SOURCE: Richey, Esther Gilman. “Subverting Paul: The True Church and the Querelle des Femmes in Aemilia Lanyer.” In The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance, pp. 60-83. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Richey argues that Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum is a revision of St. Paul's interpretation of Genesis.]

And then the world by womans hands shall rul'd be and obey
But when the widow over all the world shall beare the sway
And cast into the sea the gold and silver with disdayne
And cast the brass of brittle man and yron into the main
Then shall the worldly elements all desolate remain.

—Thomas Brightman, A Revelation of the Apocalypse

In A Revelation of the Apocalypse, written in 1611, Thomas Brightman appropriates a passage from the “Sybyll's Books” to reveal the triumph of the bride of Christ at the end of time, a triumph represented through a stunning inversion of seventeenth-century economic and gender relations. As we have already seen, Brightman establishes the fact that the woman of the Apocalypse is not a woman at all but the “excellent brightness and purity” of the primitive church, at last restored. Her “disdayne” of wealth, he argues, bears witness to the fact that the primitive church “abhorred the coveting of riches, and contention for dignity” that now characterizes a power-hungry episcopacy. Consequently, what she “casts away” as the “brass of brittle man” is the corrupt hierarchy of the English Church.¹

For Brightman, this reversal of power relations called attention to the “right rule” of Presbyterianism—only metaphorically a marginalized woman. Inevitably, however, Brightman's language prepared the way for women prophets of the period as his metaphor was translated into far more immediate terms. And the prophetic discourse of Lancelot Andrewes performed a similar function. Because he identified the Eucharist, the church, and the act of prophesying with “virginal conception,” his language disclosed a Christian gospel that was, for all intents and purposes, feminine in orientation.

The fact that God chose a woman in which to “become flesh” was not, for Andrewes, a moment of female privilege but rather a moment of divine debasement. In his view, God “takes” woman, “the lowest and basest part of man” in order to incarnate in the feminine gender the very Word woman once refused: “Besides, from the flesh, as from Eve, came the beginning of transgression—longing after the forbidden fruit, refused the Word quite; so, of all other, least likely to be taken. The Word not refusing it, the rest have good hope” (1:89). The divine Word overcomes female transgression both by accepting her and by uniting with her to revise the whole of human history. First, of course, Christ must transform human origins by altering the reproductive process itself, an act he performs in the virgin's womb: “He was not idle all the time He was an embryo—all the nine months He was in the womb; but then and there He even eat out the core of corruption that cleft to our nature and us” (1:141). What Christ consumes in “eating out the core of corruption” reverses the cycle of death that Eve initiates in eating down to the “core” of the apple.

Yet, Andrewes concedes, Mary just as actively conceives Christ. Far from becoming a passive, merely receptive “vessel,” she gives her own flesh and blood to the making of God:

To conceive is more than to receive. It is so to receive as we yield somewhat of our own also. A vessel is not said to conceive the liquor that is put into it. Why? because it yieldeth nothing from itself. The blessed Virgin is, and therefore is because she did. She did both give and take. Give of her own substance whereof His body was framed; and take or receive power from the Holy Ghost, whereby was supplied the office and the efficacy of the masculine seed.

(1:140)

The Holy Ghost fulfills the “office” of the “masculine seed,” but it is Mary who “conceives” the Christ child, framing “His body” out of “her own substance” and delivering him to the world.

Andrewes pursues the implications of this transformation taking place in the “flesh” of woman by making Mary's activity central to the Eucharist: “That flesh that was conceived and this day born, (Corpus aptasti Mihi,) that body that was this day fitted to Him. And if we be not with Him thus, if this His flesh be not ‘with us,’ if we partake it not, which way soever else we be with Him, we come short of the Im of this day” (1:151). In switching to passive voice, Andrewes eliminates Mary from view, thereby obscuring the moment when Mary's “body” provides the clothing “fit” for Christ and thus the moment when her flesh becomes “His.” But the logic of the sermon calls attention to her presence, even as her activity provides insight into the union of “flesh and word” taking place in the audience: “This then I commend to you, even the being with Him in the Sacrament of His Body—that Body that was conceived and born, as for other ends so for this specially, to be ‘with you’” (1:151-52). In Andrewes's view, God places his Word in human flesh through a series of steps, moving from the “flesh” of a woman to the “flesh” of Christ, and now, through the “Sacrament of His Body,” to the “flesh” of his people. Consequently, the gender issues that Andrewes foregrounds at the outset become increasingly submerged when divine love crosses all boundaries. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Andrewes relied heavily on Pauline authority and a range of voices from Christian tradition to firm up the contemporary exclusion of women as speakers and authors. Only in this way could he confine women prophets—and all female reproductions of the logos—to past history, indeed to the text of biblical narrative itself.

Nevertheless, both radical prophets like Brightman and conservative prophets like Andrewes unwittingly empowered women by foregrounding the reversal of gender relations apparent in the metaphoric language of the Apocalypse and the literal language of the Annunciation. The women of the seventeenth century turned this biblical language to political, poetic, and spiritual ends, identifying the woman not only with Mary and the true church but also with Elizabeth's chaste rule. On the basis of a developing prophetic awareness and recent history, they began to locate an originary purity in the feminine metaphors of biblical prophecy. Literalizing these metaphors, they turned them into sacramental and redemptive autobiography that sanctioned their own writing by locating it within a feminist, biblical tradition. At the same time, they openly contested the Pauline mandate as it was repeatedly represented to them in Renaissance sermons.

