In the history of Western religion, women have had a far more ambiguous relation to the sacred than men. Although women were celebrated in the Hebrew Bible for their heroism and devotion to God, it was men, we are told, who were the priests and prophets chosen for God's service. With the destruction of the temple in 70 c.e., the study of the sacred Torah became exclusively the province of males, and the rabbis replaced the priests, while women engaged in practical, domestic roles supporting the spirituality of the male scholars. In some ways, the advent of Christianity might have marked a change in women's relation to the sacred, for Christ's teachings could be seen as giving women equal access to the divine—“there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28); the fact that all believers, male and female, are “sonness” of Christ (e.g., Gal. 4:6-7) and strive to be his “spouse” (e.g., Matt. 25:1-13) might minimize gender as well as class differences.¹ But there were other passages in the New Testament that implicitly placed women at a farther remove from the sacred than men. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:4-8 insists that women in church must be “covered” as a sign of their inferiority and subjection.² Whereas men can freely “prophecy” in the church, Paul orders women to “keepe silence” there, instead asking their husbands “at home” about spiritual matters, over which men are presumed to have more authority (1 Cor. 14:34-35).

As the work of Elaine Pagels, Peter Brown, and Caroline Bynum has shown, the growth of the church as an institution reveals both the importance of women's devotion and the ways in which women were distanced from authoritative, direct contact with the divine. The early centuries of the church saw women martyrs, patrons of the church, and ascetics, though the church fathers encouraged a sense of women's remove from the sacred by associating woman and the feminine with the body or “flesh,” and by presenting marriage as a model of Christian order in which women's “subjection” to their husbands mirrors both the hierarchical order of society and the body's proper subjection to the rule of the soul.³ From the late twelfth through the fourteenth century, women saints and mystics cultivated and displayed their spirituality, insisting on women's special, intimate connection with God.⁴ But as the church grew, so did the power of the priests and bishops, and restrictions were placed on women's activities within the sacred church.⁵

In some ways, the Protestant Reformation actually deepened the distance between women and the sacred. In getting rid of monastic orders and religious houses, it deprived women of a special form of sacred experience. In rejecting the adoration of the Virgin Mary and the female saints, it eliminated important models as well as objects for women's devotion. Moreover, Protestantism associated the “feminine” with the supposed “carnal idolatry” of Roman Catholicism.⁶ But Protestantism also had the potential to give women equal access with men to the sacred.⁷ All were “brethren” in God, all people could know God through reading the Scriptures, and women as well as men could be touched by God's grace.

Aemilia Lanyer's own relation to the sacred has seemed particularly ambiguous. In 1611, she published a single volume of poetry which presented itself as sacred verse, but our contemporary source of information about Lanyer, Simon Forman, presents her in his diary entries as a woman very much of the world—the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, who married Alfonso Lanyer to cover an illegitimate pregnancy, who sought a knighthood for her husband and took her brothers-in-law to court to secure her late husband's custom patent. Her reputation for holiness has not been helped by A. L. Rowse's inference from Forman's diary that she was promiscuous, or his speculation that she was Shakespeare's “dark lady.”⁸ Even Barbara Lewalski has questioned the appropriateness of calling Lanyer's poetry religious, for she finds the poems notably worldly in their concern with patronage.⁹ I would argue, however, that, for all its concern with patronage, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum asks to be taken seriously as religious poetry that adopts Christ's message to give a special place to women in devotion. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum has a claim to our interest, not only as one of the first substantial volumes of poetry published by a woman in England, but also because it is a significant cultural document expanding our understanding of women's religious roles. In her poetry, Lanyer is a biblical interpreter who claims the status of a true apostle of Christ and even assumes a quasi-priestly role. The importance of the Salve becomes clearer when read within the broad historical context of woman's vexed relation with the sacred as well as within the specific historical context of the Protestant culture of early Jacobean England—a culture that assumed women did not have as privileged a connection with God as men, but that also sanctioned the individual reader's authority to interpret the Bible.

With the accession of James I in 1603, the dominant structure of power shaping English culture and society became more distinctly patriarchal than it had been in Elizabeth's reign. As a female ruler, Queen Elizabeth had violated the traditional assumption that women were subject to men. Though it has been argued that Elizabeth's example was the exception that proved the rule of patriarchy, the very existence of a woman monarch destabilized the traditional gender hierarchy. Moreover, in constructing her monarchical authority, Elizabeth appropriated the symbols and imagery of the Virgin Mary, attempting to give religious sanction to her political rule and also implicitly preserving a powerful role for female spirituality. During her long reign, she served as head of the English Church as well as the state, thus assuming a spiritual authority that had been presumed to belong only to Protestant kings. But with the death of Elizabeth, a male figure of monarchical power replaced that of the Virgin Queen, and James promoted a rigorously patriarchal authority in both church and state. Whereas the English Church had followed the Catholic practice of allowing women as well as lay men to baptize in an emergency, James insisted in 1604 that only ministers could baptize, thus restricting women's role in the Church as he reinforced the distance between clergy and laity (Crawford, p. 56). Masculine authority was also emphasized in the king's writings and speeches, as James figured himself as husband and father of the realm. Clearly preferring the company and advice of men, he created a court with a strongly homosocial and patriarchal ethos.¹⁰ But as Leeds Barroll and Barbara Lewalski have shown, this patriarchal ethos did not go unchallenged. James's wife, Queen Anne, established a separate court, which “provided a locus, unstable yet influential, of female resistance” to the ethos and policies of James's court.¹¹ This sense of a female alternative to the male nexus of power—both secular and sacred—informs Lanyer's poem. In her prefatory poems, Lanyer looks back nostalgically to the reign of Elizabeth but in dedicating the volume to Queen Anne and the powerful noblewomen associated with her, Lanyer attempts to attach herself to Anne's court as it provided a female-centered alternative to James's.

Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum appeared in 1611, the same year as the King James Bible, the work of Launcelot Andrewes and a group of distinguished divines commissioned by James to provide “an exact Translation of the holy Scriptures into the English Tongue.”¹² In the very year that the “Authorized Version” of the Bible was published, founded on the Protestant belief that every Christian should be able to read the Bible in the vernacular, and dedicated to King James as “the principall moover and Author of the Worke” (sig. A2v), Aemelia Lanyer published her version of the Passion, proclaimed her authority as a woman to read and interpret the Bible, and asked for the queen's patronage of her work. Might we not, then, see the Salve as in some sense constituting an oppositional alternative to the monumental biblical project of James?

Though, as Lewalski observes, religious poetry was considered more appropriate than secular verse for women (Lewalski, “Re-writing Patriarchy,” p. 98), Salve Deus is hardly a conventional, modestly pious poem for a woman. Whereas the institution of the Church had increasingly restricted women's roles, Salve Deus places women at the heart of the sacred: it is introduced by ten dedicatory pieces to prospective or actual women patronesses and a prose address to her “Virtuous Readers” (defined as exclusively female), which defends the special affection and distinction Christ showed to women. The principal poem is a narrative of Christ's Passion that also contains a lengthy panegyric frame praising Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, as a virtuous woman and spouse of Christ, a catalogue of good women in biblical and classical history, and a description of the Queen of Sheba as exemplary of female spiritual devotion. As an epilogue, the country-house poem “The Description of Cooke-ham” presents the estate where Margaret Clifford lived as a spiritual retreat where women had a special connection with the holy. Though, as Elaine Beilin recognizes, women's relation with the sacred pervades the entire volume (Redeeming Eve, pp. 177-207), it is particularly striking in Lanyer's bold version of Christ's Passion that literally forms the center of the Salve. I will argue that, defying powerful cultural restrictions, Lanyer presents her poem as a true gospel, inspired and authorized by God, offering a distinctive version of the significance of Christ's Passion, bearing a message for social as well as spiritual change, and founded on a critical and independent reading of the Scriptures that recognizes the New Testament as not simply the Word of God but a series of texts, written by men, in which all parts are not equally authoritative. In reading the Bible, she discovers a disturbing discontinuity between Christ's teachings and those of his disciples.

Paul's advice that women remain “silent” in the church not only discouraged women's speaking publicly about religious matters but also suggested that men possessed greater authority about spiritual concerns—hence their freedom to prophecy and the subsequent selection of men as priests in the church. Paul's comments about women's “place” would be radically challenged in the foment of the Civil War years, when radical women of the 1640s and '50s took it upon themselves to preach or prophecy, claiming special inspiration from God. But the conduct books of the early seventeenth century and the “Homilie of the state of Matrimonie,” read regularly in every church during Elizabeth's and James's reigns, encouraged the silence of women, not only in the church but even within the home. Women's silence was a mark of their subjection, a subjection which confirmed the order of society as founded on the obedience of people to their superiors.¹³

Lanyer's “preamble” before the Passion makes clear her awareness that she is violating the social codes sanctioned by these books and by Paul's foundational verses that women be “covered” and “silent” in the church.

But my deare Muse, now whither wouldst thou flie,
Above the pitch of thy appointed straine?
With Icarus thou seekest now to trie,
Not waxen wings, but thy poore barren Braine,
Which farre too weake, these siely lines descrie.

[ll. 273-77]

Aware that in seeking to narrate and interpret Christ's Passion she is transgressing the “appointed” boundaries for a woman (her insistent consciousness of gender makes these lines more than the conventional humility topos), she prays for God's “Grace”:

Therefore I humbly for his Grace will pray,
That he will give me Power and Strength to Write,
That what I have begun, so end I may,
As his great Glory may appeare more bright;
Yea in these Lines I may no further stray,
Than his most holy Spirit shall give me Light:
          That blindest Weakenesse be not over-bold,
          The manner of his Passion to unfold.
…
Yet if he please t'illuminate my Spirit,
And give me Wisdom from his holy Hill,
That I may Write part of his glorious Merit,
If he vouchsafe to guide my Hand and Quill,
To shew his Death, by which we doe inherit
Those endlesse Joyes that all our hearts doe fill
          Then will I tell of that sad blacke fac'd Night,
          Whose mourning Mantle covered Heavenly Light.

[ll. 297-304, 321-28]

Like the women prophets during the English Revolution and like Milton in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Lanyer invokes divine inspiration, hence insisting on divine authority for what she will speak. Her prayer recalls Matthew's and Mark's accounts in the New Testament that when Christ sent out his Apostles to preach the Gospel, he told them: “take no thought how or what ye shall speake: for it shal be given you in that houre, what yee shall say. For it is not yee that speake, but the spirit of your father which speaketh in you” (Matt. 10:19-20; cf. Mark 13:11). She extends the argument still further, suggesting that her very “Weakeness” makes God's glory shine more fully, as if she is simply a medium for transmitting God's truth. But by publishing her interpretation of the Passion and its significance for humanity—a version which, like Milton's versions of biblical truth in his epics, will include significant departures from tradition and original additions—she defies Paul's prohibition against women's speaking publicly about religion, suggesting, as she will do later in the poem, that women are more qualified than men since in their weakness and humility they are closer to God and more open to his grace:

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.

[ll. 289-92]

Echoing Christ's privileging of the poor, humble, and weak, Lanyer suggests that the traditionally masculine faculty of reason (“Sence”), like the masculine “Sexe,” in its supposed strength competes with and hence may exclude divine illumination. If she is led by God's spirit and his hand guides her “Quill,” then her poem will be “true,” even perhaps in the sense that the Gospels, written by men visited by the spirit of God, are “true.”¹⁴ Like Milton, later she implies that biblical truth is not “fixed” but that God may grant later, additional revelations. Lanyer cites evidence of being favored by divine illumination when she claims in a final note “To the doubtfull Reader” that she received the title for the work “in sleepe many yeares before” (p. 139). In the prayer for divine inspiration, which introduces her narrative of Christ's Passion, she not only follows in the footsteps of those holy women of early Christianity and of the later Middle Ages who claimed to be filled by the spirit of God, but also raises the possibility that a woman could be chosen to be a true witness of God, a belated “author” of the Gospel of Christ. As she says with a simplicity born of confidence: “I was appointed to performe this Worke” (p. 139)—not by men but by God. Like the Gospels the male disciples wrote after the death of Christ, Aemilia Lanyer's, as we shall see, bears revolutionary messages radically at odds with the dominant values of the contemporary society and the institution of the church.¹⁵ Using the gospel form, she revives the gospel tradition of subverting worldly authority.

