Gender and the spectacle of the Cross: Aemilia Lanyer in context

Abstract

This article locates the Passion piety of the Jacobean poet, Aemilia Lanyer, within the context of early-seventeenth-century English Protestant devotion, to present a fresh perspective on her 1611 composition, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. A close exploration of the remarkable resurgence of visual and affecting reflection on the crucifixion of Christ within the broader contemporary religious landscape reveals that Lanyer's theology is far less radical than has been frequently asserted. Whilst maintaining that Salve Deus is a uniquely woman-centred text, this article advances an argument for a more nuanced impact of gender on its precise formulations.

Keywords:

• Aemilia Lanyer
• gender
• the Passion
• devotion
• Protestant piety

Introduction

Assuming the influence of strict confessional distinctions on post-Reformation devotion, scholars of early-modern religion have frequently portrayed the Passion of Christ as a ‘marginal’, ‘vexed and perplexing’ subject for Protestants.¹ Yet, by the final decade of the sixteenth century, there is much evidence to suggest a widespread recovery of emotive, visual reflection on Christ's crucifixion, correlating with a broader enrichment of Protestant devotional literature. Alec Ryrie has recently argued for a resurgence of Passion piety amongst second generation Protestants.² In addition, Tara Hamling has uncovered Protestant use of Passion iconography in early-seventeenth-century household decoration and commented on the ‘burgeoning tolerance of disputed imagery in some Protestant circles in this period.’³ Inspired by both pre-Reformation devotional sources and the innovations of Counter-Reformation spirituality, the Passion came to be considered fundamental to both theological exposition and meditative contemplation. As the moderate Calvinist, Joseph Hall (1574–1656), remarked, ‘Euery day […] must be the Good-friday of a Christian.’⁴ A 1596 pastoral treatise of William Perkins (1558–1602) displays the remarkable possibilities for passionate puritan reflection. Desiring to rekindle the ‘neglected’ emotive and penitential experience of meditation on Christ crucified, Perkins urged his readers, with only the slight qualifier of ‘by faith as it were’, to

set thy selfe vpon the crosse of Christ, and applie thy hands to his hands, thy feete to his feete, and thy sinnefull heart to his bleeding heart, and … dive and plunge thy selfe wholly both bodie and soule into the woundes and bloode of Christ.

Despite also denouncing the barren emotive excesses of ‘The Fryers and Iesuites’,⁵ his exhortations for imaginative, experiential engagement with the crucifixion sets the scene for a transformed devotional climate within which we should locate the Passion piety of Aemilia Lanyer.

Amongst scholars of early-modern women's writing, the 1611 Passion poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, is well known as the composition of the Jacobean author, Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645). The one-time mistress of the nobleman Henry Carey, the specious identification of Lanyer by A. L. Rowse with Shakespeare's ‘Dark Lady’, and her reported romantic liaison with the astrologer, Simon Forman, have prompted reservations concerning the religious sincerity of the poetry she produced in later life.⁶ Nine dedications to prospective female, aristocratic patrons surround Lanyer's Passion text, including the Queen, the Countesses of Kent and Cumberland (with whom she resided for periods) and the Calvinist writer, Mary Sidney (1561–1621), Countess of Pembroke, whom Lanyer evidently admired.⁷ This, alongside the work's alleged expression of radically enlightened views concerning women, has rendered Salve Deus susceptible to a gynocritical reading. It is far more commonly regarded through the lens of ‘proto-feminism’ than that of contemporary devotion. Hence, Lynette McGrath has argued that Lanyer employed ‘an acceptably conventional topic or genre to conceal a level of subversive discourse.’⁸ Although Lanyer certainly sought to solicit patronage through publishing Salve Deus, this failure to take seriously her work's own declaration of intent and to view religion as a mere cover for secular preoccupations has been subject to deserved criticism.⁹ Yet even those scholars who have foregrounded theology generally portray Lanyer's piety as unique, isolated from contemporary religious discourses. Most starkly, Theresa DiPasquale has asserted that ‘the concerns of mainstream theology are not Lanyer's concerns.’¹⁰ However, despite considerable dissimilarities in both form and theology, the popular Lamentacion of a sinner (1547) by Katherine Parr (1512–1548) has even been proposed as the source text of Salve Deus. This suggestion is seemingly underpinned by a tunnel-visioned endeavour to establish a female Passion meditation tradition amongst the limited numbers of Tudor and Jacobean women writers.¹¹ Furthermore, Femke Molekamp has recently attributed the remarkable cross-confessional features of women's Passion writings to specifically ‘female traditions of affective Christocentric meditation.’¹² However, this article will contend that, when approached through contemporary Passion discourses, Lanyer's theology appears less radical than has been commonly asserted and she is revealed to operate within the wide boundaries of a predominantly male-authored devotional landscape.

