In what ways does Aemilia Lanyer solicit us to think about the theory and practice of literary history? In general, when we write the history of literature we construct a variety of narratives to connect events, works, styles, writers, genres—what have you—over time. The narratives so constructed serve not only to represent the past, but to represent it to the present, and, the past being past, it is in the present that these narratives must have their effect. The very small number of surviving copies of the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the lack of contemporary reference to it or to any other literary works by Lanyer argue against her having participated in any great way in the construction of English literature. Perhaps something of hers was in some manner appropriated by writers the impact of whose work is easier to trace. Ben Jonson comes to mind as someone she might have influenced, and though the evidence does not support A. L. Rowse's contention that she was Shakespeare's “dark lady,” her connections to the court music as well as to the Lord Chamberlain may well have placed her on occasion in the milieux of Court and theater inhabited by Jonson, Shakespeare, and other familiar literary names of the period. We cannot rule out the possibility of her direct influence in literary history, but neither can we adduce any positive evidence for it. The question, then, arises: if, as appears to be the case, Lanyer's publication had, in fact, no historical consequence, failed to cause anything at all, in what sense (if any) was it a literary historical event? What does it mean—now—for Lanyer so belatedly to enter literary history?

As is typically true of historical questions, we can project possible answers to this question on two scenes: the past and the present. The Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum is a historical document. Its existence tells us that a woman did, in fact, publish a work of this genre in 1611 (or 1610) and that it was possible for her to address a particular group of aristocratic women in this way, although we cannot say whether the address succeeded.

Physical differences among the extant copies suggest some things about how presentation copies were prepared and patronage sought.¹ Specific references in the poems may illuminate specific historical events (in, for example, the family histories of the Russells and the Cliffords) and general trends (like that toward litigiousness regarding the heritability of land holdings). Moving a bit closer to literary history, we can also see Lanyer's book as a moment in the querelle des femmes and deduce from it interesting facts about the lives of noble and middle-class women in the early seventeenth century.²

In respect of what it suggests about life in the early seventeenth century, we might say that whether or not the Salve was, in itself, a literary historical event, it is for us a historical document. My present interest, however, is to emphasize the specifically literary historical implications of the Salve as they might come to be played out on the other scene, that of the present. I want to consider how Lanyer's addition to the canon might change the way we read other more familiar poets so as to recreate the narrative of our literary history in its relation to the present, and I want briefly to reflect on what that revision or reconstruction of the familiar might more generally indicate about the sort of knowledge literary history affords.

To illustrate the potential power of Lanyer's work as an intervention in the present construction of a literary historical narrative, I think it useful to begin with a small example: some familiar lines by a poet whose settled familiarity Lanyer disturbs:

The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him, where to look for it.
And freely men confesse, that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seeke so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomis.
'Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subiect, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
For euery man alone thinkes he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that there can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.(3)

In these lines, published in the same year as the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, John Donne laments the contemporary reduction of the world to its “atomies” by the death of Elizabeth Drury, a young girl he never met and whose most salient feature in the poem is her indistinction as an individual.⁴

Now the very fact that these lines are quoted in an essay about Aemilia Lanyer suffices to call attention to what in other circumstances has gone unnoted: that when Donne enumerates the relations “all forgot,” in 1611, he forgets to forget relations among women. Moreover, Donne evokes not just the loss of patrilineal relations but also a series of analogous disorientations. These disorientations progress upward through the loss of fealty between sovereign and subject, the order of the planets and stars and the relation of the sun to the earth. The poem thus implies the existence of a previously homogenous and integrated cosmic order, of which the “idea of a Woman” served as a symbolic representative. This order produces Woman as idea, or concept, while silently erasing the relations of actually existing mothers, daughters, and sisters, which would tend in every case to disable the concept by making it more concrete. Donne's substitution of the “idea of a woman” for the material existence of the girl whose death he commemorates shifts the focus of the poem from the loss of Elizabeth Drury, the daughter he has been commissioned to memorialize, to the failure of the cosmic order as traditionally represented. The “death” of the idealized figure of Woman is used to represent the death of a certain way of representing the world. In his reduction of (lost) relation to the parallel and inclusive sets of prince-subject, father-son, “shee,” whose death is represented in the poem as the death of the world, dies twice: once as an individual human being and a second time as the generalized holder of symbolic place in the universal order.⁵