Lanyer's version of the Passion of Christ is a mixture of the conventional and the original. All the “facts” and incidents are taken from the New Testament; her language is often close to the Bible—both when she describes the key events and when she praises Christ in terms taken from the Song of Songs, which had for centuries of Christian exegesis been understood to describe the reciprocal love between Christ and the Church. She draws her narrative of the Passion from the accounts in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but she takes on herself the ability to interpret the Bible, guided by grace, and emphasizes the distinctive roles that women and men played in their relations to Christ. Her confidence that she has interpreted the Bible correctly is evident in her challenge to Queene Anne: “judge if it agree not with the Text” (“To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie,” l. 76).

The story she tells is one of men's betrayal and women's faith. Following Matthew and Mark closely, she recounts how on “That very Night our Saviour was betrayed,” Christ “told his deere Disciples that they all / Should be offended by him” and forsake him (ll. 329, 337-38; cf. Matt. 26:31-33, Mark 14: 27-29), how Peter who “thought his Faith could never fall” and protested his constancy would before morning “deny” Christ three times (ll. 341, 345-46; cf. Matt. 26:34-35, Mark 14:30-31, Luke 22:33-34, John 13:37-38), and how Christ in Gethsemane told Peter and “the sonnes of Zebed'us” (James and John) of his sorrows (ll. 369-76) only to have them fall asleep rather than watch through the night (Matt. 26:40-45, Mark 14:37-38, Luke 22:45). While Matthew, Mark, and Luke (but not John) mention the sleeping apostles, Lanyer gives far more attention to this detail, drawing out its symbolic and spiritual significance:

But now returning to thy sleeping Friends,
That could not watch one houre for love of thee,
Even those three Friends, which on thy Grace depends,
Yet shut those Eies that should their Maker see;
What colour, what excuse, or what amends,
From thy Displeasure now can set them free?
          Yet thy pure Pietie bids them Watch and Pray,
          Lest in Temptation they be led away.
Although the Spirit was willing to obay,
Yet what great weakenesse in the Flesh was found!
They slept in Ease, whilst thou in Paine didst pray;
Loe, they in Sleepe, and thou in Sorow drown'd.

[ll. 417-28; cf. Mark 13:38]

But the sleep of the apostles signifies not just the inescapable weakness of the body—it is a defect of the heart: “Their eyes were heavie, and their hearts asleepe” (l. 465). The ominous sleeping, the fatal inattentiveness to Christ, anticipates their disloyalty when Christ's “foes” come to seize him: “all his deere Disciples do forsake him” (ll. 623-24).

Those deare Disciples that he most did love,
And were attendant at his becke and call,
When triall of affliction came to prove,
They first left him, who now must leave them all:
For they were earth, and he came from above,
Which made them apt to flie, and fit to fall:
          Though they protest they never will forsake him,
          They do like men, when dangers overtake them.

[ll. 625-32]

If Christ's apostles, his closest friends, “forsake” him, what can one expect of his enemies? Lanyer makes explicit what is implicit in the biblical accounts, that those responsible for Christ's death were all men: the Jewish high priest Caiaphas; the witnesses who make false charges; Judas, whose example shows that only “faithlesse dealing” “can be expected / From wicked Man” (ll. 737-39); Pontius Pilate, who consents to Christ's death and frees Barrabas; King Herod; the “Crier” and the “Hangman” (ll. 961, 963); and the “spightfull men [who] with torments did oppresse / Th'afflicted body” of Christ (ll. 993-94).

In sharp contrast to these men—who are guilty of contributing to Christ's death through evil, cowardice, or (in the case of Pilate) the desire to please Caesar (ll. 919-20)—are the women. Again relying closely on the New Testament Gospels for her evidence, but particularly on Luke, who distinctly emphasizes the importance of women in Christ's life, Lanyer presents women as the only ones to recognize Christ's innocence, remain constant in their devotion, and be moved by compassion.¹⁶ The tears of the Jewish women of Jerusalem elicit Christ's “grace” as he comforts them (Luke 23:27), though they cannot touch the men, whose “hearts [are] more hard than flint, or marble stone” (ll. 975, 1002). Elaborating on John's remark that Mary “stood by the cross of Jesus” (John 19:25), the poem describes the sorrows of the Virgin Mary, presenting her as a model of devotion (ll. 1009-1104, 1129-36). Lanyer's extended attention to this “Blessed” “Mother of our Lord” (ll. 1032, 1031) recalls and perhaps revives the devotion to the Virgin Mary that blossomed in medieval Catholicism but withered with Protestantism.¹⁷ But it is Pilate's wife who drives home Lanyer's point that the women are the true believers and who articulates the significance of Christ's Passion, a significance Lanyer finds implicit in the New Testament accounts but either unobserved or suppressed by male writers who have interpreted the Passion.

The role of Pilate's wife is her most original and startling addition to the narrative of the Crucifixion. The Gospel according to Matthew mentions in passing, “Also when hee [Pilate] was set downe upon the judgement seate, his wife sent to him, saying, Have thou nothing to doe with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dreame by reason of him” (Matt. 27:19). But Lanyer expands the episode, giving the wife a ten-stanza speech that defends Jesus, offers an “Apologie” for Eve, and asserts women's rightful liberty. It is this speech that has struck her readers as most radical. Lanyer's earlier claim that she receives “divine illumination” in writing her poem sanctions her invention of this speech, authorizing her version, which adds to the known Gospels of the New Testament, much as Milton later in Paradise Regained will invoke God's special inspiration in order to write what had been “unrecorded left through many an Age” about the temptations of Christ.¹⁸ The argument of Pilate's wife's speech deserves further attention for its centrality in Lanyer's interpretation of the Crucifixion's significance.

