Prophecy and Gendered Mourning in Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

Aemelia Lanyer's Salve Deus reclaims the fraught ideology of gendered grief in English culture. She specifically allies her strategically prophetic voice with the womanly weeping that was both feared and admired in English post-Reformation ideologies of grief. Lanyer first cloaks her self-authorizing strategies in the idiom of a passive-prophetic dream state. She then welds this dreamer's role to her defense of Pilate's wife and her praise of Mary Sidney (the ultimate weeping writer) in order to construct her feminine armor of sorrow in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.