SOURCE: Rienstra, Debra. “Dreaming Authorship: Aemilia Lanyer and the Countess of Pembroke.” In Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric, edited by Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson, pp. 80-102. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Rienstra examines the influence of Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, on Lanyer’s writing.]

Twenty years after A. L. Rowse “discovered” Aemilia Lanyer's substantial, peculiar body of religious poetry, her work has recovered from its initial presentation as a Shakespeare-related curiosity to an established fixture in the sub-canon of early modern women's writing. Her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum exemplifies literary culture of the early seventeenth century with its multiple-dedication scattershot at patronage, its deploying of scriptural authority, and its keen attentiveness to the social differential between author and audience. At the same time, however, Lanyer's work has made a glaringly illuminating addition to the canon exactly because it turns conventional practices forcefully on their heads. Her dedications circumvent gendered rhetorical strategies of the male, courtly suitor-author since both she and all her dedicatees are women. Her use of scriptural sources defies interpretive tradition, and mobilizes this defiance in a blatant critique of patriarchy and class structure itself—all the while hoping to benefit from the remainders of the system she decries.¹ One particularly interesting strain of Lanyer scholarship has attempted to answer the question, How does Lanyer, from her position of multiple social disadvantage, muster the courage to do this? Like her male counterparts on the fringes of court life—Spenser and Jonson make for especially apt comparison—she needed to find a means of entering “the psychomachia of writing performance,” but she had to construct a feminine version of their masculine declarations.² Tracing Lanyer's strategies in this regard leads quickly to another recently recovered early modern woman poet: Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.

Lanyer's dedicatory poem to Pembroke immediately suggests Pembroke's importance for Lanyer as a figure of feminine literary tradition. Lanyer reifies this tradition within her poem, then calls upon it to undergird her emerging authorship. The specific shape of Pembroke's precedence for Lanyer, however, turns out to be a rather complicated matter. Kari Boyd McBride and Wendy Wall have recently analyzed persuasively the relationship between Pembroke's and Lanyer's poetry. McBride connects Lanyer's dedicatory poem to pastoral conventions, describing Lanyer's anxiousness to legitimate not only female subjectivity in poetry, but, even more radically, the public presentation of this subjectivity through publication. She suggests that Pembroke becomes the poet Lanyer must “displace” in order to create for herself an Orphic narrative in which she establishes her poetic vocation on the “corpse/corpus” of the dead predecessor. Wendy Wall examines rhetorical strategies in the two poets' dedicatory poems, showing how Lanyer followed Pembroke, inverting the gendered language of mastery in presenting the body of the text through publication (Wall 310-30). Both of these perceptive essays usefully employ current critical interest in the rhetoric of the body. Neither, however, attends to the way in which the content of Lanyer's poetic project most pervasively reveals Pembroke's role in enabling Lanyer's writing performance.

Lanyer's volume is at heart an astonishingly radical exegesis of Scripture, one that lays bare the truth of Scripture that had lain hidden, from her point of view, behind a centuries-old veil of mean-spirited and misguided interpretation. This ambitious task is not merely an act of loyalty to the sacred text, or an attempt to write by ventriloquizing. Lanyer is harnessing the most direct medium of authority in post-Reformation England to valorize the humble, marginalized, suffering, and feminine—where Lanyer persistently locates herself. To access the power of this authority-source, Lanyer had to wrest the privilege of interpretation away from the masculine tradition and present an alternative interpretation. The accuracy of her interpretation was, of course, essential. Thus she challenges the Queen in her first dedicatory poem to judge if “Eves Apologie,” her most inflammatory exegetical performance, “agree not with the Text” (76). But accuracy is not enough; Lanyer needs to present some form of authorization to interpret Scripture against tradition. Thus, any explanation of Lanyer's strategies for establishing authorship must speak not only to writing poems but also, even more urgently, to exegeting Scripture. A stable, lyric subjectivity is necessary, but not sufficient. Lanyer must justify the possibility that the ability to circumvent traditional human (male) misprision and speak Truth might indeed appear in a woman.³ This is exactly what Pembroke, author of the bulk of an innovative, scholarly metrical psalter, provides for Lanyer: a precedent for female interpretive authority vis-à-vis the authoritative text. But there is one further step. By publishing her volume, Lanyer transformed an act of exegesis into a public polemic. To swing the weight of divine approbation behind this move, Lanyer had to claim not just a poetic vocation, but a prophetic vocation. Here is where Pembroke's precedent is less apparent, but equally crucial. Pembroke awakened Lanyer to the possibility of claiming the prophetic power of the Psalms by creating a female, psalmic “I.” This enabled Lanyer to move from the more limited space in which Pembroke herself presented her exegetical work to the riskier sphere of publication. Lanyer's relationship to Pembroke, then, provides an example of how women poets, in a way parallel to male poets, create authorship by connection to a distinguished precedent. But because their poetry specifically involves deploying the authority of Scripture, the Pembroke-Lanyer connection also provides an instructive comparison for how authors of both genders negotiate the dangers and advantages of weaving the Text into their texts.

PEMBROKE AS IMAGINED MENTOR

World-dwellers all give heede to what I saie,
to all I speake, to rich, poore, high, and low;
knowledg the subject is my hart conceaves,
wisdome the wordes shall from my mouth proceed;
which I will measure by melodious eare
and ridled speech to tuned harp accord.

(Psalmes 49.1-6)

The metrical psalms composed by Pembroke and her brother Philip Sidney came to be considered Pembroke's, even though her brother Philip initiated the project with his versions of the first 43 psalms.⁴ After Philip's death, Pembroke edited his portion, completed the remaining 107 psalms over the course of several years, and circulated the complete work, The Psalmes of David, in manuscript.⁵ The psalter was a magnificent accomplishment in a number of ways, as many of its contemporaries acknowledged,⁶ but one of the most important dimensions of the volume for Lanyer was Pembroke's bold method of composition in “translating” the Psalms. The Sidney-Pembroke Psalter marked a critical transition in English religious poetry in the lyric mode. Rather than adhering as closely as possible within the loose confines of ballad meter to an English prose translation—as was the typical, deferent approach of mid- to late-sixteenth century English metrical psalmists—Sidney and Pembroke established a relationship of authority in tension with the text. Pembroke, especially, re-authors each psalm, drawing upon extensive study of commentaries and prose translations to recreate the emotional and imagistic contours of the original. Her psalms rearrange material, create rhetorical structures to define relationships among ideas left merely proximate in the Hebrew, intensify or insert images, and, in short, interpret and particularize the porousness of the psalm originals. Her translation of Psalm 111, for example, seems to drape her own passion for the work on the psalmist's basic framework:

At home, abroad most willingly I will
Bestow on god my praises uttmost skill:
Chaunting his workes, workes of unmatched might,
Deem'd so by them, who in their search delight.