Yet, insofar as “Her Ghost doth walke” in a “kind of world remaining still” (ll. 67-70), the world of dead male relations is haunted by another, in which the relevant relations are the unspoken ones of queen and subject, mother and daughter.⁶ It is in the interest of literary history to consider Lanyer's peculiar ability to make us aware of what we might not otherwise notice, to recall what we have been in fact trained to forget, giving voice to the maternal ghost necessarily inhabiting and perhaps outliving a patriarchal genre. I have just invoked Donne's lamentation, in the Anniversaries, for the loss of “the idea of a woman” from whom all relation stems and to whom no relation is necessary, and I will soon advert to Jonson, because I want to begin to see what, if anything, happens, in a literary historical sense, when her voice, Aemilia Lanyer's voice, the voice of a woman who, like her contemporaries Donne and Jonson, needs financial means and seeks patronage through the poetry of praise, is (re)placed in dialogue with the voices of the two male poets whose names have, again, in a literary historical sense, served alternatively as ways to name seventeenth-century verse: for example, in university courses with names like “Age of Jonson” or “Donne and the Metaphysicals” and enduringly useful books like Joseph Summers's The Heirs of Donne and Jonson.⁷

Therefore, in addition to its intrinsic poetic interest, which is considerable, the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, by virtue of its early date and the example it affords of a feminine voice speaking in the genres of the poetry of praise, presents an opportunity to consider in a concrete way issues central to our understanding of the interrelationship of material history and literary form. I am thinking in particular of two large questions: (1) What is the relationship between the ideological work performed by seventeenth-century epideictic poetry and the becoming canonical of certain generic conventions? and (2) In what ways do generic conventions function as protocols of reading, and, conversely, to what extent and in what ways are noncanonical poems rendered opaque by these protocols? Gaining access to the intrinsic poetic interest of Lanyer's poems is, I want to suggest, not just a matter of learning to value the conventions and figures of her poetry as we have been taught to value those of (generically speaking) his, but of learning to read otherwise, a process of dialectical negation in which the “natural” is converted to the “historical” through an active consideration of the genders of genre.

Choosing the most obvious generic parallel, I want to consider how a comparison of Lanyer's “The Description of Cooke-ham” and Jonson's “To Penshurst” helps to make visible how deeply implicated Jonson's poem is in assumptions about land tenure and inheritance from which Lanyer is excluded by gender.⁸ Lanyer's poem allows us to stand at a key distance from Jonson's poem and the rhetorical norms established in it. While “The Description of Cooke-ham” may well be the first English country-house poem, by virtue of its feminine origin and address it cannot sensibly engage what will become the canonical metaphors of the English country-house genre. Thus the comparison illuminates the facts that the country-house genre was gendered at its inception, and that, unsurprisingly, in literary historical as in material historical terms, the male form engendered a self-conscious lineage beneath which the female genealogy becomes difficult to read. The material ways in which the male country-house poem and the legal system of patrilineal descent reinforce each other at the expense of the female country-house poem and female genealogy are obvious, but the details of this interaction between literary and material history can be illuminating.

