In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

` Micheline White - A Woman with Saint Peter's Keys?: Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and the Priestly Gifts of Women - Criticism 45:3 Criticism 45.3 (2003) 323-341



[Access article in PDF]

A Woman with Saint Peter's Keys?:
Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and the Priestly Gifts of Women

Micheline White


PART OF THE COMPLEX ecclesiastical and social restructuring that took place in England following the Reformation involved the articulation of new religious roles for women. As the Protestant church dissolved female Catholic communities and adopted Luther's doctrine of the "spiritual priesthood" of all believers, it exhorted women to embrace new religious activities and ideals. A wide range of genres contributed to the emergence of normative values associated with the ideal Protestant woman, genres including funeral sermons, exemplary biographies, conduct manuals, fictional texts, and panegyric poetry. A survey of works written between 1560 and 1625 reveals that educated, wealthy women were typically praised for dispensing charity, reading the Bible and devotional works at home, attending public religious exercises, providing religious instruction to their households, displaying exemplary piety in their communities, and remaining humble and obedient to their husbands.

In the past decade, Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) has been recognized as an important Jacobean text because it challenges these normative ideals and reimagines women's relationship to the sacred in provocative ways. This essay will examine two interrelated features of the volume that warrant more thorough investigation. First, while Lanyer draws on a wide range of orthodox religious imagery in praising her female dedicatees, she also appropriates clerical language and suggests that they wield certain priestly powers. Notably, she asserts that the Countess of Cumberland exercises the healing power of St. Peter's keys, that the Countess of Cumberland and her daughter are "shepherdesses" who heal and feed Christ's "flock," and that virtuous women are authorized to anoint themselves with "Aaron's oil" and feed each other with the Word. A careful examination of Lanyer's Passion poem [End Page 323] reveals that these unusual claims about her contemporaries are thoroughly consistent with her understanding of the role that women played in the drama of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. Specifically, she depicts women as the true disciples and founders of Christ's healing Church, and she positions Jacobean women as the spiritual heirs of these female disciples.1

These unorthodox claims warrant careful consideration, not only because they enrich our understanding of the radical nature of Lanyer's work, but also because they contribute to a newly uncovered tradition of dissent regarding women's supposed inability to access the gifts associated with the Christian priesthood. Recent feminist scholarship has argued that women played important leadership roles in the Jesus movement and early Christianity, and that it was not until the third or fourth centuries that male leaders began attacking female leaders and developing arguments to disqualify them from religious offices.2 A thousand years later, when Reformation leaders drastically revised their understanding of the essence and function of the clergy, they did not significantly revise their views regarding women and the priesthood. Rather, they reaffirmed the now "orthodox" arguments that women could not fill such offices because Christ had chosen men, not women, to be his disciples; because Paul had forbidden women to teach in public religious assemblies; because only men could persuasively serve as "images" of Christ; and because the church had always forbidden women from being priests.3

However, as feminist historians are now demonstrating, there were individuals and communities that challenged women's exclusion from the powers associated with the priesthood throughout the medieval and early modern periods, doing so from a variety of theological, social, and political perspectives.4 Lanyer's representation of women's hieratic gifts contributes to this tradition of dissent, and her work is all the more remarkable since there was no significant discussion about women and the priesthood in mainstream Elizabethan or Jacobean discourse. It should be stated from the outset that Lanyer does not explicitly argue for institutional changes that would allow women to serve as priests within the existing ecclesiastical hierarchy. Rather, woven throughout her...

pdf