(Psalmes 111.1-4)

Instead of effacing herself before the sacred original, deliberately subsuming artistry to the “matter” as previous metrical psalmists did, Pembroke created speakers who exuberantly celebrate “uttmost skill” and originality in the singing of divine song. Far more than her predecessors in English, Pembroke's poetic subjectivity operates in collaboration with the authoritative text; she asserts her own stylistic ingenuity and meditative idiosyncracies upon and even against prose translations.⁷ Donne remarks in his 1621 poem praising the Psalmes that Sidney and Pembroke as “David's successors, in holy zeal, / In forms of joy and art do re-reveal” their scriptural originals.⁸ To call them re-revelations places them on a plane of inspiration, and hence authority, equal to the originals. The Psalmes served, for poets of both sexes, as a transition from sixteenth century metrical psalm translations to the meditative, metaphysical religious poetry of the seventeenth century, still steeped in Scripture but embodying the lyric voice of the individual poet.

A further implication of Pembroke's work for Lanyer is that, by paraphrasing the Psalms, Pembroke found a location that could energize the feminine, lyric/prophetic “I.” The biblical Psalms represent a vast range of moods and postures: repentance, jubilation, lament, praise, adoration, despair, as well as more polemic modes of vengeance, imprecation, and judgment. As a body of poetry, the Psalms model the same kind of criss-crossing mix of modes and genres that Lanyer created in her own complicated volume. More important, the Psalms merge the lyric, ritual, and prophetic modes.⁹ Contemporary generic commentary on the Psalms widely acknowledges that David is both lyric poet and prophet, and that the Psalms are, of course, a book of resources for worship.¹⁰ Overall, the Sidneys tend to shift the ritual-prophetic-lyric resources of the Psalms elegantly toward the lyric. Many psalms demonstrate an effort to enhance the lyric integrity of the poem: unifying apparently fragmented voices, smoothing transitions from one section to the next, and shaping a graceful music from the often rough-hewn English prose. However, as Pembroke's style often lends forcefulness and immediacy to the psalmic speakers, the more prophetic moments in the psalms (e.g., Psalm 49 quoted above) acquire an air of authority with a feminine shading.

The evidence of exegetical authority and the feminine prophetic voice can be observed by any reader through study of the Psalmes. But the question remains how Lanyer herself imagined Pembroke's importance. The answer is most readily available in Lanyer's dedicatory poem to Mary Sidney, “The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembroke.” The poem gives no indication that Lanyer knew Pembroke personally, certainly not to the degree she claims to have known Margaret Clifford.¹¹ In fact, the speaker of the poem, representing Lanyer, observes a pastoral figure of Pembroke for much of the poem without knowing her identity. When the dream vision concludes, the speaker approaches the “real” Countess from a respectful distance. Nevertheless, the poem literally occupies a central position in Lanyer's full prefatory set, as the sixth of 11 pieces.¹² The form and length of the poem—a dream vision in 56 iambic pentamenter quatrains—are unique in her prefatory set. These observations serve as initial suggestions that Lanyer understood Pembroke to play a special role for her, an hypothesis that the poem as a whole supports.

Lanyer's speaker envisions a pastoral scene, in which she is seeking a certain unnamed “Lady whom Minerva chose” (3). Through the speaker's “eie of Reason” (6), she sees the lady, surrounded by the Muses and crowned by Fame. Other allegorical figures come to pay homage to the lady—Bellona, Dictina, and Aurora. The entire group then moves on to “That sacred Spring where Art and Nature striv'd” (81). The ladies (all present are female, except the god Morpheus, who is leading the speaker at a distance) take the role of goodnatured “umpiers” (85) and decide that Art and Nature should “for ever dwell, / In perfit unity by this matchlesse Spring. / … Equall in state, equall in dignitie, / That unto others they might comfort give, / Rejoycing all with their sweet unitie” (89-96). The group are seated by the spring, where they “devise / On holy hymnes” (115-16). They recall the Psalmes and agree

Those holy Sonnets …
With this most lovely Lady here to sing;
That by her noble breasts sweet harmony,
Their musicke might in eares of Angels ring.
While saints like Swans about this silver brook
Should Hallalu-iah sing continually,
Writing her praises in th'eternall booke
Of endlesse honour, true fames memorie.

(121-28)

A note in the margin of this passage reads “The Psalms written newly by the Countesse Dowager of Penbrooke.” There is no indication of a distinction between the biblical texts and Pembroke's version of them; the Psalms are “written newly” by her, a phrase that effectively erases the “old versions” in a remarkable gesture, similar to Donne's, toward Pembroke's interpretive authority. At this point, the speaker requests the identity of this great lady, which Morpheus reveals in an eight-stanza encomium as “great Penbrooke hight by name, / Sister to valiant Sidney” (137-38). The speaker then awakens, scolds Morpheus for leaving her just when she might have introduced herself, and determines that she “shall enjoy the selfe same sight” in her waking state as she did in her dream (191). She “to this Lady … will repaire, / Presenting her the fruits of idle houres” (193-94). In the last five stanzas, the dream vision shifts into more conventional language of patronage, as the speaker addresses the Countess directly. The speaker offers her poem by several metaphorical means, “craving pardon for this bold attempt” (209) and inviting the Countess to “Receive him [i.e., Christ] here by my unworthy hand” (221).