The Person of Christ in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

Thus far, the two major attempts to contextualize Lanyer's piety have been significantly influenced by Debora Shuger's isolation of a group of early seventeenth-century English texts, which she regarded as indebted to John Calvin's theology of the Passion.¹³ Shuger presented these Passion narratives as collectively ‘troubling, dark, bordering on the grotesque’, evincing a sadistic concern to heighten the violent spectacle of the crucifixion.¹⁴ Lanyer's work displays several of Shuger's central themes. Her references to the Jews as an ‘accursed crew’ of ‘Monsters’, ‘rav'ning wolves’, and ‘chiefest Hel-hounds’, parallel the venom of writers such as Hall who raged against this ‘mad & miserable nation.’¹⁵ Similarly, Lanyer's visual reflection on Christ's crucified corpse, along the lines of Psalm 22: ‘His joynts dis-joynted, and his legges hang downe […] his bloody side, / His members torne’, parallels much of the ‘grotesque physicality’ of the Ecce Homo of Shuger's Calvinist Passions.¹⁶ However, Lanyer's overall emphasis on Christ's triumph over and against his anguished victimhood has prompted Barbara Bowen to comment on her reconciliation of the strategies of ‘the Reformation passion narratives by men’ to ‘a female readership.’¹⁷ As such, a heavy dependence on Shuger's somewhat mono-dimensional appraisal of a limited number of texts has prompted a deceptive impression of divergent gendered approaches. Through a reconsideration of these sources, alongside further Protestant Passion reflections, this article will locate Lanyer within what was actually a far more diverse contemporary devotional tradition, whilst also revealing the precise ways in which gender registers in her work.

As would be expected from a Protestant devotional work, Lanyer's Salve Deus envisions a clear gulf between divine and human experience. Reflecting on Christ's ‘matchlesse Torments’, she observed that ‘all the Suffrings Thoughts can thinke upon […] are […] not a Mite to that he did / Endure for us.’ Yet, in line with the conventions of pre-Reformation devotional literature, her poetry also evokes a powerful sense of immediate entry into the crucifixion events, which is not purely an exercise in historical imagination. Lanyer's verses bestow upon her female dedicatees a prime spectator position at Christ's Passion, even allowing that ‘His bleeding body there you may embrace.’¹⁸ Yet some male Protestant writers envisioned the reader's presence in a similar way, as with Perkins’s imaginative formulation. In the intentionally meditative Passion reflection in his Contemplations on Principall Passages of the Holie Storie (1612–1634), Hall, ‘transported with the sense of thy sufferings’, even claimed, in compassionate imitatio Christi, to ‘feele thy lashes; I shrink under thy painfull whippings.’¹⁹ Lanyer also employed an objectifying rhetoric of beholding, exhorting her dedicatees to ‘view this Lambe’ and ‘view thy Love’ whom ‘I present unto you.’²⁰ This resembles the vivid style of three Passion sermons which were composed by the ceremonialist divine, Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), between 1597 and 1605. Aside from exhortations to ‘looke upon Him’ and ‘to behold ’, Andrewes actually enjoined his hearers to ‘looke into the verie entrailes; and with our eye to pierce him that was thus pierced.’²¹

