Salve Deus Rex Judæorum

by Aemilia Lanyer, Susanne Woods (Editor)

Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was the first woman poet in England who sought status as a professional writer. Her book of poems is dedicated entirely to women patrons. It offers a long poem on Christ's passion, told entirely from a woman's point of view, as well as the first country house poem published in England. Almost completely neglected until very recently, her work changes our perspective on Jacobean poetry and contradicts the common assumption that women wrote nothing of serious interest until much later. Mistress and friend of influential Elizabethan courtiers, Lanyer gives us a glimpse of the ideas and aspirations of a talented middle class Renaissance woman.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, 17th Century, School, Christian, Feminism, Read For School

191 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1611

About the author

Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was born to Margaret Johnson and Baptista Basano. She would become a well known woman and poet years after she published a volume of religious poems in 1611. She grew up in the height of Elizabethan power but lived her adult life under the reign of James I during his move towards a strictly patriarchal society. Aemilia Lanyer was an influential poet because she was the first English woman to have her book of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, published. This book challenged the thoughts on gender and ideology of the time.

Little is known about Lanyer’s family or her life. There are multiple leads in her family tree and even their religious background. A.L. Rowse believes Lanyer’s family was actually Jewish based on records he found in the Italian town of Basano, where Lanyer’s family came from. Rowse is not in the majority though; most critics believe her family was Protestant because her writing appears to be strongly rooted in Protestant's traditions and her parents are believed to have connections with the Protestant reform movement. Basano was a court musician and died when Lanyer was seven. After his death, Lanyer was sent to Susan Bertie, dowager countess of Kent, where she received five years of humanist education. The skills she learned during her schooling are seen later in her poems; Lanyer’s work clearly showcases knowledge of Latin, classical literature, and the Bible along with rhetorical and poetic skills.

In 1587 Lanyer’s mother passed away and 18 year old Lanyer found herself immersed in court life. There, she attracted the attention of Henry Carey, Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin. The affair that bloomed from this relationship lasted until 1592, when Lanyer was found with child and married a musician (like her father) named Alfonso Lanyer. The baby was a boy which they named Henry. When Aemilia and Alfonso decided to have their own children, they ran into difficulties as Lanyer had several miscarriages.

It was these miscarriages which prompted Lanyer to visit Simon Forman, a popular astrologer, in 1597. Forman kept detailed diaries of his clients and although his handwriting was messy, these diaries give readers a new look on Lanyer and her life. Not only was she worried about miscarriages but also money troubles. When she was at court and involved with her lover Carey, Lanyer had access to large amounts of money and missed this in her marriage. She hoped Alfonso would be knighted which would make her a lady and provide more money. As he did with his other clients, Forman attempted to seduce her: he came to her house when Alfonso was at sea and tried to have a liaison with her. Lanyer refused and some critics believed it was Forman’s attempt that prompted Lanyer to write about men’s untrustworthiness in her poems.

Alfonso died in 1613 and left Lanyer with financial woes. These difficulties would stay with Lanyer for the rest of her life. She tried various ventures to earn money such as founding a school in St. Giles in the Field from 1617-1619. Unfortunately, the school was unsuccessful. Not much about her life is known after that. Lanyer’s final record was her death on April 3, 1645; she was seventy-six years old.

Reviews

[james · Rating 3 out of 5]

Over half of the bound sheets for the original printed editions of Salve Deus were taken up by prefatory and dedicatory material –– over 500% more dedications than the average published poetry put out by her male competitors in the 1590-1620 literary market. The dedications were written to Queen Anne of Denmark, her daughter princess Elizabeth, Mary Sidney Herbert and a host of other aristocratic women known to be patrons of the arts. Big hitters. Lanyer wasn't fucking around. The daughter of a court musician, and finding herself in an increasingly precarious financial situation, her goal was simple: patronage. Her publisher knew this, and the prospect of raking in big sums was what made investing in those extra sheets worth it.

The Protofeminist reading of Salve Deus is plain. Eve's apology, Christ's Passion as an analogy for the subjugation of women, the opportunities for seeing this as an early work of feminist literature are manifold. But what's more interesting is the intersectionality between gender and class: protofeminism as a literary device –– a hook –– employed by a working class woman to titillate and recruit an aristocratic female readership. Lanyer's prefaces 'To the Vertuous Reader' and 'To All Vertuous Ladies in Generall' imbue the poem with a moral valuation: either a text reserved exclusively for the 'Vertuous', or an offering of indoctrination /into/ virtue. The reading of Salve Deus is marketed as a moral obligation. How could any self-respecting and progressive lady of the gentry or monarchy refuse such an important work of feminist solidarity?

