns pseaulmes et cantiques mys en chant — the Marot psalms with melodies of their own, the others fitted to existing German tunes.

It was in Strasbourg that Calvin came to grasp what communal singing could do for the emerging Reformed churches. Back in Geneva in 1541 he had the new church order accepted and set the cantor Guillaume Franc to revising the melodies; La Forme des prieres et chantz ecclesiastiques appeared in 1542, and the Geneva Psalter was born. Using Marot's poems for the liturgy was not Marot's idea but Calvin's initiative: he annexed texts he had found somewhere, and saw what they could do.

Two lineages, and their sizes

From 1542 the tradition splits in two. In the cultural lineage the editions open with Marot's own liminary epistles — to the King, to the ladies of France — and the natural habitat of the poems is the French court and French culture at large. In the liturgical lineage the texts always appear with their tunes, Marot's epistles are replaced by a preface in which Calvin explains and justifies his model, and the psalter is often bound together with a service book. The tunes are for unaccompanied unison singing.

The sizes are instructive. Counting the editions that contain more or less the whole of Marot's fifty psalms, the years to 1550 yield some forty-three text-only editions against five hymnbooks and seven volumes of polyphonic settings. The text editions come overwhelmingly from Paris and Lyon; Geneva accounts for two. In the 1540s Marot's psalms celebrate their greatest triumph extra ecclesiam. Retrospectively the hymnbooks look like the important event; in 1543 they may well have seemed a local liturgical experiment, interesting to insiders.

The musicians

Composers went to work on Marot's psalms before any church melody had appeared in print, and mostly without any connection to Geneva. As early as 1540 an otherwise unknown musician signing himself “Abel” set Psalm 137, Estans assis aux rives aquatiques, for four voices, and it opens a collection of worldly chansons by the best French composers of the day. Three settings of Psalm 130 followed, by Benedictus Appenzeller, Gentian and Pierre de Manchicourt, likewise inside secular chanson collections — and none of these composers had any tie to the French court.

That changes abruptly in 1545, when Pierre Certon and Antoine Mornable, both attached to the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris — colleagues, in a manner of speaking, of the late Marot — published two complementary books of his psalms with Pierre Attaingnant. The title pages show how the wind had turned: Marot is not named, the composers' impeccable offices are spelled out at length, and instead of a translation according to the Hebrew truth the publisher advertises psalms traduictz de Latin. Mornable treats the texts as material for free motet-like compositions; Certon, more surprisingly, builds on the Geneva tunes — which says nothing whatever about his sympathy for Calvin's project.

The first to set all fifty systematically was Loys Bourgeois, Paris-born and living in Geneva since 1545, in two collections printed at Lyon in 1547. His own preface tells the musicians where to perform them: at home, ès maisons, with voices and with instruments. Edification and divertissement at the same time — a loyal citizen of Geneva and a propagandist for the cultural use of the same material. Janequin followed, with settings that are skilful and simple: pious chansons. In musical circles the psalms came into vogue outside the church altogether, and their popularity peaked in the 1550s and 60s.

Why it matters

Two annexations, then, of the same body of poems. Calvin annexed the texts for his purpose, which was liturgy. Music-lovers annexed the tunes for theirs, which was divertissement. The interference between the two proved remarkably fertile: it produced everything from simple two-part bicinia to polychoral settings for twelve voices, and the poems went on crossing confessional boundaries freely while staunch Protestants were singing them to affirm an identity.

Reading Marot's psalms only backwards, from their liturgical use as Protestant hymns, is therefore short-sighted in a precise sense: it fixes the attention on the Calvinist milieu and obscures the fact that this was not their native habitat. Before they were hymns they were courtly poems, meant for pious reading and recitation in private. Seen from there, a good deal of the musical history of the sixteenth century falls into a different and more interesting shape — and so, incidentally, does the poet.

On the editions of Marot · The full chapter (Brill, 2023) · Other scholarly work

Dick Wursten