[In the following essay, Bowen examines issues of race and womanhood in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.]

“Woman,” in the late-capitalist United States at least, is a racial term. Some of the most powerful work of modern feminism has been devoted to revealing the correlation between race and womanhood that white supremacy must suppress; “all the women are white,” the title of a black feminist collection observed in 1982 (Hull et al.). Eve Sedgwick identifies as one of the two great “heuristic leaps” of feminism the recognition that all forms of oppression, though they are structured differently, “must intersect in complex embodiments” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 33). Where patriarchy coexists and collaborates with white supremacy, “woman” silently encodes at least race, and possibly also class, age, sexuality, ethnicity, physical ability, even weight. Not all women are women. Even as feminists undertake a necessary deconstruction and historicizing of the category “women,”¹ the positioning of some women to reify the womanhood of others persists, with material consequences that become increasingly clear as we enter a global economy.

While women of color and other feminists have made it possible to see the ways in which womanhood is epistemologically complicit with racism, it is perhaps surprising to find that the racialization of “women” was forecast as early as 1611, in one of the first published volumes of original verse by an English woman. Aemilia Lanyer's poem on the passion of Christ, written as England underwent a massive shift in its relation to the world, is an extended meditation on womanhood as a social rather than individual identity, and one at least partly constituted by exclusion. I want to suggest that the grounds for exclusion, as articulated by the poem, are racial ones, with all the complexity that “race” in this period entails. Titled, or as I shall argue mistitled, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews), Lanyer's poem is actually not one work but many, a series of texts folded in on a disappearing central narrative of the crucifixion. Salve Deus stages a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, with the poet's own status as a woman at stake; of Jewish and Italian descent at a time when both were racialized and “race” was being newly mobilized as a political category, Lanyer writes womanhood as womanhood's Other.² My aim is to read the political unconscious of the poem, restoring to its surface the sometimes repressed reality of a gendered and racialized history of struggle,³ and focusing attention somewhat away from the questions that have so far dominated critical discussion. With a fine modern edition published in 1993 and a substantial body of criticism now in print,⁴Salve Deus is poised to become an increasingly central text in evaluations of early modern culture. As it moves into a near-canonical position, if only as “minor” literature, I want to urge that the poem be read for its extraordinary meditation on the racialized process through which early modern women constituted themselves as a group.

In connecting the racialization of womanhood with the beginnings of European hegemony and the distant but real economic relation between European women and the women subjugated by European merchant capitalists in Africa, the Americas, and Asia, I invoke the work of a growing number of scholars who have begun to turn their attention to the gendered history of racism, many of us seeking a basis of collective political agency that does not reinscribe racial domination.⁵ To trace what Fredric Jameson calls the “solidarity” of the “forms, structures, experiences, and struggles” of the past with those of the present (p. 18), however, is not to deny the radical differences of history. That both race and gender ordinarily present themselves as unchanging or self-explanatory is a sign of the success of patriarchal and white supremacist regimes of knowledge; feminism must intervene to make these categories speak and deliver up their histories. Much of the emphasis of the rapidly developing scholarship on “race” has been on its historicity: not only do notions of race change over time and place, but race itself has no biological basis as a system of human classification—“racism invented race,” as Fernand Braudel reminds us. Thus by examining continuities between early modern and late-capitalist formations of womanhood, I do not want to suggest that gender and race are unchanging categories; on the contrary, I hope to retrieve a history that has been systematically forgotten. The work of recovery is already under way by such scholars as Winthrop Jordan, Kim Hall, Ania Loomba, Margo Hendricks, and Lynda Boose, who have made clear the radical instability of the concept of “race” in early modern England, while much of the scholarship on gender in this period has served to complicate the notion of a simple binarism.⁶ Nor is “whiteness” exempt from historicization; it needs to be understood as “a complexly constructed product of local, regional, national, and global relations, past and present” (Frankenburg, p. 236). With the concepts of race and gender in particular turmoil in early modern Europe and with both concepts radically bound by their historical moment, we are not going to find any simple origin for what might be called white womanhood. Lanyer's work beckons, however, because it speaks into this turmoil; Salve Deus does not so much explain as problematize white womanhood, an ideological formation that continues, in the twentieth century, to limit the possibilities of feminist thought and action.⁷

As a woman publishing a volume of original verse in 1611, Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) had almost no precursors⁸; it cannot be coincidental that this early attempt by a woman writer to participate in the literary print culture is also a meditation on the way women are socially defined. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Lanyer's only known publication, is a complex plea for readmittance to court circles and resumption of aristocratic financial support; it is also arguably the most important text we have for an understanding of intellectual alliances among literate women in early modern England. One of the very few texts from the period to reflect on class relations among women, or to argue for a change in the poet's own relation to State power through the agency of women, Salve Deus is perhaps the only early modern English text to discuss women's communities from the perspective of a racialized outsider. It is now known that Lanyer was the daughter of an Italian Jew who was brought to England in 1541, along with his four brothers, to enhance the quality of the music at the court of Henry VIII.⁹ Lanyer was also the discarded mistress of Queen Elizabeth's first cousin Henry Cary, Lord Hunsdon, and later the wife of a French musician, Alphonso Lanyer, who was also at the English court. If she wrote from any of the complicated subject-positions this history would have offered her, Lanyer would be an unusual voice among Jacobean writers. That she saw connections between these positions, and explored their epistemological implications for her as a writer of Christian narrative, makes her unique. But my interest is not so much in her singularity as in the radical impulses her work contains: Lanyer, I would suggest, is of major importance to the feminist project of recovering such initiatives in the texts of early women writers.

Despite its significance for a counterhegemonic reading of the Renaissance, however, Salve Deus, as a literary text produced at a time of mass illiteracy, cannot be taken as an expression of all oppositional or marginalized cultures; Jameson is instructive on the problem of the autonomy from history that printed texts project. “Since by definition,” he writes, “the cultural monuments and masterworks that have survived tend necessarily to perpetuate only a single voice in [the] class dialogue, … they cannot be properly assigned their relational place in a dialogical system without the restoration or artificial reconstruction of the voice to which they were initially opposed” (p. 85). Although there is room for debate here—on the monological nature of canonical texts and on whether Lanyer's poem can be considered a cultural monument merely by having survived—Jameson's formulation provides a historical way of understanding some of the poem's most puzzling formal features: its recursiveness, its tendency to impede its own narrative progress,¹⁰ its strange double-voiced character. Salve Deus is both a passionately religious work and a work with the secular position of women at heart. (For Lanyer, as we shall see, these two trajectories are not unconnected.) Her poem is a work of multiple digressions, of anger mixed with longing for aristocratic mothers, of passages demonizing the Jews within a reading of the crucifixion that exculpates at least Jewish women for Christ's death. While Lanyer does not represent the whole range of positions marginalized by early modern English society, she does at least intermittently force a usually silenced voice into the realms of bourgeois high culture. As a woman who was once part of the libidinal economy of the court (like but unlike the men of her family, all court musicians) and who seeks through her poem to win a new position within it, Lanyer is both insider and outsider; her poem speaks alternately in hegemonic and oppositional voices.

Lanyer's importance lies not only in the social position she occupied but in her ability to reconceptualize the master narratives of her culture from within her subject-position. We will be disappointed if we try to resuscitate her as a lyric poet on the order of Jonson or Donne; she needs to be seen outside the masculinist framework these poets and their readers have helped to establish.¹¹ Although there are lyrical passages in Salve Deus and evidence of an impassioned engagement with Jacobean literary culture, Lanyer's contribution is primarily her original critical readings of the world in which she struggled to conduct a public intellectual life. Salve Deus is an unapologetic attempt on the part of a Jacobean woman who was denied access to the profession of the male members of her family to be paid for cultural rather than sexual work. (Lanyer's position in the sexual economy is documented by the astrologer Simon Forman, whom she consulted several times in 1597 and whose sensationalized account of her visits provides a crucial, if unreliable, source on her life: “The old Lord Chamberlaine kept her longue She was maintained in great pomp. … She hath 40£ a yere and was welthy to him that maried her in moni and Jewells.”¹²) It would be hard to overstate the intellectual ambitiousness of Lanyer's poem: this is a work that rewrites both of the major narratives of Christianity from a gendered perspective; that argues for an alternative, matrilinear patronage network in a unique series of dedications exclusively to women; that intervenes directly in a high-stakes legal battle over the right of a woman to inherit property; that invents (as female pastoral) the genre of the English country-house poem¹³; that calls into being, through its sustained address, a community of literate women. Its three sections—dedications, title-poem in ottava rima, and the country-house poem “The Description of Cooke-ham”—rewrite the scripts of patriarchy, in part by defining the collective interests of virtuous womanhood.