The text cited in the sermons, tracts, and arguments of the seventeenth century was the unequivocal pronouncement of the apostle Paul: “Let the woman learne in silence with all subjection. I permit not a woman to teache, nether to usurpe autoritie over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived & was in the transgression” (1 Tim. 2:11-14).² If women were to find a place for themselves as speakers and writers, they must first call into question Paul's interpretation of Genesis; they must first overturn his assessment of Eve.³ Among those who took up this task, no woman did so with more art, authority, or skill than Aemilia Lanyer in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Yet, despite the recent surge in scholarly criticism of Lanyer's work, we have not yet analyzed the revision of Paul that informs Lanyer's passion narrative, nor have we identified the subversive hermeneutic method that provides Lanyer with the impetus for this revision.⁴

What we have identified are the questions that puzzle us. Barbara K. Lewalski, for example, closes each of her articles with an awareness of how much we do not know, particularly about Lanyer's feminism: “How should we account for the feminist thrust of [Lanyer's] volume, which re-writes patriarchy by revising the fundamental Christian myths: Eden, the Passion of Christ, the Communion of Saints, with women at their centre?”⁵ At the same time, Lewalski's work on Aemilia Lanyer suggests the beginning of an answer: she identifies the remarkable feminism of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum with the Querelle des Femmes, a genre popular with Medieval and Renaissance writers.⁶ The authors of the Querelle repeatedly attack the Pauline interpretation of Genesis, contesting both his analysis of the Fall and his subordination of women.⁷ Among these, Cornelius Agrippa's Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of Womankinde offers the most striking parallel to the revision of Paul found in Lanyer. A book first entering the English imagination as an affirmation of Mary and Elizabeth's right to ascend the throne, Of the Nobilitie is, according to Constance Jordan, the “most explicitly feminist text to be published in England in the first half of the century.”⁸ Its popularity would increase during the reign of Elizabeth, a time when the works of Agrippa were being widely read by Sidney, Bacon, Nashe, and Marlowe and when the debate about women was culminating in the pamphlet wars.⁹

Before turning to Lanyer, then, I shall first illustrate how Agrippa rereads the Genesis account to undermine Pauline hermeneutics, thereby overturning the very authority that underwrites Renaissance gender relations. By writing the Pauline subjugation of Eve and her daughters not only out of the Old Testament but also out of the epistles of Paul himself, Agrippa indicates that Eve and the women who follow her reproduce an open, more generous New Testament—a Renaissance version of ecriture feminine.¹⁰ I will argue that it is this hermeneutic process—visible most clearly in Agrippa and available to Lanyer in the general milieu of the Querelle des Femmes—that becomes the “feminist” framework for Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.

As Agrippa analyzes Genesis, then, he quite literally starts over, providing an altogether different “genesis” for women:

Thus blessyng was gyven for the woman, and law for the man: The lawe I say, of anger and of cursynge. For why, the fruyte of the tree was forbydden to the man, but not to the woman: which was not than created. For god wolde her to be fre from the begynning. Therefore the manne sinned in eatynge, not the woman. The man gave us deathe, not the woman … And we take orygynalle synne of oure father the man, not of our mother the woman.¹¹

In his thorough rereading of Gen. 2:15-17, Agrippa explores the gaps in the chronology of the biblical narrative: God plants a garden, places Adam within it, and issues a command not to eat the forbidden fruit. Immediately afterward God says, “It is not good that the man shulde be him selfe alone: I wil make him an helpe mete for him” (Gen. 2:18). God's statement, according to Agrippa, calls attention to Eve's absence: she “was not than created.” Consequently, Adam alone is under the “Law” of the Father; Eve is free, subordinate neither to the “Law” nor to Adam and therefore the conduit of divine “blessyng.” In making Eve's absence the locus of divine presence, Agrippa undoes the patriarchal assessment that Paul's interpretation reinforces: thus, Adam fathers the discourse of law, judgment, and death (as he writes the Old Testament), while Eve gives birth to Christ and the freedom of the Gospel.

Agrippa continues to link the feminine gender with the incarnation as he rewrites the order of creation. Revising Paul's argument that God affirmed Adam's dominant role by making him first, Agrippa suggests that God affirmed Eve's nobler role by making her second, in this way perfecting his work of redemption. And Agrippa refuses to describe woman in Pauline terms as the image and “glory of Man” (1 Cor. 11:7), identifying her instead as the “simylitude of Christ” (Cv4), the one who most adequately reflects the logos. Even in taking flesh, Christ refuses to be the “sonne of man,” choosing a “womanne” to reproduce him: “Yet for all that I say, that he beynge verye God (I speak of Christe) wold not be the sonne of man, but of a woman, the which he so hyghly honored, that of a womanne onely he toke fleshe and bloudde” (sig. Cv5). Agrippa's Christ circumvents patriarchal “Law,” taking his descent “of a womanne onely.” It is thus in the “fleshe and bloudde” of a woman that Christ observes his first communion, receiving the “fleshe and bloudde” from Mary that he will offer to the world.

This communion between Christ and women, in which women reflect and reproduce him, continues to predominate in Agrippa's interpretation of a women-centered New Testament. At the same time, he identifies the men who judge and crucify Christ with the fallen patriarchal “Law” they attempt to perpetuate over time: “Christe was boughte and solde, accused, condemned, scourged, hanged on the Crosse, and at the last putte to cruell deathe onely by men” (sig. Cv7-8). Even the men who are part of Christ's inner circle, the disciples whom he calls and trains, abandon him in his hour of need. In the midst of this absence, women fill in the gap, becoming Christ's only supporters: “Yea, he was denyed of his owne Peter, forsaken of his other disciples, and only accompanied wayted upon and folowed of women unto the crosse and grave. Also the very wyfe of Pylate, an hethen woman, went aboute, and laboured more to save Jesus than any man, yea, any of these men, that beleved in hym” (sig. Cv7-8). Here, too, a woman “incarnates” and delivers the logos: the wife of Pilate “labours” to save Christ more than any of his disciples, becoming the single person at Christ's trial committed to correctly representing him. Unfortunately, Agrippa notes, the truth to which she and others like her bear witness is repeatedly suppressed: “Also they be repelled frome preachynge of goddes worde, against expresse and playn scripture, in whyche the holy gost promised unto them by Johel the prophet saieng: And your daughters shall prophecie and preache: lyke as they taught openly in the tyme of the apostels” (sig. G). Highlighting Joel's prediction of women prophets, Agrippa notes that “later Lawe-makers” suppress this truth and so break “goddes commaundemente, to stablyshe theyr owne traditions” (sig. G). Because they “prove theyr tyranny by holy scripture” (sig. Gi4-Gii), by, in fact, quoting Paul's injunction to female silence, they actually reveal their carnal way of reading: “these thynges,” Agrippa notes, “be not repugnant but in the rynde” (sig. Gii). The Spirit resides in the kernel of truth that such interpreters overlook, a truth that Agrippa uncovers in the words of Christ: “But whan men commytte offence and erre, the women have power of Judgement over theym. … And that quiene of Saba shall judge the men of Jerusalem” (sig. Gii1). Citing Christ's revolutionary statement about female awareness in Matt. 12:41, Agrippa offers Christ's words to justify his “spiritual” reading of the text. For Christ, the Queen of Sheba's ability to search out the truth puts the present generation to shame: “The Quene of the South shall rise in judgement with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the utmost parties of the earth to heare the wisdom of Solomon: and beholde, a greater than Solomon is here” (Matt. 12:41). Holding up the Queen of Sheba as an ideal, Christ notes that her wisdom contrasts sharply with the ignorance and blindness of his age. Though separated from him by religion (she was a heathen), by gender (she was a woman), and by time (she lived during the reign of Solomon), she nevertheless will receive the right to judge in the Apocalypse, illuminating, by way of contrast, the very wisdom that the “present generation” has missed.

