Refiguring the Sacred Feminine: The Poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer and John Milton

LANYER

105 LANYER Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum is concerned with ecclesiastical, theological, social, aesthetic, and political issues. But for Lanyer, gender is the terminus a quo for every question she considers and the terminus ad quem for every argument she presents. Lanyer’s anticourtly stance, her vision of the church, her expressions of desire, and her impassioned response to the class distinctions that separate her from her addressees all arise from her fundamental concern with the experience of women as such throughout history, her attention to the attitudes and actions of prominent women of her time, and her belief in her own vocation as a female poet. Lanyer writes in self-conscious reaction to Stuart court culture as she sees it—that is, in condemnation of a society that centers itself upon praise of a male monarch and relegates women to ancillary and subservient roles. In doing so, she makes a specifically anti-Jacobean contribution to the ongoing debate over the nature of womankind that originated in the antifeminist polemics of the patristic and medieval periods and included defenses of woman by Christine de Pisan in the fifteenth century, Cornelius Agrippa in the early sixteenth century, and a range of early modern English writers from the mid-sixteenth century on. But Lanyer is not really concerned with defending the idea that woman is as good as or better than man, an idea she takes as an established premise; rather, she asserts as female privileges a sacerdotal vocation and a uniquely 106 Lanyer unfallen and untainted sexuality, both of which arise from what Lanyer believes to be woman’s unique place in the economy of redemption.1 For Lanyer, Christian women—including the Blessed Virgin, the Marys at the tomb of Jesus, the Countess of Cumberland, the other virtuous women addressed in Salve Deus, and she herself —are not only feminine conduits of grace, but female agents of salvation, priests and living incarnations of the church through whom God redeems fallen man and ameliorates the fallen world. They do not—as in the traditional Roman Catholic and English Protestant notion of priesthood—represent Christ, the head of the church, but rather figure forth the church herself, the feminine body of which Christ alone is head. Thus, like Saint Paul, John Donne, and the Christian tradition more broadly, Lanyer defines the church as feminine; but at the same time, more radically , she insists that woman is church. Critiquing the apostles Jesus ordained as priests and, by implication, their male successors , Lanyer articulates a new, gynocentric ecclesiology. She does not seek to reform the institutional church, nor does she feel the need to declare allegiance to any one Christian denomination ; rather, Lanyer believes that each virtuous woman is Ecclesia incarnate and that the community of virtuous women across history is the church, the body of Christ at work in the world. Lanyer’s belief that women are the most loyal disciples of Jesus and that flesh and spirit are reconciled in their experience leads her not only to claim the priesthood for womankind, but also to define the erotic desire of virtuous women as a grace- filled impulse, whether it be directed heavenward, toward honorable men, or toward other women. Rejecting the notion that the female is naturally more fleshly and libidinous than the male and thus necessarily subordinate to him, Lanyer recasts woman ’s experience of eros—both sacred and profane—as holy, liberating , and redemptive. Not surprisingly, the poet defines love of God as the highest and most perfect expression of womanly desire; and for Lanyer, a woman may become more perfectly one with Christ than a man ever can. But in the lives of female human beings, Lanyer believes, nature and grace, eros and caritas, spirit and flesh are in no way opposed; she thus envisions untainted female eros as the exhilarating, proactive, and even redemptive alternative to a range of ills. The love of Christ is the alternative to sinful worldliness and to the victim status afforded those who choose unfaithful human males as lovers; unsubmissive love for a worthy man is the alternative to the unendurable subjugation of marriage as it is defined by Ephesians 5 and 1 Peter 3; and a woman’s love for another woman challenges the ironclad rules that alienate the commoner from the noblewoman. Lanyer cannot fully realize her vision of human-directed eros...