The section begins as Lanyer, addressing Pilate, who is about to judge “faultlesse Jesus” (l. 746), tells him in close paraphrase of Matthew 27:19 to “heare the words of thy most worthy wife, / Who sends to thee, to beg her Saviours life” (ll. 751-52). It ends ten stanzas later as Lanyer paraphrases the last part of Matthew's verse:

Witnesse thy wife (O Pilate) speakes for all;
Who did but dreame, and yet a message sent,
That thou should'st have nothing to doe at all
With that just man.

[ll. 834-37]

The stanzas in between are the “message” or “words” that Pilate's wife sent, though a certain indeterminacy of voice has led some critics to suggest this is Lanyer's speech rather than that of Pilate's wife (Hutson, p. 170; Lewalski, “Rewriting Patriarchy,” p. 103). The confusion of voice is significant, for the poet's identification with Pilate's wife—a woman who also had a dream, whose knowledge came from divine illumination—allows her to speak with and for her. The implication is that both women have not only interpretive power but the right and responsibility to speak publicly. The words of both women violate the codes of their respective societies that encourage the silence of women and their subordination to the authority of husbands. Far from yielding to her husband, Pilate's wife advises him, judges Jesus more justly, and makes her “words” public, sending them to him. Thus in her intervention, Pilate's wife provides Lanyer with an example for the role she herself assumes in publishing her devotional poem. That the wife's words went unrecorded in Matthew (and Matthew is the only apostle to mention her) may suggest the silencing of women's words by the men who wrote the Gospels, or their blindness to their importance—an omission Lanyer is out to correct.

The warning to Pilate to “open thine eyes” yields to a defense of Eve contrasting her small, innocent sin with the sin Pilate commits in condemning Jesus. In Lanyer's reading of the brief narrative of the Fall in Genesis—the text that, subjected to the exegesis of men throughout history, had been used to sanction the authority of men and the inferiority and submission of women to their husbands—Eve appears “simply good” (l. 765), possessing an “undiscerning Ignorance” that allowed her to be “deceav'd” by the “cunning” of the “subtile Serpent” (ll. 769, 773, 769). Though Lanyer's indictment of Adam as “most too blame” (l. 778) because he was stronger and “Lord and King of all” (l. 783) may seem sophistical, her emphasis on Eve's simplicity and on her generous nature (her “fault was onely too much love, / Which made her give this present to her Deare,” ll. 801-2) could be considered a plausible interpretation of the biblical account (Gen. 3:1-6). Even more important, however, in a single move that overturns centuries of exegesis, Lanyer turns Eve's credulity into a virtue, much as she had turned her own weakness of “Sexe” and “Sense” into a strength. For Eve's credulity is presented as an innate tendency to believe and trust, that is, a disposition to faith—and thus her simple credulity links her to the receptive, humble faith that the Virgin Mary shows in receiving the visitation from God (she “could hardly apprehend” Gabriel's “salutation,” “Nor couldst [she] judge, whereto those words did tend,” ll. 1058-60) and to the faith of all the women who believe in Christ and instinctively acknowledge his innocence and divinity. The credulity and gullibility of Eve is but the reverse side of the faith that sustains these women and distinguishes them from the men who, either weak in faith or moved by hate rather than love, are complicit in the Crucifixion.

Because Pilate's act is far worse than Eve's sin, it lessens her guilt: Eve's “weakenesse did the Serpents words obay; / But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray” (ll. 815-16). While Lanyer follows Genesis in acknowledging that men “had power given to over-rule us all” (l. 760; cf. Gen. 3:16), she argues that Pilate's sin—and by extension men's role in crucifying Christ—invalidates and revokes God's sentence subjecting Eve and her female descendents to their husbands' authority. If Pilate condemns Jesus to die,

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

[ll. 818-20, 823-32]

Here in this crucial passage, Lanyer offers a new understanding of the significance of Christ's crucifixion. Rather than simply following the tradition from Paul and Augustine through Luther and Calvin that interprets the Crucifixion as generally abrogating the human bondage to sin, to the flesh, and to the Mosaic laws that Christians believed were the mark of human bondage to sin, Lanyer sees it as, in addition, specifically redeeming women, liberating them from their subjection to men under the Law.¹⁹ Just as the “sleeping” apostles and the otherwise treacherous men failed to see what the women saw in Christ, so Lanyer implies that throughout the history of Christianity the male apostles who interpreted the events of the Passion and, after them, the male interpreters of the Bible have failed not only to recognize women's devotion to the sacred but also to understand the full significance of the events surrounding the Crucifixion. Though her version of the Passion is closely based on the “facts” and words of the New Testament, her interpretation is independent of church tradition. Identifying with the women who from the beginning accepted Jesus, and especially with Pilate's wife, Lanyer claims the authority to interpret the Bible and the meaning of Christ's Crucifixion for humankind. In her Gospel, Christ's Passion reverses the order that gave men “power … to over-rule us all,” undoing the punishment that God placed on Eve and cancelling the bondage of women. Speaking through and with Pilate's wife, as if she were present at Christ's Passion, Lanyer insists that now—with Pilate's condemnation of Jesus—there is a new dispensation that should make women the “equals” of men, “free” from their “tyranny.” But the fact that she is also writing in seventeenth-century England and protesting the continued subjection of women suggests that Christ's redemption, which should have changed the social order, has yet to be enacted on earth.

For Lanyer, Christ's Passion and his teachings bear significance for transforming the secular order of society as well as humans' spiritual relation with God. Recalling the early Christians and anticipating the radical Protestants of the mid-seventeenth-century English Civil War, Lanyer recognizes the radical message of Christ's life and death for reordering society. Many of the teachings of Jesus were socially revolutionary. The pronouncements that the last shall be first, and that the meek shall inherit the earth, inverted the social and economic orders of secular society and thus were considered dangerously subversive in the centuries before Christianity became the established religion of Rome. Similarly defiant of the contemporary social order were Christ's teachings suggesting that the true Christian should cast off the bonds of marriage and family to follow Christ: “if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26); “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife” (1 Cor. 7:32-33). For all the seeming worldliness of Lanyer's concern for patronage, she recaptures something of the revolutionary spirit of Christianity in her interpretation of the Passion as calling for a radical reordering of society even in her own time. Properly understood, Lanyer suggests, Christianity undoes not only the power hierarchy in which the strong dominate the weak, but also the socially constructed gender hierarchy in which men rule over women—an order that characterized early seventeenth-century England much as it did Roman and Jewish societies in the time of Christ, and that was inscribed in the social codes of marriage that were understood to uphold the larger social order.