Agrippa takes Christ's affirmation of women still further, however, locating it within the Pauline allegory of “Law” and “Grace” in Gal. 4. Paul, of course, argues that Hagar, Abraham's bondwoman, gives birth to Ishmael and the Law of Mount Sinai, while Sarah, Abraham's wife, gives birth to Isaac and the Grace of “Jerusalem which is above” (Gal. 4:25-26). Agrippa glosses this allegory more completely by incorporating into it the fact that God privileges Sarah's voice in the Old Testament account: “In all that Sarah shall saie unto thee, heare her voice: for in Isak shall thy sede be called” (Gen. 21:12). By combining the two texts, Agrippa arrives at a completely alternative reading of Paul: “Therfore they, whyche beynge iustifyed by fayth: are become the sonnes of Abraham, the chylderne I say of promyssion, be subdewed to a woman, and bounden by the cõmandement of god, sayenge to Abraham: what so ever Sara saith unto the[e], folow it” (sig. Gii1). Using God's Word to revise Paul's word, Agrippa reveals that those “iustifyed by fayth” are typologically prefigured in Abraham who is “bound” to hear the “cõmandement of god” spoken by his wife. Because Sarah provides access to divine truth and because she conceives the son that brings in the New Covenant, she initiates, through speech and bodily action, the “freedom” available only by faith. As a result, the human race is no longer subject to patriarchal Law “which gendereth to bondage” (Gal. 4:24), but lives instead under the covenant of Grace. On this basis, Agrippa informs us, Abraham and all men after him must listen to women if they are to hear the Spirit of God.

Through this cunning reinterpretation of Paul, Agrippa locates a spiritual reading of the biblical text that transforms gender relations and displaces the Pauline reading of Genesis. Beneath the “rynde” of the “Law” so often employed by carnal interpreters to silence women, he finds the Spirit of the New Covenant that authorizes women to speak and to justify all who believe. Those who fail to listen, he suggests, do far more than oppress women; they silence the liberating message of the New Testament.

Applying what becomes available to her through the work of Agrippa and other writers of the Querelle, Aemilia Lanyer creates Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum to recover the status that Christ assigns women. In fact, each point Agrippa makes—his reinterpretation of Genesis, his awareness of feminine incarnation and communion, his christological foregrounding of Matt. 12 to displace Pauline hermeneutics, his understanding of feminine insight and vision—reappears in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Beneath Lanyer's pen, however, these points are transformed into a feminist theory of reading and writing that is both visionary and poetic. Deeply aware, like Agrippa, that the feminine body contains the logos, Lanyer shows that Paul himself employs metaphors of female reproduction, gender-coding the revelation of Christ as specifically feminine.¹² Reappropriating this discourse for women where, in her view, it originates, Lanyer writes her New Testament to give women a voice.

Similar to Agrippa, Lanyer recovers her New Testament from the gaps in biblical narrative. Consequently, at the very margins of her text, in her subtitles, and in her concluding letter “To the doubtfull Reader,” Lanyer locates the female visionaries of Scripture.¹³ Linked to the title and to one another by the word containing, these women reproduce Christ in a variety of ways, from cogently argued defense to divine incarnation. Not surprisingly, Lanyer places herself among these female prophets in her final words, indicating in closing that her title was “delivered unto me in sleepe many yeares before I had any intent to write in this maner” (139). This dream is now a “significant token,” an indication that she, like the female bearers of the logos, is “appointed to performe this Worke” (139). Consequently, she assigns the “title” as received.¹⁴

But what Lanyer receives is subversive to men in positions of power as the title she delivers immediately indicates. The words Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (“Hail God, King of the Jews”) are the words of the men who crucify Christ, a “title” they assign him on the cross. Written in Latin and ironic in implication, the title indicates not only what men do with Christ but also what they do with power and knowledge. For Lanyer, the words reveal them better than they know.

When Lanyer turns to the body of her text, the epistolary dedications and Salve, she demonstrates that the epistolary form participates in the virgin's incarnational act. To reinforce this perspective, Lanyer replaces Paul's epistolary instruction with John's apocalyptic letters and Passion narrative,¹⁵ a move that allows her to subsume the Pauline oppositions of flesh and spirit into an incarnational theology where the flesh no longer opposes the spirit but in fact gives it form.¹⁶ On this maternal and material basis, Lanyer offers her patron, Margaret Clifford, “Jesus himselfe”:

I present unto you even our Lord Jesus himselfe, whose infinit value is not to be comprehended within the weake imagination or wit of man: and as Saint Peter gave health to the body, so I deliver you the health of the soule; which is this most pretious pearle of all perfection, this rich diamond of devotion, this perfect gold growing in the veines of that excellent earth of the most blessed Paradice, wherein our second Adam had his restlesse habitacion.

(34)

By emphasizing what she “offers,” and “delivers” as well as what “grow[s] in the veines” of women, Lanyer calls attention to her epistle as a reproductive act.¹⁷ She thus identifies Paul's metaphoric “travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you” (Gal. 4:19) as distinctively feminine, noting with some irony that the “infinit value” of reproducing Christ “is not to be comprehended within the weake imagination or wit of man.” But Lanyer also acknowledges the fact that the “black soyle” that reproduces Christ has little value in itself:

For as a right diamond can loose no whit of his beautie by the blacke soyle underneath it, neither by beeing placed in the darke, but retaines his naturall beauty and brightnesse shining in greater perfection than before; so this most pretious diamond … can receive no blemish, nor impeachment by my unworthy hand writing; but wil with the Sunne retaine his owne brightness and most glorious lustre, though never so many blind eyes looke upon him.