Jonson's poem does its ideological work by identifying land and lord as earth and fruit, mother and father; these metaphors, like Donne's summary of relation “all forgot,” use the commonplace assumption that the microcosm will reproduce the macrocosm to assert a relation not between nature and humankind but between natural order and man: the rhetorical formalization of this analogy as at once metaphor and mimesis—comparison and imitative representation—posits an immanent reduplication between logos and maleness, constituting and establishing precisely what we might today call phallogocentricity.⁹

The gendered distinction between nature and natural order for which I am reaching here is aptly characterized in Luce Irigaray's recent je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference (1993). In order to illuminate the deployment of nature and order within the broad context of discursive phallogocentricity I am going to quote at some length from an essay, “On Women's Discourse and Men's Discourse,” included in that book. Asserting, a very generalized difference between masculine and feminine discourse, Irigaray characterizes men's discourse as distinctly mediated by culture:

Most of the time, in men's discourse, the world is designated as inanimate abstractions integral to the subject's world. Reality appears as an always already cultural reality, linked to the individual and collective history of the masculine subject. It's always a matter of a secondary nature, cut off from its corporeal roots, its cosmic environment, its relation to life. This relation is only ever mentioned to be denied, and is perpetually passing into uncultured behavior. The forms may change, but the blind immediacy of the behavior stays the same. The male subject's relations to his body, to what it has given him, to nature, to the bodies of others, including those of his sexual partners, are yet to be developed. In the meantime, the realities of which his discourse speaks are artificial, mediated to such an extent by one subject and one culture that it's not really possible to share them.¹⁰

Now it is necessary to be careful and precise about this assertion. I would want, at some point, to meditate on the doubly paradoxical situation of (1) Irigaray's reliance on this highly conceptualized language to make the point that a discourse mediated by the concept is characteristically masculinist and (2) the decorum of my situation as a man appropriating her distinction for the traditionally masculine demands of literary history. More importantly, I think, we would do better to think of what Irigaray describes as a style of discourse identified as masculine within a certain historically occurring patriarchal configuration rather than as “men's discourse.” Many men may be quite comfortable in “women's discourse,” which by implication we may characterize as less culturally mediated—more “natural” in the sense of being more in touch with the body, its senses, and their more or less immediate objects—as some women are surely quite comfortable in “men's discourse.” A fully theorized use of Irigaray's gendered discourses would thus require a careful consideration of the (at least quasi-) essentialist tendencies of the broad distinctions she makes, and an emphasis on the fact that insofar as we are talking about discourse, we are not talking about unmediated nature at all, but about a cultural ideal of nature, a distinction not between nature and culture but between cultural attitudes toward nature and culture.

For now, however, I have the more modest aim of noting the admirable specificity of Irigaray's formulation in relation to the seventeenth-century poems I have been discussing. It is not, then, a question of women actually or essentially having an unmediated relation to nature—an assertion I would deny on the grounds I have just suggested—but of the fact that, when seen in their difference from Lanyer's poems, Jonson's “To Penshurst” and Donne's Anniversaries (to take just the two examples I have discussed) answer as well as they do to Irigaray's description of “men's discourse.” Both Irigaray and Lanyer use the same opposition between culturally mediated and naturally immediate discourse as a way of figuring difference; that is, of figuring the feminine as difference, as that which remains outside or beyond the conceptual frame.

One might, after all, think that the language system formed around the expected repetition of the same divinely instituted structure in microcosm and macrocosm is precisely and historically a mediation of world by body.¹¹ Hegel thought it such when he labelled such rhetorical tools image thinking. To become fully patriarchal such figures need to be negated as image and incorporated in the more general and abstract form of concept. But in the dialectic of patriarchal practice it tended to be also the body which was mediated by the world—that is, by the world experienced in accord with a highly determined idea of cosmic design. Within this idealization the immediacy of things was sacrificed to a reassuring sense of the immediately significant. The suppression of women under the figure of a generic and idealized Woman who functions as the focal point around which male (conceptual) discourse may be constituted was one important symptom of this displacement. Beatrice and Laura are two of the better known names of the generic “she,” who functions, in this way, as the support of a conceptual discourse from which she is, herself, excluded.