The poem's characteristic gesture is to turn from the individual woman to the collective; the gesture occurs in the extraordinary sequence of dedications, but its most vivid appearance is in Lanyer's revision of the story of the Fall. “Eves Apologie,” as Lanyer entitles this section, comes halfway through the passion narrative, in which Lanyer gives the largest speaking part to Pilate's wife. The wife's voice displaces Pilate's and even Jesus', as her dream, the subject of one verse in Matthew's gospel,¹⁴ becomes the pretext for an irruption of feminist argument into the mythic narrative. It is Lanyer's brilliant innovation to see that the two central events of Christianity can be linked by gender; if Eve's acceptance of the apple has meant that all women are indicted in the Fall, then guilt for the crucifixion should likewise indict all men. Pilate's wife attempts to clear Eve of blame (interestingly, portraying her as a woman in search of “knowledge”) and then makes the poem's crucial leap from the theological to the social:

Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit;
          This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre
          As doth the Sunne, another little starre.
Then let us have our Libertie againe,
And challendge to your selves no Sov'raigntie;
You came not in the world without our paine,
Make that a barre against your crueltie;
Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine
Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?
          If one weake woman simply did offend,
          This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end.

(pp. 86-87)

The jump from women's sin to the claim that women should have their liberty restored (“againe”) is probably the most idiosyncratic moment in the poem, though humanist defenses of women had already argued for legal rights based on the spiritual equality of the sexes.¹⁵ As it exposes and challenges the theological roots of patriarchy, the passage also hints, via a direct quotation from The Rape of Lucrece, that the crucifixion might be understood as a rape. Early in Shakespeare's poem, Tarquin considers whether he should go through with his planned assault on the virtuous Roman matron; he hesitates when he recalls his relation to Lucrece's husband: “But as he is my kinsman, my dear friend, / The shame and fault finds no excuse nor end” (237-38). That Lanyer dares to align the crucifixion with rape (and perhaps the Christian with the Roman Republican myth of origin, one involving male sacrifice, the other female) suggests the radicalism of imagination that underlies this often conventional poem. The feminized Christ is not an original trope and functions in Salve Deus as an analogue to the sufferings of the female patron, but the passage allows Lanyer to voice one of the period's signal assertions of gender equality: “why should you disdaine our beeing your equals?” (Antisemitism had a similar theological basis and could be subject to a similar challenge; if such a connection is implied here, it is never directly made.) Lanyer's vision of prelapsarian Eden necessarily entails freedom from gender hierarchy, as becomes clear in the poem's final section, where gender liberation takes the form of a paradise populated exclusively by women.

My interest in moments like this one—where Lanyer points to the way in which womanhood has been historically created—is in the connection between definitions of women as a collective and the racialized exclusion of some women from womanhood. How much does Lanyer's community of women depend on a shared whiteness? By asking such a question I hope to offer an alternative to what Gayatri Spivak once called the “basically isolationist admiration” for the literature of women writers that “establishes the high feminist norm” (p. 262). Though feminist literary criticism has inched away from this position in the ten years since Spivak wrote “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” discussions of early periods, despite some important exceptions, tend to read women's texts within an analytic based on the English nation-state or at most on Europe.¹⁶ Communities of women, even when formed discursively, seem to me especially subject to isolationist admiration: at the current historical moment they hold out the promise of female agency exercised outside of the privatized world of text or family. But post-structuralist thought has made it clear that communities tend to consolidate their identity through the nomination of an Other; one of the painful lessons of feminist history has been the extent to which white women's communities, even when formed for progressive purposes, have been constitutive of white racism. It is urgent, then, at this relatively early stage in the study of Renaissance women's alliances that we pay attention not only to “the complex embodiments” in which different social formations such as sexuality, religion, ethnicity, race, and gender overlap, but to the ways in which they consolidate existing relations of power as female alliances are formed. Particularly in the early modern period, as Europe was embarking on a period of expansionism that would come to be justified by theories of racial superiority, it cannot be taken for granted that alliances among white women were innocent of the ideology that was to emerge as racism.¹⁷

Toward the end of the fifteenth century Europe became the center of what has been described as the first “world-economy” (Wallerstein, p. 15), and the literature of this period has to be read within an analytic that accounts for that economy just as surely as American literature has to be read within the context of what Toni Morrison calls a “wholly racialized society” (Morrison, p. xii). Marx made the connection between the activities of European merchant capitalism—“the discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, … the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the hunting of blackskins”—and a European commercial war that made the world into its theater (Marx, p. 915); Immanuel Wallerstein developed Marx's idea by locating in this period “a kind of social system the world had not really known before”:

It is an economic but not a political entity, unlike empires, city-states and nation-states. … It is a “world” system, not because it encompasses the whole world, but because it is larger than any juridically-defined political unit. And it is a “world-economy” because the basic linkage between the parts of the system is economic, although this was reinforced to some extent by cultural links and eventually … by political arrangements.

(p. 15)¹⁸

While some aspects of Wallerstein's formulation may be open to question, his analysis seems to me a vital antidote to isolationist literary criticism. Spivak wrote that it should be impossible to read nineteenth-century British literature without attention to Britain's engagement in imperialism (p. 262); it should be equally impossible to read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature outside of an international context. Trade, colonialism, slavery, and migration impinge everywhere, even where they are not explicitly at issue.¹⁹ I propose to situate within the new European world-economy one of the few Renaissance texts in which a woman writer self-consciously identifies the nature of womanhood and argues for the existence of a women's community. As we shall see, the text is embedded in a nexus of relations to the colonial enterprises of merchant capitalists that are not acknowledged in its exclusive focus on England.²⁰ Like all cultural works from this period, Salve Deus will yield new knowledge under the pressure of a reading that does not serve the interests of nationalism. That the writer in this case occupied a marginalized position within the English social structure—and that she seized the margin as a place from which to speak—only makes her poem a particularly compelling case for a kind of reading all early modern European literature demands.

In groundbreaking scholarship that has begun the development of a new analytic for early modern literature, Kim Hall shows that “[t]he language of aesthetics is constitutive of the language of race” (Hall, 1994, p. 179). By the sixteenth century, for instance, the word “fair” had acquired a racial meaning; it began to describe complexion as well as beauty, and its antonym was now “dark” as well as “foul.” This semantic shift, Hall demonstrates, coincided with England's entrance into the African slave trade and the ideological use of “blackness to privilege white beauty” (p. 183). Hall argues that women writers, necessarily conscious of the instability of their own subject-position as speakers in a culture that prescribed silence for women, used the newly racialized language in distinctive, gendered ways. Hall writes that Mary Wroth and other literary women demonstrate, in their deployment of the tropes of light and dark, a “simultaneous recognition of oppression and a will-to-power” (p. 180), an impulse to consolidate their own tenuous position as authors through reference to women who can be othered. What happens, though, when the woman writer is herself at least partially Other, when she not only displays a “heightened sensitivity to difference and to the cultural implications of [her] own investment in the language of racial difference” (p. 179), but suggests that such language defines her as outside of normative womanhood? Hall groups Lanyer with Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary, and Mary Wroth, and reads the following moment from Salve Deus as part of a pattern of references to Cleopatra by (white) women writers who use her “darkness” to differentiate her from themselves:

No Cleopatra, though thou wert as faire
As any Creature in Antonius eyes;
Yea though thou wert as rich, as wise, as rare,
As any Pen could write, or Wit devise;
Yet with this Lady canst thou not compare,
Whose inward virtues all thy worth denies:
          Yet thou a blacke Egyptian do'st appeare;
          Thou false, shee true; and to her Love more deere.

(p. 112)

Lanyer is contrasting Margaret Clifford, her principal dedicatee, to women who experience mortal love rather than the love of Christ: “Great Cleopatra's love to Anthony, / Can no way be compared unto thine.” For Hall, the lines are evidence that Lanyer “clearly identifies with the Roman Octavia” (p. 112), the “fair” woman, neglected wife in Rome. But I am troubled by Lanyer's use of the second person (“thou wert as rich …”) and the fact that she shifts unexpectedly to direct address here and the only other time she mentions Cleopatra.

The other reference comes early in the narrative, after an apparent digression Lanyer calls “An Invective against outward beuty unaccompanied with virtue.” In thirty-three stanzas that precede the formal beginning of the passion narrative, Lanyer addresses Margaret Clifford, reminding her of God's ability to “behold [her] inward cares” (p. 53) and commending her for withdrawing from court: “Leaving the world, before the world leaves thee” (p. 58). Lanyer catalogues God's powers through a series of quotations from the Psalms (which in complex ways address Mary Sidney's translation of the same Psalms), then praises Clifford's refusal to substitute physical for spiritual beauty. The context is significant, but consider first the turn to Cleopatra:

Twas Beautie bred in Troy the ten yeares strife,
And carried Hellen from her lawfull Lord; …
          Great Cleopatraes Beautie and defects
          Did worke Octaviaes wrongs, and his neglects.
What fruit did yeeld that faire forbidden tree,
But blood, dishonour, infamie, and shame?
Poore blinded Queene, could'st thou no better see,
But entertaine disgrace, in stead of fame?
Doe these designes with Majestie agree?
To staine thy blood, and blot thy royall name.
          That heart that gave consent unto this ill,
          Did give consent that thou thy selfe should'st kill.