In early seventeenth-century England, marriage, far from circumscribing a fully private sphere, was part of the public world. Like the homily on marriage, the numerous marriage conduct books, with their various prescriptions for women's obedience, all assume the value of marriage in sustaining the order of society. While it is often mentioned that the marital conduct books of this period show the Puritan valuing of companionate marriage (in contrast to the supposed Catholic privileging of celibacy and virginity), in Protestant England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries marriage was particularly valued because it was understood to embody, encourage, and preserve a hierarchical social order. Domestic order mirrors and breeds order within the church and state. As Robert Cleaver puts it in A Godly Forme of Houshold Government, “a Household is as it were a little Common-wealth.”²⁰ Given this close connection between marriage and the social order, it is far from coincidental that Aemelia Lanyer's poem, with its socially radical interpretation of the Passion as offering a new liberty to women, also implicitly rejects the institution of marriage.

Lanyer praises those women whose devotion to Christ has taken the place of earthly, human marriages: the Virgin Mary, who is “Farre from desire of any man” (l. 1077, her marriage to Joseph is erased from Lanyer's text), and Margaret Clifford, who as a widow refuses to entertain the “desires / Of idle Lovers” (ll. 1550-51) and is completely faithful to Christ, whom she has chosen to be her sole “Lord” and “Lover” (ll. 1705, 1398). Her prefatory poems encourage women to take Christ as their bridegroom, to put on “wedding garments” (“To all vertuous Ladies in generall,” l. 8) and take him into “your soules pure bed” (“To the Ladie Susan,” l. 42). In Salve Deus, she tells Margaret Clifford that Christ is the “Bridegroome” from whom she “shalt never be estrang'd” (ll. 77, 60)—a phrase that evokes the countess's former unhappy marriage, in which for a number of years she lived apart from her philandering husband. Drawing on the familiar biblical analogy between human marriage and the relation between the individual believer (or the Church) and Christ, particularly as developed in centuries of Christian interpretations of the Song of Songs, Lanyer presents Christ as the only “true” “Lover” (l. 1267), the only husband a woman needs.

This is that Bridegroome that appeares so faire,
So sweet, so lovely in his Spouses sight,
That unto Snowe we may his face compare,
His cheekes like skarlet, and his eyes so bright
As purest Doves that in the rivers are,
Washed with milke, to give the more delight;
          His head is likened to the finest gold,
          His curled lockes so beauteous to behold;
Blacke as a Raven in her blackest hew;
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,
His cheekes are beds of spices, flowers sweet;
          His lips, like Lillies, dropping downe pure mirrhe,
          Whose love, before all worlds we doe preferre.

[ll. 1305-20]

In a sense, this appropriation of the Song of Songs is conventional, as is her eroticization of the relationship between the countess and Christ: the language of human, erotic love is the only language we have for apprehending divine, spiritual love. But rather than emphasizing the congruence between secular and sacred love, Lanyer draws the analogy only to reject secular love, arguing that Christ is the only true object of our love and fulfills all our desires. Whereas the interpretations of the Song of Songs in the Middle Ages saw Solomon and Sheba's marriage not only as describing the relation between Christ and the Church but as validating or sacramentalizing human marriage and thus supporting the social order (Astell, pp. 31, 63, 179), Lanyer's reading of the Song of Songs ultimately points to a rejection of earthly marriage. Although Lanyer's praise of the Queen of Sheba might initially seem to validate a reordered human marriage in emphasizing the equality between Solomon and Sheba (“Here Majestie with Majestie did meete, / Wisdome to Wisdome yeelded true content,” ll. 1585-86) and celebrating female agency (she fearlessly travels over “sea and land” to pursue her “Desire,” ll. 1604-1601), the example of Solomon and Sheba actually yields to the greater example of Margaret's passion for Christ, which leaves actual, secular marriage behind as something no longer necessary for the fulfilment of Christian women:

Yet this rare Phoenix of that worne-out age,
This great majesticke Queene comes short of thee,
Who to an earthly Prince did then ingage
Her hearts desires, her love, her libertie,
Acting her glorious part upon a Stage
Of weaknesse, frailtie, and infirmity:
          Giving all honour to a Creature, due
          To her Creator, whom shee never knew.
But loe, a greater thou hast sought and found
Than Salomon in all his royaltie;
And unto him thy faith most firmely bound
To serve and honour him continually.

[ll. 1689-1700]

Ultimately, the Salve uses the language of love and marriage to reject marriage in favour of a celibacy that recalls not so much the Catholic privileging of virginity as the socially revolutionary stance of those women and men in the early centuries of Christianity who, following Christ's teachings, chose virginity, repudiating the institution of marriage that was the foundation of their society, and disdaining to perpetuate that society by producing offspring.²¹ The rejection of secular marriage in the Salve may also recall Queen Elizabeth's refusal to marry so as not to compromise her authority by having a man “over” her. Whatever one makes of Lanyer's position as mistress of Lord Hunsdon in the early 1590s, her 1611 poem, with its revolutionary gospel spirit, its sense of exclusive devotion to Christ, its sense that earthly loves and marriages conflict with marriage to God, aligns itself with those passages in the New Testament in which Christ teaches that “The children of this world marrie and are married. But they which shalbe counted worthy to enjoy that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marrie wives, nor are married” (Luke 20:34-35; cf. Matt. 22:30). It is notable that many of the women she dedicated her poetry to were in some sense independent of, or in conflict with, the authority of husbands.²² Moreover, while her inclusion of mothers and daughters seems to emphasize family and lineage, sons and husbands are conspicuously absent in her addresses to contemporary women—almost as if these women, as she says of Christ, exist “without the assistance of man” (“To the Vertuous Reader,” p. 49).