The putative subject of Donne's Anniversaries, Elizabeth Drury, fulfills a similar function.¹² Donne's 1611 poem is, however, more reflexively diagnostic than its predecessors, representing the death of Drury as marking precisely the end of the effectiveness of the figure of idealized femininity as the constitutive other of “men's discourse.” In the First Anniversary, “her” disappearance is identified with the inviability, in 1611, of a cosmology that organized vision around “natural” forms that offer themselves immediately as also symbolic representations. Thus Donne identifies and records a historical moment in which the figure of the idealized woman is itself lost to a conceptual mediation of the cosmos. The circular orbits of the Ptolemaic planets traced real lines in real space to outline the abstract conceptual being of a God whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. This visual world organized relation, made the world cohere. “Shee” then, as the conventional and visual embodiment of a sublimed and subjected desire is also this sign of significance:

She that was best and first originall
Of all faire copies; and the generall
Steward to Fate …
…
She to whom this world must itselfe refer,
As Suburbs, or the Microcosme of her

[ll. 222-36]

Donne's lament gives us some idea of what is at stake in appropriating the figure of Woman as the emptied center around which a patriarchal conceptual economy circles, or, to put it another way, of foreclosing the space in which something other than that idealized figure might be maintained. The unspoken dialogue between the country-house poems of Lanyer and Jonson tells us something of what might happen if that space, which threatens to become silent and disorganized for Donne, were actually to be filled with the sound of women's voices.

The implicit or explicit claim that these voices would, if they could be heard, paradoxically speak a relation to nature unmediated by the logos—that is, according to the categories, compartments, and polarities of a conceptual order—takes on a particular potency in this dialogue because it poses a very specific threat to the work of the Jonsonian poem. This work, in the case of “To Penshurst” at least, is rhetorically to assimilate patrilinearity to nature—to unify the origin of the logocentric and the phallocentric by representing a particular and historically determined set of laws and customs as expressing a divinely designed natural order.

The seventeenth century was aware of and sensitive to a crucial point of resistance inherent in this naturalizing arrangement. Take, for example, the following exchange between Miranda and Prospero:

MIR.
Sir, are not you my father?
PROS.
Thy mother was a piece of vertue, and
she said thou wast my daughter; and thy father
Was Duke of Milan; and his only heir
And princess, no worse issued.(13)

Prospero's rejoinder evinces both the system of patrilineal descent that makes Miranda his heir and the word of the silenced mother on which that system depends.

Whatever status we might want finally to assign to Irigaray's (and Lanyer's) claims for a distinctively feminine access to a material reality unmediated by discursive culture, I think we can acknowledge that maternity is a position that can be established on empirical grounds. It is written visibly on the mother's body and witnessed visually at birth. Paternity, on the contrary, is not only necessarily mediated by the word; it is, in fact, necessarily mediated precisely by the mother's word. As we see in Prospero's exchange with Miranda, this is a word that cannot be spoken without paradoxically evoking the scandal of its potential falsity. This scandal in the structure of patrilinearity itself is acknowledged in Jonson's penultimate compliment to Penshurst, when, like Prospero, the poet presumes to speak the mother's word: “Thy lady's noble, fruitful, chaste withal. / His children thy great lord may call his own” (ll. 90-91).¹⁴ The serious tension that underlies these lines is betrayed by the poet's attempt to relieve it with the wry addition of “A fortune in this age but rarely known” (l. 92). The relation of dialectical negation between male and female genres comes into view in these lines. In the very moment that Lady Sidney's word is made good, generic woman must be denigrated, her word made nought. The individual is praised at the expense of the genus.

In Jonson's “To Penshurst” the assertion of an autochthonous link between the Sidney family and the Kentish land covers over two ideologically less convenient possible accounts of the Sidney estate: the relatively recent, Henrician origins of the family's landed status in Kent and Robert Sidney's financial dependence on Barbara Gammage's legacy to replenish family fortunes depleted by his illustrious brother Philip.¹⁵

Moreover, the presentation of the Sidneys as cultivating and cultivated by the land covers over this political and economic history in a way that exemplifies Irigaray's remark that

Although our societies, made up half by men, half by women, stem from two genealogies and not one, patriarchal power is organized by submitting one genealogy to the other. Thus, what is now termed the oedipal structure as access to the cultural order is already structured within a single, masculine line of filiation which doesn't symbolize the woman's relation to her mother. Mother-daughter relationships in patrilinear societies are subordinated to relationships between men.

