"Owning" in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum ("Hail God King of the Jews")

Scholars often discuss the literary significance of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum in terms of its importance as the first original reinterpretation of scripture published by a woman in English. This work also functions as an important contribution to the early modern querelle des femmes, the longstanding controversy over women's ontological and social status. The woman controversy, which has its roots in writings of the fourteenth century, was one outgrowth of humanist thought at a time when ideas about gender were taking shape within a shifting landscape of the Reformation, with its changes in laws concerning property rights and inheritance, its burgeoning print culture, and its increasing distinction between public and private spheres of activity. Debaters in the woman controversy frequently based their invectives or encomia on biblical and classical models of behavioral ideals, citing exempla of exceptionally strong or lascivious women.¹ One popular argument, for example, was that women are innately immoral as typified by Eve's role in the biblical account of original sin. Lanyer's work, published in 1611, is a tour de force in the midst of this controversy; Salve Deus is a spirited and lively rebuttal of standard misogynist arguments that women are inferior and subject to men by God's will according to the Bible. Salve Deus engages key Christian tenets in its creative exegesis of biblical literature, and in doing so it challenges traditional gender and class hierarchies; at the same time, and just as importantly, it engages specifically secular ideas underwriting those hierarchies. This essay examines Salve Deus as an important reinterpretation of the classical notion of civic virtue that informed early modern humanist thought. Lanyer's poetry participates in the humanist educational enterprise to inspire virtuous action in the world and thus fulfills Sir Philip Sidney's well known argument that poetry is "A speaking Picture, with this end to teach and delight."² At the same time, Lanyer redefines the Aristotelian notion of "virtuous citizen" by interrogating the philosophical grounds on which women are excluded from civil society. She finds in the conjunction of intellectual property and real property a basis for the assertion of her own citizenship and entitlement on the same grounds that in classical political theory were reserved exclusively for titled, wealthy, educated men. Throughout Salve Deus, and especially in its numerous dedications, Lanyer transforms the standard language of patronage into a strident bid for the acknowledgment of intellectual property in terms that anticipate many of Milton's ground-breaking arguments in Aereopagitica. She argues not merely for monetary support of her artistic abilities but for public recognition of her authorial right to shape the commonwealth and for other women's right to public speech, as well.

Lanyer relies on the confluence of the language of patronage and the rhetoric of religion to endorse her claims to authority grounded in virtue, which is an unusual strategy in the tradition of dedications to patrons. Poets seeking patronage from nobles typically adopted a tone of extreme humility and self-effacement, apologizing "in advance" for the inadequacy of their work as it fails to measure up to the lofty and incomparable worth of the patron or dedicatee. Similarly, the rhetoric of religion emphasizes the innate worthlessness of humanity in its fallen condition, stressing the importance of humility in the recognition that each individual owes his or her redemption to the incomparable sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the savior. This confluence is ironic because, in the language of patronage, the supplicant at least ostensibly acknowledges her indebtedness and inferiority to a social superior, thereby authorizing the legitimacy of class hierarchy; in the rhetoric of religion, the supplicant acknowledges her indebtedness and inferiority to a deity with a view toward the eventual equality in heaven of all who are saved in Christ's name. According to Christian theology, ultimately all who are not damned will be one with God; hence all earthly hierarchies will be annihilated forever. Lanyer exploits the Christian concept of equality in heaven, reminding her dedicatees that "God makes both...