(35)

Having clothed the “Sunne” in her “unworthy” handwriting, Lanyer pauses over the possibility of hiding what she intends to reveal, of darkening what she intends to illuminate.¹⁸ She finds, however, no impairment of divine beauty; Christ shines “in greater perfection than before,” unaffected either by the darkness of her “hand” or the blindness of a readership.¹⁹

What Lanyer learns about representing Christ through handwriting becomes the primary message of her feminist epistle: women must continue to convey Christ to the world, in their words as well as in their actions. Beginning by reflecting Christ to nine different noblewomen, Lanyer engages them in the same art: that of endlessly reflecting the beauty of the “sun/son.” As Elaine Beilin and Lynette McGrath have suggested, she takes her metaphoric mirror from Paul, but she moves beyond the “dark mirror” of 1 Cor. 13:12 to identify women with the ever increasing radiance of 2 Cor. 3:17-18: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, & where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is libertie. But we all behold as in a mirrour the glory of the Lorde with open face, and are changed into the same image, from glorie to glorie, as by the Spirit of the Lord.”²⁰ Emphasizing the liberation that the Spirit provides, Lanyer writes reflection and refraction into every aspect of female behavior: women “re-present” the divine image in all their interaction, mirroring the “glory of the Lorde” and becoming, as Agrippa argues in his text, “the simylitude of Christ.” Lanyer thus revises out of existence Paul's doctrinal assertion that “[Man] is the image and glorie of God: but the woman is the glorie of the man” (1 Cor. 11:7).

Because women not only reflect Christ but also reproduce him, the female delivery of Christ is metaphorically present in Paul's description of communion. Paul had written, “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, to wit That the Lord Jesus in the night that he was betrayed, toke bread. And when he had given thankes, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my bodie, which is broken for you: this do ye in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:23). In connecting the Passion of Christ with his “flesh and blood” delivery by a woman, Lanyer highlights the basic doctrine of the Church of England put forward by Bishop Jewel: “For they are sacraments of Christ's body and blood; therefore whoso receiveth the same confesseth thereby that Christ of the virgin received both body and blood.”²¹ As we have seen, Lancelot Andrewes pushes Mary's material communion with Christ still further, and Lanyer embraces his awareness; for her, receiving the “body and blood” has less to do with the Pauline “confession” and more to do with the feminine reception and delivery of Christ's suffering—the desire to participate in the same betrayal, marginality, and brokenness that Christ undergoes. As she directs this understanding to noblewomen, then, Lanyer invites Queen Anne to participate in the Passion in a surprisingly unconventional way:

Here may your sacred Majestie behold
That mightie Monarch both of heav'n and earth,
He that all Nations of the world controld,
Yet tooke our flesh in base and meanest berth:
Whose daies were spent in poverty and sorrow,
And yet all Kings their wealth of him do borrow

(5.43-48)²²

Lanyer requests the queen to find herself in a Christ who surrenders “Monarchy” to assume “our flesh,” one who relinquishes power to accommodate the lowly. Choosing the “meanest berth” among the lower classes, this Christ bridges the gulf between divine sovereignty and human suffering, taking his form finally from a woman. And it is in this “meane attire”—the text before us—that he continues to appear:

In the meane time, accept most gratious Queene
This holy worke, Virtue presents to you,
In poore apparell, shaming to be seene,
Or once t'appeare in your judiciall view:
But that faire Virtue, though in meane attire,
All Princes of the world doe most desire.

(6.61-66)

Because Christ makes no claims to outward power, authority, or status, Lanyer suggests for the queen the same willing renunciation.²³ Indeed, she invites “all vertuous noblewomen” to embrace Christ's marginality, to find themselves in a reading of the Passion:

Come like the morning Sunne new out of bed,
And cast your eyes upon this little Booke,
Although you be so well accompan'ed
With Pallas, and the Muses, spare one looke
Upon this humbled King, who all forsooke,
That in his dying armes he might imbrace
Your beauteous Soule, and fill it with his grace.

(17.8-14)

Identifying her readers as “the morning Sunne,” Lanyer reveals them to be the mirror image of the “mourning Son” whose dying arms embrace them in a still more perfect union. Christ's Passion becomes the ultimate passion, wedding each woman to the fairest of lovers: “And in his humble paths since you do tread, / Take this faire Bridegroome in your soules pure bed (20.41-42). Lanyer thus associates her female audience with the bride of the Song of Solomon and the woman clothed with the sun of the Apocalypse.²⁴ Because women are really “one” with Christ, Lanyer invites “all vertuous Ladies” to re-present him, to wear Christ's clothing even as she does: “Let all your roabes be purple scarlet white, / Those perfit colours purest Virtue wore” (12.15-16). In this way, Lanyer encourages her entire audience (from the queen to “the Vertuous Reader”) to reproduce Christ by giving up, as he does, status, life, and authority. In her New Testament, color, class, and gender become meaningful only through a complete inversion of the standard hierarchies since Christ identifies with the dark, the poor, the feminine.²⁵

Near the end of her dedicatory epistles, Lanyer opens her text to a still wider readership. Offering her work “for the generall use of all virtuous Ladies and Gentlewomen of this kingdome” (48), she seems to envision a readership beyond the immediate one: “And this have I done, to make knowne to the world, that all women deserve not to be blamed” (48; emphasis added). Aware of the constant defamation to which women have been subjected, Lanyer calls such libelous discourse into question by subtly adopting Christ's own term for this abuse; the “Vipers” who “deface the wombes wherein they were bred” (48) have already been judged by Christ: “O generations of vipers, how can you speake good things, when ye are evil? For of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” (Matt. 12:34). Because Christ links scurrilous speech with the satanic perversion of divine truth, he confirms for Lanyer a further parallel: men who defame women and deny them the right to speak take the same strategy as the persecutors of Christ and the murderers of the prophets. Like Agrippa, Lanyer identifies their attempt to silence women with the intentional suppression of divine truth: “Such as these, were they that dishonoured Christ his Apostles and Prophets, putting them to shamefull deaths” (48-49). The only way to escape the corrupt influence of these interpreters is to recover biblical narrative in its purest form and to interpret it anew; this is all the more necessary, Lanyer argues, because women are beginning to forget who they are: “though some forgetting they are women themselves, and in danger to be condemned by the words of their owne mouthes, fall into so great an errour, as to speake unadvisedly against the rest of their sexe” (48). As she echoes Christ's statement in Matt. 12:37, Lanyer returns to the same passage that Agrippa uses to justify the speech of women. Here, Christ's “For by thy wordes thou shalt be justified, and by thy wordes thou shalt be condemned” establishes a new precedent: women's speech, not their silence, will ultimately condemn or justify them. Moreover, Lanyer suggests, if we give attention to male and female ways of representing Christ, we will discover that Christ who was “borne of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman” (49) will continue to take form in the words of women. Recommending on this basis that men “speake reverently of our sexe” (50), Lanyer closes by submitting her words to the judgment of a readership: “To the modest sensures of both which, I refer these my imperfect indeavours, knowing that according to their owne excellent dispositions, they will rather, cherish, nourish, and increase the least sparke of virtue where they find it, by their favourable and best interpretations, than quench it by wrong constructions” (50). Having underlined the difficulty of correctly interpreting the logos, Lanyer makes the “dispositions” of her readers the ultimate test: those who have learned to read in a way that nourishes and sustains will extend the prophetic act, refusing to “quench it by wrong constructions.” Again appropriating Paul's injunction, “Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophecying” (1 Thess. 5:19-20), Lanyer subtly turns his own words against him: in silencing the woman prophet he has broken his own rule.

In Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum Lanyer gives form to the feminist theory she develops in her opening epistles by illustrating the difference between masculine and feminine ways of reading. Consequently, Christ offers himself as a text to a series of people, first, to his disciples (who fail to stay awake), and then to those who come to arrest him:

When loe these Monsters did not shame to tell,
His name they sought, and found, yet could not know
Jesus of Nazareth, at whose feet they fell,
When Heavenly Wisdome did descend so lowe
To speake to them: they knew they did not well,
Their great amazement made them backeward goe:
Nay, though he said unto them, I am he,
They could not know him, whom their eyes did see.

(73.497-504)

Lanyer underscores the breakdown of interpretation as these men “name” the one they seek, ironically find, and fail to know; in their skewed relationship to the logos, Lanyer pinpoints the failure of Adamic “naming” and the limits of masculine knowledge. Christ's self-revelation (“I am he”) only compounds their hermeneutic difficulties, forcing Christ to “descend” still lower. In pursuing their redemption, he must now write the Passion, must turn his body into a book, willingly being “bound” to “loose” his disciples and all future readers:

And he alone is bound to loose us all,
Whom with unhallowed hands they led along,
To wicked Caiphas in the Judgement Hall,
Who studies onely how to doe him wrong.

(78-79.633-36)

“Bound,” handled, and finally “studied” by men who preside over a corrupt legal system, Christ is repeatedly misread as his words are twisted to serve the worst of human motives: “They tell his Words, though farre from his intent, / And what his Speeches were, not what he meant” (79.655-56). According to Lanyer, these powerful men cannot represent Christ, revealing instead their fallen way of reading; for them the logos remains cryptic, incomprehensible, mysterious. In the face of their failure, Christ remains silent, speaking only when he is charged “in his glorious name” by Caiaphas himself. Then he echoes Caiaphas's words back to him, suggesting the extent to which all meaning has been deferred. Caiaphas reacts, however, by choosing to distance himself still further: he sends Christ to Pilate.

Having shown how men misread, mishandle, and abuse Christ in attempting to preserve their power, Lanyer now focuses on women's interpretations. Here, she enters the gaps in New Testament narrative to recover the voices that have been suppressed, recording for the first time the words of Pilate's wife.²⁶ It is at this point that Lanyer draws most clearly on Agrippa, artistically linking in the wife's speech Agrippa's rereading of Genesis with his “spiritual” interpretation of Paul. By having Pilate's wife speak precisely when men have committed the greatest of spiritual errors, Lanyer indicates that Christ has authorized women under just such circumstances—“when men commit offense and err.” By having her speak in defense of Eve, Lanyer underscores the intimate connection between the Passion of Christ and the suppression of the female voice. Moreover, Lanyer suggests, if one is to rectify the simultaneous misrepresentation of Christ and women so long perpetrated by those in power, one must begin at the very beginning; one must analyze the political implications of the first story.²⁷

Thus, for Lanyer as for Agrippa, Eve is not present when God creates Adam and utters the prohibition; Pilate's wife underscores Eve's absence: “For he was Lord and King of all the earth, / Before poore Eve had either life or breath” (85.783-84). Despite the fact that Eve is not yet created, Pilate's wife does not assert Agrippa's interpretation by arguing that the divine command does not apply to Eve; instead, she notes that Eve comes later and so receives the command in mediated form. I believe Lanyer revises Agrippa in this instance to make the distinction between woman's interpretation of what happened and the “canonical” interpretations that have arisen more explicit: she does so by tracing patriarchal authority back to creation, to the “breath” of knowledge and power moving between two males, God and Man: “And from Gods mouth receiv'd that strait command, / The breach whereof he knew was present death” (85.787-88).²⁸ The command comes to Adam in fully integrated form, making his knowledge of life and death complete. But Adam does not use his knowledge when the moment arrives: he fails to tell Eve what he has learned, fails to stop her at the crucial moment: “He never sought her weakenesse to reprove, / With those sharpe words, which he of God did heare” (86.805-6). Forgetting what he knows in the heat of a merely physical longing, Adam takes the fruit because it is “faire” (86.798), and he takes it for himself alone. Eve, in contrast, takes the apple only after God's Word has been corrupted by Satan, a process perfectly captured in the serpentine twisting of her speech: “For she alleadg'd Gods word, which he denies, / That they should die, but even as Gods, be wise” (85.775-76). Though Eve's knowledge of the command is partial, Pilate's wife argues that she still defends God's Word when Satan challenges her. But she is no match for the hermeneutics of this “Viper” and eventually succumbs to his plot. Her motives, however, are nobler than Adam's. She eats the fruit “for knowledge sake” (86.797), a knowledge that—denied her by God and Adam alike—makes her far more susceptible to deception. And, acting out of generosity rather than selfishness, she gives the apple to Adam so that his knowledge too might “become more cleare” (86.804). Unfortunately, Pilate's wife contends, Eve's desire to share knowledge has been skewed by male interpreters, becoming the very reason it is now withheld: “Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke / From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke” (86.807-8). Switching into future tense, Pilate's wife reveals the real fruit of the Fall. It is not to be found in “Eves faire hand” but in that “boasting” associated with male knowledge and control.

Yet God, according to Pilate's wife, gives women the last word. Choosing to circumvent masculine authority, he now offers himself to women in visions and dreams. On the basis of her own revelation—a knowledge she shares with her husband—Pilate's wife warns Pilate not to go through with the murder of Christ, prophesying a sin of such magnitude that worlds cannot contain it:

Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die,
Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit;
All mortal sinnes that doe for vengeance crie,
Are not to be compared unto it:
If many worlds would altogether trie,
By all their sinnes the wrath of God to get;
This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre
As doth the Sunne, another little starre.