The rejection of marriage in the Salve is an integral part of Aemilia Lanyer's socially radical understanding of the meaning of Christ's Passion. To reject marriage is to undo the hierarchical social order in which men rule over women, thus freeing women from bondage to men and thus fulfilling the redemptive significance of Christ's Passion. If the goal of life is union with Christ in heaven at the end of the world, then marriage, with its commitment to reproduction, only delays that goal. Moreover, for a woman to choose Christ as her only Spouse, her true lover, is not just to be devoted to God but to reject the authority of any earthly husband, an authority understood in early seventeenth-century England to be representative of the authority of all earthly magistrates, particularly the king. Hence her argument has strongly subversive implications. King James well expressed this notion of the symbolic authority of husbands when, in his speech to his first English Parliament (19 March 1603), he compared the union between the monarch and his subjects to marriage: “I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife. I am the Head, and it is my Body” (Political Works, p. 272).

James's comment here, which genders the notion of obedience as it insists on the interconnection between marital and political order, echoes Paul's comments in Ephesians comparing a well-ordered marriage to the relation between Christ and the Church:

Wives, submit your selves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the wives head, even as Christ is the head of the Church, and the same is the saviour of his body. Therefore as the Church is in subjection to Christ, even so let the wives bee to their husbands in every thing. … So ought men to love their wives, as their owne bodies: he that loveth his wife, loveth himselfe. … This is a great secret, but I speak concerning Christ, and concerning the Church. Therefore every one of you, doe yee so: let every one love his wife, even as himselfe, and let the wife see that shee feare her husband.

[Ephesians 5:22-24, 28, 32-33]

Paul's analogy identifies the husband with Christ and the head, the wife with the Church and the body, defining a mutual dependence and “love” based on woman's “subjection” and “submission,” which is seen as necessary for a well-ordered society. These foundational verses from Ephesians, as well as other New Testament verses on marriage in which the apostles gave prescriptions for women's behavior, were enormously influential in Lanyer's time.²³ Cited in the “Homilie on … Matrimonie” and marital conduct treatises, they were used to give religious sanction to the established social and political order. Frances Dillingham's Christian Oeconomy opens with the passage from Colossians 3:18, “wives subject yourselves to your husbands, as it is meete in the Lord,” and quotes Paul's advice in 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I permit not a woman to teach, neither to usurpe authoritie over the man, but to be in silence”). Robert Cleaver's A Godly Forme of Household Government, the most popular of these books (it went through nine editions between 1598 and 1624), repeatedly cites Ephesians 5:22-27 to encourage wives' obedience to their husbands, sometimes invoking a number of biblical passages in powerful combination: “wives [should] submit themselves, and be obedient to their owne husbands, as to the Lord, because the husband is by Gods ordinance, the wives head, … and therefore she oweth her subjection to him, like as the Church doth to Christ; and because [of] the example of Sarah, the mother of the faithfull, which obeyed Abraham and called him Lord” (Ephes. 5:22, 1 Cor. 11:3, 1 Pet. 3:6, Ephes. 5:24, cited in margin).²⁴

Perhaps these conduct books, with all their emphasis on women's subjection, described an ideal at odds with actual practice. The point I wish to make, however, is that in all these treatises the apostles, particularly Paul and Peter, are understood to provide unshakable biblical authority for prescriptions about domestic order, seen as the basis of all order in society. These apostolic verses are precisely the ones Lanyer so insistently defies in the Salve, as she gives women a public voice, insists on their equality or even superiority, and argues against the authority of men to rule them.²⁵ The argument of the entire poem, as well as of “Eves Apologie,” constitutes a firm rejection of those New Testament verses in which the apostles rigorously prescribed wives' submission to the authority of their husbands. The evidence of Lanyer's poem thus suggests her recognition of a fundamental contradiction or discontinuity between Christ's teachings, which subverted the social order of Roman and Jewish society and emphasized the equality of the sexes, and those interpretations of Christ's message by his disciples that perpetuated the subjection of women.

The Salve reveals a surprisingly sophisticated hermeneutics, touched by a skepticism about the Bible one would not expect to find in the seventeenth century, for she clearly distinguishes between, on the one hand, Jesus's words and the “facts” of the Gospels and, on the other, the moral, domestic, and social prescriptions concerning women made by the male disciples and authors of the books of the New Testament. In a fundamentally Protestant move, Lanyer returns to the words of Christ, rejecting later human interpretations and accretions. But she goes considerably further than most of her Protestant contemporaries, for she rejects many of the apostolic texts themselves as corruptions of Christ's teachings. A discriminating reader of the text of the Bible, she suggests that all of its words are not equally inspired and authoritative. For Lanyer, the prescriptions of Paul and the other disciples for ordering/subjecting women and for silencing them in the Church—principles at odds with the teachings and actions of Christ as recorded in the Bible—prove to be misinterpretations of Christ's message that, supported by centuries of Christian commentary, have perpetuated the very bondage the Crucifixion was to have abrogated.

