SOURCE: Woods, Susanne. “Lanyer and English Religious Verse.” In Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet, pp. 126-62. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Woods discusses Lanyer's religious verse and places her among several key religious poets, including John Donne and John Milton.]

Religion defined the social, political, and intellectual life of medieval and Renaissance Europe. From the imperialist folly of the Crusades to individual sacrifices, from cathedrals and epics to vestments and sonnets, religion also infused and transported the period's artistic imagination. Today many find it hard to grasp the ubiquity and power of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It underlay virtually every assumption about the nature, purpose, and value of life, and what appear to us as small differences within a hegemonic worldview were reasons for debate, imprisonment, and even martyrdom.

The seventeenth century is the great age of English religious verse. Stimulated in part by the Protestant focus on the Word and in part by the vivid piety of the Counter-Reformation, poets struggled to articulate their personal relationship with the divine. Religious verse was of course not new to England in this period. The greatest portion of extant medieval English verse is occasioned by religious themes, but they represent a religion so integrally a part of the rhythms of human life that the sacred and secular are often barely separable. The Second Shepherd's Play is a celebration of Christ's Nativity, but it is also a jolly comedic romp, and even Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have an overlay of pious intention. Petrarchan love lyrics seem remote from religion, until we remember the Christianized Neoplatonism that subsequent writers (such as Ficino and Spenser) derived from the last third of the Canzoniere.

Through the sixteenth century religious lyrics were characteristically translations and imitations of the Psalms. Considered the “compendium par excellence of lyric poetry” by Reformation lyricists, the Book of Psalms appeared in over three hundred English editions by 1640 and provided models for a wide range of topics and approaches to religious experience and feelings.¹ Lanyer grew up surrounded by these verses. In addition to the Sternhold-Hopkins common meter Whole Booke of Psalmes (1562) which had a long life as the principal hymnal of Protestant worship, she would have known Anne Vaughan Lock's sonnet sequence based on Psalm 51, and she cites the Sidney-Pembroke Psalms as an important model for her own verse.²

Poets such as Lanyer, Donne, and Herbert move toward a more personalized religious expression. As the energy of the Reformation drew away from issues of national to issues of individual identity, it seems to have promoted a new intensity in the religious lyrics of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The break with Rome and subsequent schisms, the access to a vernacular Bible, the emphasis on individual conscience all served to make religious interpretation more subjective and therefore more tenuous, vexed, and urgent. Even Catholic writers are forced into a more considered and dangerous piety, as Church and State were thought to be inseparable and recusancy therefore treasonous.

Lanyer writes of religion in the midst of this ferment and at the beginning of the great age of English religious poetry. Her central poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, summarizes and challenges key Protestant beliefs and presents a view of Christ's passion in some details not unlike Counter-Reformation piety. In this she rehearses some of the varied religious discourse of the period, at the same time challenging the authorities by which it was traditionally dispensed: men in power.

This chapter situates Lanyer as a poet among a few of her key Protestant and Catholic predecessors; her best-known contemporary among writers of religious verse, John Donne; and two of her brilliant successors, with whom she had affinities, Herbert and Milton.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS VERSE

Two important differences between Protestant and Catholic doctrine recur consistently in both popular and polemical literature of the sixteenth century: whether salvation is a function of faith or of works, and whether Christ exists memorially or corporeally (the doctrine of “transubstantiation”) in the sacrament of bread and wine. Protestants believed that faith in Jesus Christ alone brought salvation, though good works would issue, through God's grace, from a proper faith. Catholics believed that good works were pleasing to God, and a community of good works could bolster the lagging sinner; the model and mediation of saints were therefore properly invoked as part of that community of salvific work. Protestants reduced the number of sacraments (“certain and sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace, and God's good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us”) from seven to two, baptism and communion, “the Supper of the Lord.”³ The latter, the blessing and partaking of bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ, though it comes from the tradition of the Catholic mass, was carefully distinguished from Catholic teaching: “Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine [into the physical body and blood of Christ, as the Catholics taught]) … is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions. The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner.”⁴

For Protestants (and especially for Calvinists) human nature since the fall was utterly degenerate and therefore incapable of works that could be redemptive; faith alone, itself a gift from God, could save a sinner. According to the Calvinist catechism, “all suche workes as we doe of our selves, by our Nature are utterly corrupte: whereof it followeth necessarily, that thei can not please GOD, but rather do procure his wrath, and he condempneth them every one.” When the catechizing minister asks the child how the works “whiche we doe by vertue of [God's] Spirite” may be made acceptable to God, the child properly answers, “by faithe onely.”⁵ For Catholics, human nature became perverted and distorted but not utterly debased. A man or woman could and should be a partner with God, sharing in the good works made possible by Christ's redeeming sacrifice. When the child in the Catholic catechism asks his master why, “if Christ have satisfied his Father for the sinnes of all men … we have neede to doe penance for our sinnes,” he receives this response:

Christ hath satisfied for the sins of all men: but it is necessarie to aplie this satisfaction in particular to this man and to that man, which is done by faith, by the Sacraments, by good workes, and particularlie by penance: and therefore we have neede to do penance and other good works, though Christ have suffered, and wrought for us.⁶

These doctrines had implications for how a poet might approach and represent religious matters. In general, a Protestant poet might reflect on his or her condition and seek God's grace, or celebrate and enhance a faith already in place in another. Since Christ is the source and only mediator of the divine, and since works could contribute nothing at all to attain salvation, Protestant verse tends to focus on the penitent's sense of sin, longing for grace, and relationship with Christ. Catholic verse, on the other hand, though it may be equally focused on the need for repentance, may invoke the mediation of saints and may treat the contemplation of Christ's and saints' lives as a holy work. Further, as Catholic iconography and doctrine is more corporeal, Catholic poetic language tends to emphasize the incarnational aspects of the divine, while Protestant language tends to be more analytic and intellectual.⁷ Catholic language tends to be tropic, with symbols and extended metaphors, while Protestant language tends to be schematic, its artistry in analytical devices such as parallelism and contrast, and its passion in repetition.

The concluding few lines of Lock's second introductory sonnet to the Psalm 51 sequence illustrate the Protestant sense of sin, conveying emotion in the schematic play and repetition of key words and phrasings:

Yet blinde, alas, I groape about for grace.
While blinde for grace I groape about in vaine,
My fainting breath I gather up and straine,
Mercie, mercie, to crye and crye againe.(8)

(ll. 11-14)

A similarly penitential lyric by the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell, “A vale of teares,” uses rich and sensuous description to allegorize the suffering soul:

A vale there is enwrapt with dreadfull shades,
With thicke of mourning pines shrouds from the sunne,
Where hanging clifts yeld short and dumpish glades,
And snowie floud with broken streames doth runne,

(ll. 1-4)

.....Where waters wrastle with encountring stones,
That breake their streames, and turne them into foame,
The hollow clouds full frought with thundering groans,
With hideous thumps discharge their pregnant wombe.(9)

(ll. 13-16)

These are only general tendencies. Most poets use metaphor, and all poets structure verse schematically. Lanyer is particularly interesting because her use of these devices blurs some of the doctrinal distinctions between Protestantism and Catholicism. There is no reason to believe her faith was anything other than the Reform Protestantism in which she was apparently raised, particularly given the centrality of Christ to all her extant poems, but her expression of that faith, though it contains typically Protestant language, includes visual and sensual elements more similar to her Catholic than to her Protestant predecessors.

Lanyer's references to Christ make ample use of the biblical and attributive epithets common to Protestant poetics. He is a “mightie monarch,” “humbled king,” “king of kings,” “King of Heaven and Monarch of the Earth.”¹⁰ He is the “Paschall lambe,” “this Lambe,” “pure unspotted Lambe,” “sweet lambe of God,” “this siely lambe.”¹¹ He is also the “Saviour in a Shepherds weed,” “the Shepheard,” “the rock,” the “watchman.”¹² Above all, he is “The Bridegroome” of the women for whom Lanyer writes.¹³

Yet Lanyer's imagery is more insistently physical than we might expect from a Protestant poet. If Lanyer is presenting the crucifixion as a text that a woman must learn to read, she encodes its meaning in the body and blood of Jesus. So she presents the figure of Christ to “All Vertuous Ladies” “In bloody torments” (l. 60) and to “Lucie, Countess of Bedford”

          … all stuck with pale deaths arrows:
In whose most pretious wounds your soule may reade
Salvation, while he (dying Lord) doth bleed.

(ll. 12-14)

She assures “Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk” that Christ in his death is “writing the Covenant with his most pretious blood,” presents him “Crowned with thornes, and bathing in his blood,” and urges her to see his beauty, his “faire corps,” in the “rose, vermillion” of his “precious blood” (ll. 47, 62, 80-82). Christ's blood drenches the Salve Deus, from the scripturally derived description of his agony in Gethsemane, where “his pretious sweat came trickling to the ground, / Like drops of blood” (ll. 406-08; Luke 22:44), to the imaginative vision of Christ on the cross, “His blessed blood watring his pierced feet” (l. 1176).¹⁴ At the center of Lanyer's salvation story is a bloody Christ who hangs like the crucifix in a Catholic church.