(p. 60)

The first two lines of this stanza are ambiguous: is Cleopatra the “forbidden tree,” whose fruit Antony enjoys, or has Lanyer already begun the apostrophe to Cleopatra, making adultery the tree and Cleopatra the Eve-figure who picks the fruit? Given the exoneration of Eve that comes later in the poem—“Was simply good, and had no powre to see” (p. 84)—also phrased in terms of blindness, the connection suggested here between Eve and Cleopatra is important. Both are icons of female culpability; the suggestion may be that Cleopatra's story would be as radically transformed as Eve's if Lanyer were to retell it. Although the poem leaves the exoneration of Cleopatra as merely a suggestion, and in fact adduces her as a counterexample to the “virtue” which is its central topic, there is an intimacy with “the blacke Egyptian” that is unmatched in any of Lanyer's other discussions of historical female figures. The second-person address, not used elsewhere in the catalogue of women undone by beauty, seems to register the pressure the black woman exerts on Lanyer's text, forcing her to redirect her voice. These two moments may betray intimacy as well as distance; they may originate in a sense of connection with Cleopatra that must be fended off through accusation.

Without suggesting that Lanyer was in any simple way either “Jewish” or “black,” I want to explore how passages like this one position her in relation to a racialized Jewishness in early modern England. (A fuller treatment of Lanyer's position would need to investigate the range of cultural meanings of Italianness and how they overlap with Jewishness as well as the differences between the positions of African and European Jewish women in the seventeenth century. Although the categories “black” and “Jewish” were frequently collapsed in early modern writing, Lanyer cannot be taken to stand synecdochically for all racialized women, nor can her voice alone substitute for a whole nonhegemonic culture that has been obscured. The relation between social groups cannot be reconstructed from one text, even as dialogical a text as this.) Lanyer presents herself as “dark” almost obsessively in the dedications, a sequence of eleven texts that simultaneously envision a new kind of female community and map out Lanyer's own social position. These are autobiographical texts as well as epideictic ones; like Elizabeth Clinton in her treatise on breastfeeding or Anne Askew in her record of political interrogation, Lanyer finds in the interstices of her subject a space for writing her own life.

The use of multiple dedications exclusively to women is Lanyer's invention; although dedications to individual women were common, especially in the works of women writers, there is no precedent for her choice of nine female patrons. But what Lanyer invents is not just the trick of speaking exclusively to women; as Lorna Hutson has shown, the dedications implicitly show up the language of compliment as a rhetorical traffic in women. Together with the Cookham poem, the dedications—which comprise a full third of Salve Deus—make the point that Lanyer seeks an alternative patronage network, one that bypasses the existing structure designed to enable male production of culture. The language of lightness and darkness is highly conventional, especially in dedicatory writing, but Lanyer's reliance on these terms to negotiate a position from which to speak suggests that they had a special potency for her.

The opening poem announces the strategy for much of what follows, as the poet asks Queen Anne:

From your bright spheare of greatnes where you sit,
Reflecting light to all those glorious stars
That wait upon your Throane; To virtue yet
Vouchsafe that splendor which my meannesse bars:
          Be like faire Phoebe, who doth love to grace
          The darkest night with her most beauteous face.

(p. 4)

Class, or more accurately social position within her class—what Lanyer calls “my meannesse”—is immediately translated into terms of light and dark. In a complex image, Lanyer represents her poem first as “virtue” then as “darkest night” on which the queen is asked to cast her light. Although the reference in the last line is to the poem, not to Lanyer herself, the conjunction of “darkest night” and “beauteous face” brings darkness close to the poet's body in a way that will occur several more times. Darkness and the poet's body are coupled again in the dedication to Margaret Clifford, where Lanyer apologizes for having “neither rich pearles of India, nor fine gold of Arabia” to offer the Countess. She appropriates Peter's description of himself as the healer who offers miraculous restoration rather than silver or gold (Acts 3:2-8), and uses it to position herself as a writer: “having neither rich pearles of India, nor fine gold of Arabia, nor diamonds of inestimable value … which were presented by those Kingly Philosophers to the babe Jesus I present unto you even our Lord Jesus himselfe” (p. 34). Lanyer is neither magus nor merchant: in this passage and another, where she is “honey” to Mary Sidney's sugar (“Though sugar be more finer, higher priz'd,” p. 30), Lanyer claims Englishness for herself and suggests that she is not a participant in the world-economy that benefits her patrons. Part of the complexity of the poem is that Lanyer can assert her Englishness and her gender in the same passage that represents her own body as a site of difference, for she goes on to compare Christ to a diamond and herself to the foil:

The sweet incense, balsums, odours, and gummes that flowes from that beautifull tree of Life, sprung from the roote of Jessie, which is so super-excellent, that it giveth grace to the meanest & most unworthy hand that will undertake to write thereof; neither can it receive any blemish thereby: for as a right diamond can loose no whit of his beautie by the black foyle underneath it, neither by being placed in the darke … so this most pretious diamond … can receive no blemish, nor impeachment, by my unworthy hand writing.

(pp. 34-35)

Her “hand” is ink, is blackness, is flesh; both her handwriting and her writing hand are the darkness that reveal the brightness of her subject and her patrons.

In her use of the imagery of blackness, Lanyer may be rewriting the topos of authorial humility by way of Mary Sidney, who, at a crucial point in establishing her own literary authority, draws on what Wendy Wall has termed “a debilitating discourse” that aligns the (white) woman writer with darkness. “To the Angell spirit,” Sidney's dedication of the Psalmes to her brother, comments, “thou art fixed among thy fellow lights: / my day put out, my light in darkenes cast.”²¹ Wall sees this passage as part of Sidney's effort to invoke the stance of mourner as a legitimation for female authorship; “the powerful emotions of piety and grief” allow Sidney to clear a space for “an alternative poetics of display” (p. 317). Mary Wroth employs the same strategy in her Urania (1621), where she becomes, as Kim Hall has suggested, her own “dark lady,” frequently comparing herself to night and at one point crying, “Let me be darke.”²² But unlike Sidney and Wroth (whose class and gender position, like that of Lanyer, was complicated by sexual history), Lanyer lives on the fringes of the aristocracy and constantly measures her distance from the world Sidney and Wroth inhabit. The litany of references to her patrons' brightness, together with the dreamlike repeated scene in which she imagines the patrons calling out to her, write her social distance into the poem: “Yet some of you me thinkes I heare to call / Me by my name” (p. 15); “as I wak'd me thought I heard one call” (p. 29)—so end her two allegorical visions of female community. What for Wroth and Sidney may be a gesture of self-erasure that ultimately allows access to poetic voice, for Lanyer becomes a gesture of self-exposure that dramatizes her position on the margins of the community of virtuous womanhood. Lanyer is the dark lady, but not in the sense A. L. Rowse maintains; the reluctance among critics to read race in Salve Deus may have been compounded by Rowse, whose misogynistic account of Lanyer seems to have poisoned the topic of her darkness for feminists. The subject needs to be reclaimed from Rowse, however, as it is when we understand authorial darkness as a trope with a specific genealogy in women's writing—and one adapted by Lanyer to negotiate a gender position mediated by both class and sexuality.

If a racialized language of light and dark allows Lanyer to map her distance from the community of women to whom she speaks, the terrain of the erotic allows her to imagine a closeness that might otherwise seem too risky. One of the work's most haunting qualities is its figuration of collective female desire—both for the existence of all-women's discursive and physical spaces and for the eroticized male body of Christ. As Wall has shown in The Imprint of Gender, Lanyer displaces her own corporality as female poet onto this body; the dedications keep coming back to the image of Christ as bridegroom with the patrons exhorted to accept Christ as their lover. To “all vertuous Ladies in generall,” Lanyer writes: “Put on your wedding garments every one, / The Bridegroome stayes to entertaine you all” (p. 12); to Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent, she says: “Receive your Love whom you have sought so farre / … Take this fair Bridegroome in your soules pure bed” (pp. 19-20). Lanyer inflects the parable of the wise and foolish virgins from Matthew (25:1-13) with the eroticism of the Song of Songs, the text through which Calvinist passion narratives regularly negotiate the treacherous erotic terrain of representing the body of the crucified Christ.²³ The community of virgins awaiting the bridegroom in Matthew become in Lanyer's text co-spouses of Christ, not merely guests at the wedding. As the poem offers the body of Christ the bridegroom and the crucified Christ as objects of scopophilic desire, an intense female community is established through a shared eroticism. The conventional device of the mirror—which comes to Lanyer through a rich history of Biblical exegesis (the Bible as a mirror reflecting divine truth), ethical exempla literature (the text, as Plutarch proposed, mirroring the reader's virtuous mind), and misogynistic discourse (the glass as the sign of gendered vanity)²⁴—becomes in her hands an instrument of female mimetic desire: the imagined longing of each patron for Christ generates a longing for other women. Salve Deus offers itself as “the Mirror of a Worthy Mind” (p. 5); the dedications repeatedly signal the poem's connection to the tradition that views the mirror as a site of religious and ethical instruction, while they strive to disconnect the mirror from its association with women's “outward beuty.” Seeking Christ in the reflection of their own virtuous reading, the patrons find each other; Lanyer eroticizes the mirror so that both Christ and other women become objects of desire. The poem draws deeply on Ovidian as well as Pauline meanings of reflection, but once again in a way that signals Lanyer's exclusion from the very community she creates. “Let your faire Virtues in my Glasse be seene” (p. 7), she writes to Queen Anne; looking in the mirror of Lanyer's poem, Anne will become Narcissus, discovering the Other as a self. Only the poet, who cannot be “fair,” remains on the dark side of the mirror.