Lanyer's application of such affective rhetoric is underpinned by a striking visual depiction of Christ as bridegroom in accordance with the biblical imagery of the Song of Songs. Scholars have interpreted these features in terms of a reversal of power relations; the desired, male Christ is rendered the sanctioned ‘object of the female gaze’ in a transformation of the Petrarchan convention of the blazon.²² However, assumptions of female-specific application are misguided, for Canticles was widely allegorized amongst male Protestant writers as a spiritual marriage between Christ and the individual soul. Indeed, this nuptial formulation became particularly prominent amongst puritans from the mid-seventeenth century.²³ Interestingly, alongside several other Protestant women, Lanyer extensively employed this convention prior to prominent puritan expositions such as Francis Rous's (1579–1659) The Mysticall Marriage (1631). However, precedents certainly existed and it is the conformist Calvinist John Hayward's (c.1564–1627) exceedingly popular Sanctuarie of a troubled soule (1601) which provides the clearest parallel. Hayward contemplated Christ's Passion within the affective framework of a divine love-affair, repeatedly re-issuing his work to incorporate several hundred additional pages of crucifixion meditation. Lanyer's tender exhortations that her dedicatees ‘Take this faire Bridegroome in your soules pure bed’, ‘That in his dying armes he might imbrace / Your beauteous Soule’, pale in comparison with Hayward's eroticized expressions of his desire for spiritual immediacy. He wrote of his longing ‘to embrace thy naked body vpon the Crosse’, that ‘my soule shall be enfolded in the flames of thy loue’, encouraging the reader to ‘with thy naked arms embrace thy naked Sauiour.’²⁴ Hayward also shares Lanyer's explicit use of Canticles imagery. Just as her Christ is attributed with ‘lips, like Lillies, dropping downe pure mirrhe’, ‘curled lockes so beauteous’ and lips sweeter ‘Than is the sweetest hony dropping dew’, Hayward earlier affirmed, ‘thy lips are the hony comb’, ‘thy lips were like the lilies; thy fingers did still droppe pure myrrh.’²⁵

Although Shuger has underplayed the occurrence of this theme in contemporary Passion discourses, Canticles imagery does feature across several accounts.²⁶ Interestingly, these predominantly address the paradox of Christ as unsightly victim and exquisite lover, a scriptural discourse with which Lanyer herself interacts.²⁷ In a sermon preached before James VI & I, a Church of England clergyman, Samuel Walsall, drew on Bernard of Clairvaux's twelfth-century sermons on the Song of Songs to expound this theme. The same is also true of the Wiltshire rector and Prayer Book devotee, Thomas Ailesbury (1597–1660/1), who employed the description of Christ as ‘blacke, but comely’ (Song 1:5) to convey that, although marred by suffering he was ‘without disparagement to his glory.’²⁸ Furthermore, in the English translation of his Passion discourse, the Dutch Calvinist, Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655), portrayed Christ's ‘cheekes as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers; his lips like Lillies’, yet considered how he ‘lyeth now disfigured with wounds.’²⁹ For Lanyer though, despite acknowledging Jesus’s humiliation, ‘through the sable Clowdes of Shame & Death, / His beauty shewes more clearer than before.’ Although she focused primarily on the exquisite risen Bridegroom, Christ's ‘faire corps’ is all the more luminous against the backdrop of his violent humiliation.³⁰

Elizabeth Clarke has recently argued that, whereas ‘male commentators’ were frequently ‘deaf to the female-gendered voice of the Bride’, women writers exploited its full potential.³¹ However, early seventeenth-century evidence seems to frustrate a starkly gendered reading. Whilst Lanyer repeatedly evoked her female dedicatees’ spiritual marriage to their ‘Husband’ (Christ), Hayward noticeably degendered the biblical trope, avoiding explicit terms such as Bridegroom and designating his soul ‘it’ not ‘she.’³² Similarly, the texts which Shuger isolated do not reflect substantially on the romantic relationship of soul and divine lover. Although Walsall employed the erotic metaphor of the Bride's beloved as a bundle of myrrh between her breasts (Song 1:13), stripping it of its references to gendered bodies, he ultimately transmuted the image into an instruction that ‘euery Christian man’ gather Christ's ‘Paines and Pangs and Passions […] in his in-most breast.’³³ Conversely, Erica Longfellow has contended that formulations of Christ as desirable object of the readers’ gaze were actually far more widespread amongst contemporary male writers.³⁴ Interestingly, the dramatist John Ford's (1586-c.1640) male-dedicated Reformed Passion poem, Christes Bloodie Sweat (1613), employed the Petrarchan courtly ideal of the knightly lover wooing the inconstant feminine soul, embracing the explicitly gendered voices of Christ and his ‘Ladie.’³⁵ Whilst the mystical marriage convention may have proved particularly conducive to authorizing female religious writing, Lanyer's sensual imagery seems overall more profitably assessed in relation to the evidently diverse functioning of the erotic within wider seventeenth-century discourse.

