'The Bay Psalm Book' was the first book to be printed in North America, twenty years after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in Massachusetts. Now extremely rare - only eleven copies survive - it is also the most expensive book in the world, fetching over $14.2 million at auction.Worship in the 'mother tongue' and congregational hymns had become key tenets of Puritanism following the Reformation. New England Puritans were unhappy with contemporary translations of the Psalms and decided that they needed their own version, which would better represent their beliefs. A team of writers in the Massachusetts Bay settlement, including John Cotton and Richard Mather, set about translating the psalms into English from the original Hebrew, and setting the lyrics to a metre so that they could easily be sung in congregation. The resulting translation, 'The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre,' was published in 1640 on a printing press brought over from Surrey. It became known as the Bay Psalm Book after the name of the colony that was home to its translators.Every page of this extraordinarily influential book, including the translators' preface, is faithfully reproduced here, complete with original printer's errors and binding marks. An introduction by Diarmaid MacCulloch sets the book in context and explains how this unassuming Psalter came to have a profound effect on the course of the Protestant faith in America. This edition is made from the original held at the Bodleian Library, one of the best preserved of the surviving copies, despite its accidental submersion in the river Thames in 1731, when the barge carrying it to Oxford unexpectedly sank.

The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.

"The first edition of the Bay Psalm Book, or New England version of the Psalms, printed by Stephen Daye at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640, has the distinction of being the first book printed in English America. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, and founded the first permanent colony in New England, they brought with them Henry Ainsworth's version of the Psalms in prose and metre, with the printed tunes. This version was used in the church at Plymouth until 1692. Elsewhere, the Puritan colonists of the Massachusetts Bay, coming over in 1629 and 1630, sang the words and tunes of Sternhold and Hopkins' Psalms, which for many years had been published with the ordinary editions of the English Bible"--Introduction.

The Whole Booke of Psalmes was one of the most published and widely read books of early modern England, running to over 800 editions between the 1570s and the early eighteenth century. It offered all of the Psalms paraphrased in verse with appropriate tunes, together with an assortment of other scriptural and non-scriptual hymns, and was rapidly (if unofficially) adopted by the established English Church. Yet, despite the significant impact of the Whole Booke of Psalmes upon English culture and literature, this is the first book-length study of it, and the first sustained critical examination of the texts of which it comprises. By tracing the ways in which historical contingency, religious fervor and the print marketplace together created and were changed by one of the most successful books of English verse ever printed, this study opens a new window through which to view the intellectual and ecclesiastical culture of Tudor England.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR NPR • Time Magazine • The Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • The Boston Globe A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians—a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister, Jane, whose obscurity and poverty were matched only by her brother’s fame and wealth but who, like him, was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Making use of an astonishing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one extraordinary woman but an entire world.