SOURCE: Seelig, Sharon Cadman. “‘To All Vertuous Ladies in Generall’: Aemilia Lanyer's Community of Strong Women.” In Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, pp. 44-58. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000.

Pondering the question of literary circles in Renaissance England and attracted by the thought of a literary circle in Dearborn, I began to wonder, with Joan Kelly-Gadol, whether women had literary circles. They did, of course: one thinks of the circle of patronage created by the countess of Pembroke at Wilton, of the notables attracted by the light of Lucy, countess of Bedford, whom Donne and Jonson found the “brightness of our sphere”¹ (though I note that both these circles were inhabited chiefly by male poets); one thinks of Katherine Philips, who re-created herself as Orinda, supplied her husband and friends with literary names to suit, and thereby became known as “the matchless Orinda,” center of a fictive as well as an actual circle. I thought even of the much humbler An Collins who, in writing her strongly biblical poetry, seems to have addressed a circle of like-minded believers, a community of the faithful. Or one might recall Margaret Cavendish, who, though not particularly adept at relations with other women, was able, by multiplying images of herself in The Blazing World, to create a little circle of her own. But I was also conscious of the circles that were not, of failures of connection and of isolation, of circles that existed in longing and imagination, in particular those of Aemilia Lanyer and the woman who figures strongly in Lanyer's elegiac vision of Cookham, Anne Clifford.

Lady Anne Clifford's diary from the years 1616-1619, for all that it represents a woman of remarkable determination and pluck and for all its connections with wealth and power, includes many striking moments of frustration and exclusion. Prominent, of course, is Anne Clifford's long-standing battle with her husband, Richard Sackville, earl of Dorset, over her inheritance, which she wanted established in her name and he wanted to trade for cash. Besides enlisting the power of the king, the Church, and the patriarchy, Dorset also used the weapon of isolation: Anne Clifford's diary records his frequent journeys, the time he spent at court, in gambling and cockfighting, while she remained alone at Knole. For example, in May 1616 she wrote:

All this time my Lord was in London where he had all and infinite great resort coming to him. He went much abroad to Cocking, to Bowling Alleys, to Plays and Horse Races, & [was] commended by all the World. I stayed in the Countrey having many times a sorrowful & heavy Heart & being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the Agreement, so as I may truly say, I am like an Owl in the Desert.²

Perhaps even more poignant is the instance of the following year, when a good many of Anne Clifford's friends and acquaintances were assembled at Penshurst, a mere seven miles away, and she, the countess of Dorset, the daughter of George Clifford, third earl of Cumberland, and Margaret Russell, dowager countess of Cumberland, was not allowed to join them. Her entry for August 4, 1617, reads: “In the morning my Lord went to Penshurst but would not suffer me to go with him although My Lord & Lady Lisle sent a man on purpose to desire me to come. He hunted, & lay there all night, there being my Lord of Montgomery, my Lord Hay, my Lady Lucy & and a great deal of other Company.”³ The next few entries record her depression: “I kept my Chamber, being very troubled & sad in mind” on both the eighth and the tenth of the month; “the 12th and 13th I spent most of the time in playing Glecko & hearing Moll Neville reading the Arcadia.” While Anne Clifford's husband enjoyed the life of a courtier, with its manly sports and forms of dissipation, visiting the home of the Sidneys and moving at will and in splendor through the countryside, she could participate only vicariously, finding her chief entertainment in the pastoral romance that originated with the most notable members of that family.

This image of a woman standing outside a social group, vividly imagining it even as she is denied access, re-creating it in a work of fiction, is for me one of the strongest impressions of Aemilia Lanyer's work, in which, not coincidentally, Anne Clifford and her strong and pious mother, Margaret Russell, figure prominently. That impression is created by the elegiac representation of “The Description of Cooke-ham” and is also pertinent to the circle of good and powerful women constructed by the dedications to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. The circle I describe is literary in a particular sense, that is, it is created by the text itself, as Aemilia Lanyer represents a group of powerful women and places herself in relation to them, sometimes as supplicant, as admirer, and even as instructor, though her own circumstances were far humbler than theirs.

