A study of the Psalter's influence on the language of prescription and proscription, injunction, command, censure, reproof, and other ethical instruction in late medieval England, as well as exegesis and meditation that clearly had a homiletic or polemic bias. Among the themes is the distinction between the private and public use the Psalms were put to, and the deliberate blurring of that distinction to illustrate the unity between individual salvation and the reform of society.