The poem suggests by its genre that this famous lady whom Lanyer does not know nevertheless presides over Lanyer's imaginative world. She is the central figure in a pastoral, literary kingdom of women, just as Margaret Clifford will become the central figure (next to the dominant voice of Lanyer's speaker) in the earthly kingdom of heavenly-minded women created by Lanyer's work as a whole. Most important for Lanyer's creation of her own poetic persona, Pembroke provides the perfect model not only of a woman artist, but also a divinely sanctioned new-writer of Scripture. Her perfection is suggested in that the goddesses who attend Pembroke symbolize standard feminine virtues—Minerva, wisdom and chastity; Bellona, fortitude and wisdom; Dictina, chastity; and Aurora, beauty.¹³ Morpheus testifies that the Countess exemplifies “virtue, wisedome, learning, dignity” (152), adding learning to the mix. This is a significant addition, since Lanyer is particularly concerned to celebrate learned women in her dedicatory verses. While learned women were still at this time considered exceptional to their sex and looked upon with nervous suspicion, learning might be a proper accomplishment for a noblewoman, so long as it was used to enhance her personal virtue and not to enter the world of male discourse—except through translating male voices.¹⁴ Lanyer invokes this “learned and virtuous” formula for the Countess, but it is soon apparent that this Pembroke moves outside the zone of safety with her learning. She is not merely a pious translator, but a woman with a divinely inspired and sanctioned voice, a divine artist. Lanyer's presentation of the dream—Pembroke here recalls a term Philip Sidney used in his Apology for Poetry—a vates. Sidney defined this term first in reference to classical poets:

Among the Romans a poet was called vates, which is as much as a diviner, fore-seer, or prophet, as by his conjoined words vaticinium and vaticinari is manifest: so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this heart-ravishing knowledge.

(Sidney 98)

Immediately after this definition, Sidney “presume[s] a little further, to show the reasonablenes of this word vates” with the example of David as the divinely inspired poet (Sidney 98-99). Lanyer does not use Sidney's term, but in this pastoral world, the Muses and Graces wait upon this female David, and she leads the singing of angels and saints with “her noble breasts sweet harmony” (123). Lanyer depicts Pembroke as the first of a new kind of woman, one who has managed to harmonize the standard composite of the godly, virtuous woman with artistic mastery.

With the scene in which the ladies will that Nature and Art dwell in perfect unity, Lanyer subtly explores this classic tension to establish the deep superiority of the Countess as goddess-like singer. In defending her own voice to the queen in an earlier dedicatory poem, Lanyer acknowledges the suspicion with which her society regarded learned women—particularly the ones who speak—by claiming that she herself is no scholar but writes simply from Nature:

Not that I Learning to my selfe assume,
Or that I would compare with any man:
But as they are Scholers, and by Art do write,
So Nature yeelds my Soule a sad delight.

(147-50)

She thus initially invokes the standard equation of women with nature and the primitive, and men with civilization and the artificial. But she goes on to defend the validity of her voice by pointing out that Art springs from Nature, the “Mother of Perfection” (152), in the first place. The implication is that hers is a more direct imitatio and therefore superior, free from the negative connotations of the term “artifice.” In her own case, she mouths acceptance of the old terms, while turning them to her advantage. When considering Pembroke, however, Lanyer affirms that the ideal is to move beyond this Nature-Art dichotomy. In Lanyer's pastoral world, by Pembroke's guidance, the ladies bring into harmony Nature (feminine) and Art (masculine) by creating art in a feminine voice. The scene suggests, then, if one can see past all the pastoral trappings, that Pembroke's Psalmes make possible a female art superior to male art. The Sidney-Pembroke Psalter itself stands as testimony to Pembroke's ability to harmonize masculine and feminine voices, masculine and feminine roles, Art and Nature. That this ideal harmony has at last been achieved by a woman has powerful implications for women's ability to surpass masculine tradition.

A few stanzas later, Lanyer expresses this rather subtly implied declaration of Pembroke's superiority even more explicitly, with a passage that must have pressed rather uncomfortably against the cult of Philip Sidney. While the poem frequently emphasizes Pembroke's eternal honor, both in heaven and on earth, Morpheus's speech clearly presumes to honor Pembroke before her brother Philip. After identifying the mysterious dream-Pembroke as Sidney's sister and praising Sidney as the one who “Gives light to all that tread true paths of Fame” (139), Morpheus returns to “this faire earthly goddesse,” declaring that

In virtuous studies of Divinitie,
Her pretious time continually doth spend.
So that a Sister well shee may be deemd,
To him that liv'd and di'd so nobly;
And farre before him is to be esteemed
For virtue, wisedome, learning, dignity.

(145-52)

In composing this poem, Lanyer is shrewd enough to praise the brother whose praise is known to please Pembroke, but she does not refrain from emphatically setting Pembroke above him, even in the masculine field of learning. Pembroke has accomplished a unity of Nature and Art that no man, not even Sidney, was able to do. Perhaps Lanyer is implying that Pembroke surpassed her brother exactly because she completed his most “virtuous” project. Lanyer may be offering a corrective for the way in which praise of Pembroke is always overshadowed with praise of her brother—a phenomenon that Pembroke herself encouraged. But the passage is typical of Lanyer's gender configurations throughout the volume: women are central and men are marginalized, demonized, or excluded. Here, this applies even to the incomparable Sidney. In this female pastoral community, Astrophil may be highly honored, but he is not invited.

The next passage in Morpheus's speech further specifies Pembroke's role as an inspirer of divine lyric. Her “blessed spirit remaines,” says Morpheus,

Directing all by her immortall light,
In this huge sea of sorrowes, griefes, and feares;
With contemplation of Gods powrefull might,
Shee fils the eies, the hearts, the tongues, the eares
Of after-comming ages, which shall reade
Her love, her zeale, her faith and pietie;
The faire impression of whose worthy deed,
Seales her pure soule unto the Deitie.
That both in Heav'n and Earth it may remaine,
Crownd with her Makers glory and his love.