As Judith Scherer Herz has provocatively argued, Lanyer might well be seen as outside the literary tradition altogether, as it is not at all clear that her work, despite its numerous dedications, was read, or that it intersected with or influenced subsequent work. Indeed, one might find an emblem of that exclusion in the fact that “The Description of Cooke-ham,” unlike its near contemporary “To Penshurst,” is restricted to the grounds of the great house; it never penetrates to the warmth of the table and fireside celebrated by Ben Jonson.⁴ Yet, I suggest that while Anne Clifford succeeded in life—she was at last able to join the fellowship at Penshurst and through long life and tenacity to reclaim her lands—Aemilia Lanyer succeeds in an imaginative vision: out of marginality, out “of absence, darkness …, things which are not,” indeed out of weakness, Lanyer creates in Salve Deus a remarkable community of strength, present more powerfully and enduringly in her fiction than in life itself. In looking at these poems I shall begin at the end with “The Description of Cooke-ham” and then proceed to the initial dedications, leaving Salve Deus itself for another occasion.

“The Description of Cooke-ham” records the loss of the very place and circle it honors. In “Farewell (sweet Place) where Virtue then did rest / And all delights did harbour in her breast” (ll. 7-8), Lanyer bids farewell to something she will never again experience, something that is itself passing away: even Margaret Russell, called “(great lady) Mistris of that Place” (l. 11), is forced to leave Cookham, a royal country estate that was not in her possession but leased by her brother from the Crown.⁵ Cookham thus becomes an emblem of all that is transitory, even as it persists as an image of the eternal bliss and stability the author longs for:

As fleeting worldly Joyes that could not last:
Or, as dimme shadowes of celestiall pleasures,
Which are desir'd above all earthly treasures.

(ll. 14-16)

Not only the poet but all nature mourns the loss of the countess and her daughter; the same trees and winds that celebrated their coming now lament their departure in a thoroughgoing and dramatic act of pathos:

The trees that were so glorious in our view,
Forsooke both flowres and fruit, when once they knew
Of your depart, their very leaves did wither,
Changing their colours as they grewe together.

(ll. 133-36)

Even more striking is Lanyer's relation to the society she depicts, for she stands tentatively on the margins, claiming relationship even as she acknowledges difficulties. Although she describes Margaret Russell as the source of “Grace” (that is, favor) (l. 2) and attributes to her the impulse of authorship—“From whose desires did spring this worke of Grace” (l. 12)—Lanyer laments the effect of

Unconstant Fortune …
Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame:
Where our great friends we cannot dayly see,
So great a diffrence is there in degree.

(ll. 103-6)

The difference in rank that makes “The Description of Cooke-ham” something like a dream vision also makes Lanyer's connection with the family so tenuous that she claims her parting kiss not from Anne Clifford (“noble Dorset, then a virgin faire” [l. 160]) but secondhand, from the tree from which Anne Clifford “with a chaste, yet loving kisse tooke leave” (l. 165). This line may, unfortunately, bring to mind another image of indirection—the kiss that Thisbe bestows on the wall that separates her from Pyramus—a sign that Lanyer has not found an altogether satisfactory way to represent her connection with the Cliffords, a connection clearly less intimate than she desires.⁶

Lanyer's claim of relationship has been variously interpreted: Barbara Lewalski asserts that Lanyer's dedications, “though hyperbolical like most of their kind,” nevertheless “reveal something about Lanyer's actual associations,” whereas Kari Boyd McBride argues that Lanyer's portraits subvert “the realities of social position and power to construct her own authority.” Similarly, Lisa Schnell sees considerable ambivalence in Lanyer's attitude toward her patrons and argues that in the act of praising them, she in effect exercises control over them.⁷ In any case, such control as Lanyer exercises is authorial and textual: she constructs in her texts relationships that include her, even as she laments their limitations in fact.

Yet, Lanyer, who struggles from the margins to earn a place in the story, also establishes a powerful image of community, not just, as has been rightly suggested by Barbara Lewalski, a community of good women, but also a community of strong women, a constellation of heroic virtue.⁸ In this exclusively female society, the male associates are purely religious or mythological figures; whatever is done is done by women who (as in the argument for women's colleges or cities of ladies) assume all the roles themselves. Margaret Russell sits on a “Prospect fit to please the eyes of Kings” (l. 72), where “Hills, vales, and woods, as if on bended knee / They had appeard, your honour to salute” (ll. 68-69). Margaret's religious devotion brings her into male company of functionally equal terms, as she joins a society drawn from biblical texts:

In these sweet woods how often did you walke,
With Christ and his Apostles there to talke;
…
With Moyses you did mount his holy Hill,
To know his pleasure, and performe his Will.
With lovely David you did often sing,
His holy Hymnes to Heavens Eternall King.
…
With blessed Joseph you did often feed
Your pined brethren, when they stood in need.