There is no direct match in approach and vision among her older poetic contemporaries. Among Lanyer's most likely models are the two Protestant women poets already mentioned, Anne Lock (c. 1533-c. 1590) and Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621). She would have known the former because of connections between the Bassano and Vaughan families, and of course she explicitly mentions the Psalms of the latter.¹⁵ Among men whose work Lanyer certainly or possibly knew, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) and his friend Fulke Greville (1554-1628) wrote religious poems in the Reform Protestant tradition, while another Elizabethan courtier of Lanyer's time, Henry Constable (1562-1613), wrote religious sonnets that reflect his conversion to Catholicism.¹⁶ The poems of the Catholic priest Robert Southwell (1561-95) were published shortly after his execution, and show some interesting resemblances to Lanyer's language in Salve Deus. The Protestant and Catholic approaches illustrated by these six poets show Lanyer to be Protestant in her basic theology, but unconventional in her poeticizing of religious materials.¹⁷

Here I focus principally on poems about salvation and penitence, since these are topics Lanyer and the other six poets clearly share. The models for these topics are largely biblical and often refer to the Psalms and the Canticles, or Song of Songs, as metaphoric resources. The Psalms provided a variety of ways in which the individual soul might approach God, while the Canticles were considered an allegory of the relationship between Christ and the Church, or Christ and the individual soul.¹⁸ These several poets show the influences of both the Psalms and the Canticles, while Lanyer, in the Salve Deus, draws from these biblical resources and adds the element of narrative, based largely on Matthew's version of Christ's passion.

Lock's sonnet sequence on Psalm 51 and the countess of Pembroke's poeticizing of Psalms 44-150 (and her brother's of 1-43) illustrate two Protestant approaches to Englishing the biblical lyric, one of passionate repentance and the other of assured salvation. Lock's sequence incorporates and extends the language of the Psalm, taking it as an opportunity to reflect on the degradation of sin and the impossibility of redemption through works. The Sidney-Pembroke Psalms remain close to their originals but formulate each psalm into confident English. Lanyer's Salve Deus has both passion and confidence.

Lock's language, as her editor Susan Felch notes, “reflects that of a nonconformist molded by the catholic Christian tradition” and, despite the example I gave above of her direct, schematic poetics, her attention remains firmly tied to the physical world.¹⁹ By contrast, Pembroke's handling even of the same Penitential Psalm (51) remains elegant and assured. Of the two, the countess's version is more “Protestant,” in that it is more analytic and less iconic. Take, for example, her reading of 51:2, “Wash me throughly from mine iniquitie, and clense me from my sinne”:²⁰

o clense, o wash my fowle iniquitie:
          clense still my spotts, still wash awaie my staynings,
          till staines and spotts in mee leave noe remaynings.(21)

The lines gain their rhetorical force from a schematic device: “clense” and “wash” are repeated in the second line accompanied by “spotts” and “staynings,” which are repeated with variation (“staines” and “spotts”) in the third line. The repetition of “still” in the second line, which reinforces the cascading parallelisms, underscores “Till” in the third. The power of the passage comes from an artfully arrayed set of emphases; however passionate the expression, the speaker is in control, and the experience is of the mind, not the body.

The reverse is true in the Lock sonnet on the same biblical verse (“Wash me yet more from my wickednes, and clense me from my sinne,” as it appears in the sidenote to the sonnet):

So foule is sinne and lothesome in thy sighte,
So foule with sinne I may be washed white
So foule I dare not, Lord, approche to thee.
Ofte hath thy mercie washed me before,
Thou madest me cleane, but I am foule againe.
Yet washe me Lord againe, and washe me more.
Washe me, O Lord, and do away the stain
Of uggly sinnes that in my soule appere.
Let flow thy plentuous streames of clensing grace.
Washe me againe, yea washe me every where,
Both leprous bodie and defiled face.
Yea wash me all, for I am all uncleane.
And from my sin, Lord, cleanse me ones againe.(22)

Devices of repetition abound, but with less self-conscious variation than in the Pembroke selection. The repetitions, often at the beginning of the line (“So foule,” “Wash me”), serve a passionate insistence rather than an artful analysis, and lead to the climactic image that gives the sonnet its principal power: “yea wash me everywhere, / Both leprous bodie and defiled face.” This language depicts a real scrubbing—a maternal God, cloth in hand, chafing off the ingrained dirt of an incorrigible child. The portrayal is both emotional and physical, suggesting the medieval heritage Felch notes in Lock's style. She may be closer in time, and therefore rhetorical tendency, to an iconic Catholic tradition, but, like Mary Sidney, her theology is firmly Protestant, and her descriptive language leans away from the baroque lushness toward which Counter-Reformation verse was heading.

The distinction between Protestant and Catholic penitential verse is clear in a comparison between the poems of statesman and writer Fulke Greville and his sometime colleague, Catholic convert Henry Constable. Both poets had associations with the Sidneys. Greville, who went to Shrewsbury School with Sir Philip and became his biographer, considered him his closest friend and had at least some contact with the countess of Pembroke after Philip's death.²³ Constable knew Sidney and his widow, Frances, who became countess of Essex, and was a friend of Penelope Rich, reputed to be Sidney's first love (the “Stella” of Astrophil and Stella). Although he claimed not to know the countess of Pembroke personally, he dedicated a sonnet to her.²⁴ Greville and Constable also had associations with the countess of Cumberland's circle, with which Lanyer may have been associated as early as 1589 or '90. Greville appears to have been friendly with Samuel Daniel in the 1590s and is mentioned by name in Daniel's Musophilus (1599).²⁵ One of Constable's poems is dedicated to the sisters, Ann, countess of Warwick, and Margaret, countess of Cumberland.²⁶ Greville and Constable's religious poetry, whether or not Lanyer knew it the way she knew the work of Lock and Pembroke, sprang from the Elizabethan court with which she was familiar.

On the same general theme as the Lock and Pembroke versions of Psalm 51—God's redemptive power over the inevitable sins of mankind—Greville expresses the Calvinist understanding of “mans degeneration” as absolute, and God's mercy as an unfathomable doctrine of faith:

Wrapt up, O Lord, in mans degeneration;
The glories of thy truth, thy joyes eternall,
Reflect upon my soule darke desolation,
And ugly prospects o're the sprites infernall.
          Lord, I have sinn'd, and mine iniquity,
          Deserves this hell; yet Lord deliver me.
Thy power and mercy never comprehended
Rest lively imag'd in my Conscience wounded;
Mercy to grace, and power to feare extended,
Both infinite, and I in both confounded;
          Lord, I have sinn'd, and mine iniquity,
          Deserves this hell, yet Lord deliver me.
If from this depth of sinne, this hellish grave,
And fatall absence from my Saviours glory,
I could implore his mercy, who can save,
And for my sinnes, not paines of sinne, be sorry;
          Lord, from this horror of iniquity,
          And hellish grave, thou wouldst deliver me.(27)

Despite the claim that hellish horrors “rest lively imag'd” in his conscience, we are not presented those images. Instead, the poem sets out the Reform Protestant case that man is unable to help himself and depends entirely on God's grace for the transformation of mind and heart (“and for my sinnes, not paines of sinne, be sorry”) that allows for salvation.

Constable, by contrast, presents icons of repentance and tells their stories in vivid imagery. Originally an outspoken Protestant, Constable converted to Catholicism around 1590 and spent most of the rest of his life in France. Before his conversion he had apparently been a favorite of Queen Elizabeth and a continental spy for Lord Burghley. Even afterwards he remained an English patriot to the extent his religion and residence away from England would allow, advising King James on continental issues. Constable had been a popular sonneteer in the 1580s. His religious poetry, which circulated in manuscript around the first decade of the seventeenth century, reflects his Catholic conviction and sensibility.²⁸

Four sonnets “To St Mary Magdalen” exemplify Constable's penitential voice. Two will serve as examples here (and another in the next section of this chapter). The first of these appears among five other poems to several saints and concludes very differently from Greville's poem. Instead of an impassioned faith that calls for God's grace, Constable invokes penitential works, which will win heaven for the sinner:

For fewe nyghtes solace in delitious bedd,
          where heate of luste, dyd kyndle flames of hell:
          thou nak'd on naked rocke in desert cell
          lay thirty yeares, and teares of griefe dyd shedd.
But for that tyme, thy hart there sorrowed,
          thou now in heaven aeternally dost dwell,
          and for ech teare, which from thyne eyes then fell,
          a sea of pleasure now ys rendered.
If short delyghtes, entyce my hart to straye,
          lett me thy longe pennance learne to knowe
          how deare I should for triflyng pleasures paye:
And if I vertues roughe beginnyng shunne,
          Lett thy aeternall joyes unto me showe
          what hyghe Rewarde, by lyttle payne ys wonne.(29)

Not only does the poem's message emphasize works over faith (Magdalen earned heaven through her thirty years of penance), the poem's method is thoroughly Catholic, invoking the model of a saint's life rather than examining the unhappy conscience of the speaker.

Constable's religious poems often involve the mediation of saints and tend to be more narrative and pictorial than those of his Protestant contemporaries. His other three poems to St. Mary Magdalen form a short sequence at the end of the manuscript,³⁰ where they rely on the contrast between earthly and heavenly love, drawing on the language of the Canticles, to make their point. The first of these three signals a crucial difference between Lock and Greville's view of the total degeneracy of the human condition, and Constable's vision of the joy of repentance:

Blessed Offendour: who thyselfe haist try'd,
          how farr a synner differs from a Saynt
          joyne thy wett eyes, with teares of my complaint,
          while I sighe for that grave, for which thow cry'd.
No longer lett my synfull sowle abyde
          in feaver of thy fyrst desyres faynte:
          but lett that love which last thy hart did taynt
          with panges of thy repentance, pierece my syde.
So shall my sowle, no foolish vyrgyn bee
          with empty lampe: but lyke a Magdalen, beere
          for oyntment boxe, a breast with oyle of grace:
And so the zeale, which then shall burn in mee,
          may make my hart, lyke to a lampe appere
          and in my spouse's pallace gyve me place.

While Constable sees “how far a synner differs from a Saynt,” Greville sees “the depth of mine iniquity, / That ugly center of infernall spirits,” a place unredeemable except by “this saving God of mine” (sonnet 99, ll. 1-2, 6). The words that capture Greville's imagination are “deformity,” “degeneration,” desolation,” and “eternall doome” (ll. 3, 8, 14, 20). Although the result, through faith, is still salvation, made more wonderful by the distance traveled between man's sin and God's forgiveness, it is difficult to think of Greville or any Protestant praising a “Blessed Offendour.” Yet Constable has much for a Protestant poet to admire, including his allusions to the biblical authority of the Canticles.