The poem's most explicit comment on the racialized ideology of female beauty occurs in the “Invective against outward beauty unaccompanied with virtue.” This is the passage that ends with the reference to Cleopatra as “Poor blinded Queene,” and it is worth quoting in full:

That outward Beautie which the world commends,
Is not the subject I will write upon,
Whose date expir'd, that tyrant Time soone ends;
Those gawdie colours soone are spent and gone:
But those faire Virtues which on thee attends
Are alwaies fresh, they never are but one:
          They make thy Beautie fairer to behold,
          Than was that Queenes for whom prowd Troy was sold.
As for those matchlesse colours Red and White,
Or perfit features in a fading face,
Or due proportion pleasing to the sight;
All these doe draw but dangers and disgrace:
A mind enrich'd with Virtue, shines more bright,
Addes everlasting Beauty, gives true grace,
          Frames an immortall Goddesse on the earth,
          Who though she dies, yet Fame gives her new berth.
That pride of Nature which adornes the faire,
Like blasing Comets to allure all eies,
Is but the thred, that weaves their web of Care,
Who glories most, where most their danger lies;
For greatest perills do attend the faire,
When men do seeke, attempt, plot and devise,
          How they may overthrow the chastest Dame,
          Whose Beautie is the White whereat they aime.

(pp. 59-60)

The passage has been subtly analyzed by Lorna Hutson, who reads it as part of an effort to reclaim the disclosure of female beauty from masculinist rhetoric. Refusing to articulate female virtue “as the incriminating display of the female body,” Lanyer avoids “the analogical rhetoric through which such a display is produced, the rhetoric which implicitly strives to match ‘those matchlesse colours Red and White’” (Hutson, 1992, p. 168). It is important to add to Hutson's analysis, however, that Lanyer's rewriting of the discursive beauty system is enabled by her critique of its fetishization of color.

In directing her (rare) irony towards “those matchlesse colours Red and White,” Lanyer takes on the Petrarchan ideal at an especially charged moment in its history. The cult of red and white had a long medieval genealogy, but it was energized by the tradition of representing Elizabeth I in terms of her lily-and-rose beauty. Winthrop Jordan writes that the English discovery of black Africans at the height of the commodification of “white” complexion in women had an important effect on the development of racism (Jordan, p. 9) … ; Lanyer delays the passion narrative in order to distance herself from the ideal of beauty as “fairness.” Her repeated allusions to her own darkness, whether intellectual, social, or spiritual, resonate with this attack on the cult of whiteness; by its startling placement in a religious narrative, the “Invective against outward beuty,” in itself a conventional topic, recasts the allusions to darkness in the dedications as references to her own body. Like Desdemona in a play she may well have seen, Lanyer racializes “fairness” by recontextualizing the word. Replying to Iago's attempt to praise her in the traditional terms for female beauty (“If she be fair and wise”), Desdemona asks, “How if she be black and witty?” switching semantic fields as she substitutes “black” for “foul.” Iago responds: “If she be black, and thereto have a wit, / She'll find a white that shall her blackness [hit].”²⁵ Hovering somewhere in this polysemous reply is a pun on “the white” as the target in archery; this is the same pun Lanyer invokes in the memorable conclusion of the “Invective”: “Beautie is the White whereat they aime.” (She is directly quoting John Lyly here but probably also alluding again to The Rape of Lucrece, where Lucrece, a crucial figure for Lanyer because of her ability to unite virtue with beauty, is praised by her husband for her “unmatched red and white,” p. 11.²⁶) Lanyer's invocation of the White is at least as complex as Iago's: a poem that repeatedly positions its author as black cannot innocently equate beauty with whiteness, even by way of allusion. She creates a place for herself inside the circle of virtue that includes the women to whom she writes, but with the same gesture she places herself outside the ideal of female beauty to which the patrons, inevitably positioned as “bright,” still have access. Why does she create a racialized margin moments before she begins the “Preamble of the Author before the Passion”?

Part of the answer lies in the complicated negotiations with Jewishness that are at work in Salve Deus. While the poem contains no direct expression of Jewish belief or historical experience that I have been able to identify—it is a work squarely within the tradition of Protestant female piety—Salve Deus does take on the narrative through which Jewish guilt was constructed and, crucially, it interrogates the discourse of race through which, in part, Jewish “difference” was expressed. Lanyer's poem finds that it cannot discuss womanhood without thinking about race (and class), at just the moment when the terms for “race” across Europe (“race” in French, raza in Spanish, raça in Portuguese) began to be applied to specific groups conceived as physically “different,” rather than to “variously designated notions of lineage or genealogy.”²⁷Raza in its modern sense is a legacy of the Inquisition, where it was first invoked in order to produce a spiritual difference between Christians on the one hand and “Moors” and Jews on the other. The metropolitan concept of race, essentially the Inquisition's “limpieza de sangre” or purity of blood, was transported to the colonies, where it intersected with ideologies of race already in formation and was eventually used to justify both invasion and slavery (Stolcke, pp. 274-76). Although Lanyer may have represented her own darkness out of a sense that her location on the fringes of the ruling class, her public sexual history and, especially, her religious and ethnic heritage could position her as Other, her rhetoric gains power because of its historical situation during the early decades of the racialization of whiteness. In his Shakespeare and the Jews, James Shapiro argues that theology, and especially the question of Jewishness, “shaped the way people thought about both racial and national difference in early modern times” (p. 170); my argument is that if the problem of determining Jewish identity had largely defined “race” for the English until the 1550s, England's African and American encounters became definitive afterward, informing English ideas of Jewishness and supplying a new political context for any discourse of “race.” Lanyer's poem, if not Lanyer herself, draws on the whole range of meanings blackness was beginning to acquire as she places herself in relation to a (white, Christian) community of women.

There is no question that Jewishness was racialized in early modern England and that a discourse associating Jews with blackness was readily available to the English Renaissance writer. Shapiro provides ample documentation of the “racial” attributes assigned to Jews and the frequency with which Jews were positioned as “dark” to England's “fair.” “I knew you to be a Jew,” states one 1539 treatise, “for you Jews have a peculiar colour of face different from the form and figure of other men. Which thing hath often filled me with admiration, for you are black and uncomely, and not white as other men.”²⁸ A visitor to a London synagogue reports in 1690 that “they were all very black men, and indistinct in their reasonings as gypsies” (Shapiro, p. 171). And a Portuguese text from 1604 shows how the discourses surrounding Jewishness and Africanness were beginning to overlap: “Who can deny that in the descendants of the Jews there persists and endures the evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in Negroes [there persists] the inseparability of their blackness?”²⁹

Shapiro shows, however, that such confident pronouncements of the racial status of Jews were often at odds with historical practice, because the Inquisition, the Protestant Reformation, and the growth of merchant capitalism put pressure on definitions of Jewishness in England and gave rise to a new climate of uncertainty about Jewish identity in the sixteenth century (pp. 13-14). While some commentators, notably Thomas Browne, struggled with the question of whether the Jews were “a race” or “a nation,” Jews in Europe were successfully passing as Christians and Christians occasionally passing as Jews. For Jewish women, the question of identity was even more vexed, as circumcision was the defining mark of “the Jew” for non-Jewish Europe. Lacking the inscription of their religion on their bodies, women were sometimes imagined to have more cultural mobility than men.³⁰ We still do not know enough about how women experienced their Jewishness or how a culture that tended to feminize Jewish men positioned Jewish women, yet it is clear that the emerging discourse of race and the new inquiries into the nature of Jewish identity collaborated to produce Jewishness (like Italianness) as at least potentially marked by darkness.³¹

But would Lanyer have had any sense of herself as a Jew? And if so, how can we expect to find Jewishness written in a literary text, especially one whose title, “Hail, God, King of the Jews,” quotes the very phrase that became a byword for Jewish culpability in Christ's death? Lanyer's connection to Jewishness comes through her father,³² in whose will she is named “Emelia Bassany Daughter of the bodie of Margarett Bassany also Margarett Johnson my reputed wieff” (Woods, p. xv). The same document identifies her father as “a native of venice and one of the Musitions of our Sovereigne Ladye the Quenes majestie” (p. xv). Baptista Bassano, Aemilia's father, was the youngest of five Jewish brothers who were recruited for the King's Music to bring the practice of playing in consorts to the English court. The Bassano family, as court musicians for several generations, is fairly well documented, and it has been suggested that the family was drawn to emigrate in part because of the cultural climate created by the English Reformation.³³ The relation of the Bassano brothers to Judaism is in itself difficult to ascertain, and even if Lanyer's father Baptista identified himself as a Jew throughout his life, his daughter Aemilia, as the child of a non-Jewish mother, would not usually have been considered Jewish.³⁴ In addition, Lanyer was baptized as a Christian, saw her two children baptized, and wrote a Protestant poem that expresses a vibrant, lived relationship to that religion in a culture in which the practice of Judaism was officially outlawed: there is no simple expression of Jewishness in Salve Deus.

