The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.

Susanne Woods, ed. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. (Women Writers in English 1350-1850.) New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. li + 139 pp. $32.50 cloth; $12.95 paper.

Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum represents a series of "firsts" in English poetry generally and in English women's poetry in particular: the first requests for literary patronage by a woman to women; the first long religious poem known to have been written by a woman; and the first English country house poem, certainly published and probably written before Jonson's "To Penshurst." Yet until now, the only modern edition of Lanyer's full work has been in A.L. Rowse's The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady, where it served as a kind of appendix to his tenuous argument identifying Lanyer as the mystery woman of Shakespeare's sonnets. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer provides a much-needed authoritative edition of Lanyer's work for scholarly and classroom use in seventeenth-century English studies.

As Susanne Woods's introduction makes clear, Lanyer's life offers a case study of the economic hardships faced by a socially marginal woman in early modern England, raised in Elizabeth's court but -- beginning with the death of her musician father -- increasingly without clear social status or adequate financial means. The eleven dedicatory poems and letters preceding Salve Deus represent one of several strategies Lanyer devised to support herself. But these dedications "To all vertuous Ladies in general!" and to prospective female patrons, such as Queen Anne and the Countess of Pembroke, also create a prospective community of women, a female utopia that encourages women's artistic and scholarly work by alleviating their financial dependence on men.

The nearly two thousand iambic pentameter lines of the Salve Deus proper at once retell the biblical story of Christ's Passion and continue the imaginative vision of women's community begun in the dedications. Lanyer achieves this synthesis by isolating and expanding passages from the Gospels that portray women as defenders and supporters of Christ. These heroic women become for Lanyer the types of all women, while the men who crucify Christ become the types of all men. Within the Passion narrative, Lanyer embeds a defense of Eve which, like most defenses of women in the period, claims Eve is not the evil temptress (male) theological commentary has made her. But Lanyer goes beyond this conventional argument in her insistence that whatever Eve's sin, it cannot equal in magnitude the sin of the crucifixion. Such reasoning leads Lanyer to an astonishing declaration of female equality and independence, made by Pilate's wife: "Your fault being greater, why should you disdaine / Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?" (830-31) While other early seventeenth-century English defenses assert women's moral superiority to men, no other I know of draws this further conclusion that women deserve not just improved treatment, but freedom from male control.

Salve Deus certainly requires a cultural context, but its value is not confined to its significance as a document in feminist history. Although Lanyer's metrics tend toward over-regularity and her use of imagery and classical allusion rarely transcends convention, her narrative creates structural complexity by embedding stories within stories, and her retelling of Christ's Passion achieves dramatic power by humanizing, often feminizing, Christ. Unlike Milton's Christ, Lanyer's Christ is more scriptural than theological, which means that his Passion indeed involves passion, that he is not so omniscient as to be impervious to his own suffering. Having taught Salve Deus in a course on the debate over women in early modern England, I would note that undergraduate students can indeed be engaged by it -- no small matter with any long religious poem.

Susanne Woods's critical introduction and editing are exemplary. Her biographical sketch combines discussion of astrologer Simon Forman's references to Lanyer in his diaries with new documentary research and autobiographical details drawn from Lanyer's poetry. The textual introduction provides information on the nine known copies of Salve Deus (including the intriguing omissions of dedicatory materials in some), and the explanatory notes on the poetry will prove helpful to both undergraduate students and professional scholars of early modern English poetry and culture. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer is a welcome addition to the growing collection of works in the "Women Writers in English 1350-1850" series.