That Lanyer intentionally depicted a feminized Christ, appealing to her and her female dedicatees, has been a further scholarly commonplace. For Janel Mueller, Lanyer's Christ is ‘the ideal woman of the Puritan manuals’, ‘submissive to higher male authorities’, mute, gentle, and meek.³⁶ Yet, as Longfellow has observed, this supposed conduct-book Christ stems from the paradoxical biblical portrait of a redeemer who humbled himself to suffer passively, a notion as frequently evoked amongst male authors. Thus, Walsall noted, Jesus ‘opened not his mouth. Milde Doue! meeke Lambe, patiently and peaceably, mildely and meekely hee’ bore his sorrows.³⁷ Indeed, Shuger has posited a ‘crisis of manhood’ in the weak, emasculated Christ of these Calvinist Passions.³⁸ Certainly, Lanyer did not employ the late-medieval maternal tradition expounded by Caroline Walker Bynum (which, in any case, derived from male-authored devotion). Jesus may be simultaneously ‘Sonne […] Husband, Father, Saviour, King’, but never mother. Lanyer's declaration that man ‘came not in the world without our paine’, does not constitute an obvious identification of maternal self-sacrifice in childbirth with Christ's agony on the cross, an explicit association amongst many late-medieval mystics.³⁹ Rather, it is Hayward who poignantly depicts the crucified Christ as ‘the true Rachel, trauelling vnto death for thy new birth.’⁴⁰ Furthermore, to a greater extent than her male contemporaries, Lanyer also eagerly dwelt on Christ as a ‘mightie Monarch’, a ‘King of kings’ clad ‘With Majestie and Honour.’ She may have noted his ‘faire obedience’, but she concluded with his blazing glory.⁴¹

‘Thrice happy women that obtaind such grace’

Crucially, it is the positive role of women in Lanyer's theology of the Passion which has been considered most indicative of feminized spirituality. Few scholars contest the claim that Lanyer ‘rewrites the Bible’ in order to praise faithful women and denounce evil men, despite the implicit basis for this interpretation within the Gospel narratives.⁴² Certainly, Lanyer's condemnation of the disciples’ lack of spiritual perception and abandonment of Jesus in Gethsemane, ‘When triall of affliction came to prove’, is forcefully confirmed in Mark's Gospel and reverberated amongst various male contemporaries. It prompted Hall's despondent, ‘Alas, what broken reeds are men?’⁴³ However, Lanyer's Passion poem also includes a unique contribution to the longstanding humanist debate, the querelle des femmes. Inspired by the positive example of Pilate's wife (Matthew 27:19), she penned ‘Eves Apologie’ to demonstrate the severity of man's crucifixion of Christ in contrast with woman's lesser part in effecting original sin. Since Eve was led into transgression by ‘undiscerning Ignorance’, ‘Her sinne was small’ compared to Adam's, for ‘What Weaknesse offerd, Strength might have refusde.’⁴⁴

Although Lanyer did not reproduce his most radical contentions, this argument seemingly depends on Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's (1586–1535) Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of Womankynde (a text which also asserted sole, masculine guilt for the crucifixion and enthusiastically celebrated Pilate's wife.)⁴⁵ Yet, whereas the contributions of Agrippa and other male humanist authors and translators appear layered with irony, Sarah Apetrei has demonstrated that seventeenth-century women refashioned this debate as a serious, pious discourse.⁴⁶ Certainly, the Fall was invariably addressed in contemporary Passion reflections, and frequently in terms of the sole sin of Adam, reversed in Christ, in accordance with a New Testament emphasis on the first/second Adam typologies.⁴⁷ However, Lanyer's assimilation of the polemic of the querelle into a work of genuine devotion should, it seems, be confidently attributed to her gender.

Lanyer's work also affords five stanzas to ‘The teares of the daughters of Jerusalem’, praising their compassion which ‘inforced mercie, grace, and love / From him, whom greatest Princes could not moove.’⁴⁸ Patricia Phillippy regarded this positive reading of Luke 23:27–31 as evidence of a feminine Passion piety. She argued that, whilst male reformed writers excoriated immoderate grief by identifying it with ‘feminized’ Catholic superstition, Lanyer subverted this ‘masculinisation of piety’ to establish women's ‘privileged relationship’ with Christ.⁴⁹ Interestingly, Kimberly Coles’, ultimately unproven, claim that Lanyer's source text was the manuscript poem, ‘The Countesse of Penbrookes passion’, might appear to support this interpretation. The work was addressed by Nicholas Breton (1554/5–c.1626) to the countess, and later appeared in print as The Passions of the Spirit (1599), dedicated to another woman. In addition to some minor shared vocabulary, habitual anti-Semitism, visual reflection on Christ's suffering and the mystical marriage convention, both texts share a model of positive female grief, whether of the Countess herself or merely the soul gendered female in Breton's verse.⁵⁰ Just as Lanyer's women ‘By teares, by sighes, by cries intreat’, the speaker of his text is overwrought with ‘greatest greife’: ‘I sighe, I mourne, I weepe, I liuinge dye’ and, in imitation of the sorrow of St Peter, Mary Magdalen and the Virgin, longs that ‘my soule were made a sea of teares.’⁵¹