(156-66)

Pembroke directs people through the troubles of earthly life with contemplations upon God that ravish the senses—her psalms. There is no attempt here to portray Pembroke's poetic endeavors as a safe, acceptable act of ventriloquism. And here is where the tentative suggestion that she is a Sidneian vates undergoes refinement. She is not a vates in the plain sense of seer, even a God-filled one, as Sidney seems to define that word in the Apology. Instead, in a way that would please Sidney for its emphasis on human creative initiative, she is clearly a poietes, a maker, working from the artistic impulses of her own mind.¹⁵ Here the classical Nature/Art discussion takes on pronounced theological shading. Pembroke leads the pastoral virgins in “devising,” or improvising, on holy hymns, and these heart-ravishing contemplations are wholly hers (Philip Sidney's role in their composition is conspicuously absent). While, like Donne in his poem praising the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter, Lanyer acknowledges that Pembroke's psalms offer a revelation of God and his “powerfull might” (she is in this sense a seer), Pembroke also receives glory herself. Ages hence will read her love, her zeal, her faith and piety. She is crowned with her Maker's glory. Further, her accomplishment, her art, is the very “worthy deed” that seals her intimacy with God. While Pembroke herself professed in her dedicatory poem to turn all praise for her work toward her brother and ultimately to God—she meant “to praise, not to aspire”—Lanyer revels in and celebrates the human achievement evident in the poems themselves. With regard to the question of inspiration, then, Lanyer has advanced beyond Sidney's sketchy treatment of the subject to combine the seer and the maker for religious poetry. Pembroke's voice is divinely sanctioned and inspired, yet she receives full creative credit for her poems. A model of virtue beyond reproach, Pembroke establishes the perfect fusion of Nature and Art, inspiration and initiative, in a woman's voice, earning eternal honor and God's special favor. She is to be esteemed even beyond her brother, the epitome of male virtue public, private, and literary. Thus, for Lanyer, this divinely sanctioned human achievement by a woman is absolutely vital: Pembroke makes possible the woman poet devising on Scripture. She opens the door, with the approval of God himself, to a female exegesis superior to its masculine rivals. Lanyer has hereby established for art what she will later establish for “reading” Christ and following the faith—that only women are capable of doing it right. However well Lanyer did or did not know Pembroke's Psalmes, she did recognize the theological implications of Pembroke's method.

The final section of the “Authors Dreame” features the peculiar disruption of the pastoral dream, and Lanyer's determination to overcome it. Within the pastoral narrative, Lanyer's speaker wakes up before she can present herself to the dream-figure of Pembroke. As with the edenic female pastoral community of Cooke-ham, this female eden, too, is fragile and frustratingly ephemeral. Nevertheless, the speaker is confident she can repair this disruption: “I know I shall enjoy the selfe same sight, / Thou [Morpheus] hast no powre my waking sprites to barre” (191-92). The speaker then proceeds to defy the inadequacy of the dream vision and work toward getting the job done in the waking world. The poem transforms into a plea for the real Pembroke to complete the broken dream, and seal the imagined mentorship with “grace,” Lanyer's complex code-word for favor and real-world patronage. The dream becomes an offering of admiration and respect to which Lanyer wishes Pembroke to respond:

And therefore, first I here present my Dreame,
And next, invite her Honour to my feast.

(205-06)

While the speaker acknowledges that Pembroke's art is beyond her own, she protests her worthiness as a follower, attempting to make her way into the waking-world Countess's circle, just as in her dream vision she placed herself on the edge of the Countess-nymph's virgin train.¹⁶ She officially offers her poems to Pembroke using the same metaphorical threads that run through the entire work. She invites Pembroke to her feast, presents a “mirrour to her view” (210), and offers the poem as a means by which to meet Christ. Schnell argues at this point that the deference with which Lanyer positions her poetry in comparision to Pembroke's, her claim of unworthiness, is a paradoxical “claim to spiritual and epistemological superiority over the woman she would have as her patron” (92).¹⁷ McBride also perceives Lanyer's paradoxical constructing of her own superiority here, pointing out that the Countess does not say a word in this pastoral dream. McBride interprets this silence in terms of pastoral convention; Lanyer is silencing her predecessor in order to make room for her own assertive voice—a voice that requires a large acoustic space indeed.¹⁸ It is true that Lanyer's basic strategy throughout her volume is to turn her disadvantages into strengths. However, as McBride already admits, the critical difference between Lanyer's situation and other instances of poetic self-assertion against the deceased predecessor is that Pembroke is still alive. Lanyer solves this problem, McBride suggests, by “intimating” Pembroke's “symbolic death.” I would offer, toward an alternative interpretation, that an even more crucial factor is Lanyer's desire for Pembroke's favor, preferably in this-worldly, material form. The dream-Pembroke's silence may therefore be interpreted as a gesture of respect for and deference to Pembroke's social and personal distance. Could Lanyer have presumed to place words in the mouth of a living woman who is by far her social and artistic superior? The poem uses pastoral conventions in an attempt to fit the aristocratic style of its central figure's poetic opus. But “The Authors Dreame” is still a dedicatory poem, designed to curry favor, delicately, from the actual Pembroke. Thus, the pastoral mode primarily operates to provide Lanyer with an elegant setting in which to enact Pembroke's role in Lanyer's imagination as the perfect conflation of artist and divinely ordained improviser, a model of the female poetic voice. She must illustrate Pembroke's imagined role before she can arrange for Pembroke to accept a version of this role in the waking world, a world which clearly matters urgently to Lanyer.

THE PSALMS AND THE FEMALE “I”

And call yee this to utter what is just,
you that of justice hold the sov'raign throne?
and call yee this to yeld, O sonnes of dust,
to wronged brethren ev'ry man his own?
O no: it is your long malicious will
now to the world to make by practize known
with whose oppression you the ballance fill,
Just to your selves, indiffr'ent els to none.
O lett their brood, a brood of springing thornes,
be by untymely rooting overthrowne
er bushes waxt, they push with pricking hornes,
as fruites yet greene are of by tempest blowne
the good with gladnes this reveng shall see,
and bath his feete in bloud of wicked one.
while all shall say: the just rewarded be
there is a god that carves to each his own.