(86-87.817-24)

Because the unjust trial of Christ exposes the corruption of men and the institutions they represent, Pilate's wife asks her husband to surrender his “Sov'raigntie,” to recognize her, not as his inferior, but as his equal: “Then let us have our Libertie againe, / And challendge to your selves no Sov'raigntie” (87.825-26). Pilate, of course, does not listen, assuming control in the trial while refusing to hear the truth his wife has spoken. Lanyer will not let him off so easily. Standing on the same ground with the Queen of Sheba and Pilate's wife, Lanyer openly judges men who fail to acknowledge divine truth:

Canst thou be innocent, that gainst all right,
Wilt yeeld to what thy conscience doth withstand?
Beeing a man of knowledge, powre, and might,
To let the wicked carrie such a hand,
Before thy face to blindfold Heav'ns bright light,
And thou to yeeld to what they did demand?
Washing thy hands, thy conscience cannot cleare,
But to all worlds this staine must needs appeare.

(91.929-36)

Because Pilate ignores the promptings of the Spirit and dismisses the revelation of his wife, his “knowledge, powre, and might” perpetrate the greatest injustice the world has ever seen, leaving the “staine” of patriarchy before the eyes of all.

But what appears equally clear in Lanyer's narrative is the way women respond to Christ's suffering; while men blaspheme in a further abuse of the logos, the women cry:

Yet these poore women, by their pitious cries
Bid moove their Lord, their Lover, and their King,
To take compassion, turne about, and speake
To them whose hearts were ready now to breake.

(93.981-84)

Calling to Christ in terms that reveal the intimacy of their union, the women of Jerusalem reflect the Passion they too undergo. The Virgin Mary suffers along with them, and as she does, Lanyer introduces into her narrative a lyrical interlude that records how Mary's “faultless fruit,” delivered to a woman and through a woman, redeems the world:

What wonder in the world more strange could seeme
Than that a Virgin could conceive and beare
Within her wombe a Sonne, That should redeeme
All Nations on the earth, and should repaire
Our old decaies.

(98.1097-1101)

Lanyer locates in the womb of the Virgin the “Sonne” who “repaires” fallen language, one who takes form in women to write the liberating truth of the New Testament.

Lanyer concludes her New Testament, much as the New Testament itself concludes, with John's visionary and apocalyptic marriage; Christ returns for the church who is his bride, prefigured in the loving union of the Canticles and described again in Revelation. Recording this shift generically, Lanyer's Gospel narrative gives way to Epithalamium, but it also revises Canticles as, beneath her pen, the speech of the bridegroom merges with that of the bride; both discover that their “lips” drop the sweetness of the “honey comb” (Song of Sol. 4:11) as they reveal divine truth:

His lips like skarlet threeds, yet much more sweet
Than is the sweetest hony dropping dew,
Or hony combes, where all the Bees doe meete;
Yea, he is constant, and his words are true.

(107.1314-17)

By this means Lanyer's New Testament discloses the “hony” of prophecy that she receives from Christ in the same way as does the beloved disciple John: “Then I toke the litle boke out of the Angels hand, and ate it up, and it was in my mouth as swete as honie: but when I had eaten it, my bellie was bitter. And he said unto me, Thou must prophecie againe among the people and nations, and tongues, and to many Kings” (Rev. 10:10-11). In Lanyer's book Christ and women offer themselves in the bitter sweetness of the prophetic act, offer themselves to be read and interpreted anew.

As Lanyer concludes her poem, then, she returns to the origin of her inspiration, the countess of Cumberland. And what the countess reproduces—in her life and in Lanyer's text—is Christ:

Therefore (good Madame) in your heart I leave
His perfect picture, where it still shall stand,
Deepely engraved in that holy shrine,
Environed with Love and Thoughts divine.

(108.1325-28)

As Lanyer represents the life of Margaret Clifford, she shows her asserting no authority over others. Surrendering her status as Christ does, the countess joins the poor and suffering, recognizing that it is as “the least of these” that Christ appears in this world:

Sometime imprison'd, naked, poore, and bare,
Full of diseases, impotent, and lame,
Blind, deafe, and dumbe, he comes unto his faire,
To see if yet shee will remain the same.

(109.1353-56)

The countess finds in the broken and suffering masses the Beloved whom she seeks, offering “all paines, all cost, all care” (109.1359) to restore the masses to health. In the process she receives a spiritual vision: her “eyes are op'ned” (109.1365), allowing her to look upon the one whose image she reflects. Lanyer's feminist Gospel has come full circle, the life of the countess reproducing the text of Christ himself.

In the final passages of her book, Lanyer reveals that Clifford's representational act surpasses all previous feminine texts, even women in Scripture. Because Margaret Clifford reproduces Christ, she reveals greater love than Cleopatra, deeper piety than Hester, more constancy than Joachim's wife, higher wisdom than the Queen of Sheba. In the course of revealing this last portrait, however, Lanyer pauses to illustrate the reciprocity of the Queen of Sheba's desire for wisdom:

Spirits affect where thy doe sympathize,
Wisdom desires Wisdome to embrace,
Virtue covets her like, and doth devize
How she her friends may entertaine with grace;
Beauty sometime is pleas'd to feed her eyes,
With viewing Beautie in anothers face:
Both good and bad in this point doe agree,
That each desireth with his like to be.

(119.1593-1600)

Through an artful doubling of subject and object Lanyer reveals that the queen desires Solomon because she is like him; she is his mirror image. But she is also a luminous “star” who guides the countess to reflect the divine “Sonne” and, like John the Baptist, to bear witness to his light:

No travels ought th'affected soule to shunne
That this faire heavenly Light desires to see:
This King of kings to whom we all should runne,
To view his Glory and his Majestie;
He without whom we all had been undone,
He that from Sinne and Death hath set us free.

(120.1625-30)

It is finally the “Son” within Margaret Clifford who comes to liberate women by unraveling all patriarchal ways of speaking and writing, a willingness perfectly summed up in Christ's willingness to “undoe the Booke”:

He onely worthy to undoe the Booke
Of our charg'd soules, full of iniquitie,
Where with the eyes of mercy he doth looke
Upon our weakeness and infirmitie,
This is that corner stone that was forsooke,
Who leaves it, trusts but to uncertaintie:
This is Gods Sonne, in whom he is well pleased,
His deere beloved, that his wrath appeased.