However, this work actually appears to be indebted to a wider genre of ‘tears-poetry’, popularized by Robert Southwell's (c.1561–1595) Saint Peters Complaint (1595). This Counter-Reformation poem proved extraordinarily influential amongst seventeenth-century Protestants, inspiring feminized Passion laments from male authors of both confessions.⁵² Indeed, Gervase Markham's (c. 1568–1637) Teares of the beloued (1600) could have offered Lanyer a Protestant model of both apostolic failure and commendable male grief.⁵³ Interestingly, Lanyer never fashions Christ himself as a model of pious weeping. However, the remarkably gendered convention of a redeemer who hangs on the cross ‘while the teares are tricklinge downe his face’, frequently recurred throughout the devotional poetry of male authors from within the Protestant mainstream. Both Breton and Giles Fletcher (d.1623) invoked this image and John Ford reflected at length on the tears of Christ as a means of underscoring the distinction between his divine and human natures: ‘His God-head smil'd to see his man-hood weepe.’⁵⁴

Distinctively, whilst Lanyer's women weep in ‘pitie’ for Christ, they do not lament their own sinfulness. Despite a fully orthodox recognition of general human depravity, Lanyer maximized the fault of ‘spightfull men’ whilst forgoing self-excoriation for Christ's Passion and presenting her female dedicatees as universally virtuous.⁵⁵ This contrasts powerfully with the model of exemplary female penitence which Breton offered to his patroness, Mary Sidney: ‘I unworthye most of all to see, / the eyes of mercye cast one looke on me’, providing a counterpoint to the recurring claim that ‘self-abasement’ was particularly characteristic of women's religious writings.⁵⁶ Instead, it is Andrewes's explicitly gendered celebration of the ‘Love, and Labour’ of the female witnesses to Christ's Passion and Resurrection, over and against male, apostolic weakness, which resonates most strikingly with Lanyer's accentuation of feminine virtue.⁵⁷

Furthermore, whilst some prominent theologians did denounce the Jerusalem women's mourning as misdirected, early seventeenth-century readings were actually more diverse than Shuger and others have acknowledged.⁵⁸ Hall's Passion Sermon spoke of the Jerusalem women's ‘idle pitty’, but his later contemplative work commemorated the exemplary compassion of ‘thy blessed Mother, and those other zealous associates of her owne sexe.’⁵⁹ Whilst Hayward acknowledged that Jesus ‘forbadde the women […] to weepe for for [sic] him’, he interpreted this as a courageous dismissal of his own suffering, exhorting Christ who ‘doest much esteeme those that are pittifull’, to ‘forbidde vs not, I beeseech thee, to weepe for thee.’ He further employed the women's example to present weeping as the most effective form of prayer.⁶⁰ Importantly, although commonly associated by scholars with Catholicism, the aspiration of eliciting tears through powerfully emotive Passion piety was commonplace within seventeenth-century Protestantism.⁶¹ In the 1620s, the Scot, Gilbert Primrose (1566/7–1642), minister in the French Reformed Church, lamented the contemporary ‘womanish’ associations of pious weeping and forcefully advocated it for men. Highlighting male culpability for ‘The most part of the evill that is done in the world’ he noted that, ‘When IVDAS betrayed Christ, when PETER denyed him, when the Priests and Elders of the Iewes accused him, women were faithfull unto him […] women wept for him.’⁶²