(Psalmes 58.1-8, 25-32)

Though Lanyer writes in her first dedicatory poem, the one to Queen Anne, that “A Womans writing of divinest things” is “seldome seene” (3-4), by 1611 this was not entirely true. Women writers had produced translations and other works on religious topics. But, as Susanne Woods remarks, for Lanyer in her recreation of the passion narrative to “revise fifteen hundred years of traditional commentary … is unheard of” (Lanyer xxxiv).¹⁹ Before engaging in the main body of her exegetical work, her “radical unfolding of the passion,”²⁰ Lanyer begins with a pastiche of Psalm passages that further demonstrates her dependence on Pembroke's precedent of feminine exegesis, and exercises the feminine prophetic voice that Pembroke modeled. After nine initial stanzas addressing and praising the Countess of Cumberland, Lanyer merges her voice with the psalmist's in lines 57-144. The ensuing composite of Psalm passages praises God for his might and justice, especially when it involves punishing the wicked. Lanyer seems to have taken her references directly from the Book of Common Prayer Psalms, whose wording she follows quite closely in most instances. I found no direct verbal resemblances to the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter;²¹ she is simply following Pembroke's more basic strategy of adopting the psalmic “I.” She intertwines carefully selected passages to demonstrate emphatically that God favors the poor, weak, and suffering above the rich, strong, and proud. “He joyes the Meeke, and makes the Mightie sad, / Pulls downe the Prowd, and doth the Humble reare,” the speaker declares (75-76). Actually, this particular reference, while psalm-like, most closely resembles the song of Mary in Luke 1, and thereby co-opts a strong, biblical voice that is unambiguously female. Lanyer places the echo of Mary between references to Psalms 104 and 103.²² Psalm 113.6, “He taketh up the simple out of the dust: and lifteth the poore out of the mire,” appears in lines 123-24: “Unto the Meane he makes the Mightie bow, / And raiseth up the Poore out of the dust.” Lanyer finds psalmic imprecations especially useful for her purposes, including echoes of Psalms 55, 58, and 18:

Froward are the ungodly from their berth,
No sooner borne, but they doe goe astray;
The Lord will roote them out from off the earth,
And give them to their en'mies for a pray,
As venemous as Serpents is their breath,
With poysned lies to hurt in what they may
The Innocent: who as a Dove shall flie
Unto the Lord, that he his cause may trie.

(113-20)

.....

That great Jehova King of heav'n and earth,
Will raine downe fire and brimstone from above,
Upon the wicked monsters in their berth
That storme and rage at those whom he doth love.

(137-40)

By creating this brief Psalm-composite in her text, Lanyer establishes a template of God's favor which she will place over the narratives examined in the rest of the poem. While she does not specifically identify the ungodly monsters or the protected righteous in these passages, the images she selects from the Psalms suggest how Lanyer's argument will proceed. From what she finds in Scripture, the venomous serpents are usually men, and the victimized doves, women. And although she apologizes for this Psalm passage as an unintentional digression, she also acknowledges by way of summary that it has laid a critical foundation for the rest of the poem. “Pardon (good Madame) though I have digrest,” says the speaker, but this passage was necessary to establish God's

speciall care on those whom he hath blest
From wicked worldlings, how he set them free:
And how such people he doth overthrow
In all their waies, that they his powre may know.

(147-52)

Lanyer draws an important initial reminder of how God views earthly dealings by redirecting streams of the inspired text to create a strong interpretive current.

PROPHETIC VOCATION

And I secure shall spend my happie tymes
in my, though lowly, never-dying rymes,
singing with praise the god that Jacob loveth.
my princly care shall cropp ill-doers low,
in glory plant, and make with glory grow
who right approves, and doth what right approveth.

(Psalmes 75.25-30)

The psalm-composite passage that opens the central poem of Salve Deus demonstrates that Lanyer has learned from Pembroke the power of the female, psalmic “I.” Snaring the prophetic mode of the Psalms lays important exegetical groundwork for the ensuing re-reading of the passion story. But Lanyer's highly polemical purposes, along with her practical need to make herself known, require an even more emphatic declaration of her public, prophetic role. Establishing a precedent for the female artist-prophet was only the first step. She also had to declare that she was indeed responding to a divine calling.

In some instances, Lanyer's claims to a calling are caught up in the more conventional depictions of herself as the writer in service to the great personage. Thus, she tells the Countess of Cumberland toward the conclusion of the main poem that her purpose from birth, given her by the “Eternall powres,” was to insure the Countess's everlasting fame:

And knowe, when first into this world I came,
This charge was giv'n me by th'Eternall powres,
Th'everlasting Trophie of thy fame,
To build and decke it with the sweetest flowres
That virtue yeelds.

(1457-61)

The Cookeham estate is special to her in part, Lanyer confesses, because there she received a confirmation of this call to service, this time from the Muses and Pallas:

Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) …
where the Muses gave their full consent,
I should have powre the virtuous to content:
Where princely Palace will'd me to indite,
The sacred Storie of the Soules delight.

(“Cooke-ham” 1-6)

In other instances, however, this idea of service to the noble (the virtuous noble, she is always careful to note) falls away and only her calling is left. Complete versions of Lanyer's volume also include a brief prose paragraph on the last leaf, entitled “To the doubtfull Reader,” where Lanyer explains that she received the title to her poem in a dream years before she wrote. She forgot about the dream until she had finished the poem, “when immediately it came into my remembrance.” “[T]hinking it a significant token,” she writes, “that I was appointed to performe this Worke, I gave the very same words I received in sleepe as the fittest Title I could devise for this Booke.” The authorization for the work comes in dreamed form, beyond the jurisdiction of her human audience. Lanyer wishes to offer conventional gestures toward service by way of gaining patronage. But the anxiety in her dedicatory poems and her constant admonishing of her audience to virtue attests to her fear that these women's virtue and benevolence are not entirely reliable. Therefore, she wishes to bypass the implied authorization of her audience and establish herself as one of God's poets, according to Pembroke's example, thereby to “seale her pure soule unto the Deitie” and be “Crowned with her Makers glory and his love.”