(ll. 81-82, 85-88, 91-92)

Although engaged in activities that might be gendered feminine—walking in the woods and groves, meditating on scripture, praying and singing psalms, and nurturing the hungry—Margaret Russell is associated with prophets, apostles, patriarchs, and monarchs, and represented as joining in actions analogous to theirs. She is not simply a pious woman but an influential and effective one. Her daughter likewise is depicted in the strong terms suitable to the (male) heir of a great family, as “that sweet Lady sprung from Cliffords race, / Of noble Bedfords blood, faire steame of Grace” (ll. 93-94).⁹

This presentation of women as strong and in some sense masculine, clearly evident in “The Description of Cooke-ham,” is even more prominent in the dedications to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. These perhaps extravagantly numerous dedications—nine to particular figures and two more general ones (“To all vertuous Ladies in generall” and “To the Vertuous Reader”)—have occasioned some comment. But as Lewalski notes, citing the seventeen dedications to The Faerie Queene, multiple dedications were not uncommon. Most readers put the number of Lanyer's dedications down to her straitened economic circumstances: she addresses the most prominent female members of the Jacobean court, some of them apparently well known to her, others clearly not.¹⁰ But while financial and social support were clearly objectives, more striking to me is the way in which these dedications construct a fictive community that functions as an alternative to the patriarchal structure. Both in number (nine to particular individuals) and in emphasis—on strength of character, intellect, and accomplishment—the dedications suggest a group of female worthies in a sense I will explore later. They are, as Achsah Guibbory suggests, “a female alternative to the male nexus of power, both secular and sacred.”¹¹

While Louise Schleiner sees the dedications as an image of “a lady's circle busy with readings, music, and devotions,” thus emphasizing the feminine activities of this group, and Elaine Beilin stresses the spiritual accomplishments of these women, Lanyer's use of the words virtue (or virtuous), which appears fifty times in the dedications, and worthy (or a variant), which occurs twenty-three times, carries a sense lost to modern readers.¹² The most obvious sense of virtue, to us, is goodness, as in the Oxford English Dictionary's definition: “conformity of life and conduct with the principles of morality.” But in the years between Lanyer and ourselves, virtue has become an increasingly narrow concept, associated with that peculiarly female virtue chastity (perhaps even silence and obedience). The first recorded use of virtue in the sense of chastity is, interestingly, from Much Ado about Nothing (1598-1599). But this meaning does not seem to be precisely what Lanyer has in mind, and the subsequent shadings of meaning may make us misread her text. To be sure, the women she celebrates are virtuous in the narrower sense thought particularly appropriate to women, but they are also considerably more powerful figures. They remind us that from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries virtue also meant “the possession or display of manly qualities; manly excellence … courage, valour,” and that the root of the English word virtue is the Latin vir, man (Middle English vertu from Old French, from Latin virtus, manliness). Some of this meaning persists in the phrase “by virtue of the authority …”; it may also be seen in the language of the Authorized Version of the Bible: when Jesus, having been touched by a woman with an infirmity, senses that “virtue has gone out of him” (Mark 5:30), he means that he has imparted strength, not that he has declined in goodness.

The nine noble women celebrated in Lanyer's dedications are preeminently figures of influence and power: they are associated with goddesses and with masculine, martial virtues, and even their traditionally female qualities are recast in terms of strength. The dedications are arranged, at least at the beginning, in order of rank, proceeding from Queen Anne to her daughter Princess Elizabeth and thence to Lady Arabella Stuart; they are addressed to particular prominent individuals as well as to those who, like “the Vertuous Reader” and “all vertuous Ladies,” aspire to the standard of perfection here outlined.¹³ Lanyer represents Queen Anne as an imperial figure who recalls Queen Elizabeth I; Anne combines the qualities of the three goddesses judged by Paris—Juno, Athena, and Venus—listed in an order that emphasizes queenly supremacy (“from Juno you have State and Dignities”) and wisdom (“From warlike Pallas, Wisdome, Fortitude”) over the more vaguely represented beauty and love (“And from faire Venus all her Excellencies”).¹⁴ Like those who follow, Queen Anne is a pattern or compendium of virtue (“all royall virtues are in you, / The Naturall, the Morall, and Divine” [ll. 67-68]), the embodiment of a quality that is also recognized by other good women, a mirror of virtue, a book of instruction as well as praise, and a figure powerful enough to “grace” Lanyer's “rude unpolisht lines” (l. 35).¹⁵