Although the Bassanos were probably the most assimilated of the Jewish musical families (as the number of marriage and baptismal records they left suggests³⁵), and Lanyer's own life as the mistress of a powerful Protestant politician could have worked to interpellate her into the dominant ideology, she was the inheritor of a specific history that may have sharpened her sense of Jewish identity and its political consequences in early modern England. In 1541 (immediately after the Bassano family arrived in England and almost thirty years before Lanyer was born) several Portuguese men, almost certainly including members of the King's Music and close colleagues of the Bassanos, were arrested and imprisoned on the basis of being “suspected Juis.”³⁶ The arrests were a response to the forced Inquisition testimony of Gaspar Lopes, who had lived in London in the 1530s and revealed the presence of a synagogue and Jewish commercial network in England; Henry VIII, eager to consolidate relations with Charles V of Spain, acted on the testimony. As Italians, the Bassanos were spared, not being subject to persecution by the Inquisition in the same way the Portuguese were, but they cannot have been untouched by an event that reversed Henry VIII's policy toward Jews of the professional classes, and marked a watershed in Anglo-Jewish history.³⁷ Charles V's ambassador to England, who had largely engineered the arrests, wrote in a letter on January 29, 1542: “The King has lately ordered the arrest and imprisonment of the New Christians that came from Portugal. Most likely, however well they may sing, they will not escape from their cages without leaving feathers behind.”³⁸

The sinister image of caged birds has been read by historians as a reference to the fact that some of the imprisoned were musicians, and the threat of feathers left behind to the expectation that some would not survive prison. A few months after the letter was written, two of the members of the Portuguese viol consort were dead.³⁹ High-level negotiations, initiated by the sister of the Holy Roman Emperor, succeeded in releasing most of the prisoners, but the uncharacteristic persecution of Jews in England had changed the climate of Jewish life in London. How it affected the Bassanos we cannot know, but to be fellow musicians and fellow Jews and not be imprisoned must have put the Bassano brothers in a complicated political and psychological position. When a “mini-expulsion” of Jews from England occurred in 1609, the year before Lanyer's book was entered in the Stationers' Register, would it have evoked this early history of her immigrant family? Already ejected from the inner circle of state power because of a gendered and sexualized class position, Lanyer may have been moved to see herself as an outsider because the 1609 expulsion served as a reminder that Jewishness in England, despite the cachet Judaism was beginning to acquire in intellectual circles,⁴⁰ could still be a criminal offense.

Lanyer comes close in this poem to disturbing the central Christian orthodoxy of Jewish guilt. Despite its piety and focus on virtuous womanhood, Lanyer's poem is essentially a polemic: like Rachel Speght's Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), Salve Deus is a rereading of the Bible, here for the purpose of proving that it was men who were guilty in Christ's death. At the heart of Salve Deus is the conceit that Christ in his suffering is analogous to Margaret and Anne Clifford in theirs, and that women have historically defended rather than persecuted Jesus. Although Lanyer draws on the antisemitic rhetoric familiar in passion narratives (“The Jewish wolves, that did our Saviour bite,” p. 81) and nowhere discusses outright the idea that Jews might not be culpable, her shift from a religious or racial category to a gender category in attributing blame for Christ's death has the effect of repositioning Jews in Christian theology. Jewish women, at least by inference, are exonerated; more tendentiously, non-Jewish men, through the connection Lanyer makes between those guilty of Christ's death and all men who defame women, are implicated. (“[E]vill disposed men … doe like Vipers deface the wombes wherein they were bred. … Such as these, were they that dishonoured Christ his Apostles and Prophets, putting them to shamefull deaths,” pp. 48-49). Lanyer's account of the passion is as a series of episodes in which men—the disciples in Gethsemane, the High Priests, Pilate—fail Christ; and women—Pilate's wife, the Daughters of Jerusalem, the Virgin Mary—comfort, argue for, or mourn him. … This is the reason for the apparently misleading information of her title page, which promises a poem in these four sections: “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,” and for the emphasis Lanyer gives to such moments as the one where Christ turns to acknowledge the suffering of the Daughters of Jerusalem on his behalf (p. 93). The story Lanyer has to tell is one in which neglected instances of female intervention on Christ's behalf create a new reading of the passion.⁴¹

That she called the poem “Hail, God, King of the Jews” may suggest an ambivalence that accompanied her revision of Matthew's gospel. Lanyer appropriates the signal phrase for Jewish (and Roman) misapprehension of Christ's divinity and rewrites it as a hymn of praise for Christ. “Ave rex judaeorum” (or in the odd Geneva translation of Matthew 27:29, “God saue thee kyng of the Iewes”⁴²) is the phrase Pilate's soldiers used to mock Christ as they dressed him for the crucifixion; it is also the basis of the inscription on his cross. By inserting “Deus” into the phrase, Lanyer clumsily spells out what is taken in Christian exegesis as a central, elegant irony: the inscription, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” designed to mock Christ and record his crime, is seen by Christians as an unintentional acknowledgment of his divinity. Lanyer, however, seems uncomfortable with the irony; it leaves open too much room for misinterpretation, and thus she adds the too-vigorous Deus. There is a nervousness in her disassociation from the words of the New Testament Jews that is reminiscent of her nervousness about Cleopatra, and that also shows up in the strange finale to Salve Deus, an address to “the doubtfull Reader” owning and disowning her title. It was, she writes, “delivered unto me in sleepe many yeares before I had any intent to write in this maner”; later the phrase became “a significant token, that I was appointed to performe this Worke” (p. 139).⁴³ Like Pilate's wife, Lanyer is a dreamer: both this dream and an earlier dream vision in which Mary Sidney resolved the contest between Art and Nature allow Lanyer to speculate on the relation between literature and truth; at the same time the identification with Pilate's wife suggests that Lanyer sees her own role as that of truth-teller, a woman whose gendered epistemology gives her salvific insight.

Lanyer's poem ends with her alone, remembering a dreamscape, not embraced by the community of women imagined in every section of the poem. It is significant that female community in Salve Deus is always envisioned or remembered, never experienced by Lanyer in the present. The dedications map out the material and cultural potential of a female community; the passion narrative remembers instances of women's collective action on behalf of Christ; the country-house poem laments the loss of an Edenic community of women in retirement from the court. Perhaps Salve Deus's emblematic moment is the story of Lanyer's stealing a kiss from the tree kissed by Margaret Clifford as Clifford departs from Cookham; even when Lanyer comes closest to contact (spiritual and intellectual as much as sexual) with another woman, the connection has to be displaced, secret, at least until it becomes public in the poem.

The female communities on which Salve Deus centers are invariably objects of memory or desire: the image of a connection just outside her grasp—whether it be Margaret Clifford's kiss or the community of women who call her by name—defines Lanyer's relation to the collective womanhood she celebrates. Although Lanyer herself may not have connected her writing of her own “darkness” to her exclusion from female community, the political unconscious of the poem ties these two strands together through the emerging discourse of race. Written at the moment when dark-skinned African and Caribbean women were beginning to appear in England, Salve Deus speaks from a position of racialized Jewishness—and a position on the margins of the ruling class—in order to suggest that womanhood was beginning to be intertwined with whiteness. Lanyer's poem registers the way in which new discursive formations of collective English womanhood were dependent on a racialized Other. It is not coincidental that Lanyer is always excluded from collective womanhood, nor that collective womanhood is evoked, at the historical moment when it begins to define itself discursively, from a position on the margin. The poem knows that the dark lady is essential to white womanhood; Salve Deus captures the historical moment when “womanhood” begins to constitute itself through the exclusion of some women who are not “women.” If what we seek as feminists approaching early women writers is something other than a confirmation of the epistemological privilege white, Euro-American women are accustomed to assume, but rather a source of radical knowledge that might help to remake modern feminism, then Lanyer's poem must be one of our points of departure.