[16]

This subordination is not news, but there is, I believe, value—for literary history and, perhaps, for contemporary feminism—in tracing out in concrete cases some of the specific ways in which patrilineal succession is expressed in the legal system on the one hand and validated or resisted by generic conventions on the other. The way in which Jonson substitutes the land for women as the womb from which succeeding generations of Sidney heirs are produced is all the more exemplary when contrasted with Lanyer's country-house poem in the feminine voice.

Lanyer's poem attacks (possibly preemptively, as it may have preceded Jonson's) the substitution of land (wealth-patrimony) for woman (mother) that characterizes the rhetoric of patrilinearity. Thus, to exemplify what I propose to call, after Adorno, the negative dialectics of the canon, the comparison of our two earliest examples of the English country-house poem makes visible the way in which “To Penshurst” significantly excludes female descent by metaphorically assimilating the Sidney women to the land from which the Sidney men descend.¹⁶ Just as Prospero's “so thy mother told me,” the “ghost” of Elizabeth Drury haunting Donne's dead world and the references to Barbara Gammage in “To Penshurst” represent remainders of the feminine genealogy negated by patriarchal practice, Lanyer's encoding of a feminine poetic subject persists as a remainder with which to confront the patrilinear literary history whose generic conventions tended to negate it.

Margaret Russell, Countess of Cumberland, and her daughter Anne Clifford, later Countess of Dorset, appear to have retreated to Cookham, a royal estate in the Russell family's holding, during the countess' estrangement from the errant Clifford in the years before his death in 1605. Jonson celebrates (or, more correctly, recommends) Robert Sidney's dwelling on the Kentish land. Lanyer, on the contrary, recalls the moment of a leave taking that probably occurred when the dowager countess moved to a Russell estate before beginning the epic litigation by which she and her daughter—the remarkable diarist—struggled to enforce an entail from the time of Edward II that would allow the property to descend through the female line and thus prevent the customary passage of her husband's estates to collateral male heirs.¹⁷ As Barbara Lewalski has noted, Lanyer portrays Cookham as a place without men, a sort of feminine academy, and evokes the departure of the spirit of the place, when the women disperse, Margaret to one of her dowager holdings and Anne to the estate of her new husband, Robert Sackville, the Earl of Dorset.¹⁸

The implications for the poems of the very different legal relations to landed property experienced by men and women within a system governed by the principle of patrilineal primogeniture may be exemplified by the gender specific ways in which trees are used to figure the relation of land to lord and lady respectively in “To Penshurst” and “The Description of Cooke-ham.” In “To Penshurst” Jonson evokes trees: Philip's Oak, “That taller tree, which of a nut was set, / At his great birth, where all the muses met,” “thy lady's oak,” under which Barbara Gammage is said to have gone into labor, producing a new Sidney, as it were fruit of the land, and, acknowledging in a cleverly repressed form her necessary financial contribution, the copse

          named of Gammage, …
That never fails to serve thee seasoned deer,
When thou would'st feast, or exercise thy friends.

[ll. 13-21]

These arboreal associations serve to develop a picture of the Sidney's rootedness in the Kentish land, which brings forth trees and Sidneys with equal fecundity.

Lanyer, on the contrary, combines the image of an oak and a strategically motivated pathetic fallacy to figure the experience of virilocality and patrilinear descent in the feminine community as a disruption, not of the logocentric order in which men read a self-validating design, but of an immediate identification of woman and nature itself. Thus the poet coming to “That Oake that did in height his fellowes passe, / As much as lofty trees, low growing grasse” (ll. 55-56), remarks:

How often did you visite this faire tree,
Which seeming joyfull in receiving thee,
Would like a Palme tree spread his armes abroad,
Desirous that you there should make abode.