There is no reason to suspect that Lanyer had any contact with the Jesuit priest Robert Southwell, but his capture and imprisonment in 1592 were famous events, and his verse, first published in 1595, not long after his execution, went through several editions of varying authority before 1610.³¹ The title poem of the earliest editions, “St. Peter's Complaint,” is a long mea culpa in the voice of Peter, who has denied Christ three times just as his master predicted (Matt. 26:69-75). The purpose of the poem, as the speaker explains in the introductory verse, “The Author to the Reader,” is to set the model of a penitent saint before the contemporary sinner:

Dear eie that daynest to let fall a looke,
On these sad memories of Peters plaintes;
Muse not to see some mud in cleerest brooke,
They once were brittle mould, that now are Saintes.
Their weakness is no warrant to offend:
Learne by their faultes, what in thine owne to mend.

(ll. 1-6)

Like Lanyer (and George Herbert) after him, Southwell complains about the attention poets give to the false beauties of love poetry (“Still finest wits are stilling Venus Rose. / … To Christian workes, few have their talents lent,” ll. 16, 18) and invokes “heavenly sparkes of wit” to speak plainly of divine things: “Cloude not with mistie loves your Orient cleere” (ll. 20, 21).

Throughout the poem proper, Southwell uses the extended metaphor of the ship in the storm, borrowing language from the traditional Petrarchan conceit of the lover in the storm-tossed sea (see, e.g., Spenser's Faerie Queene 3.iv.8-10) and alluding to Peter's own experiences as a fisherman and follower of the Christ who walked on waves (Matt. 14):

Launche foorth my Soul into a maine of teares,
Full fraught with griefe the traffick of my mind:
Torne sailes will serve. thoughtes rent with guilty feares:
Give care, the sterne: use sighes in lieu of wind:
Remorse, the Pilot: thy misdeede, the Carde:
Torment, thy Haven: Shipwracke, thy best reward.

(ll. 1-6)

The poem suggests its Catholic theology by making grace the result of penance:

Divorc'd from grace thy soule to pennance wed:

(l. 10)

.....Thy trespasse foule: let not thy teares be few:
Baptize thy spotted soule in weeping dewe.

(ll. 17-18)

Catholicism is more explicit in references to the standard Latin Vulgate Bible, attributed to St. Jerome (l. 40), and the intercessory role of the Virgin Mary:

When traitor to the sonne in mothers eies,
I shall present my humble suit for grace:
What blush can paint the shame that will arise;
Or write my inward feeling in my face?
Might she the sorrow with the sinner see:
Though I dispisde: my griefe might pittyed bee.

(ll. 577-82)

Here is hope for a mediated grace by means of penitential work, just the reverse of the Protestant unmediated and unearned grace that comes from faith in Christ alone.

There are nonetheless some interesting similarities between Southwell's work and Lanyer's. His poem is in six-line stanzas (Lanyer's is in ottava rima) and reads like a narrative despite its single penitential voice; it concerns a piece of the passion story; and it accumulates vivid detail that produces something like the tone Lanyer evokes in her retelling of the passion. Like Lanyer, Southwell portrays Christ as the perfect lover, emphasizing his physical beauty as well as his redemptive power. In a nineteen-stanza rhapsody on Christ's “sacred eyes” (ll. 331-444), Southwell includes language from the Canticles (“O Pooles of Hesebon, the bathes of grace, / Where happy spirits dyve in sweet desires,” ll. 379-80) and his rhapsodies on Christ's beauty anticipate Lanyer's portrayals of Christ. Here is Southwell on Christ's microcosmic eyes:

O little worldes, the summes of all the best,
Where glory, heaven, God, sunne: all vertues, starres:
Where fire, a love that next to heaven doth rest,
Ayre, light of life, that no distemper marres:
The water, grace, whose seas, whose springs, whose showers,
Cloth natures earth, with everlasting flowers.

(ll. 409-14)

And Lanyer, emphasizing the magnitude of the passion:

The beauty of the World, Heavens chiefest Glory;
The mirrour of Martyrs, Crowne of holy Saints;
Love of th'Almighty, blessed Angels story;
Water of Life, which none that drinks it, faints;
Guide of the Just, where all our Light we borrow;
Mercy of Mercies; Hearer of Complaints;
Triumpher over Death; Ransomer of Sinne;
Falsly accused: now his paines begin.

(ll. 641-48)

Despite Lanyer's references to “Martyrs” and “holy Saints,” Christ remains her only mediator (“Hearer of Complaints”). Her Virgin Mary, unlike Southwell's, does not stand between her sins and her God. Lanyer does place an emphasis on Mary that is unusual in Protestant piety; she devotes sixteen stanzas to “The sorow of the virgin Marie” (ll. 1009-1136), including a version of the Magnificat, “the salutation of the virgin Marie” (ll. 1041-56). This portrait contains no hint of Mary as mediator or co-redeemer, but instead presents her as the chief examplar of all the womanly virtues Lanyer praises throughout the Salve Deus. She is the “Most blessed virgin” (l. 1025), the “Faire chosen vessell” (l. 1030), the “most beauteous Queene of Womankind” (1040) whom God raised from “poore degree” to “Servant, Mother, Wife, and Nurse / To Heavens bright King, that freed us from the curse” (ll. 1086-88).

In their portrayal of women generally, however, there is a strong contrast between the two poets. Despite his invocation of a mediating Virgin Mary (a much more distant figure than Lanyer's weeping mother), Southwell has nothing good to say about women. St. Peter agonizes over his own responsibility for the sin of denying Christ three times on the morning of the crucifixion, but he also manages to blame the young women who identified him as a follower of Christ: “A puffe of womans breath bred all my feare” (l. 150). The voice of Peter later complains that while “the blaze of beauties beames” were “Davids, Salomons, and Sampsons fals” (ll. 307, 302),

… gratious features dasled not mine eies,
Two homely droyles were authors of my death:
Not love, but feare, my sences did surprize:
Not feare of force, but feare of womans breath.
And those unarm'd, ill grac'd, despisde, unknowne:
So base a blast my truthe hath overthrowne.

(ll. 313-18)

Southwell's Peter describes himself as worse than those biblical figures who were moved by beauty, since his downfall comes from ugly, weak, and insignificant women. The speaker pauses to make the point that women of every kind are the cause of evil generally:

O women, woe to men: traps for their falls,
Still actors in all tragicall mischaunces:
Earthes necessarie evils, captivating thralles,
Now murdring with your tongs, now with your glances,
Parents of life, and love: spoylers of both.
The theefes of Harts: false do you love or loth.

(ll. 319-24)

This seems an excessive response to the women of the biblical story (described simply as one and another “maide” in the Geneva translation, “damsel” in the King James, and “maidservant” in the Douai), who merely comment that Peter was one of Christ's followers. But it is part of a long line of gratuitous clerical castigation of women from at least St. Jerome forward. A similar patristic misogyny moved Chaucer's wife of Bath to throw her fourth husband's book into the fire and, more than two hundred years later, provoked Lanyer to her ingenious “Eves apology” (Salve Deus, ll. 761-832). As Pilate's wife tries to persuade her husband not to authorize Christ's crucifixion, she makes the point that, whatever Eve's culpability, Adam's is at the base of it, and the men who would crucify Christ assume an even more grim responsibility:

If any Evill did in her [Eve] remaine,
Beeing made of him [Adam], he was the ground of all;
If one of many Worlds could lay a staine
Upon our Sexe, and worke so great a fall
To wretched Man, by Satans subtill traine;
What will so fowle a fault amongst you all?
          Her weaknesse did the Serpents words obay;
          But you [men] in malice Gods deare Sonne betray.

(ll. 809-16)

While Protestant misogynists can be as vigorous as Catholic ones, Southwell is the only poet within the group I am looking at here who condemns women categorically. Sidney and Greville, for example, distinguish between human and divine love and beauty, as Spenser had done (see chapter 2), but there is no universal condemnation of women in their renunciation of earthly love. Sidney longs for the light of Christian truth and seeks to cast away that which fades:

Leave me o Love, which reachest but to dust,
And thou my mind aspire to higher things:
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust:
What ever fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beames, and humble all thy might,
To that sweet yoke, where lasting freedomes be:
Which breakes the clowdes and opens forth the light,
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.
O take fast hold, let that light be thy guide,
In this small course which birth drawes out to death,
And thinke how evill becommeth him to slide,
Who seeketh heav'n, and comes of heav'nly breath.
          Then farewell world, thy uttermost I see,
          Eternall Love maintaine thy life in me.(32)

Greville similarly distinguishes between earthly fire and heavenly light. Confronted with passion, he advises endurance or renunciation:

The Earth with thunder torne, with fire blasted,
With waters drowned, with windie palsey shaken
Cannot for this with heaven be distasted,
Since thunder, raine and winds from earthe are taken:
Man torne with Love, with inward furies blasted,
Drown'd with despaire, with fleshly lustings shaken,
Cannot for this with heaven be distasted,
Love, furie, lustings out of man are taken.
Then Man, endure thy selfe, those clouds will vanish;
Life is a Top which whipping Sorrow driveth;
Wisdome must beare what our flesh cannot banish,
The humble leade, the stubborne bootlesse striveth:
          Or Man, forsake thy selfe, to heaven turne thee,
          Her flames enlighten Nature, never burne thee.(33)

These efforts to reject passion are compatible with Lanyer's attempt to move beyond false to true beauty:

That outward Beautie which the world commends,
Is not the subject I will write upon,
Whose date expir'd, that tyrant Time soone ends:
Those gawdie colours soone are spent and gone:
But those faire Virtues which on thee attends
Are alwaies fresh, they never are but one:
          They make thy Beautie fairer to behold,
          Than was that Queenes for whom prowd Troy was sold.