Notes

1. Important examples include Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

2. See Wendy Wall's rich discussion of tropes of absence and otherness in women's poetry: “Dancing in a Net: The Problems of Female Authorship,” in Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 279-340. I am indebted throughout to the subtlety of Wall's analysis. Ann Baynes Coiro also makes a provocative argument for the importance of Lanyer's political marginality in “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson,” Criticism 35 (Summer 1993): 357-76. Although I disagree with certain aspects of Coiro's reading, especially her sense that Lanyer is “acutely conscious of those below” her in class (p. 369), her emphasis on Lanyer's distance from her patrons has been an important counterpoint to the predominant view that Lanyer offers her patrons unproblematic praise.

3. The phrase is from Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981); Jameson focuses on making visible a repressed history of class struggle, with less attention to race, gender or sexuality, but see pp. 85-87 on recovering marginalized or oppositional cultures.

4. I am indebted to the scholars who first recovered Lanyer's work and made it available in anthologies. Most of these collections also include biographical and critical comment; see Betty Travitsky, ed., The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), pp. 28-29, 97-103; Mary R. Mahl and Helene Koon, eds., The Female Spectator: English Women Writers Before 1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 73-75; and Germaine Greer et al., eds., Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), pp. 44-53 (which has particularly good annotations). Until recently, the only complete modern edition of Salve Deus was The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady, ed. A. L. Rowse (London: Cape, 1978); this has been supplanted by The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford, 1993). All quotations from Lanyer are taken from the Woods edition and followed by page numbers. In addition to the essays by Wall and Coiro mentioned in note 1, critical studies of Lanyer include the following: Elaine V. Beilin, “The Feminization of Praise: Aemilia Lanyer,” Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 177-207; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Imagining Female Community: Aemilia Lanyer's Poems,” in Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 213-41, which draws on a series of earlier articles on Lanyer by Lewalski; Lynette McGrath, “Metaphoric Subversions: Feasts and Mirrors in Amelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” LIT 3 (1991): 101-13; Lynette McGrath, “‘Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe’: Amelia Lanyer's Seventeenth-Century Feminist Voice,” Women's Studies 20 (1992): 331-48; Lorna Hutson, “Why the Lady's Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun,” in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 155-75; Tina Krontiris, “Aemilia Lanyer: Criticizing Men via Religion,” in Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 103-20; and Janel Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristianne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 208-36. Jonathan Goldberg's chapter, “Canonizing Aemilia Lanyer,” in Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 16-41, appeared after this chapter was completed. Worth noting also is a web site dedicated to Lanyer: http://www.u.arizona.edu/skari/lanbib.htm. My essay is indebted in various ways to all of these pioneering studies, even when I take issue with the frameworks in which they read Lanyer.

5. The racialization of womanhood was perhaps first systematically studied in this country by African-American women of the late nineteenth century; see the account of the intellectual tradition they developed in Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). This tradition has been recovered and amplified by women of color in the United States and elsewhere, starting in the 1970s; the pathbreaking studies include: bell hooks, Ain't I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Cherrié Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1981); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and the Hull, Scott, and Smith anthology But Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982). As perhaps the most important intervention in feminist thought, the imperative to racialize gender has been widely discussed, including by several scholars who have begun to write the history of this intersection: see in particular Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon, 1988); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London: Verso, 1982); and Ruth Frankenburg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). In the early modern field, important discussions of race and gender include: Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economics of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), Margaret Ferguson, “Juggling the Categories of Race, Class and Gender,” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19 (Spring 1991): 159-81; and the revisionary collection edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994).

6. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968) is among the founding works in the field; for Lynda Boose, see her “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman,” in Hendricks and Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, pp. 35-54. For a discussion of the literature on gender and sexuality in early modern England, see Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992).

7. My sense of possible connections between early modern and postmodern periods is influenced by Jonathan Dollimore's formulation; he writes in Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991): “I approach the early modern neither as origin of the present nor as that from which the present has declined, but as a range of cultural antecedents which can simultaneously problematize and illuminate their subsequent modern forms, especially the post/modern” (p. 23).

8. Barbara Lewalski identifies Lanyer as “the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of original poems” (Writing Women in Jacobean England, p. 213). The only known figure whose achievement is comparable to Lanyer's is Elizabeth Melvill, Lady Culros, whose allegorical poem Ane Godlie Dreame was published in Edinburgh in 1606, though Anne Lok Prowse also deserves mention for her poetic meditation appended to a translation of Calvin in 1560 (Woods, Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, p. xxxii). Lanyer herself cites the Countess of Pembroke as her predecessor, possibly because she does not make the strict distinction between translation and “original” poetry that arose after the seventeenth century. The Countess of Pembroke's Psalmes were prepared for presentation to the Queen in 1599 and circulated in manuscript; Lanyer clearly knew them. Christine de Pizan also wrote a meditation on the passion specifically for women, though it is very unlikely that Lanyer would have known it, because the work has never been published. Christine's Hours of Contemplation on the Passion of Our Lord is offered to women readers as “comfort in the misery of endless tribulations.” See the preface to this work translated in The Writings of Christine de Pizan, ed. Charity Cannon Willard (New York: Persea, 1994), pp. 346-47. I thank Michael Sargent for this reference.

9. A more complete discussion of Lanyer's biography appears later in this essay. The principal sources for her life are: Roger Prior, “Jewish Musicians at the Tudor Court,” The Musical Quarterly 69 (1983): 253-65; Roger Prior, “A Second Jewish Community in Tudor London,” The Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 31 (1990): 137-52; David Lasocki, “The Anglo-Venetian Bassano Family as Instrument Makers and Repairers,” Galpin Society Journal 38 (1985): 112-32; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England; Susanne Woods, introduction to The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer; and Lorna Hutson, “Emilia Lanier” in The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons, ed. C. S. Nicholls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 388-89. Woods and Lewalski document the primary sources from which a biography can be constructed; these include baptismal and marriage records, records of legal proceedings initiated by Lanyer, documents related to the school she founded in 1617, and the strange accounts by the astrologer Simon Forman of her visits to him in 1597 (Bodleian Manuscript Ashmole 226).

10. This formulation of the poem's structure is offered in Hutson, “Why the Lady's Eyes,” p. 162.

11. Both Coiro, “Writing in Service,” and Hutson, “Why the Lady's Eyes,” make explicit arguments against the masculinist framework in which Lanyer is usually read, while many of the other critical articles make the point implicitly. See Coiro's important discussion of the impact Lanyer would have if fully included in the canon (pp. 357-60), and Hutson's subtle reading of Lanyer against the gendered rhetoric of praise (154-72).

12. Simon Forman, Bodleian, MS Ashmole 226, f. 110v, quoted in Lewalski, Writing Women, p. 215. Forman's interaction with Lanyer is discussed in Woods, Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, pp. xv-xxiv, and famously in Rowse, Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady, who bases his identification of Lanyer with the Dark Lady largely on the Forman records.

13. Critics have been reluctant to grant to Lanyer the distinction of inventing the country-house poem in English because of the possibility that Ben Jonson might have written “To Penshurst” first. “To Penshurst,” celebrating Robert Sidney's estate, was published in 1616, but written before November 1612, as its reference to Prince Henry's death establishes. “Cooke-ham” was written between February 1609 (as is shown by its reference to Anne Clifford's marriage) and October 1610 (when the book was entered in the Stationers' Register). If “To Penshurst” had indeed been written several years earlier, Lanyer might well have seen it, as she clearly read other manuscript poems of the Sidney circle. But what if Ben Jonson was responding to her poem? Coiro points out that our sense of the country-house genre will change once Lanyer is seriously admitted to it (“Writing in Service,” pp. 370-74), but the possibilities of reading “To Penshurst” as a rewriting of “Cooke-ham” have yet to be fully explored. See Lewalski's discussion of this point (Writing Women, pp. 234-38), and her article, “The Lady of the Country-House Poem,” in The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops, et al. Studies in the History of Art, no. 25. (London: National Gallery of Art, 1989), pp. 261-75.

14. Matthew 27:19: “Also when he was set downe vpon the iudgement seat, his wife sent to him, saying, Haue thou nothing to do with that iuste man: for I haue suffered many things this day in a dreame by reason of him”; The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Pilate's wife's dream is mentioned only in Matthew, which is Lanyer's principal source for the passion narrative.

15. Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 5, points out that both Catholic and Protestant doctrine in the early modern period allowed for spiritual equality of the sexes. Religious doctrine, however, did not consider that women's spiritual equality entailed “a correlative political status.”