This need to declare her own prophetic calling reaffirms the importance of the dream-vision form of Lanyer's dedicatory poem to Pembroke. Numerous biblical narratives establish that the ecstatic vision or dream is the ritual form of prophetic calling. Moses' burning bush, Isaiah's live coal, Peter's sheet of unclean animals—those called by God to speak a harsh and contrary word of truth are commissioned through sometimes bizarre experiences of alternative perception.²³ In the late sixteenth century, this tradition was given more genteel expression in the notion of divine appointment to the poetic task, an idea gaining some currency among religious poets in England. Du Bartas's powerful and popular depiction of the Christian Muse, Urania, and her personal dream-visit to him impelled other poets to consider the possibility of claiming a divine calling to write religious poetry. Du Bartas adapted the classical muse Urania to figure the idea of inspiration, even command, from the Christian God for writing poetry.²⁴

Lanyer's claims to poetic/prophetic vocation often use conventional, classical trappings—the muses, Pallas Athena—rather than Urania or an hebraic live-coal ritual. But the dream-vision form of Lanyer's “The Authors Dreame” can be seen as a tentative version of an ordaining vision she is attempting to construct for herself. The scene near the river Parnassus might have become an imagined passing of the prophetic mantle from Pembroke to Lanyer, if the two had met in the dream world. But Lanyer did not complete this manufactured transcendent experience; the dream is cut off. This disruption of the dream may speak to Lanyer's insecurities about her calling. Or, it may be a clever strategy for keeping Pembroke's mentorship from remaining purely imagined; after all, Pembroke is still alive in 1611 and could, presumably, help Lanyer “enjoy the selfe same sight” her dream created. By engineering the disruption, Lanyer creates a lack and invites Pembroke to fill it. The always practical-minded Lanyer is asking her Urania to bridge the imagined and the material with a prophetic anointing of her own devising.

The need for Pembroke's “grace” may have seemed all the more urgent to Lanyer as she was attempting to step beyond Pembroke's example. The real Pembroke stopped short of claiming a prophetic role for herself with her psalms. By “newly writing” the poems of the original lyric-prophet, Pembroke transposed the public voice of God's truth-singer into the female key. However, Pembroke left it to others to declare her poems “re-revelations.” She herself carefully cultivated the impression that her psalms were a matter of private devotions, a bereaved woman's efforts to deal with the sorrowful vicissitudes of life. In her dedicatory poem to the Psalmes, “To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney,” Pembroke invokes the elegiac mode in legitimating her task. Her “penns impressions move / the bleeding veines of never dying love” (79-80) for her brother, whom she asks to pardon her “presumption too too bold” (25). Even regarding her authority over Scripture, her dedicatory poem ritually denies what her psalms actually do. She assures God that she does not wish to aspire to “Theise sacred Hymmes thy Kinglie Prophet formed” (14). Pembroke made use of the printing press for other works, guiding her brother's and some of her own works to the press and thereby doing much to ease the “stigma of print” for the aristocratic author. But the text most crucial to Lanyer, her Psalmes, Pembroke withheld from print. Instead, she chose for the psalms the most prestigious and controllable form of publication—the beautifully rendered manuscript. From her position as a member of a powerful artistocratic family and the executor of her brother's reputation and poetic estate, Pembroke could navigate the conventions of print and manuscript publication and manage to distribute her psalms without risking a self-proclaimed prophetic calling.

For the more socially tenuous Lanyer, putting her manuscript where her call was and publishing Salve Deus in 1611 was obviously a huge gamble. Her choice to go to print represents, as Ann Baynes Coiro points out, an act of defiance against the system of patronage in which she was caught, a “rejection of her private role as a woman of service within a matriarchy” (373). Her position of simultaneous submission to and defiance of this system, and her gesture toward self-professionalization as a means of negotiating that entrapment, parallels Jonson with his 1616 Workes. But even Jonson, her approximate social peer, did not build his professional self on a claim to prophetic vocation. This is more, too, than her male counterparts in the mode of devotional lyric would attempt. For Donne and Herbert, as I demonstrate elsewhere, the shift in the relationship of the reader-poet to the sacred text that the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter represents was crucially enabling, but also a source of great anxiety.²⁵ Donne's anxiety in asserting a poetic subjectivity into the generic narrative of redemption distorts the psalmic-lyric precedent into a kind of mischievous bravado, a play-acted resistance to the humbling truth of free grace. Herbert's anxiety about “weaving the self into the sense” of his psalm-like collage of “spiritual conflicts” is most famously traced in his “Jordan” poems, but is apparent throughout The Temple. For them, the psalmic background of devotional verse marked out primarily a space for private struggle. Donne later found his public, divinely ordained vocation in the pulpit. Herbert cautiously imagined his vocation, but figured it as a cross carried in the presence of God. Any future reader who might thrust his heart into Herbert's lines would do so in a similar, private space. Fittingly, both Donne's and Herbert's religious lyrics were published only posthumously.

Herbert, Pembroke, even Donne, each had a more secure social footing on which to set up, in the early seventeenth century, the kind of public, divinely ordained poetic persona that Lanyer attempted. That she, with all the strikes against her, exhibited a more confident public ability to re-speak Scripture than better-established poets, fits the kind of inversion of good sense that permeates her work. Her very lack of likely qualification is exactly, in her mind, what justifies her audacity. In the long invocation section of the main poem, the speaker reassures herself that God's call bypasses every worldly qualification:

But yet the Weaker thou doest seeme to be
In Sexe, or Sence, the more his Glory shines,
That doth infuze such powerfull Grace in thee,
To shew thy Love in these few humble Lines.

(289-92)

Lanyer may not have had the refined restraint of her imagined mentor, but she was merely driving Pembroke's example to its logical conclusion. Decades later, Milton would achieve what Lanyer attempted, masterfully sculpting his own prophetic/poetic persona. Unlike Lanyer, however, Milton seems to have been under the impression that, while he would suffer for his vocation, he was somehow qualified for it. Lanyer, by cleverly coopting her gender association with Pembroke and, at the same time, turning her social inferiority into a virtue, managed to dream her own authorship in 1611, unfolding the central narrative of Scripture in lines that “may no further stray, / Than his most holy Spirit shall give me Light” so that not only “Heavens cleare eye,” but “all the World may see” (301-07).

Notes

1. All quotations from Lanyer in this essay are taken from The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer. Numbers in parentheses following quotations from Lanyer indicate line numbers. Important introductions of Lanyer since Rowse include Beilin, “The Feminization of Praise: Aemilia Lanyer,” in Redeeming Eve; Lewalski, “Of God and Good Women”; Lewalski, “Rewriting Patriarchy and Patronage”; and McGrath, “‘Let us have our libertie againe’: Aemilia Lanier's 17th-Century Feminist Voice.” Lanyer scholarship has shifted emphasis in the last ten years from what the introduction to this volume has termed the “re-covery mode” to the “dis-covery mode,” as is exemplified in a recent volume of criticism on Lanyer, edited by Marshall Grossman, exhibiting a variety of critical approaches. An additional recent article describing Lanyer's possible sources and also exploring the issue of exegesis in the “Eves Apologie” section is Richey, “‘To Undoe the Booke’: Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer and the Subversion of Pauline Authority.” References to other scholarship treating specific issues will appear below, throughout.