Furthermore, neither Lanyer's gender nor any covert Catholic tendencies need be posited to account for her portrait of the dolorous Virgin, whom she depicted ‘in depth of sorow drowned; / Her griefes extreame […] To see his bleeding body oft shee swouned.’ Despite the rather Romanising epithet, ‘most beauteous Queene of Woman-kind’, Mary is presented, not as a Catholic intercessor, but as an exemplary mother and Christian.⁶³ Gary Kuchar has argued that Lanyer's swooning Virgin intentionally evoked the lo spasimo⁶⁴ controversy through a pre-Tridentine iconographic illustration of Mary as co-redemptrix, suffering visibly in partnership with her son. However, the allegedly radical nature of this physical depiction of Mary's grief is fundamentally challenged by the Calvinist Hall's parallel emphasis on her ‘swounings.’⁶⁵ Ultimately, even Kuchar regarded Lanyer's representation of this scene as more reflective of feminized spirituality than Catholic theology.⁶⁶ However, Lanyer did not even exploit the scriptural prophecy of Simeon (Luke 2:33–35) to present her Virgin as the ultimate model of co-suffering with Christ, as some of her male contemporaries did. Ailesbury affirmed Mary's entry into the crucifixion, noting, ‘by a reflect act her hands and feet with his are pierced, her side wounded and head bruised with thornes, as if but one soule in two bodies.’ Even Hall depicted the ineffable agonies of the ‘blessed virgin’, exclaiming: ‘how many swords pierced thy soule […] [when] thou sawest thy deare Sonne […] how wert thou crucified with him.’⁶⁷

Lanyer's emphasis on Mary's grief appears contingent on the fluidity of early-seventeenth-century Protestant devotion, rather than on her gender. However, Salve Deus also includes substantial parentheses on the Annunciation and Incarnation which, although conventional in themselves, are atypical of contemporary Passion discourse. Alongside lengthy discussions of other biblical and classical women, Lanyer's extensive Marian reflections were presumably intended to hold specific gendered appeal for her dedicatees. Certainly, the Laudian, Anthony Stafford (1587–c.1645), assumed that his remarkable Marian ‘panegyricke’ would prove especially relevant to women, despite his own evident attraction to this devotional style and his joint recommendation of it to ‘the masculine reader.’⁶⁸ Clearly Lanyer did envisage men as being readers of Salve Deus, for personal presentation copies dedicated to Prince Henry and Thomas Jones (c.1550–1619), the Protestant archbishop of Dublin, still exist.⁶⁹ Her address ‘to the Vertuous Reader’ does outline a polemical objective; Lanyer's appraisal of Scripture led her to highlight Jesus’s positive relationships with women and assert primary male culpability for his crucifixion.⁷⁰ However, although she aligned examples of women's suffering at the hands of cruel, powerful men with Christ's own oppression, she asserted no generalized sense of female spiritual privilege. Longfellow is ultimately correct to maintain that Salve Deus presents ‘a model of ungendered virtue.’ It is not ‘women and women alone’ who respond rightly to Christ's message, for Lanyer also eulogized ‘blessed’, ‘honourable Joseph’ of Arimathea and concluded with the vindication of Christ's male apostles through mimetic sacrificial martyrdoms.⁷¹

Conclusion

Whilst it would be fallacious to reject the significance of gender as a category for analysing Lanyer's poetry, this article has sought to offer a corrective to widespread, blanket assumptions of the purely feminine piety of Salve Deus. Lanyer's writing may not always conform to conventional expectations of Protestant devotion, but, as such, it challenges scholars to uncover the variety and complexity of wider Passion discourse. This article has argued that, rather than standing within a female literary Passion tradition, Salve Deus is indicative of a contemporary devotional landscape which displays a renewed confidence in textually representing Christ crucified. The Passion was depicted through highly vivid and affecting rhetoric which stirred the emotions, enabling believers to experience compassionate proximity to the events of salvation history. By this period, a revival of physical reflection on Christ's sufferings had even permeated the writings of notable puritans, reflecting a confessional fluidity which historians’ emphasis on the politics of religion has frequently obscured.

Furthermore, this article maintains that gender continued to pervade the genre, not primarily with regard to the traditional, rather crude dichotomy of the author's sex, but in fluid conceptions of femininity and masculinity, in relation to Christ's Passion, which men and women were both active in shaping. Significant potential for varied evocations of gendered rhetoric has been uncovered amongst Lanyer's male contemporaries. Such research offers an interesting counterpoint to the claim that the Reformation presided over a ‘masculinization’ of piety, a suggestion which has informed many assessments of the gains and losses of female experiences of religious reform.⁷²Amongst this diversity of male-authored Protestant devotion, the majority of the dominant theological perspectives in Salve Deus find revealing parallels. These combine in Lanyer to create a unique, woman-centred discourse, but one which was, evidently, in dialogue with contemporary religious conventions. A close contextual assessment of Salve Deus, thus, suggests the need for a more nuanced gendered analysis of early-modern women's writings, which goes beyond simple assertions of sex-specific devotion.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sarah Apetrei and Judith Maltby, who kindly read and commented on earlier drafts of this article. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council without which this research could not have been completed.