In the second poem, Anne's daughter Princess Elizabeth is addressed in terms that summon up the memory of her famous predecessor, whose qualities she is said to possess:

Most gratious Ladie, faire Elizabeth,
Whose Name and Virtues puts us still in mind,
Of her, of whom we are depriv'd by death;
The Phoenix of her age, whose worth did bind
All worthy minds so long as they have breath. …

(ll. 1-5)

In this dedication, Lanyer offers two kinds of lineage—the mother-daughter link between Anne of Denmark and her daughter Elizabeth and the connection of a powerful name, from Queen Elizabeth to her namesake, the princess—both of which disregard the male heirs to the throne. And she uses two crucial terms, virtues and worthy, that underscore the notion of models of female strength.¹⁶

The seven remaining dedications to specific women are framed by a ninety-one-line poem, “To all vertuous Ladies in generall,” and a final prose address, “To the Vertuous Reader.” In this third dedicatory poem, the most prominent figure is not a member of the royal family but virtue itself, a figure whom Lanyer constructs as a queen waited on by all virtuous women. Lanyer adapts the biblical parable of the wise and foolish virgins waiting for the bridegroom (Christ) to give particular prominence to this female figure; the other eminences of this poem, also female, are the muses “whose Virtues with the purest minds agree,” the “nine Worthies” to whom “all faire mindes resort” (ll. 31, 35).

While the primary reference of the phrase “nine Worthies” (l. 35; reinforced by “worthy ladies,” l. 71) here may be the muses, the use of the term with its specifying number also suggests an alternate female power structure, a counterbalance to those male figures of primarily military accomplishment, the nine Worthies drawn from classical, Judaic, and Christian history. Caxton, in his preface to Le Morte d'Arthur, lists Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar; Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabaeus; and Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon. Shakespeare's list in Love's Labour's Lost includes Pompey, Hector, Alexander, and Hercules (5.2). The example of “Those sacred sisters that on Pallas wait” (l. 30) is for Lanyer as powerful as that of military conquerors but “free / From sword, from violence, and from ill report” (ll. 33-34); they are capable of “godly labours” (l. 32) and able to avoid the temptations into which their male counterparts may fall.

There was in fact a tradition of classical female Worthies that arose in the late thirteenth century in the visual arts and persisted into the seventeenth century in written texts.¹⁷ The cast of characters varies somewhat, and the division into three eras of history was not universally observed. But in a poem that Lanyer might well have known, Robert Chester's Loves Martyr (published together with Shakespeare's “Phoenix and the Turtle”), Chester sets out a group of “Nine worthie women,” arranged into classical, Hebrew, and Christian.¹⁸ Chester's list (Minerva, Semiramis, and Tomyris; Jahel, Deborah, and Judith; and Maude, Elizabeth of Aragon, and Johane of Naples) is not identical with Lanyer's, but it does include four of the same figures, and it stresses the warlike qualities of several of them. Of Minerva we hear that she “many manlike battailes manly fought”; of Tomyris that “From forth her eyes she lightned Honors Brand, / And brandished a Sword, a sword of Fame, / That to her weake Sexe yeelded Hectors name”; Jahel's “uncomprehensible valour in the end, / Did free and set at large her captiv'd Countrie, / … By killing hand to hand her foe great Sisar”; and Judith, “Bringing in triumph Holofernes head, / … got a great and greater Victorie, / Then thousand Souldiers in their maiestie.”¹⁹

