Ainsworth Psalter

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Does anyone know if the Ainsworth Psalter (used by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and at Plimouth Colony) has been republished? I have a book about the Ainsworth Psalter, but I would love to get an actual copy. From my research, it seems that there are none to be found. The only copy I have ever seen was an antiquarian copy at Plimouth Plantation in Massachusetts. I have a republished copy of the Bay Psalm Book and hope to add the Ainsworth Psalter to my library one day.

 

[Peter]

Never heard of it. I thought the American Puritans used the Bay Psalter. Actually the very 1st book printed in America!

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Henry Ainsworth was a remarkable Hebrew scholar associated with the Separatists in Holland. His Psalter was carried across the Atlantic in the Mayflower and used by the Pilgrims who settled in Plimouth, Massachusetts in 1620. The Bay Psalm Book was published in Massachusetts in 1640 (the first book published in America) and ultimately replaced the Ainsworth Psalter.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were a time of great religious turmoil in Great Britain, as various ideologies struggled for control of the Church. The reign of the Catholic queen Mary Tudor (d. 1558) meant persecution and exile for many Protestants. She was succeeded by Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603) who failed to reform the church to the degree many Protestants desired. As a result, separatist groups formed who worshiped outside the established church -- the beginnings of the congregational or "gathered church" movement -- and some of these groups moved into exile in Holland. In 1612 in Amsterdam, Henry Ainsworth published his Book of Psalms for the use of these congregations, including 39 tunes of English, Dutch and French origin. The Ainsworth psalter was brought to Plymouth Colony in 1620 by the group we know as the Pilgrims and was used there for a generation.

Source: http://www.zionsong.org/art-leonard-singpsalms2.html

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Wikipedia article on Henry Ainsworth

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Courtship of Miles Standish:

So through the Plymouth woods John Alden went on his errand;
Came to an open space, and saw the disk of the ocean,
Sailless, sombre and cold with the comfortless breath of the east-wind;
Saw the new-built house and people at work in a meadow;
Heard, as he drew near the door, the musical voice of Priscilla
Singing the hundredth Psalm, the grand old Puritan anthem,
Music that Luther sang to the sacred words of the Psalmist,
Full of the breath of the Lord, consoling and comforting many.
Then, as he opened the door, he beheld the form of the maiden
Seated beside her wheel, and the carded wool like a snow-drift
Piled at her knee, her white hands feeding the ravenous spindle,
While with her foot on the treadle she guided the wheel in its motion.
Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth,
Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together,
Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard,
Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the verses.
Such was the book from whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem,
She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest,
Making the humble house and the modest apparel of home-spun
Beautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being!

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Like Matthew Poole, Henry Ainsworth was thought to have been poisoned.

For further discussion of this see Daniel Neal, History of the Puritans, Vol. I, p. 342; Benjamin Brooks, Lives of the Puritans, Vol. II, p. 302; Alice Morse Earle, Sabbath in Puritan New England, p. 73.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Courtship of Miles Standish:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born 200 years ago today, on February 27, 1807.