Notes on contributor

Lucy Busfield, of St John's College, Oxford, is completing doctoral studies at the Oxford University Faculty of Theology and Religion.

Correspondence to: Ms Lucy Busfield. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Michael Carl Schoenfeldt, ‘“That spectacle of too much weight”: The Poetics of Sacrifice in Donne, Herbert, and Milton’, Journal of Medieval and Early-modern Studies 31, no. 3 (2001): 561–63; Erin Henriksen, Milton and the Reformation Aesthetics of the Passion (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 40, 51–63; Jessica Martin, ‘English Reformed Responses to the Passion’, in Private and Domestic Devotion in Early-modern Britain, ed. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 115–16, 133–4. Martin's recent and valuable appraisal of the diversity of Reformed devotion does retain an overarching belief that the Passion was inherently ‘problematic’ for Protestants.

2 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 289–91.

3 Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 195–98.

4 Joseph Hall, The Passion Sermon, Preached at Paules Crosse on Good-Friday (London, 1609), 2.

5 William Perkins, A Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified (Cambridge, 1596), sigs. C1, A3^r, A5^r, B8^v.

6 A. L. Rowse, The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 1–37.

7 Susanne Woods, ‘Textual Introduction’, in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), xvii, xxv–xxxiv. (Hereinafter cited as SDRJ).

8 Lynette McGrath, ‘“Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe”: Aemilia Lanier's Seventeenth-Century Feminist Voice’, Women's Studies 20, no. 3–4 (1992): 341.

9 Suzanne Trill, ‘Feminism versus Religion: Towards a Re-Reading of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, Renaissance and Reformation 25, no. 4 (2001): 68–76.

10 Theresa M. DiPasquale, Refiguring the Sacred Feminine: The Poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer and John Milton (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008), 172.

11 Jonathan Gibson, ‘Katherine Parr, Princess Elizabeth and the Crucified Christ’, in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in English 1550–1700, vol. 1, Early Tudor Women Writers, ed. Elaine Beilin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 216, 219 n. 32. Frances James advanced a similar argument in ‘“A Christal Glasse for Christian Women”: Meditations on Christ's Passion in the Devotional Literature of Renaissance Women’, Journal of International Women's Studies 10, no. 3 (2009): 64–70.

12 Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early-modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 203.

13 Cf. Erica Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early-modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 70–91; Kimberly Anne Coles, Religion, Reform and Women's Writing in Early-modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 149–78. Salve Deus has also been examined in relation to the Protestant literary canon. See, for example, Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

14 Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley, University of California Press 1994), 90–92, 107–109.

15 Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 91–92, 112–13; SDRJ, 73–76, 81; Hall, Passion Sermon, 13.

16 SDRJ, 101; Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 95–96.

17 Barbara E. Bowen, ‘The Rape of Jesus: Aemilia Lanyer's Lucrece’, in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard (London: Routledge, 2001), 121–22. Coles concluded similarly in Religion, 165, 169.

18 SDRJ, 70, 105, 108.

19 Hall, The Contemplations upon the History of the New Testament (London, 1634), 271, 263. See also Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early-modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2012), 76–78, although he has interpreted such rhetoric as incompatible with ‘Hall's “official” Calvinist position’.

20 SDRJ, 46, 101, 34.

21 Lancelot Andrewes, ‘A Sermon Preached at the Court, on the XXV. of March, A.D. MDXCVII. being Good-Friday’, in XCVI Sermons (London, 1629), 334, 341.

22 Others have also speculated on precedents in medieval women's writings. See McGrath, ‘“Let us Have our Libertie”’, 343, 347 n. 21.

23 Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 30–31, 47–49, 53–56; Elizabeth Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

24 SDRJ, 20, 17; John Hayward, The second part of the sanctuary of a troubled soule (London, 1607), fos. 42^v, 90^v, 121^v.

25 SDRJ, 107; Hayward, Second part, fos. 143^v, 55^v.

26 Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 97–98.

27 In relation to Isaiah 53:2, Psalm 45:2 and Song of Songs.

28 Thomas Ailesbury, The Passion Sermon at Pauls-Crosse (London, 1626), 29. See also Samuel Walsall, The Life and Death of Iesvs Christ (Cambridge, 1607), sig. F1r.

29 Daniel Heinsius, The Mirrour of Humilitie: or Two eloquent and acute discourses vpon the natiuitie and passion of Christ (London, 1618), 62. See also John Ford, Christes Bloodie Sweat, or the Sonne of God in His Agonie (London, 1613), 6.