2. The phrase is from Ann Baynes Coiro (“Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson”), who explores Lanyer's construction of her own authorship within a complex determined by class as much as or more than gender. Coiro compares Lanyer to Jonson as well as to Spenser and Milton.

3. Janel Mueller (“The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’”) confirms Lanyer's ambition to be a truth-teller. Her account of Lanyer's salutations is especially helpful.

4. All quotations from the Psalmes and from Pembroke's dedicatory poem are from the recent edition, The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. I am grateful to the editors for the use of page proofs of the edition while preparing this article, and particularly to Noel Kinnamon for verifying quotations against the final version.

5. The introductory material in Collected Works provides extensive accounts of Sidney's and Pembroke's roles in composing the Psalmes, their differing methods of composition, the nature of the extant manuscripts, and the known history of its circulation. The edition also conveniently gathers references to previously available scholarship on the psalter. For Mary Sidney's role in promoting her brother's reputation and the contemporary association of her with the psalter, see Hannay, Philip's Phoenix.

6. For the most recent account of contemporary reception of the Psalmes, see Hannay, “‘Bearing the livery of your name.’”

7. For an account of Pembroke's revision process, see Rienstra and Kinnamon, “Revisioning the Sacred Text.” Further examples of her method of composition, including many places in which Pembroke deviated from Calvinist doctrine or commentaries in her poems, appear in Collected Works. An extensive consideration of Sidney's and Pembroke's style and method, particularly in comparison to the metrical psalm tradition, appears in Rienstra, “Aspiring to Praise.”

8. John Donne, “Upon the translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke his sister.”

9. Roland Greene, in “Sir Philip Sidney's Psalms, the Sixteenth-Century Psalter, and the Nature of Lyric,” articulates the merged modes of ritual and lyric in the Psalms. Greene's intriguing remarks about Sidney's psalms lack, unfortunately, any reference to Pembroke's psalms. He regards Sidney's poems merely as an incomplete psalter. The idea of a ritual mode is not as relevant to this essay as the tension between lyric and prophetic modes, and thus will not be discussed.

10. A useful summary of contemporary Psalm commentary appears in Lewalski, Protestant Poetics.

11. Lisa Schnell, in “Breaking ‘the rule of Cortezia’: Aemilia Lanyer's Dedications to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” proposes that Lanyer may not have even known her chief addressee, Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, despite the intimacy the poem everywhere implies. Certainly, the so-called “community of good women” Lanyer constructs is no secure assemblage. The dedicatory poems contain numerous indications of Lanyer's anxiety about these women's virtue and benevolence toward her. Lanyer is well aware that the audience she writes into existence is as fragile and ephemeral as the edenic Cookeham of her “To Cooke-ham.”

12. Not all the extant copies of Salve Deus contain the full set. See the “Textual Introduction” in the Woods edition. Also, Leeds Barroll has noted that Lanyer placed the poem dedicated to Pembroke ahead of the one to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, whose poem, by rank, should come first. Barroll terms this a “major mistake (as regards any hope of penetrating the queen's circle)” for Lanyer. However, it may reflect Lanyer's more intimate and hopeful imagined relationship to Pembroke. See Barroll, “Looking for Patrons,” 40.

13. These associations are suggested in Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 189.

14. As Elaine Beilin has observed: “To men and perhaps to some women, a woman's desire for knowledge was a frightening prospect, recalling images of Eve's hand reaching for the apple. But by claiming that learning would increase a woman's virtue (her chastity, obedience, humility), the humanists and their successors reassured society that a woman's knowledge was under control and directed only to enhancing her womanliness” (Beilin xxi-xxii).

    For discussions of learned women in the period, see Hannay, Silent But for the Word, 1-14. Also in that volume, see Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Cooke Sisters.”

15. In the section following the “vates” passage, Sidney takes pains to establish that the poet is much more than a stenographer. The poet's singular nobility is that he is a maker: “Only the Poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, … so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit” (100).

    Looking back to the section on David, one sees that Sidney lists the specific virtues of the Psalms under the heading of David's “handling” of the prophetic material received through divine inspiration. David's initiative in the process is acknowledged.

16. Lanyer's depictions of her own work as compared to Pembroke's reflect the Nature-Art complex she has been exploring thus far. Pembroke's poetry is natural, but refined, a harmony of nature and art, like sugar. Lanyer's is purely natural (as she claimed in her poem to the queen), like honey, but wholesome even so, as it springs from virtue. While McGrath assesses Lanyer's “feminine poetics” as associated with nature and not with art, Lanyer's account of Pembroke's superior harmonizing of the two undercuts any such straightforward account of what Lanyer values in poetry. See Lynette McGrath, “‘Let us have our libertie againe’: Aemilia Lanier's 17th-Century Feminist Voice,” 340.

17. Schnell also remarks at this point that “Lanyer appears to be bestowing on herself a privilege that is very nearly prophetic,” an idea I obviously affirm and wish to account for and define in greater detail. See also Susanne Woods's interesting analysis of the ambiguous pronouns in this passage (“Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson” 23).

18. McBride (“Remembering Orpheus in the Poems of Aemilia Lanyer”) writes: “Rather than fictionalizing a female mentor poet on the body of a dead woman in the manner of Milton's Lycidas/Edward King, Lanyer intimates Mary Sidney's symbolic death, silencing the live Mary Sidney by placing her in a mythic heavenly landscape—the realm of the happy dead, but dead nonetheless—and by fusing her poetic person to that of her dead brother” (94).

19. The previous pages in the Woods edition give a brief summary of women's religious writing before 1611 and refer to other works already mentioned here.

20. I refer to Catherine Keohane's essay, “‘That blindest weaknesse be not overbold’: Aemilia Lanyer's Radical Unfolding of the Passion,” which treats the radical nature of Lanyer's exegesis in the long, central poem of her volume in the kind of thorough detail not possible here. Achsah Guibbory's article, “The Gospel according to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred,” also considers the details of Lanyer's treatment of the gospel narratives. While these studies explore the results of Lanyer's radical exegesis, I have attempted to account instead for the way in which she engineered the hermeneutical stance that made these results possible.