(122.1657-64)

Because, as Saint John reveals, “no man in heave nor in earth … was able to open the Boke, neither to loke thereon” (Rev. 5:3), Christ alone can provide this new way of reading; he alone can undo the book. Submitting to the judgment of the Father and the “plots” of men in order to “undoe” them, he discloses himself only at the margins of discourse, in the prophetic and visionary utterances of women. Thus, it is precisely at this moment that he turns his attention upon the Queen of Sheba, granting her the grace and authority that women have been denied:

Of whom that Heathen Queene obtain'd such grace,
By honouring but the shadow of his Love,
That great Judiciall day to have a place,
Condemning those that doe unfaithfull prove;
Among the haplesse, happie is her case,
That her deere Saviour spake for her behove;
And that her memorable Act should be
Writ by the hand of true Eternitie.

(123.1681-88)

Christ validates feminine speech not only by allowing this “Heathen Queene”—a clearly marginal figure—to judge the unfaithful but also by representing her love of wisdom with his own hand. Again following Agrippa, Lanyer foregrounds Matt. 12:41 as the kernel of truth about female speech and writing that patriarchy has suppressed. To all assertions of masculine power and authority, she discloses Christ as the redemptive countertext:

The Pilgrimes travels, and the Shepheards cares,
He tooke upon him to enlarge our soules,
What pride hath lost, humilitie repaires,
For by his glorious death he us inroules
In deepe Characters, writ with blood and teares,
Upon those blessed Everlasting scroules;
His hands, his feete, his body and his face,
Whence freely flow'd the rivers of his grace.

(124.1721-28)

It is only by reducing himself that Christ can “enlarge our soules,” only by coming in humility that he can restore “what pride hath lost,” only by writing in the feminine language of “blood and teares” that he can redeem the book. From this divine communion with human suffering, Lanyer's inspiration flows, spilling over her lines in a lyrical recovery of prophetic truth:

Sweet holy rivers, pure celestiall springs,
Proceeding from the fountaine of our life;
Swift sugred currents that salvation brings,
Cleare chrystall streames, purging all sinne and strife,
Faire floods, where souls do bathe their snow-white wings,
Before they flie to true eternall life:
Sweet Nectar and Ambrosia, food of Saints,
Which, whoso tasteth, never after faints.

(125.1729-36)

Lanyer's language here approaches the apocalyptic, her “currents” carrying redemption and offering the receptive reader a heavenly vision. The concluding stanzas of her poem move progressively toward this glimpse of the eternal as Christ's “hony dropping dew of holy love” (125.1737) enters the mouths and takes form in the words of men who have embraced the same understanding of the Passion. Thus, Stephen, Saint Laurence, Andrew, and John the Baptist, like the women of this text, are completely receptive to divine truth, willing to confront political and religious institutions in prophetic power and even to die at their hands: “Not sparing Kings in what they did not right; / Their noble Actes they seal'd with deerest blood” (128.1813-14). Enacting Christ's passion in a similar willingness to undo patriarchy, their words record the sweetness of the vision they attain. Lanyer closes Salve with a portrait of John the Baptist, the greatest, according to Christ, “among them which are begotten of women” (Matt. 11:11). Because he stands up to a corrupt political system, he dies just as Christ does, “for speaking truth according to Gods Word” (128.1820). But his willingness to justify the divine text by speaking from the margins of society reveals a communion he shares with women, one for which he gives his very life.

In form as well as content, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum embodies Agrippa's subversive rereading of Paul, but it goes one step further: it records the voices of women who have been silenced in the pages of the New Testament and it uncovers the politics of that suppression. Behind these voices Lanyer's own voice can also be heard, a voice that becomes deeply personal only in her final poem “To Cookeham.” Then, in a last rewriting of Genesis, Lanyer takes us to the “tree” where Margaret Clifford led her “by the hand” (136.162), where Clifford offered the Passion to her in the fruit of her own life. To speak in this way, Lanyer reveals, is to be bound in order to liberate, to be “undone” in order to undo. Consequently, Lanyer closes her work by acknowledging the rich chains “tying” her to the countess—tying her to redeem women and the book.

Notes

1. Thomas Brightman, A Revelation of the Apocalypse that is, the Apocalyps of St. John, 698.

2. Suzanne W. Hull discusses the influence of Pauline authority on women (Chaste, Silent, and Obedient, 106-26), and a wide range of criticism offers the same assessment. See, for example, Margaret Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family, 16; Margaret Patterson Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works; Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 22-33; Betty Travitsky, ed., The Paradise of Women, 5; Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing, 1649-1688, 5-11. The quote is from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition. I refer to this translation throughout the article, as the Geneva Bible was the biblical text most often used until 1640. The King James Bible was printed the same year as Lanyer's work.

3. For an analysis of Paul's influence on Renaissance texts in general, see John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible. Coolidge argues that Pauline authority led the Puritans to “feel the old modes of presentation as a form of bondage” (xiii). As I will demonstrate here, a number of writers felt that Paul had not gone far enough. Because Paul placed women under the “law,” he put them in the very “bondage” from which Christ came to liberate them. If women were to gain a voice, the prophetic reading had to be given authority: “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy” (Joel 2:28), the Pauline reading suppressed.

4. Aemilia Lanyer's lengthy passion poem Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum has had a checkered literary history. First emerging under the editorial direction of A. L. Rowse in 1974 and called The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady, Lanyer's text became a footnote to Rowse's thesis—that he had located the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets. For the range of criticism now available, see Esther Gilman Richey, “To Undoe the Booke: Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer, and the Subversion of Pauline Authority,” 107.

5. Lewalski, “Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Ann Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer,” 106; Lewalski, “Of God and Good Women: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer,” 224.

6. Lewalski cites Lanyer's final epistle “To the Vertuous Reader” as a “remarkable contribution to the Querelle des femmes” in “Of God and Good Women” (212), and she analyzes this epistle more completely in “Rewriting Patriarchy and Patronage” (102). Elaine Beilin sees the Querelle as a much larger influence, noting that Lanyer “accomplished her task” by drawing upon the “traditional debate material on the women question”; she makes a direct connection to the early defenses of women, citing Cornelius Agrippa in particular (Redeeming Eve, 179, 323). The Querelle itself has been much discussed. A bibliography of primary texts participating in this tradition is available in Francis Lee Utley's The Crooked Rib. For an analysis of it, see Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, eds., Half Humankind, 3-46; Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient, 106-26; Joan Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400-1789”; Betty Travitsky, “The Lady Doth Protest: Protest in the Popular Writings of Renaissance Englishwomen”; and Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance.