Finally, it is not only confidence in divine inspiration that allows Lanyer to claim religious authority; it is also her identification with a uniquely privileged woman, the Virgin Mary. Her description of the “blessed Virgin” (l. 1025)—of “meane estate” and “lowly mind,” “hardly [able to] apprehend” Gabriel's salutation, yet deserving that “the Holy Ghost should … overshadow thee” (ll. 1034-35, 1058-59, 1082-84)—mirrors Lanyer's sense of herself as lowly (“To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie,” ll. 109-14, 127-28), “Weake” in “Sexe” and “Sense,” and fully receptive to God's grace and illumination (ll. 289-302). In what is perhaps a Protestant revision of Catholic mariolatry, the Virgin Mary becomes a pattern for the individual woman's unmediated connection with the divine. Like the Virgin Mary, Lanyer has been “chosen” to be a vessel for Christ (“To the doubtfull Reader”; cf. Salve Deus, l. 1030). Thus her poem contains Christ. She presents his “picture” as something the Countess of Cumberland can keep in her “heart” and draw spiritual nourishment from (ll. 1325-28). But her prose dedication to the countess insists she is offering not simply an image or picture, but God himself: “Right Honourable and Excellent Lady … I present unto you even our Lord Jesus himselfe. … Therefore good Madame, to the most perfect eyes of your understanding, I deliver the inestimable treasure of all elected soules, to bee perused at convenient times” (pp. 34-35; italics mine).²⁶ The language here suggests that she is like the priests of the church who in celebrating Holy Communion offer Christ to the congregation.²⁷ Finding in Mary a precedent for a female priesthood, for woman's worthiness to contain and offer up God for human salvation, Lanyer thus assumes for herself something like the public, priestly power denied to women within the institution of the Christian church. In this assumption of a priestly function, she turns to women's advantage the Protestant emphasis on the priesthood of all believers. But she is also a true descendent of the early Christian women who believed they had the right to preach and even baptize, and of the medieval holy women who, as Bynum says, “saw themselves as authorized to teach, counsel, serve, and heal by mystical experience rather than by office” (Holy Feast, p. 235) and thus challenged the exclusive, intimate connection with God enjoyed by the priest.²⁸ Lanyer's presumption of this authority was certainly radical in 1611. But even today, the idea that women might bear priestly authority remains intensely controversial—witness the furor over the decision to allow the ordination of women in the Church of England, a decision prompting clergy as well lay Anglicans to consider conversion to Roman Catholicism. Claiming the authority to reinterpret the Bible and the significance of the Crucifixion, joining the ranks of the (male) apostles and correcting their prescriptions for human behavior where they diverge from what seems to her the message of Jesus, Aemilia Lanyer takes the next logical step and defies the assumption that the priesthood is an exclusively male privilege.

Notes

1. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), esp. ch. 1 (pp. 5-32), discusses Christianity within the cultural context not only of Rome but of the first-century Jews. See also Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988). On women's roles in early Judaism and early Christianity, see Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983). On the discontinuities about woman implicit in the two creation stories in Genesis, and their complex development through centuries of Christian tradition, see James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). New Testament references are to the Geneva Bible (1602 ed.); i/j and u/v have been modernized.

2. The marginal annotations on these passages in the 1607 printing of the third (1602) ed. of the “Geneva” New Testament, based on Beza, point out that the “covering” of women “declareth that the woman is one degree beneath the man by the ordinance of God,” and that “having their heades covered … was then [in Paul's time] a signe of subjection.” The Geneva Bible (The Annotated New Testament, 1602 Edition), ed. Gerald T. Sheppard, Pilgrim Classic Commentaries, vol. 1 (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1989), p. 85r.

3. See Pagels's account of the heroism of Thecla and Perpetua (ch. 1-2). Brown (p. 145) notes the important role of women in the church by 200 c.e., though Pagels implies that as early as the deutero-Pauline letters of the New Testament (particularly Timothy 1 and 2, and Ephesians) there was an attempt to suppress the empowering of women evident in the case of Thecla, who claimed that women could teach and baptize (ch. 1, esp. pp. 24-26). See Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, 2 vols. (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1948), Bk. 14 ch. 7 (II, 10-12), Bk. 15 ch. 20, and Bk. 15 ch. 22-23 (II, 84-89, 91-97) on the association of woman with flesh, which tempts man from God. On subjection in marriage as the model of order, see Augustine, City of God, Bk. 14. ch. 7 (II, 10-12), Bk. 19 ch. 14 and 16 (II, 322-23, 325-26) and Pagel's discussion of Augustine (p. 114). On the association of woman with the flesh, see also Brown's discussion of Ambrose (pp. 348-49) and Jerome (pp. 375-77), Pagel's discussion of Augustine, esp. pp. 113-14, and Ann W. Astell's discussion of Origen in The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 2-5. Brown and Pagels emphasize the powerful influence of Augustine on Christianity and, indeed, Western values (Brown, ch. 19; Pagels, ch. 5).

4. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

5. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), esp. Introduction (pp. 1-21), and “Women Mystics in the Thirteenth Century: The Case of the Nuns of Helfta” (pp. 170-262). Bynum (Holy Feast) argues that the increased power of the clergy was related to the late medieval proliferation of holy women, for these women claimed an immediate, intimate experience of God that was similar to that enjoyed by the priest. Astell sees a distinctly positive valuing of the feminine in religious experience in medieval interpretations of Canticles.

6. On the Protestant suppression of the feminine aspect of Catholic spirituality, see Maureen Sabine, Feminine Engendered Faith: The Poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 1-42, and Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500-1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 21-37.

7. Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), discusses the Reformist women prose writers and poets, some of whom contributed to religious polemic (see esp. pp. 48-150). On women's status as defined in English Protestant writings, particularly in relation to Roman Catholicism, see also Charles H. George and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation, 1570-1640 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 258-65, 275-89.

8. A. L. Rowse, Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age: Simon Forman the Astrologer (New York: Scribners, 1974); Rowse, “Introduction: Shakespeare's Dark Lady,” in The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1979), pp. 1-37.

9. Barbara K. Lewalski observes: “The title of Lanyer's volume promises, somewhat misleadingly, a collection of religious poetry” (“Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer,” Yearbook of English Studies 21 [1991]: 98). See also Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 213-41. Lewalski stresses the secular aspect of the volume as a “defense and celebration of the enduring community of good women” (Writing Women, p. 213).

10. On Elizabeth, see Sabine, p. 13; Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), pp. 117-28, esp. p. 126, and Phillippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), who emphasizes the importance of Elizabeth's spiritual authority, noting also that the queen assumed the title “supreme governor” of the Church rather than “supreme head,” the title of Henry VIII (pp. 65-66). On James, see Sabine (p. 25) and Jonathan Goldberg, “Fatherly Authority: The Politics of Stuart Family Images,” in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, ed., Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 3-32. For James's writings, see The Trew Law of Free Monarchies and his first speech to the English Parliament, in The Political Works of James I, intro. Charles Howard McIlwain (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), pp. 55, 273.

11. Lewalski, Writing Women, p. 18. See also Leeds Barroll, “The Court of the First Stuart Queen,” in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 191-208.