[ll. 59-62]

Seated not under but in the tree, Lady Margaret “might plainly see,”

Hills, vales, and woods, as if on bended knee
They had appeard, your honour to salute,
Or to preferre some strange unlook'd for sute:
All interlac'd with brookes and christall springs,
A Prospect fit to please the eyes of Kings.

[ll. 68-72]

It is striking here that Lanyer does not simply oppose the figure of woman-in-nature in contradistinction to Jonson's assimilation of man to natural order; rather, she posits a distinctly alternative mode of reading the logos. Reversing Jonson's metaphoric transfer of the qualities of permanence, stability, and rootedness from tree to man, Lanyer's pathetic fallacy transfers human attributes to the landscape, which appears “as if on bended knee.” Where the trees at Penshurst knit the Sidneys to a land that willingly provides for their needs, the tree at Cookham affords a “Prospect” from which the landscape appears to want something of the ladies: “some strange unlook'd for sute.” Finally, where Jonson's construction emphasizes the expanse of time—the Sidney line reaching backward to the immemorial time measured by the slow growth of trees and forward to the horizon of anticipation, the view from Lanyer's poem collapses time to a visual prospect that mediates an eternal moment beyond anticipation or retrospection:

What was there then but gave you all content,
While you the time in meditation spent,
Of their Creators powre, which there you saw,
In all his Creatures held a perfit Law;
And in their beauties did you plaine descrie,
His beauty, wisdome, grace, love, majestie.
In these sweet woods how often did you walke,
With Christ and his Apostles there to talke;
Placing his holy Writ in some faire tree,
To meditate what you therin did see:
With Moyses you did mount his holy Hill,
To know his pleasure, and performe his Will.

[ll. 75-86]

With subtle irony this evocation of the logos read in rather than out of the trees (in contrast to Sir Philip's Oak, where “in the writhèd bark, are cut the names / Of many a Sylvan, taken with his flames” [“To Penshurst,” ll. 15-16]) abridges the law of primogeniture that governs Jonson's figures and evokes instead a divine first genesis that envelopes and subsumes man's phallocentric law.¹⁹ An alternative to this law appears when the “prospect” of a divine communion beyond time gives way to a vision of female descent and timely communion in the praise of Anne Clifford:

And that sweet Lady sprung from Cliffords race,
Of noble Bedfords blood, faire, streame of Grace;
To honourable Dorset now espows'd,
In whose faire breast true virtue then was hous'd:
Oh what delight did my weake spirits find
In those pure parts of her well framed mind.

[ll. 93-98]

In sharp contrast to Jonson's stress on Sidney's dwelling, Lanyer, evoking the futility of feminine attachments, astutely connects the demands of virilocality—which disrupt female community and make impossible the ideological identification of land and lady that Jonson makes of land and lord—to the demands of hereditary degree:

And yet it grieves me that I cannot be
Neere unto her, whose virtues did agree
With those faire ornaments of outward beauty,
Which did enforce from all both love and dutie.
Unconstant Fortune, thou art most too blame,
Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame:
Where our great friends we cannot dayly see,
So great a difference is there in degree.

[ll. 99-106]²⁰

In contrast to Jonson's slyly muted presentation of the movement of Barbara Gammage from her late father to her new husband, which served to replenish Penshurst with wealth and a continuing supply of Sidneys with which to ensure the historical perpetuity of her lord's dwelling, Lanyer represents the movement of Anne Clifford from Cookham to Dorset's Kentish estate, Knole, as the disruption of a community that, because it lacks a locus of perpetual descent, must be retained and preserved in the perpetual present of inward recollection: “Therefore sweet Memorie doe thou retaine / Those pleasures past, which will not turne againe” (ll. 117-18).

The force of the structural and thematic differences between the male and female country-house poems may be appreciated in relation to J. G. A. Pocock's argument locating the English discovery of history in common-law debates about the “ancient constitution.”²¹ These debates, which become crucial in the 1640s as arguments about the priority of king or parliament, begin in land use and inheritance cases—like the lengthy litigation in which Margaret tried to retain the Clifford estates for her daughter Anne.