While Chester's worthies are an important reference point for Lanyer's text, one should note that the women of “To all vertuous Ladies in generall,” though heroic, are not specifically warriors. Although triumphant, urged to “bring your palmes of vict'ry in your hands” (l. 37) to celebrate the ultimate victory of virtue, they have a kind of priestly function similar to that of the women of Cookham; they are urged to “Annoynt your haire with Aarons pretious oyle” (l. 36). And, riding in a chariot drawn by “simple Doves” and “subtill serpents” (l. 49), they are associated with innocence and wisdom: Lanyer's iconography turns away from images appropriate simply to Venus—the doves signifying love—to recall the command of Christ to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16), that is, to fulfill the duties of Christians in a dangerous world. One might say that the muses are to women what the Worthies are to men, providing alternate, more feminine models. But Lanyer's dedications, which foreground bold and transcendent behavior coupled with a refusal of violence, create in effect the nine Worthies of a female hierarchy.

In the dedications that follow, which vary in length and in the degree of intimacy or acquaintance asserted, Lanyer emphasizes qualities of strength, learning, and heroism. Arabella Stuart, cousin to King James and potential heir to the throne, is praised as a learned lady, associated with Pallas Athena. Susan Bertie, countess dowager of Kent, described as a bold voyager, a veteran who has “delighted in Gods truth” (l. 3), is depicted as making a heroic and dangerous journey:

Whose Faith did undertake in Infancie,
All dang'rous travells by devouring Seas
To flie to Christ from vaine Idolatry.

(ll. 19-21)

In fact it was the countess's mother, the duchess of Suffolk, who initiated the journey: she fled England during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, taking her child with her. Lanyer represents this action as both a virtuous imitation of Christ and a manifestation of principled courage:

Leaving here her lands, her state, dignitie;
Nay more, vouchsaft disguised weedes to weare:
                                        When with Christ Jesus she did meane to goe,
                                        From sweet delights to taste part of his woe.

(ll. 27-30)

There is also a kind of architecture to these dedications, conveying and implying worth. The longest of them (224 lines, arranged in quatrains) and the one that occupies a central place is that to the countess of Pembroke, with whom, as a poet, Lanyer wishes to be linked.²⁰ In a dream vision that places the poet in the “Edalyan Groves” in search of “a Lady whom Minerva chose” (ll. 1, 3), Lanyer depicts Mary Sidney as associated with the muses and crowned by Fame. But she calls up a more vigorous figure, Bellona, goddess of war and wisdom, “a manly mayd which was both faire and tall” (l. 35), to honor this woman whose behavior is such that “a Sister well shee may be deemd, / To him that liv'd and di'd so nobly” (ll. 149-50), her warrior and courtier brother, “valiant Sidney.” Mary, according to Lanyer, even surpasses Sir Philip in qualities in which men and women may join: “And farre before him is to be esteemed / For virtue, wisedome, learning, dignity” (ll. 151-52). Both in the degree of praise and in the qualities emphasized, the countess emerges as a figure of strength, honored by Minerva and crowned by Fame, a powerful foremother to whom, when the dream vanishes, Aemilia Lanyer intends to present her poems.

The last specific dedication is to Anne Clifford, daughter of the chief dedicatee of these poems, Margaret Russell. The younger woman is celebrated as a defender of a proud heritage that combines traditional masculine and feminine qualities:

You are the Heire apparant of this Crowne
Of goodnesse, bountie, grace, love, pietie,
By birth its yours, then keepe it as your owne,
Defend it from all base indignitie.

(ll. 65-68)

But this heritage has a kind of double valence: to be “Gods Steward” (l. 57), as instructed “by your most worthy mother” (l. 59), and to honor her ancestors, Anne must perform the most traditional acts of Christian charity:

And as your Ancestors at first possest
Their honours, for their honourable deeds,
Let their faire virtues never be transgrest,
Bind up the broken, stop the wounds that bleeds,
Succour the poore, comfort the comfortlesse,
Cherish faire plants, suppresse unwholsom weeds.

(ll. 73-78)²¹

Virtue here is active, not passive, certainly not limited to female chastity, but Lanyer significantly makes of actions often associated with women the chief acts of the virtuous Christian, valorizing them in a new way. Like Christ and like Peter before her, Anne Clifford is a master builder and a shepherd of the flock.²²

He [Christ] is the stone the builders did refuse,
Which you, sweet Lady, are to build upon;
He is the rocke that holy Church did chuse,
Among which number, you must needs be one;
Faire Shepheardesse, tis you that he will use
To feed his flocke, that trust in him alone.

