Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of original poems, and to make an overt bid for patronage as a male poet of the era might, though in distinctively female terms. Her volume of (ostensibly) religious poems, published in 1611, was entitled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. The author identifies herself on the title page as a married gentlewoman whose status is defined through her husband's position as an officer and court musician: "Mistris Aemilia Lanyer, Wife to Captaine Alfonso Lanyer Servant to the Kings Majestic" Besides containing some good poems and passages, the volume is of particular interest for its feminist conceptual frame: it is a defense and celebration of the enduring community of good women that reaches from Eve to contemporary Jacobean patronesses. Lanyer imagines that community as distinctively separate from male society and its evils, and proclaims herself its poet.

We know very little about Aemilia Lanyer, but enough to recognize her as a marginal figure at Elizabeth's, and still more at James's, court. Her family connections were with the circle of court musicians dependent upon patronage, and she had virtually no prospects beyond what she could win for herself. A. L. Rowse's edition of the Salve Deus [The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum by Emilia Lanier, 1978] marshals some of the known facts about her life, chiefly drawn from the casebooks and diary of Simon Forman, the astrologer, in the service of his highly tenuous argument that she was the "Dark Lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets. But the links to Shakespeare suggested by the few records we have are much too weak to support Rowse's confident claim, even if we grant his very questionable assumption that Shakespeare's sonnets are to be read as straightforward autobiography. A more complete and reliable account of the biographical facts and the documents supporting them is supplied in Susanne Woods's edition of Lanyer's poems [Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 1993]….

The title of Lanyer's volume of poems promises, somewhat misleadingly, a collection of religious poetry—a genre thought especially appropriate for women writers: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Containing, 1. The Passion of Christ. 2. Eves Apologie in defence of Women. 3. The Teares of the Daughters of Jerusalem. 4. The Salutation and Sorrow of the Virgine Marie. With divers other things not unfit to be read. In a postscript to the volume addressed "To the doubtfull Reader," she claims that the Latin title was delivered to her in a dream long before she conceived of the work, but that she later read that dream as a God-given sign appointing her to it:

Gentle Reader, if thou desire to be resolved, why I give this Title, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, know for certaine, that it was delivered unto me in sleepe many yeares before I had any intent to write in this maner, and was quite out of my memory, untill I had written the passion of Christ, when immediately it came into my remembrance, what I had dreamed long before; and thinking it a significant token, that I was appointed to performe this Worke, I gave the very same words I received in sleepe as the fittest Title I could devise for this Booke.

Lanyer's statement at once claims a divine sanction for her work, and at the same time asserts complete responsibility for it since she remembered the dream only after she finished the book. But despite the title and the dream, the volume in fact contains several kinds of poems on subjects not exclusively religious, in various poetic genres and verse forms. As a whole, the work is devised as a comprehensive Book of Good Women, fusing religious devotion and feminism so as to assert the essential harmony of those two impulses. Lanyer does not imitate (though she might conceivably have read) Boccaccio or Christine de Pisan or Chaucer; her volume offers in a quite unexpected form a feminist defense and celebration of women and of Lanyer as woman poet.

The volume was entered in the Stationers' Register on October 2, 1610, by the bookseller Richard Bonian, and the poems were probably written within a year or two of that date. It was issued twice in 1611, with a minor change in the printer's imprint, and is now very rare; possibly only a few copies were printed, chiefly for presentation purposes, though the epistle "To the Vertuous Reader" implies a larger intended audience. In at least two copies (and perhaps more) certain dedications were omitted to tailor the volume for the recipient. Lanyer's husband seems to have taken some pride in her work, as he presented a copy to Thomas Jones, Lord Chancellor of Ireland and Archbishop of Dublin, whom he knew from his Irish service.

The book is in three parts. The first section contains nine dedicatory poems in a variety of genres addressed to royal and noble ladies, a prose dedication to the Countess of Cumberland, and a prose epistle "To the Vertuous Reader," which is a vigorous apologia for women's equality or superiority to men in spiritual and moral matters. The title poem is a long meditation on the Passion and death of Christ (1,056 lines) which in fact incorporates the three other items listed as separate poems on the title page. But while that table of contents is misleading, it properly registers the title poem's emphasis on the good women associated with the Passion story. The Passion narrative is itself contained within a frame of 776 lines (more than a third of the whole), comprising elaborate tributes to Margaret Clifford as virtuous follower of the suffering Christ. The volume concludes with a country-house poem, "The Description of Cooke-ham," celebrating an estate that was occupied on occasion by Margaret Clifford, as a lost female paradise. This poem may or may not have been written before Jonson's "To Penshurst" (commonly thought to have inaugurated the genre in English literature), but it can certainly claim priority in publication.

Given Lanyer's dubious past, her evident concern to find patronage, and her focus on women, contemporary and biblical, we might be tempted to discount the Passion subject as a thin veneer for a subversive feminist statement. But Lanyer was a woman of her age, and her imagination was governed by its terms. At the time of this writing, she appears to have been sincerely, if not very profoundly, religious, and she presents Christ's Passion as the focus for all the forms of female goodness (and masculine evil) her poems treat. Her good women meditate upon and imitate this model, and as poet she interprets her experience of life in religious categories. Her feminist perceptions can be rendered only in terms of the discourse of Scripture, but they force a radical imaginative rewriting of its patriarchal norms to place women at the center.