The urgent litigation of the Cliffords, to which Lanyer alludes in the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, was unusual in its scope and duration, and in the difficulties and the opportunities of defiance it would later present to Anne, but the necessity of litigation to preserve rights of descent through the female line seems to have been a definite feature in the landscape of feminine experience referenced in Lanyer's work: witness the fact that the poet herself would, within a few years, enter her own bitter and protracted efforts to enforce on her brothers-in-law an agreement concerning the proceeds of her late husband's hay- and straw-weighing patent. Although this litigation was in Lanyer's future when she wrote “The Description of Cooke-ham,” Simon Forman's records suggest that she already brought to the poem her own experience of her husband's misappropriation of funds she derived from the Lord Chamberlain, and, of course, the anomalous experience of having been cast off as Hunsdon's acknowledged mistress in consequence of producing a son who could not also be an heir.

Excluded by gender from the glorification (and mystification) of patrilinear descent that structures Jonson's poem, Lanyer develops the alternative notion of a lateral or synchronic community of women.²² This community is at once the product and the audience of the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. In the title poem, Lanyer underlines the tension that exists between this community and the patriarchal and virilocal culture which is its host. Setting the temporal arrangements of patrilineal descent against an eternal arrangement that both precedes and succeeds it, she subsumes Margaret Russell's temporal passage to widowhood—a passage through which her husband's estates and titles passed to his brothers, leaving her with the dubious title dowager countess—in the comprehensive and eternal legacy of Christ:

Still reckoning him, the Husband of they Soule,
Which is most pretious in his glorious sight:
          Because the Worlds delights shee doth denie
          For him, who for her sake vouchsaf'd to die.
And dying made her Dowager of all;
Nay more, Co-heire of that eternall blisse
That Angels lost, and We by Adams fall.

[Salve Deus, ll. 253-59]

Once again Jonson's use of trees to figure aristocratic continuity over time may be contrasted with Lanyer's use of the two trees, by tradition one and the same, to which she alludes in this astonishing passage. To figure the divine abridgment of time, Lanyer represents the tree of knowledge, as a gift of Eve misused by men, and the tree of the Passion, through which this ambiguous gift of “blisse” returns.

The “Description of Cooke-ham” is necessarily gendered in its dissent from the Jonsonian celebration of patrilineal dynastics. Take for example the very different rhetorical uses of trees in “To Penshurst,” where they bind the generations to the soil and mark the passage of time, and of the tree in “Cooke-ham,” which serves as a focal point for feminine companionship and endeavor during the stay of Margaret and Anne, but becomes insignificant in their absence, because, in the absence of the women who grasp its significance, its function as a meditative lever out of time lies dormant. As in winter:

Each arbour, banke, each seate, each stately tree,
Lookes bare and desolate now for want of thee;
Turning greene tresses into frostie gray,
While in cold griefe they wither all away.

[“Cooke-ham,” ll. 191-94]

The Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, in general, and “To Cooke-ham,” in particular, present a specific resistance to the recollection of the past as history. Attending to this model provides a better understanding of the ideological work performed by its canonical alternative and perhaps allows us to hear differently and for the first time the heretical voice that the canonical form suppresses. Ironically, this voice, when it is heard, has the potential precisely to restore history, by opening a dialogue in which can be traced that history's formulation in and as ideology. From the point of view of literary history, and that is the point of view I have been trying to establish, the canon cannot be simply opened through addition, nor paralleled by another canon, nor can it be discarded. Like patriarchy itself, the canon is a historical fact, which must be submitted to dialectical negation, a practice which reinscribes canonicity as a temporal performance by a historically situated work. This negation is, for the moment, the positive task of the literary historian.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the different forms of extant presentation copies of the Salve for Prince Henry and Thomas Jones, Archbishop of London, see Woods, Poems, “Textual Introduction,” pp. xlviii-xlix. See also, Leeds Barroll, this volume, chapter 2.