30 SDRJ, 39.

31 Clarke, Politics, 137–39, 169–73, at 138.

32 Cf. SDRJ, 62; Hayward, The sanctuarie of a troubled soule (London, 1601), 181, 246–48.

33 Walsall, Life and Death, sigs. F2^v–F3^r (my emphasis). Cf. SDRJ, 108.

34 Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 26, 82.

35 Ford, Christes Bloodie Sweat, 42–51.

36 Janel Mueller, ‘The Feminist Poetics of “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum”’, in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 112.

37 Walsall, Life and Death, sig. D3^v; Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 84–86.

38 Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 115–18.

39 SDRJ, 95, 87; Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), esp. 151–53; Contra DiPasquale, Refiguring, 183.

40 Hayward, Second part, fo. 122^r.

41 SDRJ, 5, 38, 54, 40, 74.

42 Contra DiPasquale, Refiguring, 126; but see Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing, 215.

43 SDRJ, 65–78, at 78; Hall, Contemplations, 253.

44 SDRJ, 50, 84–87.

45 See Esther Gilman Richey, ‘“To Undoe the Booke”: Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer and the Subversion of Pauline Authority’, English Literary Renaissance 27, no. 6 (1997): 106–28. Agrippa actually claimed that, by virtue of Eve's latter creation, womankind must be the perfection of God's work. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of Womankynde, trans. from Latin original of 1529 (London, 1542), sigs. A7^v–A8^r, C7^v–C8^r.

46 Sarah Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 31, 51–60, 74.

47 See Hayward, Second part, esp. fos. 87^r, 106, 117^v; Hall, Contemplations, 271.

48 SDRJ, 93.

49 Patricia Phillippy, ‘Sisters of Magdalen: Women's Mourning in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, English Literary Renaissance 31 (2001): 80–81, 91, 98, 104–05.

50 Coles, Religion, 162–69, 236 n. 76; British Library, MS Sloane 1303, fos. 62^r, 65.

51 British Library, MS Sloane 1303, fos. 60^r–61^r, 63^v–64^r; SDRJ, 94.

52 Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 57–63, 79–88.

53 Gervase Markham, The teares of the beloued: or, The lamentation of Saint Iohn (London, 1600).

54 British Library, MS Sloane 1303, fo. 65^r; Ford, Christes Bloodie, 5, 7. See also Giles Fletcher, Christs Victorie and Triumph in Heaven and Earth (London, 1610), 48.

55 SDRJ, esp. 39, 53, 99, 108–111.

56 British Library, MS Sloane 1303, fo. 69^r. See Suzanne Trill, ‘Engendering Penitence: Nicholas Breton and “the Countesse of Penbrooke”’, in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early-modern Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 27–29.

57 Andrewes, ‘A Sermon Preached before the King's Maiestie, at White-hall, on the XXVII. of March, A.D. MDCVIII. being Easter Day’, in XCVI Sermons, 404.

58 See Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 100.

59 Hall, Passion Sermon, 50; Hall, Contemplations, 266–67.

60 Hayward, Second part, fos. 109^v–115^r.

61 Ryrie, Being Protestant, 187–89, 290.

62 Gilbert Primrose, The Christian Mans Teares, And Christs Comforts (London, 1625), sigs. A1^v–A2^v, A5.

63 SDRJ, 94–100. See further Woods, Lanyer, 138.

64 Mary's fainting with grief.

65 Gary Kuchar, ‘Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin's Swoon: Theology and Iconography in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, English Literary Renaissance 37, no. 1 (2007): 47–61. Note also Lanyer's fierce anti-papalism and her celebration of the Reformed Protestant, Catherine Willoughby's flight into exile to escape ‘vaine Idolatry’. SDRJ, 19. Hall, Contemplations, 275.

66 Kuchar, ‘Aemilia Lanyer’, 72–73.

67 Ailesbury, Passion Sermon, 26; Hall, Contemplations, 274–75.

68 Anthony Stafford, The Female Glory; or, The Life, and Death of our Blessed Lady (London, 1635), sigs. b3^r–c3^r, d1^r.

69 Woods, ‘Textual Introduction’, xlviii–l.

70 SDRJ, 48–50.

71 Longfellow, Women's Religious Writing, 91; Contra Mueller, ‘Feminist Poetics’, 105–106; SDRJ, 105–106, 125–29.

72 See, for example, Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), 10–12, 36–37.