(ll. 129-34)

In acting as builder, shepherd, and guardian, Anne Clifford will, according to Lanyer, “shew from whence you are descended”—in other words, Christ, Peter, and Margaret Russell—“And leave to all posterities your fame” (ll. 81-82).

Concluding the dedications is the prose address “To the Vertuous Reader.” In contrast to the initial “To all vertuous Ladies in generall,” which depicts Queen Virtue served by virtuous women, the latter warns against women slandering women. Yet, this warning prefaces a highly rhetorical elevation of women on the grounds that all men are “begotten of a woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a woman,” and that Christ was even “obedient to a woman” (p. 49, ll. 43-44, 45). The women Lanyer praises are not only those who have passively “indured most cruel martyrdome for their faith” (l. 53) but also the more active “wise and virtuous women” appointed by God to “bring downe [the] pride and arrogancie” (ll. 32-33) of wicked men; their accomplishments range from violence to cunning to determined resistance. “[C]ruell Cesarus [was brought down] by the discreet counsell of noble Deborah, Judge and Prophetesse of Israel: and resolution of Jael wife of Heber the Kenite: wicked Haman, by the divine prayers and prudent proceedings of beautifull Hester: blasphemous Holofernes, by the invincible courage, rare wisdome, and confident carriage of Judeth: & the unjust Judges, by the innocency of chast Susanna” (p. 49, ll. 33-39). These are the powerful women who will be celebrated in the body of Salve Deus itself, as “famous women … / Whose glorious actions” overthrew “powrefull men” (ll. 1465-67).²³

While the powerful and sometimes violent women of this list, like the women of Lanyer's dedications, are notably chaste, Lanyer's treatment strongly emphasizes their boldness and initiative, virtues that are strength rather than merely endurance. In fact, there is some testing of gender roles as several of Lanyer's worthy contemporaries are set against the suffering Christ who is the subject of the longer poem, and whose passivity and subjugation complement their strength and active engagement. As several critics have argued, Salve Deus presents a Christ who is feminized and women who are by contrast masculinized; in that process Lanyer, putting Christ in the position usually occupied by a female subject, makes him the object of the female gaze.²⁴ Arabella Stuart is urged to

                                                                                spare one looke
Upon this humbled King, who all forsooke,
That in his dying armes he might imbrace
Your beauteous Soule, and fill it with his grace.

(p. 17, ll. 11-14)

Lucy, countess of Bedford, is enjoined to “entertaine this dying lover,” “the true-love of your soule, your hearts delight” (pp. 32-33, ll. 16, 6). To Margaret Russell, countess of Cumberland, Lanyer offers Christ as a jewel surpassing all jewels. To Katherine, countess of Suffolk, and her daughters, Christ is presented as “a Lover much more true / Than ever was since first the world began” (pp. 38-39, ll. 52-53), “In whom is all that Ladies can desire” (l. 85). Later, in Salve Deus proper, Lanyer emphasizes Margaret Russell's having no earthly lover but only a heavenly one, Christ, as “the Husband of thy Soule” (l. 253), who “dying made her Dowager of all” (l. 257). Lanyer depicts women as distinctly heroic and independent, as dominant, placed in relationship to a Christ who is suffering rather than triumphant. Although they may sometimes imitate that suffering, more often they are distinguished by valuing Christ's passion, acting as strong partners to this bridegroom.

In short, the dedications to Lanyer's Salve Deus are not only, as has been thought, a bid for patronage, or simply a circle of reading women, or merely an assertion of female goodness, or simply a collection of the most prominent women of Lanyer's day. Lanyer does bring together a group of women who were powerful at court, distinguished for learning, for endurance and independence, for religious faith and action. But the virtuous ladies she praises are not good merely in our dilute modern sense; rather, they are powerful and exemplary figures. Lanyer's circle of good women is drawn from life: its characters are historical yet fictive in that the associations she forms by placing them together are stronger than those that actually existed. And she reaches beyond these women to address “all vertuous Ladies in generall,” a circle that all her female readers are encouraged to join, a community in part created by Lanyer herself, in part joined and concluded by her readers.