16. See the works by Hall, Loomba, and Ferguson, mentioned earlier, as well as Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, Introduction to Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. xv-xxxi. In particular, see the essays in Hendricks and Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, which form a kind of manifesto, though one with many internal debates, for a new, antinationalist criticism of early modern literature. Margaret Ferguson has written profoundly about the tendency of studies of women's agency in this period to be undertheorized, arguing that it can be connected to “a sense of despair about the possibilities of collective feminist action under the conservative economic and political policies of the 1980s in both Britain and the United States”; Margaret W. Ferguson, “Moderation and Its Discontents: Recent Work on Renaissance Women,” Feminist Studies 20, no. 2 (1994): 364. For an important critique of the Euro-centric framework of early modern studies, see Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literary, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

17. Categories of gender, religion, and class all were mediated both by each other and by the imperialist enterprise: English notions of Jewishness, for instance, were informed by the emerging discourse of “race” even as they derived primarily from local pressures, while the poor laws in England from the seventeenth century were directly connected to merchant capitalism in the New World. See Emily C. Bartels, “Malta, the Jew, and the Fictions of Difference: Colonial Discourse in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta,” ELR 20 no. 1 (1990): 1-16, for an important discussion of links between colonialism and the treatment of the oppressed at home in England. She reads Marlowe's representation of Jewishness through the colonial context of Malta. Bartels cites Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 71, on the connection between English poor laws and English imperialism.

18. As the capital necessary for the emerging capitalist mode of production was acquired from Europe's colonies at an astonishing rate—for instance when Drake's first expedition was launched with £5,000 and brought £600,000 in profit—European women were cast in a new role as the “consumers and demonstrators” of wealth, as Maria Mies has shown in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed, 1986), p. 101. While slave women in the Caribbean were being forbidden to marry or have children (it was cheaper to import slaves than to support slave families), European women were being interpellated into the ideology of domesticity and affective motherhood. The story of the relation between European and non-European women is more complex and nuanced than I can suggest here, but it is important to see both that gender in the early modern period was configured within a new international economy and that the economy itself was already gendered. See Mies's important discussion of the “housewifization” of European women concurrent with the subordination of non-European women (pp. 100-11).

19. Ania Loomba, “The Color of Patriarchy: Critical Difference, Cultural Difference, and Renaissance Drama,” in Hendricks and Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing, p. 26, makes this point when she writes of reading Shakespeare: “[t]he notion of ‘race’ must transcend the black presence in the plays and inform understandings of gender, the state, political life, and private existences.” For related “racialized” analyses, see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) and Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).

20. There is evidence that Salve Deus was implicated in the financial arrangements that subtended England's rise to imperial power. Lanyer's need for funds probably arose from her husband's loss of money in the Essex expedition to the Azores in 1597 and later in his campaigns to subjugate Ireland. A copy of the poem was presented by Lanyer's husband to the powerful Archbishop of Dublin only a month after the title was entered in the Stationers' Register (October 2, 1610). See Lewalski, Writing Women, pp. 321-22, on the history of this copy, and Woods, Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, p. xlix, on the presentation to the Archbishop. The copy now in the Chapin Library at Williams College bears an inscription on the title page in a contemporary hand: “guift of Mr. Alfonso Lanyer. 8. No 1610” and the signature “Tho: Jones.” Thomas Jones was Archbishop in 1610, and Alphonso Lanyer had served with him in the Irish campaigns. Both Lewalski and Woods feel that the omission of the most feminist of the dedications, “To the Vertuous Reader,” from this copy is significant.

21. Cited in Wall, Imprint of Gender, p. 317, from “To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney,” The Triumph of Death and Other Unpublished and Uncollected Poems, ed. Gary Waller (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1977).

22. Kim Hall, “Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Race, Gender, and Power in Early Modern England,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1990), p. 63. The passage from Wroth occurs in Sonnet 100, line 6; The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). Both Hall and Wroth are cited in Wall, Imprint of Gender, p. 332. See also Hall's discussion of Wroth in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

23. See Debora Shuger's detailed and sensitive account of Calvinist passion narratives in The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), where she comments, “Pictures of desirable and powerful manhood replace the shameful body in an anamorphic sequence—the bruised and deformed figure of Christ suddenly reconfigured as beautiful and virile. The images of the grotesque and erotic bodies are very closely juxtaposed” (p. 97).

24. On the association of the mirror with the practice of reading Scripture, see Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 138. Kruger cites Ritamary Bradley, “Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Medieval Literature,” Speculum 29 (1954): 100-15. On the overlap between traditions of ethics and misogyny in the trope of the mirror, see Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 7-8, cited in Wall, Imprint of Gender, p. 322. Lynette McGrath, in “Metaphoric Subversions,” has an important commentary on Lanyer's use of the mirror; she argues that Salve Deus uses the image “to reinforce alliances of women with women and women with a feminized, maternal Christ” (p. 108). McGrath cites Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), in a suggestive discussion of Lanyer's eroticism.

25. Othello (II.i.132-33); William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). This edition uses the Q1 reading, “hit,” which is suggestive of the pun on “the white” as a target; the F1 reading, “fit,” seems more consistent with a pun on “wight” and “white.”

26. John Lyly, Euphues and His England (1580), in John Lyly. The Anatomy of Wit … Euphues and His England …, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1869), p. 406. The quotation is from a dialogue that has just defined beauty as a “white and read [red] complection.” Camilla, the female speaker, refutes the man's argument “that where beautie is, there is also vertue” (p. 405) and recommends instead such qualities as temperance and chastity in both women and men. By citing this text, Lanyer takes a position vis-à-vis the masculinist literature for women; how she envisions the alternative she offers becomes clear as she revises her source. The passage is part of Camilla's argument that male desire, not female beauty, has agency in love; it plays on the newly double meaning of the word “fair”: “The similitude you brought in of the arrowe, flewe nothing right to beautie, wherefore I must shute [shoot] that shafte at your owne brest. For if the eye of man be the arrow, and beautie the white (a faire mark for him that draweth in cupids bow) then must it necessarily ensue, that the archer desireth with an ayme to hitte the white, not the white the arrowe, that the marke allureth the archer, not the shooter the marke” (p. 407, modernizations in Arber's text). On the ways Lyly had capitalized on the popularity of his first book among women readers, see Suzanne Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1982), p. 11.

27. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, Introduction to Women, “Race,” and Writing, p. 2. My discussion here closely follows theirs; on the controversial history of the origins of the Spanish word raza and the development of modern notions of “race” from the needs of the Inquisition, see the important essay by Verena Stolcke, “Invaded Women: Gender, Race, and Class in the Formation of Colonial Society,” in Hendricks and Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, p. 276.

28. Sebastian Munster, Messias Christianorum et Judaeorum (Basel, 1539), sig. A5v, as translated in Paul Isaiah [Eleazar bar Isaiah, pseud.], The Messiah of the Christians, and the Jewes (London, 1655), Sig. B3v, p.2. The text is cited in James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 170; my discussion closely follows Shapiro's pioneering archival work on the subject. Note that the passage from Munster deliberately reverses the language of the Song of Songs—“I am blacke, o daughters of Ierusalem, but comelie”—the text that is to be the basis of the most jubilant passages in Salve Deus.

29. The 1690 text is by Robert Kirk, in Donald MacLean, ed., “London in 1689-90,” Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archeological Society n.s. 7 (1937): 151, cited in Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, p. 171. The 1604 Portuguese text is by Prudencio de Sandoval, in Jerome Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws, and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987), 16-17 (cited in Shapiro, p. 36). One measure of the prevalence of the association of Jewishness with blackness is that it began to be denied in late seventeenth-century writing; Shapiro cites Francois Maximilien Mission's 1691 discussion of the “vulgar error that the Jews are all black” (Shapiro, p. 171).

30. The best known example of this pattern is The Merchant of Venice, where Jessica is imagined as able to “cross the religious boundaries that divide [her] stigmatized father … from the dominant Christian community” (Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, p. 120). See Shapiro's discussion of this topic, pp. 120-21. See also Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race,’” on the coupling of “the Turk and the Jew” in early modern drama as “oppositional examples of some kind of similar Otherness.” “Might the implied alienation of this pair,” Boose asks, “be likewise grounded in bodily difference—not the difference of ‘nature’ signified by skin color but the difference that religion and culture had carved upon the (male) body?” (p. 40).

31. Dympna Callaghan's essay on Elizabeth Cary (in Women, “Race,” and Writing) is an important beginning to this work. I am grateful for her example in formulating my argument about Lanyer's expression of her own Otherness. Callaghan writes, “I want to argue here that suppression of ‘race’ not only erases important thematic issues, but also impairs our understanding of gender within [The Tragedie of Mariam] and the position of Cary as a Renaissance woman writer” (p. 164).

32. Baptista Bassano's Jewishness has been established on the basis of his name, his association with other known Jews, his profession as a maker and player of recorders, and his probable origin in the northern Italian town of Bassano del Grappa (which was itself founded by an Ashkenazi Jew). See Prior, “Jewish Musicians,” pp. 253-59, and Prior, “Second Jewish Community,” pp. 138-41 and 145-50; also Lasocki, “Anglo-Venetian Bassano Family,” pp. 114-15; both Shapiro and Katz include the Bassanos in their discussions of the London Jewish community in the mid-sixteenth century; see Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, pp. 68-70; David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 7.