(ll. 185-92)

Despite her appreciation for the Virgin Mary and her richly descriptive penitential language, Lanyer remains more closely identifiable in doctrine and sensibility with her Protestant predecessors than with the Catholic Southwell. The sensibility and language in Constable's religious sonnets, however, resonate in Lanyer's Salve Deus and may help us to see how the work of yet another Catholic (turned Protestant), John Donne, compares to Lanyer's verse.

LANYER AND DONNE

The figure of Christ the bridegroom offers an interesting point of departure for considering how male and female poets, whether Catholic or Protestant, envision salvation and their personal relationship to Christ. The bridegroom in the Christian interpretation of the Canticles is always Christ, but the bride may be either the church as a whole, invariably depicted as female, or the individual soul (whether of a man or a woman), depicted in a posture of female subservience to and union with Christ. Beyond those conventions, Catholic and Protestant imaginations differed considerably in how they negotiated the allegory. In general, the Protestant exegetes used the allegory of the celestial wedding to interpret a historical and personal narrative of pilgrimage, while the Catholic tradition saw the bride as the perfected church or the soul in mystical union.³⁴

The last of Constable's poems to Mary Magdalen portrays the transformed penitent as a model for the soul's ultimate fulfillment in Christ. This poem extends the image of the celestial wedding, on which so much of Lanyer's Salve Deus also depends, transforming Mary Magdalen into the exemplary bride of Christ and allowing the (male) poet to see what his own happy union will become:

Sweete Saynt: Thow better canst declare to me,
          what pleasure ys obtayn'd by heavenly love,
          then they which other loves, dyd never prove:
          or which in sexe ar differyng from thee:
For lyke a woman spowse my sowle shalbee,
          whom synfull passions once to lust did move,
          and synce betrothed to goddes sonne above,
          should be enamored with his dietye.
My body ys the garment of my spryght
          whyle as the day tyme of my lyfe doth last:
          when death shall brynge the nyght of my delyght
My sowle uncloth'd, shall rest from labors past:
          and clasped in the armes of God, injoye
          by sweete conjunction, everlasting joye.

The image of Christ the bridegroom mating with the reformed Christian soul takes a more violent turn in the well-known Donne sonnet, “Batter my heart, three person'd God”:

Yet dearely I love you, and would be lov'd faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie,
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

(ll. 9-14)³⁵

These are Catholic and Protestant versions of the same desire: that the soul of a man be like the body of a woman and achieve its union with Christ. For Constable the wedding night is “the rest from labors past” as well as the “uncloth'd” enjoyment of “sweet conjunction” with Christ—the reward for good works, as well as the gift of spiritual consummation. Donne's poem is more reminiscent of Anne Lock's in the violence of its imagery, and, although its implicit physicality may be more like the Catholic tradition in which Donne was raised, it is Protestant in its plea for a grace that will overcome the worthless degradation of the longing soul and in its use of spousal imagery to describe the struggle of pilgrimage rather than the ecstasy of union.

Another of Donne's “Holy Sonnets” offers a more considered look at the relation between bridegroom and bride, Christ and the church, in the confusing world of Reformation and Counter-Reformation:³⁶

Show me deare Christ, thy Spouse, so bright and clear.
What! is it she, which on the other shore
Goes richly painted? or which rob'd and tore
Laments and mournes in Germany and here?
Sleepes she a thousand, then peepes up one yeare?
Is she selfe true and errs? now new, now outwore?
Doth she, and did she, and shall she evermore
On one, on seaven, or on no hill appeare?
Dwells she with us, or like adventuring knights
First travaile we to seek and then make Love?
Betray kind husband thy spouse to our sights,
And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove,
Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then
When she is embrac'd and open to most men.

Like his “Satyre III,” this sonnet is a plea that the pilgrim be guided toward the true church. It also offers a distinctively male twist on the Canticles imagery. The speaker identifies not with the bride (as in the Constable poem), but with the bridegroom: “let myne amorous soule court thy milde dove.” The wit of the poem depends on the paradox of a bride / church who is “most trew” to Christ “When she is embrac'd and open to most men.” Donne may have written his “Holy Sonnets” while he was contemplating holy orders, in which case his association with Christ in this poem may have had the particular resonance of priesthood. Conservative theologians continue to argue against women priests by claiming that the earthly gender of Jesus means that only a man can represent the full manhood of Christ's priesthood. Donne assumes a more general male privilege in this sonnet, however (“most men”). Men are like Christ, and in that sense can love (as well as be) the true church.

Lanyer, too, genders Christ by making him, in contrast to both Constable and Donne, specifically the bridegroom of women: of “all vertuous Ladies in generall” (l. 9), of Susan, dowager countess of Kent (l. 42), of Lady Anne, countess of Dorset (l. 15), and most particularly of Margaret, countess of Cumberland (Salve Deus, e.g., ll. 77, 1305-44). Lanyer's women are the correct gender for the traditional Christian allegorizing of the Canticles. Like a mortal bride, they are women and can love the bridegroom without the nervousness Donne's wit betrays. As the bride, they also most particularly represent the true church and can therefore figure salvation to individual souls. This is precisely how Lanyer portrays the countess of Cumberland: she is the true bride, therefore the true church, whose model is salvation for those who would follow her.

… in thy modest vaile do'st sweetly cover
The staines of other sinnes, to make themselves,
That by this meanes thou mai'st in time recover
Those weake lost sheepe that did so long transgresse,
Presenting them unto thy deerest Lover;
          That when he brings them back into his fold,
          In their conversion then he may behold
Thy beauty shining brighter than the Sunne,
Thine honour more than ever Monarke gaind,
Thy wealth exceeding his that Kingdomes wonne,
Thy Love unto his Spouse, thy Faith unfaind,
Thy Constancy in what thou hast begun,
Till thou his heavenly Kingdom have obtained;
          Respecting worldly wealth to be but drosse,
          Which, if abuz'd, doth proove the owners losse.

(ll. 1394-1408)

The countess is no saint or icon, but a living example of the redeemed Protestant soul whose faith accomplishes the redemption of others. Her portrayal brushes closer to Constable's mediating Mary Magdalen, and his picture of blessed union, than to Donne's Calvinist impotency in “Batter my Heart,” and his historical journey in “Show me deare Christ,” yet the countess is also on a pilgrimage. Her exemplary blessedness remains part of an earthly journey, “Till thou his heavenly Kingdom have obtained.”

If a man can be the bride of Christ, a woman (Lanyer suggests) can also defy gender expectations. She can have honor and wealth greater than a king (ll. 1402-3) and can display “Love unto [Christ's] Spouse,” the church as a whole. She is both the “Deere Spouse of Christ” (l. 1170), herself the figure for the whole church, and the lover of both church and Christ, presenting redeemed “weake lost sheepe” (l. 1397) to the sacred bridegroom. Lanyer has taken the opportunity offered by the Canticles to imbue the countess with rich symbolic resonance: she is both priest and bride, mediator in history and image of transcendent perfection.

In the image of Christ the bridegroom, and of the bride as both church and individual soul, Lanyer and Donne offer interesting contrasts in the gendering of religious imagery. Another poem that illustrates gender differences between these near contemporaries is one of the few works by Donne that was printed during his lifetime, An Anatomy of the World (the “First Anniversarie”). Like the Salve Deus, it was published in 1611.

While the Anatomy is a funeral elegy and Salve Deus purports to be a narrative of Christ's passion, both are long lyrics about what Arthur Marotti calls “loss and the need for recovery.”³⁷ Both poems seek patronage by expressing sympathy for a high-born family. In the “Anatomy” Donne offers sympathy to the Drury family for the loss of their daughter, Elizabeth, who died at the age of fourteen in December 1610; in the Salve Deus Lanyer sympathetically laments what the countess of Cumberland has suffered, first, over her separation from her husband and then, after his death, from the loss of her daughter's expected patrimony. Both poems concern the evil and injustice of the world, yet there are interesting differences in how they portray gender and assert authority in the poetic enterprise.

Donne's portrayal of Elizabeth Drury (whom he had never met) as an Astraean perfection whose abandonment of earth signals the world's decay was controversial in its own time. William Drummond of Hawthornden reports that Ben Jonson “told Mr. Donne that if [the Anatomy] had been written of the Virgin Marie it had been something,” an accusation that apparently prompted Donne to reply “that he described the Idea of a Woman, not as she was.”³⁸ The relation between the poet and the woman who is the subject of his poem is never a relationship between John Donne and Elizabeth Drury, but between the artificer and an idea of perfection.

Barbara Lewalski has glossed Donne's use of “Idea” by reference to his sermons, where “the Idea of Mankind” is “the image of God,” or, more particularly in the Anatomy, the figure of Elizabeth Drury represents “the restoration of the image of God in man through grace.”³⁹ Donne has therefore infused enormous symbolic force into an image of virtuous womanhood, which his poem will presumably display as an occasion for admonishing the world against its decay. His presentation of that image and his authority to rail against the world's decay are intertwined, even fused, in the poem.

In a prefatory commendation,⁴⁰ Joseph Hall comments on the late Elizabeth Drury's good fortune in finding so effective and authoritative an elegist:

And thou the subject of this wel-borne thought,
Thrise noble maid; couldst not have found nor sought
A fitter time to yeeld to thy sad Fate
Then whilst this spirit lives, that can relate
Thy worth so well.

(ll. 11-15)

The young woman has managed to die at a time when she can provide the occasion for this man's pen, Hall suggests, and he goes on to make explicit the virginal page she presents to the worthy pencil:

Admired match! where strives in mutual grace
The cunning Pencill, and the comely face:
A taske, which thy faire goodnes made too much
For the bold pride of vulgar pens to touch.

