Aemilia Lanyer, Edmund Spenser, and the Literary Hymn

The most excellent kinds of poetry are hymns and paeans; next rank songs (mele), odes, and scolia, which are sung in the praise of brave men. The epic, in which are both heroes and lesser men, comes third, and then follows tragedy along with comedy. Comedy, however, will receive a fourth place by itself. Thereafter come satires, exodia, interludes, jests, nuptial songs, elegies, monodies, incantations, and epigrams.

–Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem¹

Hymnes to the gods was the first forme of Poesie and the highest and the stateliest.

–George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie²

The chiefe both in antiquitie and excellencie, were they that did imitate the inconceivable excellencies of GOD. Such were, David in his Psalmes[,]…Moses and Debora in theyr Hymnes[,]…[and] Orpheus, Amphion, Homer in his hymnes, and many other, both Greekes and Romanes.

–Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie³

Over the past twenty-five years, scholars have explored the intertextual relationship between Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and Edmund Spenser's Fowre Hymnes (1596). While they have identified how Lanyer in her poem incorporates and modifies the themes, language, and cosmology of Fowre Hymnes, they have yet to recognize that she also repurposes Spenser's genre—the literary hymn.⁴ Traditionally, the literary hymn comprises three parts: (1) an exordium that "usually invokes the Muse and apostrophizes the god or goddess to be praised"; (2) the main celebration that "consider[s] in more detail some major characteristic … [or] significant myth associated with the god"; and (3) the peroration or farewell that "contains some sort of apostrophe and prayer."⁵ However, Spenser in Fowre Hymnes transforms this three-part model into a four-part one by inserting a creation myth in between the exordium and main celebration.⁶ As we shall see, Lanyer draws on Spenser's four-part model to structure the title poem of Salve Deus as a literary hymn. She largely dedicates her poem to revising Spenser's figuration of the genre, revealing a closer connection between the two works than has been previously recognized. More importantly, Lanyer's reworking of Fowre Hymnes illuminates her literary ambitions in Salve Deus. By composing the title poem as a literary hymn, Lanyer writes herself into the august history of Christian literary hymnody: she positions herself as the principal heir of the tradition and offers her poem as a new, Protestant model of the genre.

Scholars have turned to genre to delineate and legitimate Lanyer's authority as a poet. Besides identifying the plethora of genres and modes in Salve Deus's prefatory and concluding verses, scholars have classified the title poem in several ways.⁷ Marshall Grossman has characterized it as religious, epideictic verse.⁸ Barbara K. Lewalski has indicated that it constitutes a passion poem, which additionally includes an apologia, laments, and encomia.⁹ And while Kari Boyd McBride has argued that the title poem repurposes pastoral, elegy, and epithalamium, Susanne Woods has suggested that it evokes an epyllion.¹⁰ Yet scholars have not considered the title poem as a literary hymn.¹¹ While the genres and modes mentioned above reveal Lanyer to be a serious poet working within established poetic traditions, they do not afford her the authorial gravity or significance that a literary hymn does. In their hierarchization of genre, early modern critics such as Julius Caesar Scaliger, George Puttenham, and Philip Sidney placed hymns and paeans at the top of their taxonomies. As the epigraphs to this essay demonstrate, Scaliger, Puttenham, and Sidney maintained that the hymn was written by only the "most excellent," "highest," "stateliest," and "chiefe" poets. The hymnic structure of Salve Deus, then, asks us to reconsider the way in which Lanyer represents herself as a poet. To be sure, by composing her title poem in epideictic verse (with other genres and forms embedded therein), she highlights her abilities as a writer. However, by constructing her poem as a literary hymn, she consciously presents herself as a hymnist—a poet of the highest caliber, chief among others.

In Salve Deus, then, Lanyer reshapes the...