33. This is an argument made by Roger Prior, in his groundbreaking article on the subject, “Jewish Musicians at the Tudor Court.” In “A Second Jewish Community in Tudor England,” Prior has developed his argument. He speculates that they had fled Bassano for the relative safety of Venice in the 1520s or 1530s, a time when the presence of Spanish armies in Northern Italy made life particularly dangerous for Jews who had to pass as Christians, as musicians would have been required to do in order to work outside the Jewish community. Venice offered the relative safety of the Ghetto, and the freedom to practice their religion, but no opportunity to participate in the range of musical life beyond the walled Jewish quarter. England, especially under Henry VIII, who had already consulted Jewish scholars on the question of divorce and adopted a deliberate policy of cultivating enemies of the Pope, promised freedom from persecution by the Inquisition and access to the high European musical culture. Ironically, it also provided contact with other Jews, for Henry had recruited Sephardic Jews from Portugal to form a viol consort at the same time the Bassanos came to England. Before the decline of the financial value of a court position in the early seventeenth century, the Bassanos trained their sons (apparently no daughters became professional musicians) for the family profession, and by 1630 thirteen of the nineteen court wind players were Bassanos (Lasocki, “Anglo-Venetian Bassano Family,” p. 115).

34. The law regarding the religion of children of mixed marriages is from Mishnah and Talmud [Kid. 3:12] and was firmly in place by this time, but we do not know how it was observed by Jews living in England. There is evidence, for instance, that the son of a non-Jewish mother in England may have identified more with his Jewish heritage than the daughter of one of the other Bassano brothers, a woman who was Lanyer's cousin (Prior, “Second Community,” p. 146). On the sources for the law determining the religion of children, see “Jew,” in Encyclopedia Judaica (Macmillan: Jerusalem, 1971), which also cites Yad, Issurei Bi'ah 15:3-4. On the complicated relation of Mishnah and Rabbinic Judaism to the Greco-Roman legal system of Palestine, see David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992). We get a sense of how difficult it was for the small Jewish community in England to observe their religion from the Inquisition testimony of Thomas Fernandes in 1557, which recounts that Simon Ruiz, a Jew living in London, would secretly send other Jews the dates of Passover (Katz, Jews in the History of England, p. 11).

35. We do not know how long Lanyer lived with her family as part of the community of Jewish musicians, for her father died when she was seven and she spent some time in the household of the Countess of Kent. We do know that the family retained some of its “foreignness,” being on record as still speaking Italian in the 1590s and owning land in Venice as late as 1635, and that they continued to live in close contact with London's Jewish community until at least the mid-seventeenth century. The Bassanos left more records than any of the other musical families; there is evidence of marriages and baptism; of wills, including Lanyer's father's, witnessed by Christians; of a series of petitions to Queen Mary from the Bassano brothers; and of one member of the family's boasting to John Spencer, the sheriff of London, when threatened with arrest, “We have as good friends in the court as thou hast and better too” (Prior, “Second Community,” p. 148). By 1634, when Lanyer was in her sixties, several of her nephews had obtained a family coat of arms, and even during her childhood her father would have had the title “gentleman,” a courtesy extended to all court musicians (Lasocki, “Anglo-Venetian Bassano Family,” p. 116).

36. The Acts of the Privy Council i.76, January 17, 1542/3: “the matter betwene his Majestie and certeyne marchawntes strawngers, probably suspected to be Juis,” cited in Katz, Jews in the History of England, p. 8. This is the record of one of several Privy Council discussions of the 1541 imprisonment case. On March 9, 1542/3, the matter was finally resolved, when the Privy Council recorded its intention “to restore the goods of certain Portuguese (seized because of their being charged with Judaism), in whose favour [Mary, regent of the Netherlands] has twice written during these past months, as also have the King and Queen of Portugal” (cited in Katz, p. 9). Roger Prior was the first to make the claim that the prisoners included Portuguese musicians, as well as merchants. His argument has been accepted by David Katz, the leading historian of Anglo-Jewry (Katz, p. 7), and receives serious consideration in Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, p. 69. See also Prior's article, “More (Moor? Moro?) Light on the Dark Lady,” Financial Times, October 10, 1987, P1, p. 17, where important information on the Bassano family coat of arms (and a possible pun it contains on the Italian word “moro”) is offered in service of a defense of A. L. Rowse's reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

37. Katz, Jews in the History of England, sees the imprisonment as a turning point: “The testimony of Gaspar Lopes before the Inquisition was part of the change in attitude towards the Jews which would lead to their flight from England during this period” (p. 6).

38. Eustace Chapuys to Granvelle, January 29, 1542, in Great Britain, Public Record Office, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509-1547, ed. James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1900), vol. 17, no. 64 (cited in Katz, Jews in the History of England, p. 7). The remainder of this short letter, part of which was originally in code, discusses the Genovese ambassadors at the English court and the Bishop of London. In a letter written the same day to Charles V, Chapuys describes “the King's [Henry's] frequently expressed wish for a closer reliance with the [Holy Roman] Emperor [Charles V],” and Henry's “fear of making an alliance with France, to thwart which has been his continual study” (G.B., PRO, Letters and Papers, vol. 17, no. 63).

39. Prior gives the names of those who died: Romano of Milan and Anthony Moyses (“Second Community,” p. 141). Moyses, a sackbut player, had his will witnessed by four members of the viol consort, including one, Ambrose Lupo, who used what seems to be the Hebrew spelling of his name in the legal document (ibid., p. 140). Immediately after the release from prison was negotiated in the Privy Council, all but one of the six Jewish viol players at Henry's court left England, although most returned the following year.

40. The major work on this topic is David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603-1655 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). “It was during the early seventeenth century,” Katz writes, “that a positive philosemitic view of contemporary Jewry developed in England” (p. 7). The sources of English philosemitism are complex; they include an interest in Hebrew as a possible universal language, a belief that the lost tribes of Israel had been found in the New World and thus that they could be converted to Christianity, and a movement toward religious toleration that began to be extended to Jews. But Katz points out that seventeenth-century England wanted “Judaism without Jews,” and Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, shows that there was often little ideological distinction between antisemitism and philo-semitism (p. 11).

41. Mueller, “Feminist Poetics,” also comments on the aptness of the title page headings, and discusses the significance of Lanyer's timing in issuing a challenge to orthodox readings of the passion just as the Authorized Version of the Bible was being published. Its publication in 1611, the same year as Salve Deus, marked the intersection of “court culture, humanist scholarship, and vernacular biblicism” (p. 215).

42. The phrase “Ave rex judaeorum” is at the center of a modern controversy on whether the gospels attempt to shift the blame for Christ's death from the Roman authorities to an instance of “mob violence” by the Jews; see William Foxwell and C. S. Mann, intro., transl. and notes to The Anchor Bible: Matthew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), p. 335. The phrase appears in all four gospels—in Mark 15:32 and Matthew 27:42 it is used by “the chief priests of the Jews” as well as the Roman authorities—and almost certainly is a parody of the form “Ave Caesar!” the greeting of the emperor (Foxwell and Mann, p. 336). It is almost always translated “Hail, King of the Jews!” and occurs in this form in the Wyclif (1380), Tyndale (1534), Cranmer (1539), Rheims (1582), and King James (1611) versions of Matthew 27:29. The Geneva Bible translates the passage from Matthew “God saue thee kyng of the Iewes,” whereas it translates the occurrences of the phrase in the other Gospels “Hail kyng of the Iewes” (with some variation in spelling). I have not been able to explain the idiosyncracy of the Geneva translation of Matthew, but it seems clear that Lanyer was using this version, and that her reading of Salve back into the Biblical text is a result of her adherence to the Geneva Bible, coupled with an imperfect knowledge of Latin. She may also have been influenced by the popular opening of hymns, “Salve,” although I have not been able to find a contemporary hymn beginning “Salve Deus.”

43. For an extended discussion of what she calls “the mystique of salutation in Lanyer's religious poetics,” see Mueller, “Feminist Poetics,” pp. 222-77, who also comments on Lanyer's addition of “Deus” to the phrase from Matthew. Mueller illuminates a pattern of salutations in Salve Deus and describes the form as “a speech act uniquely expressive of the capacity to apprehend truth that distinguishes women and the feminized Christ” (p. 224).

I wish to thank Jean Howard, who gave me the opportunity to begin research on this topic at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender of Columbia University, and Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, who were exemplary feminist editors. I am grateful also for the deep readings and many suggestions offered by Anthony O'Brien and Marianne Eckardt, for the help of my colleagues Steven Kruger, Michael Sargent, and Alisa Solomon, and for the expert work of my research assistant Jonathan Burton.