(ll. 17-20)

Donne's power is sexual, just as Elizabeth Drury's value as an “Idea” depends in large part on her virginity. As Donne notes in an accompanying poem, “A Funerall Elegie,” she “soone expir'd”

Cloath'd in her Virgin white integrity
          For mariage, though it doth not staine, doth dye.
To scape th'infirmaties which waite upone
          Woman, shee went away, before sh'was one.

(ll. 74-78)

To be a woman is to be tainted by sexual conquest. Better to be conquered instead, Hall says, by the masculine authority of the poet.

By lauding her virgin purity, Donne inevitably connects Elizabeth Drury with the Virgin Mary; Elizabeth, too, is a “Queene” for whom heaven is as “her standing house” (ll. 7-8). Not unlike Lanyer's figure of the countess of Cumberland, Donne's Elizabeth Drury is a type of the co-redeemer who would erase original sin, but here it is Eve's sin that specifically needs to be overcome and is (ironically) overcome by her descent to earth as “the weaker Sex”:

She in whom vertue was so much refin'd,
That for Allay unto so pure a minde
She tooke the weaker Sex, she that could drive
The poysonous tincture, and the stayne of Eve,
Out of her thoughts, and deeds; and purifie
All by a true religious Alchimy.

(ll. 177-82)

Donne uses the image of idealized virginal purity to assert his own authority as a poet in terms that suggest important differences between what a man could claim and what a woman, such as Lanyer, might find or claim through her own idealization of another woman. Donne offers his poem on Elizabeth Drury as a tribute to her and to the virtue she represents not only to the penitent soul but to the recorder:

                              … blessed maid,
Of whom is meant whatever hath beene said,
Or shall be spoken well by any tongue,
Whose name refines course lines, and makes prose song,
Accept this tribute. …

(ll. 443-47)

Yet it is not the “Idea of a woman” that authorizes Donne's lines. His right to inscribe the example of perfection, warn against earthly decay, pay tribute to virtue and castigate vice, and to do it all in verse rather than sermon or history, comes from a more powerful inspirational source:

                                                                                … if you
In reverance to her, doe thinke it due,
That no one should her prayses thus reherse,
As matter fit for Chronicle, not verse,
Vouchsafe to call to minde, that God did make
A last, and lastingst peece, a song. He spake
To Moses, to deliver unto all
That song: because he knew they would let fall,
The Law, the Prophets, and the History,
But keepe the song still in their memory.

(ll. 457-66)

God, not Elizabeth Drury, authorizes the poet. Lewalski suggests that we may bridge the gap between Elizabeth Drury as the inspiration for the poem, and the divine authority Donne claims here, by reference to Donne's theory of “Idea”: “for Donne the Idea of a man, or of a woman, is—quite precisely—the image of God. … If, then, Donne declared his intention to praise Elizabeth Drury not as she was but rather as the Idea of a Woman, we may suppose that he undertook to praise the image of God created and restored in her.”⁴¹ This would situate the power of God, Donne's ultimate authority, in his subject. But his subject is a deliberate cipher, an unknown woman, and the poem is about decay and disappointment, not about transformed perfection. The woman is gone and was never a “woman” in the first place. Her virginity made her a clean page to write upon; the image of perfection resides in her absence, not her presence. What fills the void is the authorial voice which finds its authority in the same voice that inspired Moses. The poet is made bold by Moses' example, and concludes his poem by asserting the poet's primacy over his subject matter:

… such an opinion (in due measure) made
Me this great Office boldly to invade.
Nor could incomprehensibleness deterre
Me, from thus trying to emprison her.
Which when I saw that a strict grave could do,
I saw not why verse might doe so too.
Verse hath a middle nature: heaven keepes soules,
The grave keepes bodies, verse the fame enroules.

(ll. 467-74)

The example of Moses, God's authority, allows the poet to “invade” and “emprison” his subject in the artifact of verse. What lasts is not the person but the song, not the object of imitation but mimesis itself, not the decaying physical presence but the mnemonic power of the record. Verse “enroules” the fame—but whose fame? In the Anatomy, Donne dominates his ostensible subject and becomes himself the authority for his vision of the world. He becomes God's image, redeemed through a new creation, his own. He engenders his subject and disengenders her as part of the process of asserting his own poetic authority, and he aligns himself with the voice of God.

In Lanyer's work the relation between subject and authority is different. While the godly authority that Donne ultimately claims for himself distances him from his subject, making him a transcendent divinity in relation to his poetic creation, Lanyer merges her authorial voice with the subject(s) and process of her poem, making her an eminent creative force within the territory of her creation. Just as her gender connects her with her great patrons, mediated through “Eves Apologie” in her poem to Queen Anne (ll. 73-78), for example, or through a mutual effort at divine poetry in her poem to the countess of Pembroke (ll. 201-04), so it infuses the gendered point of view she brings to the passion story, including her portrayal of Christ.

The Salve Deus begins where Donne's Anatomy concludes: by claiming the eternizing role of verse. After elegizing the departed Queen Elizabeth (ll. 1-8), Lanyer turns to the living object of her praise, the countess of Cumberland:

To thee great Countesse now I will applie
My Pen, to write thy never dying fame;
That when to heav'n thy blessed Soule shall flie,
These lines on earth record thy reverend name.

(ll. 9-12)

Donne's portrayal of the unknown Elizabeth Drury is hyperbolic and (Jonson at least believed) incidental, but Lanyer's attention to the countess, her virtues and her suffering, is grounded in the living reality of the countess's “sad soule, plung'd in waves of woe” (l. 34). Though the topic of her poem is Christ's passion, the poet pays considerable direct attention to the countess; roughly 500 of the poem's 1840 lines address her directly, describe her situation (e.g., “Thou from Court to the Countrie art retir'd,” l. 161), or praise her virtue and faithfulness. The central passion story is framed by catalogs of women who failed to find the true good or sought it imperfectly, so the countess's own devotion to Christ may be contrasted with, yet gain force from, a historical community of suffering women.

Lanyer's central authorizing strategy is to make the situation of women—the countess of Cumberland, the women in the poem's frame, the women who accompany Christ through the story as Lanyer tells it—inseparable from the passion itself. Even Christ becomes a figure for female experience, both as object of the female gaze and, as Janel Mueller has pointed out, as a feminized character whose words and silences are misconstrued by the men in the poem:

They tell his words, though farre from his intent,
And what his Speeches were, not what he meant.

(ll. 655-56)

A female identification with Christ, Mueller suggests, authorizes Lanyer to interpret Jesus's actions. She cites “the pattern of fundamental misprision exhibited by all of the males in the story, friends and foes alike, while the female poet unfailingly understands what and who Jesus is.” Lanyer's Christ, “like the ideal woman of the Puritan manuals, is silent except when induced to speak, and modest and taciturn when he does; he is gentle, mild, peaceable, and submissive to higher male authorities.”⁴²

Lanyer's authority for her version of the biblical passion—for her anatomy of the world's decay and redemption—lies in her identification with, and ability to interpret, the passion of Christ. She who has the power to understand has the authority to speak, an assumption that runs throughout the Salve Deus. She portrays that understanding as quintessentially female, from the voice of Pilate's wife which moves imperceptibly back to that of the narrator (ll. 749-912), through the tears of the daughters of Jerusalem and the sufferings of the Virgin Mary (ll. 968-1136), to the particular insight of the countess of Cumberland (ll. 1329-68).

For both Lanyer and Donne, authority resides ultimately with God, but Donne identifies with Moses and an Old Testament divinity who imposes law from the mountaintop. Lanyer's identity is with the women of the New Testament who understand a God who enters his own creation in order to save it. If, according to Donne, Elizabeth Drury “tooke the weaker sexe” to redeem Eve's sin (Anatomy, l. 179), by contrast Lanyer claims that her weakness (like Paul's) is an opportunity to demonstrate the power of this humble Christ:⁴³

But yet the Weaker thou [“my deare Muse”] 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)

Lanyer's fusion with her subjects proceeds only up to a point. The creator never disappears entirely into her creation, nor does the claim of weakness abrogate the force of her vocation. As visionary and interpreter of Christ's passion, the poet is the giver who offers the gift of Christ crucified to the judgment of her inspiring patron:

Which I present (deare Lady) to your view,
Uppon the Crosse depriv'd of life or breath,
To judge if ever Lover were so true.
To yeeld himselfe unto such shamefull death.

(ll. 1265-68)

Even more directly, she tells “the doubtfull Reader” in her brief afterword that she was “appointed to performe this Worke.” Still, Lanyer is a divinely called representative of this privileged community of female weakness, rather than an external authority etching a “middle way” between body and soul.

Lanyer sees her Creator as alive in the world, joining his creation through shared humility and suffering, and, as God's image, she joins her own creation, largely through shared gender. Donne, on the other hand, identifies specifically with a masculine authority that shares gender with God. As he would share the bride with the bridegroom in “Show me deare Christ,” so he shares Christ's own incarnational function by mediating between grave and soul at the end of the Anatomy.

Like Lanyer, however, Donne's biblical poetics are difficult to categorize simply in Protestant or Catholic terms. He had a particular appreciation for the Virgin Mary, for example, possibly a heritage of his Catholic background. In “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” Mary is Christ's “miserable mother” (l. 30)

Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus
Halfe of the Sacrifice, which ransom'd us.

(ll. 31-32)

Although she is portrayed as co-redeemer, she still does not intercede or mediate between man's sin and God's grace. Donne's version of the passion emphasizes the distance between Christ's sacrifice and the speaker's abject sinfulness, which can be bridged only by an active grace from God:

O think me worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face.

(ll. 39-42)

In “The Litanie,” however, Mary is not only co-redeemer, she is a mediating force whose “deeds” are “our helpes”:

          For that faire blessed Mother-maid,
Whose flesh redeem'd us; That she-Cherubin,
          Which unlock'd Paradise, and made
One claime for innocence, and disseiz'd sinne,
                    Whose wombe was a strange heav'n for there
                    God cloath'd himselfe, and grew,
Our zealous thankes wee poure. As her deeds were
Our helpes, so are her prayers; nor can she sue
In vaine, who hath such title unto you.

