Poetry Criticism | Lanyer, Aemilia - Barbara K. Lewalski (essay date 1985)

Barbara K. Lewalski (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: Lewalski, Barbara K. “Of God and Good Women: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer.” In Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, edited by Margaret Patterson Hannay, pp. 203-24. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Lewalski admires Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum for its “quite remarkable feminist conceptual frame.”]

A volume of religious poems published in 1611, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, was written by a gentlewoman who identified herself on her title page as “Mistris Aemilia Lanyer, Wife to Captaine Alfonso Lanyer, servant to the Kings Majestie.”¹ Since published women poets were so very rare in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the volume invites attention on that score alone.² But beyond this, it has considerable intrinsic interest as a defense and celebration of good...

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