In 1638, the first printing press was imported to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and a group of local religious leaders—including, it is thought, Richard Mather, John Cotton, and Richard Eliot—set about to create “a plain and familiar translation of the psalms and words of David into English metre” for use in the colony’s church meetings. Earlier psalteries had been brought to the New World by colonists, but in Puritan thought they had strayed too far from the original Hebrew text. In 1640, The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre was published in Cambridge; it was the first book published in the American Colonies. The Bay Psalm Book, as it has come to be known, consists of a substantial introduction summarizing the creators’ philosophy and intentions, followed by translations of the Psalms rendered into meter, enabling them to be sung to well-known tunes of the day. The psaltery was soon in widespread use on both sides of the Atlantic. It went through multiple printings and editions before being succeeded by newer texts in later decades.

Generations of theologians and scholars have turned to The Bay Psalm Book, considering it from a variety of perspectives. Besides its significance as a religious treatise, spiritual guide, and historical document, The Bay Psalm Book is also recognized as an important milestone in the evolution of the American musical tradition. In recent years, a new generation of scholars has returned to the book, seeing it from fresh perspectives—as a social document, for example, and as a physical artifact of early American life in the Massachusetts Bay area.

The Digital Bay Psalm Book gives scholars, researchers, and enthusiasts alike a rich and intimate experience of the book as it was known by its earliest readers.

As an electronic-only publication offered as a downloadable PDF, The Digital Bay Psalm Book takes advantage of digital technology to offer meticulously rendered photographs of the 7.25 x 4 inch book, one of several once owned by Thomas Prince, scholar and minister of Boston’s Old South Church from 1718 to 1758. In this format, users are able to zoom in to examine each individual page, the quality of the paper and printing, marginalia, notes, and other marks accrued over the centuries, yielding insights into the owner’s use and understanding of the text as well as the very life of the book itself. In addition, Christie-Miller provides four supplements that shed light on the technology and craft that went into the creation of America’s first English-language book.

The writings of Pope Pius VI, head of the Catholic Church during the most destructive period of the French Revolution, were compiled in two volumes by M.N.S. Guillon and published in 1798 and 1800. But during the Revolution, the reign of Napoleon, and the various revolutionary movements of the 19th century, there were extraordinary efforts to destroy writings that critiqued the revolutionary ideology. Many books and treatises, if they survived the revolution or the sacking from Napoleon’s armies. To this day, no public copy of Guillon’s work exists in Paris.
    Now, for the first time in English, these works comprising the letters, briefs, and other writings of Pius VI on the French Revolution are available. Volume I treats the first shock of the Revolution and the efforts of the Pope in 1790 and 1791 to oppose the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (which famous revolutionary and shrewd diplomat Talleyrand referred to as “the greatest fault of the National Assembly”). Volume II will be published later, and deals with the aftermath of the Civil Constitution through Pius’s death in exile). Editor and translator Jeffrey Langan presents the materials leading up to and directly connected with these decrees, in which the National Assembly attempted to set up a Catholic Church that would be completely submissive to the demands of the Assembly. Volume I also covers Pius’s efforts to deal with the immediate aftermath of the Constitution after the National Assembly implemented it, including his encyclical, Quod Aliquantum.
    The letters will show how Pius chose to oppose the Civil Constitution. He did so not by a public campaign, for he had no real temporal power to oppose the violence, but by attempting to work personally with Louis XVI and various archbishops in France to articulate what were the points on which he could concede (matters dealing with the political structures of France) and what were the essential points in which he could not concede (matters dealing with the organization of dioceses and appointment of bishops).
    Since the 1980s, with the writings and school that developed around François Furet, as well as Simon Schama’s Citizens, a new debate over the French Revolution has ensued, bringing forth a more objective account of the Revolution, one that avoids an excessively Marxist lens and that brings to light some of its defects and more gruesome parts – the destruction and theft of Church property, and the sadistic methods of torture and killing of priests, nuns, aristocrats, and fellow-revolutionaries. 
    An examination of the writings of Pius VI will not only help set the historical record straight for English-speaking students of the Revolution, it will also aid them to better understand the principles that the Catholic Church employs when confronted with chaotic political change. They will see that the Church has a principled approach to distinguishing, while not separating, the power of the Church and the power of the state. They will also see, as Talleyrand himself also saw, that one of the essential elements that makes the Church the Church is the right to appoint bishops and to discipline its own bishops. The Church herself recognizes that she cannot long survive without this principle that guarantees her unity.
    Pius VI’s efforts were able to keep the Catholic Church intact (though badly bruised) so that she could reconstitute herself and build up a vibrant life in 19th-century France. (He did this in the face of the Church’s prestige having sunk to historic lows; some elites in Europe thought there would be no successor to Pius and jokingly referred to him as “Pius the Last.”) He began a process that led to the restoration of the prestige of the Papacy throughout the world, and he initiated a two-century process that led to the Church finally being able to select bishops without any interference from secular authorities. This had been at least a 1,000-year problem in the history of the Church. By 1990, only two countries of the world, China and Vietnam, were interfering in any significant way in the process that the Church used to select bishops. 
    Pius VI’s papacy, especially during the years of the French Revolution, was a pivotal point for the French Revolution and for the interaction between Church and state in Western history. All freedom-loving people will be happy to read his distinc-tions between the secular power and the spiritual power. His papacy also was important for the internal developments that the Church would make over the next 200 years with respect to its self-understanding of the Papacy and the role of the bishop.