12. Holy Bible [King James Authorized Version] (London, 1611), dedicatory epistle “To the Most High and Mightie Prince James,” sig. A2v. Janel Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Christanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 208-36—and in the revised version of this essay that appears in this volume—mentions the publication of the King James Bible as part of the context for the Salve (Keller and Miller, p. 215; and see above, chapter 6).

13. An Homilie of the State of Matrimonie insists wives should suffer in silence and “be quiet,” for they will get their reward hereafter; in Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547-1571), Facsimile Reprod. of the Edition of 1623, intro. Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup, 2 vols. in one (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), II, 245. On women's silence, see William Whately, A Bride-Bush. Or, A Direction for Married Persons (London, 1623), pp. 200-1; Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Houshold Government (London, 1603), p. 230: “The best meanes therefore that a wife can use to obtaine, and maintaine the love and good liking of her husband, is to be silent, obedient, peaceable.”

14. In her emphasis on the role of women, Lanyer is closest to Luke, the one gospel written by someone who did not claim to have witnessed the Crucifixion.

15. The question of whether a woman could have written one of the Gospels is intriguing. Among the Gnostic Gospels purporting to be the secret teachings of Jesus condemned as heretical (most of which were discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945) is a Gospel supposedly by Mary Magdalen. On the Gospel of Mary, see Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, p. 61, and Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 11-14, 64-65. Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, argues for the importance of recovering “the women disciples and what they have done” (p. xiv).

16. Lorna Hutson, “Why the Lady's Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun,” in Isobel Armstrong, ed., New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 154-75, aptly observes: “Lanyer figures the climax of the narrative as a drama of interpretation, in which women elicit radiance and meaning from the event which had remained mute and indecipherable to masculine exegesis” (p. 170). Mueller, “Feminist Poetics,” notes the “pattern of fundamental misprision exhibited by all of the males in the story … while the female poet unfailingly understands what and who Jesus is” (p. 222).

17. Beilin (p. 198) observes Lanyer's emphasis on Mary but does not see the possible Catholic significance of this. Instead, she sees Lanyer's poetry as “ardently Protestant” (p. 182). Lewalski observes that many of the dedications are to women “linked through kinship or marriage with the Sidney-Leicester faction,” which was strongly Protestant (Writing Women, p. 221). However, two of Lanyer's dedicatees—Queen Anne and Lady Arabella Stuart—had Roman Catholic connections; Anne may even have converted. Certain aspects of her poem (particularly the attention to the Virgin Mary, who has thirteen stanzas devoted to her) make the label “Protestant” problematic.

18. John Milton, Paradise Regained, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 1.16.

19. See Augustine, City of God, Bk. 15 ch. 2-3 (II, 51-53), Luther, Treatise on Christian Liberty, in Works of Martin Luther, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: A. J. Holman, 1916), pp. 312-48, and John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen, 5th American edition, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, n.d.), Bk. 2, ch. 11 (I, 405-19), Bk. 3, ch. 19 (II, 62-76).

20. Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Houshold Government, p. 13. See also William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1623), “the family is a seminary of the Church and common-wealth” (p. 17); and An Homilie of the State of Matrimonie. On the analogy of family and politics, particularly in the Stuart period, see Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes especially in Seventeenth Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 54-84, and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 152-54.

21. Brown (esp. pp. 1-4, 5-102) gives an eloquent, sympathetic explanation of the socially revolutionary significance of sexual renunciation for the early ascetic Christians. See also Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, esp. ch. 1, 2, 4. Brown points out the social usefulness of Augustine's later defense of marriage in a society where “the security of the Catholic church depended on the authority of male heads of households” (p. 404).

22. Queen Anne had a separate court as well as a relatively separate life from her husband, King James, who was known for his homoerotic attachments to male favorites. (See Lewalski, Writing Women, pp. 15-43, on Anne's “oppositional politics”). The queen's daughter, Elizabeth, was as yet unmarried; the Dowager Countess of Kent and Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, were both widows; Margaret's daughter, Anne Clifford, was to be in conflict for many years with her husband as she struggled to gain legal rights to her inheritance from her father.

23. As Pagels (Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, pp. 23-26) and Brown (p. 57) have shown, the deutero-Pauline writings, which include Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Timothy, endorse marriage and thus “correct” the preference for celibacy and sexual renunciation in Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 7:1, 7-8), though the sense of gender hierarchy remains generally consistent throughout the Pauline epistles.

24. An Homilie of the State of Matrimonie, esp. p. 242; Francis Dillingham, Christian Oeconomy: or Houshold Government (London, 1609), pp. 1, 11; Cleaver, p. 224. For further examples of reliance on these biblical verses, see also Whately and Gouge. 1 Peter 3:1, 5-6 (“let the wives bee subiect to their husbandes. … For even after this maner in time past did the holy women, which trusted in God tire themselves, & were subject to their husbands. As Sara obeyed Abraham, and called him Sir”), which Cleaver paraphrases, was regularly invoked to encourage women's proper “reverence.” See An Homilie … of Matrimonie, pp. 242-43; Whately, p. 203; Gouge, p. 283.

25. On the differences between the Pauline and deutero-Pauline texts on women and sexuality, see Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, pp. 23-25; on the differences between these texts concerning marriage, see Brown, pp. 44-58; and on the contradictions in Paul concerning gender, see Daniel Boyarin, “Paul and the Genealogy of Gender,” Representations 41 (winter 1993): 1-33.

26. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), points out that Lanyer creates her authorial role as “her text becomes the Word Incarnate”; “her published text becomes Christ” (pp. 324-25).

27. Cf. 1 Peter 2:5, 9 on the faithful as a holy priesthood. But Peter implies it is men who speak God's words and minister (4:10-11). In her claims for being able to “present” Christ, Lanyer recalls the medieval holy women who, Bynum has argued, were assuming the power of priests to handle and enjoy God (“Women Mystics in the Thirteenth Century: The Case of the Nuns of Helfta,” in Jesus as Mother, pp. 170-262).

28. Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, p. 24, observes that early Christian women claimed the right to preach and baptize.