2. See, for example, Ann Baynes Coiro, “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson,” Criticism 35 (1993): 357-76; Lorna Hutson, “Why the Lady's Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun,” in Women, Texts and Histories, 1575-1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 13-38; and Barbara K. Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 213-41.

3. John Donne, An Anatomy of the World, in John Donne: The Anniversaries, ed. with an intro. and commentary, Frank Manley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), ll. 206-18.

4. Donne, of course, is reported to have told Ben Jonson that he described “the idea of a woman, and not as she was.” “Conversations with William Drummond,” in Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 462.

5. For a cogent discussion of Donne's “Idea of a Woman,” see, Edward W. Tayler, Donne's Idea of a Woman: Structure and Meaning in The Anniversaries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). The argument about The Anniversaries here summarized is developed at length in my The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), chapter 5.

6. The ghost may be discerned, for example, when Donne alludes to the matrilineal relationship in the passage just before the one quoted: “The euening was the beginning of the day, / And now the Springs and Sommers which we see, / Like sonnes of women after fifty bee” (202-4). So, the loss of patriarchal relation (“Prince, Subiect, Father, Sonne”) coincides with the inherited exhaustion and weakness of superannuated mothers, whose spectral presence nevertheless persists.

7. Joseph Summers, The Heirs of Donne and Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970).

8. My comparison of Lanyer and Jonson will be confined to the two country-house poems. For broader discussion of the two poets see Susanne Woods, “Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson: Patronage, Authority, and Gender,” Ben Jonson Journal 1 (1994): 15-27, and Coiro, “Writing in Service.”

9. On the coming together of metaphor and mimesis in seventeenth-century epideictic poetry, see Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

10. Luce Irigaray, je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 35.

11. For further discussion of the mediations accomplished by the microcosm/macrocosm analogy, see my The Story of All Things, chapter 5.

12. As Joseph Hall astutely notices in a commendatory poem, “The Harbinger to the Progres,” included in the 1612 Anniversaries: “Still vpwards mount; and let thy makers praise / Honor thy Laura, and adorne thy laies” (ll. 35-36; quoted in Manley ed., pp. 89-90).

13. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1954), I,ii,55-59.

14. All citations of “To Penshurst” are from Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. Georges Parfitt (London: Penguin, 1988).

15. Both aspects of the Sidney family history are documented by Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). See also Kari Boyd McBride, “Gender and Class in the Country House Poem,” SEL 38 (1998): “[T]he Sidneys, social arrivistes who were granted Penshurst only under Henry VIII, needed both to link themselves to the history of the house and to discount the unique valorization implicit in the estate. They needed both to pretend they had always lived there and pretend it didn't matter that they hadn't.”

16. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1987): “The critique of every self-absolutizing particular is a critique of the shadow which absoluteness casts upon the critique; it is a critique of the fact that critique itself, contrary to its own tendency, must remain within the medium of the concept. It destroys the claim of identity by testing and honoring it; therefore, it can reach no farther than that claim. The claim is a magic circle that stamps critique with the appearance of absolute knowledge” (p. 406).

17. See Barbara K. Lewalski, “Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer,” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 104-6.

18. Ibid. See also Barbara K. Lewalski, “The Lady of the Country-House Poem,” in The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops, Gordon J. Schochet, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Elisabeth Blair MacDougall, Studies in the History of Art, no. 25 (Hanover and London: National Gallery of Art, 1989), pp. 261-75.

19. For an intriguing development of the differing functions of the “Sidney oak” and the oak at Cookham in their respective poems, see Coiro, “Writing in Service”: 374.

20. Cf. Lewalski, Writing Women, p. 225: “Alluding both to Anne's loss of her lands and to her own loss of contact with Anne, now Countess of Dorset, Lanyer contrasts male succession through aristocratic titles with a female succession grounded on virtue and holiness, drawing radical egalitarian conclusions.”

21. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 30-55.

22. For a dissenting view on the presence of feminine commonality in “The Description of Cooke-ham,” see Lisa Schnell, “‘So Great a Difference Is There in Degree’: Aemilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism,” MLQ 57 (1996): 23-35.