(ll. 37-45)

Theologically more like Lock and Greville in the first instance, more like Southwell and Constable in the second, Donne is most like Lanyer in his willingness to take risks with both language and idea. As risk-takers, willing to analyze biblical texts with a new eye and to challenge traditional boundaries of theology and gender, Lanyer and Donne are contemporaries in ethos as well as chronology.

SOME LATER PARALLELS: HERBERT AND MILTON

Lanyer may have encountered George Herbert (1593-1633) or John Milton (1608-74) in her long life, though we have no evidence that she met either poet. If she maintained contact with Anne Clifford, it is possible she crossed paths with Herbert, who was installed as rector of the parishes of Bemerton and Wilton (gifts of the Wilton-based earls of Pembroke) in April 1630, shortly after his distant cousin, Philip Herbert, succeeded his brother William as earl of Pembroke. Philip married Anne Clifford in June of that same year, and apparently the former countess of Dorset, and new countess of Pembroke, had a cordial relationship with the poet-priest.⁴⁴ By 1630 Lanyer was settled in the greater London parish of St. James, Clerkenwell, with her son, Henry, and his family, many miles from Wilton (near Salisbury, in Wiltshire). Since Milton's father was a musician and a Londoner, it is just possible that Lanyer may have met him—and possibly the younger Milton—through her husband, son, or any of her musician relatives, but there is no record of their meeting.

It seems likely that she would have been familiar with Herbert or Milton's contribution to the rich heritage of religious verse of which her own book was an early part. Herbert's Temple was published shortly after his death in 1633, while Milton's Mask at Ludlow Castle and Lycidas saw print in 1634 and 1637 respectively. She died less than a year before the publication of Milton's Poems, which appeared at the very end of 1645; she was buried on April 3.⁴⁵ Herbert or Milton may have read Lanyer's book of poems, but again we can only speculate. If Anne Clifford still had her copy, she might have shared it with Herbert. If John Milton senior were acquainted with Alfonso Lanyer, he may have seen or received a copy, since we know Alfonso presented at least one copy to a friend, Thomas Jones, Archbishop of Dublin. But Alfonso presumably hoped for some favors from Jones, unlikely from Milton senior. The whole search for acquaintance remains highly speculative in any case.

Although there is nothing to suggest that the two great religious poets of sixteenth-century England were influenced by Lanyer's work or that they even knew of it, her poetry still provides, as it did with earlier poets, a new and useful perspective on theirs. Herbert, like Lanyer, explores images of Christ and the relation between Christ and the redeemed soul, and Milton, like Lanyer, is interested in the ideas of freedom and what constitutes virtue beyond earthly beauty. I conclude with a few comparisons between the earlier poet and the later ones.

Poets in the Catholic tradition (including Constable and Southwell) could appeal to a variety of saintly models and mediators between themselves and God. Mary Magdalen was popular in a penitential climate, the Virgin Mary remained a favorite, and other saints might be cited.⁴⁶ For a Protestant poet the only mediator was Christ. While not absent from Catholic poetry, the relationship between the soul and its redeemer in life's pilgrimage continued to be a more common concern of Protestant verse. In the early years of the century, the Scots poet Elizabeth Melvill, Lady Culros, wrote Ane Godlie Dreame to explore the relationship between the Christian soul and Christ in the journey of life.⁴⁷ And Greville's lyric sequence ends with an appeal to “sweet Jesus” to “fill up time and come, / To yeeld the sinne her everlasting doome.”⁴⁸

The connection between the speaker and his redeemer is central to Herbert's poetry, in which he recognizes and explores many versions of that relationship.⁴⁹ Lanyer's various and complex portrait of Christ is a worthy backdrop for Herbert's achievement. In the Salve Deus her “Jesus of Nazareth” (l. 499) is, first, a betrayed man (l. 329), a “siely, weake, unarmed man” (l. 551), a humble man who embodies “virtue, patience, grace, love, piety” (l. 958). At the same time he is our “maker” (ll. 41, 420), “our heavenly King” (l. 942), and “Heavens bright king” (1088). Only the weeping daughters of Jerusalem understand the apparent contradictions, perceiving his divine origin, the force of his sacrifice, and his ultimate triumph: he is “their Lord, their Lover, and their King” (l. 982). The piety of women in Lanyer's poem illustrates the proper response to Christ's great sacrifice of mediating love: they grieve, love, comprehend, and respond. He is both “God in glory, / And … man in miserable case” (ll. 1329-30), becoming “the Booke / Wherein thine eyes continuelly may looke” (ll. 1351-52), “the Lord of Life and Love” (l. 1362).

Herbert also explores the apparent contradictions between who Christ appears to be and who he ultimately is. “The Sacrifice” might almost be a companion to the Salve Deus. In Herbert's poem, Christ speaks the passion story and regards the actions of men, asking: “Was ever grief like mine?”⁵⁰ In Lanyer's poem, when Christ goes to Gethsemane with Peter, James, and John, he struggles to tell them his sorrows. She interjects the apparent uselessness of the task:

Sweet Lord, how couldst thou thus to flesh and blood
Communicate thy griefe? Tell of thy woes?

(ll. 376-77)

Herbert's Christ observes his sleeping companions:

Yet my disciples sleep. I cannot gain
One houre of watching; but their drowsie brain
Comforts not me, and doth my doctrine staine:
Was ever grief, &c.

(ll. 29-32)

Through the betrayal, abandonment, trial, and crucifixion itself, men are relentlessly cowardly or wicked, leading to ironic distinctions between perception and reality. Herbert's Jesus is mocked by soldiers who do not understand they are speaking the truth:

They bow their knees to me and cry, Hail king:
What ever scoffes & scornfulnesse can bring,

(ll. 173-74)

.....Yet since mans scepters are as frail as reeds,
And thorny all their crowns, bloudie their weeds;
I, who am Truth, turn into truth their deeds:

(ll. 177-79)

There are no women in Herbert's portrayal, even with mention of original sin. It is “the earths great curse in Adams fall” (l. 165):

O all ye who passe by, behold and see;
Man stole the fruit, but I must climbe the tree;
The tree of life to all, but onely me:
Was ever griefe, &c.

(ll. 201-4)

Generic man may be to blame, but specific women are not cited for particular scorn.

Like Lanyer, Herbert is ultimately concerned with how the redeeming sacrificial act engenders, through grace, the proper response of love. “The Thanksgiving,” which follows “The Sacrifice,” begins, “Oh King of grief!” and seeks an appropriate human reaction to so great a sacrifice, but concludes that the distance is too great: “Then for thy passion—I will do for that— / Alas, my God, I know not what” (ll. 49-50). Poems that follow ask for grace and explore both the nature of Christ and the soul's relationship to its redeemer.

The Protestant triad of “Repentance,” “Faith,” and “Grace” assures the connection between the soul and Christ; most of Herbert's poems explore varieties of that connection.⁵¹ As they are in Lanyer's poem,⁵² the soul's expectations about its relationship with this redeeming Lord are often surprised in Herbert's lyrics. “The Collar” is a familiar example. The speaker wants freedom and abundance and thinks it resides in disorder and resistance, only to find it in the ordered call and submission of the final lines:

But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde
                                        At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child!
                                        And I reply'd, My Lord.(53)

Several Herbert poems consider the ironies of human expectation and aspiration in the face of Christ's incarnation and passion. “Redemption” is an allegory of tenant and Lord, in which the speaker knows the Lord's majesty and expects him to be in “great resorts” but finds him among “theeves and murderers” (ll. 10, 13). More characteristic are the many poems that use mind and art to struggle toward the high complexity of the divine, only to recognize a much simpler reality. “Easter” begins with complex stanzas tuning up to praise the great achievement of the resurrection, and concludes with apparently artless simplicity:

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.

(ll. 27-30)

“Man” brags on the elegance of the microcosm as a “Stately habitation,” “ev'ry thing,” “all symmetrie,” and asks finally that God “… dwell in it, / That it may dwell with thee at last” (ll. 2, 7, 13, 50-51). The speaker in “Jordan II” begins by “curling with metaphors a plain intention” since “nothing could seeme too rich to clothe the sunne,” only to be told “there is in love a sweetnesse readie penn'd” (ll. 5, 11, 17). In setting personal experience against traditional expectations, both Herbert and Lanyer draw surprising conclusions from familiar materials.

Both poets also emphasize the personal and familiar relationship between the soul and Christ. For Lanyer it is found in the Canticles' analogy of bride and bridegroom, which she renders specific to the gender of herself and her dedicatees. Herbert's relationship with Christ is grounded in the loving friendship of a discipleship not specific to gender. “Love III” concludes Herbert's lyric sequence with an image of a (Protestant) memorial meal of love, in which “the friend” keeps overturning the speaker's expectations:

                                                            … let my shame
                                        Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
                                        My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
                                        So I did sit and eat.

(ll. 13-18)

Of all the religious poets who wrote during Lanyer's lifetime, Herbert comes closest to a view of Christ like Lanyer's in the Salve Deus. Despite differences in genres, verse forms, style, and voice, they share a tone of confident exploration into the mystery of the passion and portray Christ as a real and vivid presence in their imaginations and their lives. Lanyer displaces much of the sense of Christ's companionship onto the countess of Cumberland, whereas it is the poetic “I” who does “sit and eat” in Herbert's verse, but the feeling of closeness, and of a directness and simplicity that comprehends complexity, is remarkably similar in the work of these two poets. Lanyer presents a narrative about women reading aright the central story of the human condition, and Herbert portrays a man learning to read that same story.