21. This raises the possibility that Lanyer never read the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter. However, this seems unlikely considering her praise of Pembroke's heart-ravishing hymns and the powerful influence over her imagination that Pembroke as a writer seems to have had. It may be simply that while Lanyer did have access to a manuscript long enough to become familiar with it, she did not have a copy available to which to refer during her own writing process. Living as she did at this period on the edges of noble families and court life, she may have had less access to manuscript copies of the psalter than her social superiors or even her male counterparts such as Donne, Daniel, or Jonson.

22. See Appendix for a list of Psalm references for this passage. Lewalski (Writing Women 228) has identified Lanyer's Psalm references as being “chiefly Psalms 18, 84, 89, and 104.” While Psalms 18 and 104 are surely important, I have found only one distant reference to 84 and none at all to 89.

23. The narratives mentioned occur in Exodus 3, Isaiah 6, and Acts 10. Jeremiah 1, Acts 9, and, of course, the Book of Revelation are other biblical examples of prophetic initation through visions or dreams. The connection of poetry with prophecy is an ancient one, and is reflected in modern criticism with examinations of the “poetic/prophetic” in poets as diverse as Blake, Whitman, and D. H. Lawrence. A helpful essay connecting the hebraic tradition of dreaming and prophecy to Milton is William B. Hunter, “Prophetic Dreams and Visions.” The essay is reprinted in The Descent of Urania: Studies in Milton. For a broader treatment of Milton's understanding of his own prophetic vocation, see John Spencer Hill, John Milton: Poet, Priest and Prophet.

24. Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas's poem “La Muse Chrétienne” was published in France in 1574. King James VI published an English translation in Edinburgh in 1584 and Josuah Sylvester published his translation in London in 1605. For a classic account of Du Bartas's influence on English poets' self-perception, see Lily B. Campbell's “The Christian Muse.”

25. Rienstra, “Aspiring to Praise.”

Works Cited

Barroll, Leeds. “Looking for Patrons.” Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon. Ed. Marshall Grossman. Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1998.

Beilin, Elaine V. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987.

Coiro, Ann Baynes. “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson.” Criticism 35 (1993): 357-76.

Donne, John. “On the Translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke his sister.” John Donne: The Complete English Poems. Ed. A. J. Smith. London: Penguin, 1971.

Greene, Roland. “Sir Philip Sidney's Psalms, the Sixteenth-Century Psalter, and the Nature of Lyric.” SEL 30 (1990): 19-40.

Grossman, Marshall, ed. Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon. Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1998.

Guibbory, Achsah. “The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred.” Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon. Ed. Marshall Grossman. Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1998.

Hannay, Margaret P. “‘Bearing the livery of your name’: the Countess of Pembroke's Agency in Print and Scribal Publication.” Sidney Journal (forthcoming).

———. Philip's Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990.

———, ed. Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 1985.

———, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, eds. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. 2 vols. Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1998.

Hill, John Spencer. John Milton: Poet, Priest and Prophet. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979.

Hunter, William B. The Descent of Urania: Studies in Milton, 1946-1988. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1989.

———. “Prophetic Dreams and Visions in Paradise Lost.” Modern Language Quarterly 9 (1948): 277-85.

Keohane, Catherine. “‘That Blindest Weakenesse be not Over-Bold’: Aemilia Lanyer's Radical Unfolding of the Passion.” ELH 64 (1997): 359-90.

Lamb, Mary Ellen. “The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes toward Learned Women in the Renaissance.” Silent But for the Word. Ed. Margaret P. Hannay. Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 1985.

Lanyer, Aemilia. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Ed. Susanne Woods. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.

Lewalski, Barbara. “Of God and Good Women: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer.” Silent But for the Word. Ed. Margaret P. Hannay. Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 1985.

———. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Lyric. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979.

———. “Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer.” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 87-106.

———. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993.

McClung, William Alexander. The Country House in English Renaissance Literature. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977.

McGrath, Lynette. “‘Let us have our libertie againe’: Aemilia Lanier's 17th-Century Feminist Voice.” Women's Studies 20 (1992): 331-48.

Mueller, Janel. “The Feminist Poetics of ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.’” Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Eds. Lynn Keller and Christianne Miller. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994. Rpt. Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon. Ed. Marshall Grossman. Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1998.

Richey, Esther Gilman. “‘To Undoe the Booke’: Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer and the Subversion of Pauline Authority.” English Literary Renaissance 27.1 (1997): 106-28.

Rienstra, Debra K. “Aspiring to Praise: The Sidney-Pembroke Psalter and the English Religious Lyric.” Diss. Rutgers Univ., 1995.

———. and Noel J. Kinnamon. “Revisioning the Sacred Text.” Sidney Journal 17.1 (1999): 51-74.

Schnell, Lisa. “Breaking ‘the rule of Cortezia’: Aemilia Lanyer's Dedications to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27.1 (1997): 77-101.

Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993.

Woods, Susanne. “Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson: Patronage, Authority, and Gender.” Ben Jonson Journal 1 (1994): 15-30.

Appendix: Psalm References in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

The following is a list of references to the Psalms which I found in the psalm-composite passage of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. This passage stretches, in the title poem of the volume, from line 57 through 144. I used the Book of Common Prayer version of the Psalms to compare. Line numbers, taken from the Woods edition, are listed at left, with Psalm references opposite, listed by chapter and verse.

Line numbers	Psalm references
57-58	102.26
73-74	104.1-2
75-76	(Luke 1.52)
78	40.6, 106.2
79-80	103.12
81	18.10
82	102.25, 104.2
84	76.7, 130.3
85	44.21
86	25.11-12
87	104.1
88-91	104.3-4
95	97.5
97	104.3
98-100	18.11-14
103-04	15.1-2, 24.3-4
105-10	12.2, 57.5, 64.3
107-08	11.2
111-12	52.5-6
113-14	58.3-4
117	58.4
119-20	55.6
124	113.6
126-28	103.10, 17; 84.11
129-36	15.1-5, 24.3-4
138	18.8, 12
138-42	50.3-5, 83.15
143	75.9