Our search for a literary circle then has led from life into texts, from fact to fiction, and perhaps from fiction back into life. Literary circles in Renaissance England, I suggest, are created not only by presence and contact but also by absence, longing, and imagination. They exist as vividly in texts as in reality. Anne Clifford had difficulty reaching the circle at Penshurst to which by birth and inclination she belonged, yet she created it in her diary; Margaret Cavendish, although she could not be Henry V or Charles II, announced her determination to be Margaret the First, in a world of her own construction; Katherine Philips, through naming, poetry, and letters, created a salon of largely absent friends; and Aemilia Lanyer, even as she lost touch with Anne Clifford, Margaret Russell, and Cookham, created a vivid and enduring image of the circle of virtue and strength assembled there. Her dedications represent a community of powerful women, a cohort of female Worthies worthy of the name of virtue, a circle calculated to elicit—even in the absence of historical documentation—admiration and assent.

Notes

1. I refer, of course, to Kelly-Gadol's essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koontz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 137-64; Jonson's epigram, “To Lucy, Countess of Bedford, with Mr. Donne's Satires,” in Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

2. D. J. H. Clifford, ed., The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (Wolfeboro Falls, N.H.: Alan Sutton, 1990), 33. The image of the owl in the desert, a reference to Ps. 102:6, is also used by Lady Arabella Stuart to convey desolation.

3. Ibid., 60.

4. Herz, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Pathos of Literary History,” in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 121-35. Herz raises important questions about “the prior claim the text makes upon us” in distinction to the “things we can do to the text,” the “theoretical and critical moves” that we can make in response to it (127).

   On the relationship between Lanyer's and Jonson's poems, see Lynette McGrath, “‘Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe’: Amelia Lanier's Seventeenth-Century Feminist Voice,” Women's Studies 20 (1992): 331-48; and 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.

5. Susanne Woods, ed., The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 130 n. All references to Lanyer's poetry are to this edition. As Barbara Kiefer Lewalski notes in Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), this poem must have been composed after the death of George Clifford in October 1605; it refers to a time before the marriage of Anne Clifford (“noble Dorset, then a virgin faire”) in February 1609, a reference that itself indicates a subsequent date (216-17, 396 nn. 21, 28).

6. “I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all” (A Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1.201). Michael Morgan Holmes sees the kissing of the tree as part of a pattern of homoerotic expression (“The Love of Other Women: Rich Chains and Sweet Kisses,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998], 182).

7. Lewalski, Writing Women, 220; McBride, “Sacred Celebration: The Patronage Poems,” in Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Grossman, 71; Schnell, “So Great a Difference Is There in Degree,” Modern Language Quarterly 57 (1996): 23-35; and “Breaking ‘the rule of Cortezia’: Aemelia Lanyer's Dedications to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997): 77-101.

8. It is Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra who hopes for a place in the story (3.13.46). Lewalski speaks of “a contemporary community of good women who are spiritual heirs to the biblical and historical good women her title poem celebrates” (Writing Women, 220).

9. “Streame,” the reading silently adopted by A. L. Rowse, might seem the more likely, as in a stream of blood (The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady [New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1978]). But Lanyer's printed text clearly reads “steame,” which the Oxford English Dictionary gives as an alternate spelling for stem, as in the scion of a family, a reading also quite plausible in its context. (My thanks to Susanne Woods for alerting me to this point.)

10. Lewalski, Writing Women, 220. Herz, however, finds the effect entirely different from Spenser's dedications, noting that “in Lanyer's text the margins, crowded with noble readers, take up almost as much space as the text itself” (“Aemilia Lanyer,” 129).

    Rowse cavalierly dismisses Lanyer's “too obviously sycophantic poems” (Shakespeare's Dark Lady, 33). Elaine Beilin offers substantive descriptions of the dedicatees and suggests connections to the Nine Worthies and the seven spiritual virtues (Redeeming Eve [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987], 182-91).

11. Guibbory, “The Gospel according to Aemilia,” in Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature, ed. Helen Wilcox, Richard Todd, and Alasdair MacDonald (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996), 107.

12. Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 24; Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 177-207. Jonathan Goldberg speaks of the tradition of good women, a tradition whose dangers he also notes (Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], 9).