If women are largely absent from Herbert's verse,⁵⁴ they play a prominent role in Milton's. Lanyer's “Eves Apologie” and her portrait of women generally compare interestingly with Milton's depiction of Eve in Paradise Lost and of women throughout his work. Lanyer's Eve wants to give her beloved the gift of knowledge (ll. 801-2), while Milton's fallen Eve offers Adam the fruit in order to assure she does not die alone (IX.826-31). Milton's Dalila is vain and self-serving and would enjoy dominating Samson in a voluptuous bed (Samson, ll. 920-27). In Lanyer's poem, even temptresses such as Cleopatra and the queen of Sheba affirm great love and seek wisdom (ll. 1441, 1569-78). The shepherd-speaker in “Lycidas,” if he seeks fame both earthly and divine, must reject the temptation “To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, / Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair” (ll. 68-69). By no means does he take “Knowledge … / From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke” (Salve Deus, ll. 807-8).

The debate over Milton and women has been amply considered elsewhere.⁵⁵ I want to suggest that there is more similarity between Lanyer's and Milton's approach than it might at first appear. Both retell biblical stories and take imaginative liberties with Scripture in order to comment on contemporary practices. Both intrude a personal voice that claims its authority from divine inspiration. And both challenge the traditional understanding of the fall and redemption. While Milton generally follows contemporary teaching about the sexes, including the biblical story of Eve being formed from Adam (Gen. 2:21-23), and of women's consequent secondary status (“Hee for God only, shee for God in him” [IV.299]),⁵⁶ the two poets nonetheless draw similar conclusions about female beauty as both an emblem of the divine and a serious danger.

Like Milton's Eve, Lanyer's women may be tempted by their own beauty not to look farther than surface loveliness and the satisfactions it can bring. Faire Rosamond's beauty

                    … betraid her thoughts, aloft to clime,
To build strong castles in uncertaine aire,
Where th'infection of a wanton crime
Did worke her fall.

(ll. 227-30)

True beauty, represented by the devoted virtue of the countess of Cumberland, transcends Helen's, “that bred in Troy the ten yeares strife” (l. 209), and cowardly Cleopatra's, who “flies … from him [Antony] when afflictions prove” (l. 1435). Cleopatra's “Beauty wrought the hazard of her Crowne” (l. 1448). By contrast (and in the example of the countess):

A mind enrich'd with Virtue, shines more bright,
Addes everlasting Beauty, gives true grace,
          Frames an immortall Goddesse on the earth.

(ll. 197-99)

Milton's Eve is at first tempted by her own beauty to stay gazing reflectively. Soon after her awakening, she encounters her image in a “Smooth Lake”:

                                                            … there I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pin'd with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warn'd me, What thou seest,
What there thou seest fair Creature is thyself.

(IV. 459, 465-68)

The voice leads her to Adam, whom she finds “less fair, / Less winning soft, less amiably mild, / Than that smooth wat'ry image” (IV.478-80). She turns back, only to be called by Adam, through whom she learns

How beauty is excell'd by manly grace
And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.

(IV.490-91)

In Milton's version, Eve's fall may hearken back to her vulnerability to the visually appealing. The Serpent is outwardly beautiful (IX.49-505) and his feigned affectionate indignation makes its way into her mind, yet the beautiful fruit is the principal attraction:

Fixt on the Fruit she gaz'd, which to behold
Might tempt alone, and in her ears the sound
Yet rung of his persuasive words, impregn'd
With Reason, to her seeming, and with Truth;
Meanwhile the hour of Noon drew on, and wak'd
An eager appetite, rais'd by the smell
So savory of that Fruit, which with desire,
Inclinable now grown to touch or taste,
Solicited her longing eye.

(IX.735-43)

She is tempted by knowledge, but seduced by beauty and appetite.

While confusing surface beauty and self-love with wisdom and proper desire appears to be paradigmatically female in this section of Paradise Lost, Adam's fall arguably stems from his own inability to see Eve as other than a reflection of himself. The appeal of beauty and narcissism are general, not necessarily gendered, dangers:

                                                            … I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.

(IX.914-16)

After the fall, beauty and desire bring pain, and gender hierarchy is no longer a natural compatibility but an imposed tyranny, as Milton paraphrases God's judgment of Eve (Gen. 3:16):

          Thy sorrow I will greatly multiply
By thy Conception; Children thou shalt bring
In sorrow forth, and to thy husband's will
Thine shall submit, hee over thee shall rule.

(X.193-96)

Although both poets acknowledge that Eve was tempted and deceived, they write differently the motives and consequences. Lanyer's Eve desires knowledge and has no reason to disbelieve the Serpent who offers it, while Adam, attracted by the fruit she offers him, indulges his appetite.

If Eve did erre, it was for knowledge sake,
The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall:
          No subtill Serpents falshood did betray him,
          If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him?
Not Eve, whose fault was only too much love.
Which made her give this present to her Deare,
That what shee tasted, he likewise might prove,
Whereby his knowledge might become more cleare;
He never sought her weaknesse to reprove,
With those sharpe words, which he of God did heare:
Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke
From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke.

(ll. 797-808)

In a common response to those who placed the blame for the fall entirely on Eve, Lanyer uses Eve's derivation from Adam as another reason to turn the argument around:

If any Evill did in her remaine,
Beeing made of him, he was the ground of all.

(ll. 809-10)

Lanyer's version of the passion does not ignore the gender hierarchy, but valorizes a specifically female piety. Pilate's wife concludes her apology for Eve by implying that Christ's crucifixion will so debase men that women will be liberated from their curse of submission:

          Her weaknesse did the Serpents words obay;
          But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray.
Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die,
Her sinne was small, to what you do commit;
All mortall sinnes that doe for vengeance crie,
Are not to be compared unto it.

(ll. 815-20)

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?

(ll. 825-30)

The virtues Lanyer praises in her women are similar to what Adam learns to value at the end of Paradise Lost. The modest countess of Cumberland embodies the powerful devotion to Christ and to inward virtue that surpasses the achievements of Old Testament heroines Deborah, Judith, and Susanna (ll. 1481-1542). She is constant in “Gods true service” (l. 1516), and spends “that pretious time that God hath sent, / In all good exercises of the minde” (ll. 1566-67). The queen of Sheba, who sought wisdom from Solomon, is a “faire map of majestie and might,” but only “a figure of thy deerest Love” (ll. 1609-10). The countess understands Christ's Passion and redemption:

Pure thoughted Lady, blessed be thy choyce
Of this Almightie, everlasting King.

(ll. 1673-74)

Milton's Adam (and presumably the dreaming Eve [XII.610-13]) learn the lessons that Lanyer's countess of Cumberland already knows. “Henceforth I learn,” he says, “that to obey is best, / And love with fear the only God” (XII.561-62); that God is

Merciful over all his works, with good
Still overcoming evil, and by small
Accomplishing great things, by things deem'd weak
Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise
By simply meek; that suffering for Truth's sake
Is fortitude to highest victory,
And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life;
Taught this by his example whom I now
Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest.

(XII.565-573)

For both Lanyer and Milton, wisdom and virtue are true beauty, humility true strength, and “Death the Gate of Life.” These cliches of Christian belief arise from different impulses and are differently presented and differently gendered. Yet both poets have a love of liberty, seen as a restored hope for the human condition after Christ's redemptive grace. For Lanyer “libertie” may seem a particularly gendered emancipation from masculine tyranny, which is how it is expressed in “Eves Apologie, yet an idea of liberty underlies the entire poem and is implicitly connected with her advocacy of true beauty as the virtue which chooses the right lover (Christ) and the right course of action. Lanyer blesses the countess of Cumberland's “choyce” of Christ and so inscribes her freedom. Milton was of course a great advocate of freedom, “religious, domestic, and civil,” and in Areopagitica makes a connection Lanyer might have applauded: “when God gave [Adam] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.”⁵⁷ Lanyer has Pilate's wife ask for “libertie” from the domination of men in a context that praises knowledge and suggests that men have the power to choose against the crucifixion. If they choose to crucify Christ (as historically they did and memorially they might continue to do), that frees women to choose not to submit to men. The first choice must always be, as exemplified by the figure of the countess, for Christ.

Lanyer and Milton both advocate knowledgeable choice; both put God's word and Christ's example ahead of society's rules. Milton excused the killing of a king and advocated representative government.⁵⁸ Lanyer, by contrast, merely suggested that women have the right to choose their own faith and pursue their own virtue. Milton was read, and risked imprisonment or worse at the Restoration. As far as we know, Lanyer was simply ignored.

Aemilia Lanyer is an impressive and worthy member of the group of poets who founded the great century of English religious verse. Her approach to biblical materials and doctrinal issues is original and interesting, providing perspective and commentary on the varieties of more familiar Catholic and Protestant verse. Her wit and her richly descriptive passages follow both Southwell and Greville and anticipate Crashaw as well as Milton. Her voice triangulates the complex struggle of Donne and the achieved simplicity of Herbert with a view from outside the center of worldly power, inside the center of female virtue. Lanyer was invisible when most of the current generation of professors was in college and graduate school, but it is increasingly difficult to imagine a full understanding of early seventeenth-century English poetry without her.

Notes

1. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), 39-53 and passim.

2. Anne Lock, “A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Written in Maner of a Paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme of David,” appended to Lock's translation of Calvin's sermons Upon the Songe that Ezechias Made after he had been Sicke (1560, in Susan Felch, ed., The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1999), 62-71); Lanyer refers to the Sidney-Pembroke Psalms, which circulated in numerous manuscript copies in the first part of the seventeenth century, as “rare sweet songs” and “holy sonnets” (“The Authours Dreame,” ll. 117, 121).

3. From the “Articles of Religion” (“The Thirty-nine Articles”) of the Anglican Church, article 25, “Of the Sacraments.” See also articles 11-14, on justification and works, e.g., from article 11, “Of the Justification of Man”: “We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings.” These articles became the official doctrine of the English church in 1571. For a summary history, see Massey Hamilton Shepherd, Jr., The Oxford American Prayer Book Commentary (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), 600-1.