7. In Renaissance Feminism, Jordan says that the argument over woman's postlapsarian status “fueled feminist responses” throughout the sixteenth century (23). These arguments emerge in a number of texts of the Querelle. See, for example, the work of Jane Anger and Esther Sowernam in Half Humankind, ed. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, 172-88, 217-44. William Heale in his An Apologie for Women also offers a compelling reinterpretation of Genesis (60-66).

8. See Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 122-26. For critical commentary on Agrippa and the Querelle, see also Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance. Agrippa's text is, for her, a “personal favorite,” but she “cannot believe it was meant to be taken seriously” (40). Whether or not it was, Agrippa's radical revision of Paul fueled the intellectual debate on the woman question, influencing other writers in the Querelle tradition, among them Aemilia Lanyer.

9. Agrippa's influence in the Renaissance is documented by Charles G. Nauert Jr., who notes that Erasmus, Vives, Rabelais, Sidney, Nashe, Marlowe, Bacon, and Vaughan read his works (Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, 325-26). That Agrippa was recognized as subversive by Renaissance readers is also true. John Harington cites Agrippa as calling the authority of court, priests, lawyers, and physicians into question (Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse, sig. iij2-iiij).

10. I refer specifically to Luce Irigaray's description of the feminine union with the divine on the basis of a “free offering of the self” (Speculum of the Other Woman, 196) and to Helene Cixous's awareness that “the question a woman's text asks is the question of giving” (“Castration or Decapitation”).

11. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of Womankynde, sig. CV1. Future references will be cited parenthetically within the text. A modern edition, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, is also available.

12. Elizabeth Harvey traces the cultural preoccupation with birth metaphors during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the way they informed the writing of male poets, creating “a strange transvestism” (Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts, 79). Aemilia Lanyer not only recognizes this gender coding in the language of Paul but also employs it to authorize her feminist reproduction of the logos.

13. Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, 139. Future references to Lanyer's poetry will be cited parenthetically within the text and will include page and line numbers where appropriate.

14. The name of her prophetic text—like the names of John the Baptist and Christ—is assigned in a dream. See Matt. 1:23 and Luke 1:13.

15. John Donne comments on the epistolary nature of the New Testament, perhaps illuminating Aemilia Lanyer's choice of this form for Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: “They erre not much, that call the whole new Testament Epistle. For, even the gospells are Evangelia, good messages, and that's proper to an Epistle, and the booke of the Acts of the Apostles is superscrib'd by Saint Luke, to one person, Theophilus, and that's proper to an Epistle; and so is the last booke, the booke of Revelation, to the several Churches” (The Sermons of John Donne, 1:285).

16. In this respect, Aemilia Lanyer's understanding—though far more radical—reflects that of Christian humanists such as Erasmus who fused the separate strands of Pauline and Johannine Christianity. For a brief account of this theological position, see Florence Sandler, “The Faerie Queen: An Elizabethan Apocalypse,” 152-53.

17. George Herbert similarly describes Mary as the “holy mine whence came the gold,” in “To all Angels and Saints” (The Works of George Herbert, 77-78).

18. I echo George Herbert's “Jordan (II).” The impure desires of the poet—inextricably woven into their representations of Christ—are mentioned in the works of Donne, Vaughan, and Marvell, to name a few.

19. Here, Aemilia Lanyer's “hand writing” as the OED suggests, is “the action of the hand in writing and its product.” At the same time, Lanyer's “hand” is infinitely reproduced in the darkness of print, a color with which Lanyer associates the feminine reproduction of Christ. See Lorna Hutson, “Why the Lady's eyes are nothing like the sun,” for a similar point (155). Because “darkness” generally signifies the flesh, Herbert describes the Incarnation of Christ as the divine willingness to be “wrapt in nights mantle” (“Christmas,” in Works of Herbert, 81).

20. Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 186; Lynette McGrath, “Metaphoric Subversions: Feasts and Mirrors in Aemilia Lanier's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.”

21. John Jewel, The Works of John Jewel, 258.

22. Ann Baynes Cairo takes the radical dimension of Lanyer's epistolary address to nobility much further by analyzing the sociopolitical dimension (“Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson”).

23. Perhaps this advice is a subtle critique of Anne's love of fine things. According to Beilin, “art historians have vindicated the results of [Anne's] extravagant spending” (Redeeming Eve, 322). Cairo notes a “sustained critique” reflecting at least some resentment (“Writing in Service,” 367).

24. Lanyer here draws on Rev. 12:1: “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sunne, & the moone was under her feete, and upon her head a crowne of twelve starres.” She may be also incorporating apocalyptic commentary like that of John Bale by revising his metaphoric position on women into a literal recognition of their value: “Not Mary Christes mother is this woman, though many hath so fantasyed in ther commentaries. But it is the true Christen church of whom Marye is a most notable member” (Image of Bothe Churches, Dv2).

25. Aemilia Lanyer may be writing her own “dark” appearance into her representation of Christ. That Lanyer was “dark” has been argued by A. L. Rowse, ed., in The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady, 13-14; and contested by Paul Ramsey in “Darkness Lightened: A. L. Rowse's Dark Lady Once More.” Neither writer discusses the extent to which Lanyer refers to her own darkness in Salve.

26. W. Gardner Campbell discusses the fact that a positive and a negative version of Pilate's wife exists in the literary and theological tradition available to Lanyer (“The Figure of Pilate's Wife in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum”).

27. Predating Christine Froula by several centuries, Lanyer unravels the political implications of the Fall by identifying its relationship to canonical interpretation. For Froula's version, see “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy.” Lanyer provides a renaissance version of Elaine Pagels's argument in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.

28. Froula would have found a candidate for her rewriting of the text—her “blank page”—in Aemilia Lanyer, who gives voice in her own text to the fact that “an all powerful male Creator … soothes Adam's fears of female power by Himself claiming credit for the original creation of the world, and further, by bestowing upon Adam “Dominion” (332). In Aemilia Lanyer's text, however, God shifts from male to female representation after Adam's failure—a response, Lanyer indicates, that has been suppressed in Christian tradition.

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