13. The complete order is: Queen Anne; her daughter Princess Elizabeth; “To all vertuous Ladies in generall”; Arabella Stuart; Susan, countess dowager of Kent; Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke; Lucy, countess of Bedford; Margaret Russell, countess dowager of Cumberland; Katherine, countess of Suffolk; Anne Clifford, countess of Dorset; and “To the Vertuous Reader.” See Woods, Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, for an account of apparently intentional omissions in several copies (xlvii-li). Schleiner argues interestingly about the decentering that ultimately makes Margaret Russell, rather than the monarch, the focal point (Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 25). Leeds Barroll sees a considerable error in Lanyer's placing Lucy, countess of Bedford, after the countess of Pembroke (“Looking for Patrons,” in Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Grossman, 40).

14. Lewalski notes that Pallas was “Queen Anne's chosen personification in masques and addresses,” but the qualities of that goddess are particularly appropriate for Lanyer's list of strong women (Writing Women, 220). In fact, Minerva is the first figure in the list of “Nine worthie women almost equivalent, / With those nine worthie men so valient” given by Robert Chester in Loves Martyr; or, Rosalins Complaint (1601).

15. The predecessor one might think of here is Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris, which, as Pamela Joseph Benson notes, “praised many women for acting with strength, valor, fortitude, and intelligence, that is, for exercising ‘manly’ virtues in traditionally male fields” (The Invention of the Renaissance Woman [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992], xxxvii). But as Benson goes on to argue, Boccaccio's text is actually deeply contradictory in its mixing of kinds of women, in its aims and effects. Janel Mueller, though she does not argue for a direct influence, appropriately creates a “crosscultural and transhistorical perspective” by citing Christine de Pizan (“The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994], 211). See also Natalie Zemon Davis, “‘Women's History’ in Transition: The European Case,” Feminist Studies 3 (1976): 83-103.

16. In contrast to McBride, who argues that Lanyer emphasizes the childbearing ability of the queen, thus undermining her independent authority (“Sacred Celebration,” 68), I see Lanyer constructing a female line based on names and qualities.

17. Brigitte Buettner, Boccaccio's Des Cleres et Nobles Femmes: Systems of Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript (Seattle: College Art Association, in association with the University of Washington Press, 1996), 35-36. For a more comprehensive discussion, see Horst Schroeder, Der Topos der Nine Worthies in Literatur und Bildender Kunst (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1971); and Glenda McLeod, Virtue and Venom: Catalogues of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

18. Beilin notes this instance of the female Worthies (Redeeming Eve, 188).

19. Chester, Loves Martyr; or, Rosalins Complaint, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (1601; reprint, London: New Shakespeare Society, 1878), 29-32.

20. The other long poems are the first, to Queen Anne (162 lines arranged in six-line stanzas), and the last two, to Katherine, countess of Suffolk (108 lines, also ababcc), and to Anne Clifford (144 lines in ottava rima). In fact, what Barroll sees as a misstep on Lanyer's part (see n. 13 above) may be a deliberate placing of Mary Sidney, whom Lanyer would like to see as a mentoring poet, in the architectural center of these dedications.

21. The references to “Bind up the broken, stop the wounds that bleeds,” recall Isa. 61:1 (“To bind up the broken hearted”) and Ezek. 34:16 (“I will … bind up that which was broken”) as well as Luke 10:34, the parable of the good Samaritan.

22. The charge to Simon Peter to “Feed my Lambs” and “Feed my sheep” occurs in John 21:15-17. “The stone the builders did refuse” is that of Luke 20:17.

23. The list also resembles that found in Henry Cornelius Agrippa's Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, which suggests, perhaps paradoxically, the very reversal of values at the heart of Lanyer's poems.

24. Jacqueline Pearson, “Women Writers and Women Readers: The Case of Aemelia Lanier,” in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1997), 45-54; Michael Schoenfeldt, “The Gender of Religious Devotion: Amelia Lanyer and John Donne,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 209-33; Catherine Keohane, “‘That Blindest Weakenesse Be Not Over-Bold’: Aemilia Lanyer's Radical Unfolding of the Passion,” ELH 64 (1997): 359-89. Wendy Wall says “the eroticized other, … Christ, occupies the same position of powerlessness as the speaker” (“Our Bodies/Our Texts? Renaissance Women and the Trials of Authorship,” in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan E. Sweeney [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993], 67).