4. Article 28, “Of the Lord's Supper.”

5. The Catechisme, or maner to teache Children the Christian Religion. Made by the excellent doctor and pastor in Christes Churche John Calvin, (London: Jhon [sic] Kyngston, 1582), sigs. C2-C3.

6. An Ample Declaration of the Christian doctrine. Composed in Italian by the renowned Cardinal: Card. Bellarmine. Translated into English by Richard Ha[y]dock D. of Divinite (Rouen, c. 1602), sigs. C2. Sig. C2v: [It is as if Christ worked hard to] “gaine so much money, as were sufficient to pay al the debts of this citie, and should put the same in a bank, to the end it should be geven unto al such as should bring a warrant from him: this man had surely satisfied for all … & yet manie might remaine stil in debt, for that they would not, either for pride, or for slouth, or for some other cause, demand his warrant, and carrie it to the bank, to receive the money.”

7. Diane McColley has captured this distinction neatly in juxtaposing two versions of God the Father's presence in creation by the Flemish engraver Jan Collaert after Maerten de Vos. In the first (more “Catholic” version), the background shows a robed figure lifting up his hands by a seashore, creating the heavens; in the middle perspective, another God figure sits on a rock with his hand pointed toward an array of Edenic animals: and, in the foreground, yet another, a vigorous bearded patriarch, blesses Eve as she emerges from Adam's side. In the second version, published later by a different printer, the scene is the same except that a sun-like oblong inscribed with the Hebrew name for God intertwined with the Latin “Pater” replaces the blessing patriarch, and the figures on the rock and seashore have disappeared. The Protestant version rejects an anthropomorphic God in favor of a more abstract “Word.” Diane McColley, A Gust for Paradise: Milton's Eden and the Visual Arts (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), figs. 15 and 16 (see also 21-35).

8. Felch, 65.

9. James H. MacDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown, eds., The Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 41. All citations are from this edition.

10. “Queen Anne,” l. 44; “Arbella,” l. 12; “Duchess of Suffolk,” l. 42; Salve Deus, 474.

11. “Queen Anne,” l. 85; “Ladie Anne,” l. 117; Salve Deus, ll. 319, 411, 572.

12. “Authors Dreame,” l. 218; Salve Deus, l. 560; “Ladie Anne,” l. 131; Salve Deus, l. 467.

13. “Vertuous Ladies,” l. 9; “Ladie Anne,” l. 115; Salve Deus, ll. 77, 1018, 1305.

14. See also Salve Deus ll. 677, 728, 741, 750, 896, 1012, 1017, 1111, 1135, 1143, 1188, 1204, 1254, 1302.

15. See chapter 1; “The Authors Dream,” ll. 117-32 and sidenote.

16. Lanyer lauds Sidney in “The Authors Dream,” ll. 138-44, but places the countess of Pembroke “farre before him … / For virtue, wisedome, learning, dignity” (ll. 151-52). Greville's poems apparently circulated widely before being printed in his Works, 1633 (they are mentioned in Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, 1586). See Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1945), vol. 1, 33-42 (though it is not clear whether the religious verses were circulated early). Citations from Greville are from this edition. Citations from Constable are from Joan Grundy, ed., The Poems of Henry Constable (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1960). Grundy concludes that Constable was probably at court in 1588 and 1589 (26).

17. For persuasive arguments on aspects of Lanyer's unconventional view of the passion, see Janel Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’” in Feminist Measures: Sounding in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristianne Miller (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994), and Catherine Keohane, “‘That Blindest Weakenesse Be Not Over-bold’: Aemilia Lanyer's Radical Unfolding of the Passion,” ELH 64 (1997), 359-90.

18. John King, Barbara Lewalski, and Louis Martz have described and analyzed the richness and variety of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century biblical poetics which fed the development of religious poetry in early modern English. See John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982); Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979); Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962).

19. Felch, introduction. “Despite her unswerving commitment to reformed and anti-Papist sentiments, Lock's [dedicatory] epistle [to the Duchess of Suffolk] is not iconoclastic. In both its allegorical use of biblical materials and conservative rhetoric, it remains firmly embedded in the venerable tradition of English devotional writings.” Although there remains some question about whether the sonnets are by Lock, Felch argues for her authorship, as have other recent commentators, e.g., Thomas P. Roche, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 155, and Michael Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1992), 92.

20. All citations are taken from the Geneva Bible (1560) unless otherwise noted. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 edition, intro. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969). For the definition of “Protestant” in the sense described, see, e.g., Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 78-83.

21. All citations are from Margaret P. Hannay, Noel Kinnamon, and Michael Brennan, eds., The Works of the Countess of Pembroke, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998). Psalm 51, ll. 5-7, transcribed by Noel T. Kinnamon from the Penshurst ms.

22. Felch, 66.

23. Bullough, Poems and Dramas, vol. 1, 2-9.

24. Grundy, Poems of Henry Constable, 24, 150-51, 154-55, 157.

25. Daniel credits Greville with publicizing his early work, and possibly, as Bullough suggests (19), even introducing him to the Pembroke circle. He became tutor to the countess of Pembroke's sons in the early 1590's and, some years later, to the countess of Cumberland's daughter, Anne Clifford (see chapter 1). In Musophilus, Daniel addresses Greville:

    Thy learned judgement which I most esteem
    (Worthy Fulke Grevil) must defend this course [i.e., Daniel's discursive verse],
    By whose mild grace and gentle hand at first
    My infant Muse was brought in open sight
    From out the darkness wherein it was nursed
    And made to be partaker of the light.

    (ll. 743-48)

26. Bullough, Poems and Dramas, vol. 1, 18-19; Grundy, Poems of Henry Constable, 146. The sisters were apparently close, and common dedications not uncommon (see, e.g., Spenser's dedications cited in chapter 2, 55). For a summary of the relation between the two sisters, see Victoria A. Wilson, Society Women of Shakespeare's Time (London: The Bodley Head, 1924), 138-43.

27. Sonnet 98, “Caelica,” in Bullough, Poems and Dramas, vol. 1, 143-44.

28. Grundy, Poems of Henry Constable, 53-59, 101-2.

29. Ibid., 187-88.

30. Ibid., 191-92.

31. MacDonald and Brown, Poems of Robert Southwell, lvi-lxxvi.

32. “Certain Sonnets” 32, Sir Philip Sidney, Poems, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 161.

33. Sonnet 86, Bullough, Poems and Dramas, vol. 1, 135-36.

34. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 59-69.

35. C. A. Patrides, ed., The Complete English Poems of John Donne (London: Dent, Everyman's Library, 1985), 443. All citations from Donne's poems are from this edition.

36. Patrides, Poems of John Donne, 448.

37. Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 236 (describing the central theme of Donne's two “Anniversaries”).

38. “Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden,” in C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925-52), vol. 1, 33.

39. Barbara K. Lewalski, Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), 112-13.

40. Patrides, Poems of John Donne, 326.

41. Lewalski, Donne's Anniversaries, 113.

42. Mueller, “Feminist Poetics.”

43. “And [God] said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my power is made perfite through weakenes. Verie gladly therefore wil I rejoyce rather in mine infirmities, that the power of Christ may dwell in me … for when I am weake, then am I strong” (2 Cor. 12:9-10).

44. F. E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), xxxvi; citations from Herbert's verse are from this edition.

45. The date of publication is given as “On or before 2 Jan. 1646” in A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, vol. 2, “The Minor English Poems,” ed. A. S. P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1972), pt. 1, 6.

46. See Grundy, Poems of Henry Constable, 185-92, which includes poems to “St. Mychaell the Archangel,” “St. John the Baptist,” “St. Peter and St. Paul,” “St. Katharyne,” and ‘St. Margarett,” as well as the two Marys. Southwell's poems often focus on St. Peter (a second poem called “St. Peter's Complaynte,” “St. Peter's afflicted minde,” “St. Peters remorse,” 29-31, 33-35). See also William Alabaster (1568-1640), who has poems to Christ and the Virgin Mary, but also St. Augustine and St. John the Evangelist. G. M. Story and Helen Gardner, eds., The Sonnets of William Alabaster (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), 19, 42.

47. Elizabeth Melvill (Colville), Lady Culros, Ane Godlie Dreame, Edinburgh, 1606.

48. Bullough, Poems and Dramas, vol. 1, 153.

49. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 294-96: “The speaker is forced to give over his foolish and presumptuous (Catholic) efforts to achieve an imaginative identification with the crucified Christ and to participate in his sacrifice by imitation, turning instead to a proper Protestant concern with the meaning of Christ's sacrifice for his own redemption and his spiritual life. In this interest he explores the relationship which is the theological ground of all the others—Christ as Savior and the speaker as his redeemed. … The speaker is related to Christ also as servant to lord, or sometimes subject to king, and the terms of this relationship are also transmuted by love.” Lewalski also notes Herbert's exploration of the Christ-speaker relationship as “father and child” (295), “but the primary relation explored through these poems is that of loving friends, not fixed in the Canticles' relation of Bride and Bridegroom but exchanging the roles of lover and beloved” (296).

50. Hutchinson, Works, 26-34. At two points the refrain changes to “Never was grief like mine”: at the moment of God's apparent forsaking (l. 215) and at the end (l. 251).

51. Hutchinson, Works, 48-51, 60-61.

52. E.g., when the countess of Cumberland finds the true presence of her Lord in the humble and sick, ll. 1345-68.

53. Hutchinson, Works, 153-54.

54. The notable exception is his poem on “Marie Magdalene,” Hutchinson, Works, 173.

55. See, e.g., Julia Walker, ed., Milton and the Idea of Woman (Champagne-Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991); references to earlier debates run throughout its notes.

56. Merritt Y. Hughes, John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). All references to Milton are from this ed.

57. “Second Defense,” in Hughes, 831a; “Areopagitica,” in Hughes, 733a.

58. E.g., in “Eikonklastes” and “Ready and Easy Way,” in Hughes.