Salve Deus isn't an act of scholarship; it's an act of survival.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 1611, and in writing about the betrayal of Christ and the flight of the disciples –

For they were of earth, and he came from above,
Which made them apt to flie, and fit to fall:
Though they do protest they never will forsake him,
They do like men, when dangers overtake them.

– and no man would ever have written that. And it’s oddly glorious and eye-opening that a woman did. (And also leaves you wondering if Milton read this and borrowed “Which made them apt to flie, and fit to fall” into “Sufficient to have stood, but free to fall.” And then you realize that since Lanyer lived until 1645, she might have actually met Milton, as well as Shakespeare. And then your brain starts doing a little happy dance at the wonder and possible interconnectedness of all things.)

[Hannah Sames · Rating 4 out of 5]

women!!!!!!

[Porter Sprigg · Rating 2 out of 5]

It didn’t really draw me in whatsoever. She tells the passion narrative through long poetry which is an interesting idea but gets boring fast.

[Meredith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The oscillation between praise of women to descriptions of Christ is so intriguing, especially with the "Bride of Christ" imagery.

[Shelby Rolen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know everything I just read, but I know I read it.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-edited critical edition of Lanyer's volume Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Woods gives excellent critical and textual introductions, and has edited the text well with helpful notes for students. The Salve Deus itself is a chaotic volume speaking through multiple voices and moods, and the dedicatory letters which preface it are as much a part of the text as the poetry itself.

Lanyer tends to be read as a straightforwardly proto-feminist poet particularly in her defence of Eve, but recent scholarship has exposed some of the slippages which seep through (her 'To The Vertuous Reader' letter with its intimations of female rivalry, for example), and the extent to which she's soliciting patronage rather than (or as well as?) creating space for herself as a female poet.

This isn't a cheap volume so casual readers wanting to try Lanyer might be better off with a popular volume such as Renaissance Women Poets: Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer which makes some cuts but still offers a full selection from Salve Deus.

[Kayla Randolph · Rating 3 out of 5]

But surely Adam cannot be excus'd,
Her fault, though great, yet he was most too blame;
What Weaknesse offred Strength might haue refus'd,
Being Lord of all the greater was his shame:
Although the Serpents craft had her abus'd,
Gods holy word ought all his actions frame:
For he was Lord and King of al the earth,
Before poore Eue had either life or breath.

YOU TELL ‘EM, AEMILIA!!

[Niccy]

sometimes you want to read something and you look forward to reading it and then you're reading it and you're not really getting anything out of it and that's disappointing because you wanted to like it and then the book's finished and you haven't really gained much from it and that's been happening a lot for me recently, and not just with the books i read.

[Yoohan]

Also read this for English class. No rating.

[Maria Papantuono · Rating 3 out of 5]

the part about Adam and Eve was epic, rest very meh

[izaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25/5
tbh, Aemilia slayed, devoured, and left no crumbs. Go, women!

[Kira☀️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

so very evermore by taylor swift

[Elsie Phelps · Rating 4 out of 5]

protofeminist defiance, sign me up !

[Amaranta · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow i cannot believe that this book does not have 5.0 stars, i think she writes so much better than her contemporary male writers but because it is so recent that we started studying her work, people keep idolizing just male writers

ok, so
Aemilia is considered the first english women poet, the first who published a substantial volume of poetry and the first who published country-house poems... and more. so she is amazing ok?
now,
she dedicated all of her poems to women. and i did not read all of them, but i will review the one i did, (in this book she writes more than poems btw)

TO THE DOUBTFUL READER
This is a very short note where Aemilia explains that the name of the book came in a dream several years before she actually thought about written. I found interesting the "it was in a dream" because there are many other women writers who wrote because they dreamt about it.

TO THE QUEEN'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY
This poem was addressed to Anne of Denmark
I really liked her criticism towards misoginy inside a poem dedicated to a woman. And i loved these lines:
"And if it do, why are poor women blamed
or by more faulty men so much defeamed"

"But as they are scholars and by art do write
so Nature yields my soul a sad delight"

TO THE VIRTUOS READER
Unlike to the last note, this one is for women! She says se writes for our own sex.
I like how women in this period justified the equiality of sexes (or the liberation of women) with religious arguments and they did it very well.

EVE'S APOLOGY IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN
I think Aemilia is a genious. I thought it is a beautiful experience to read the poem itself (i mean in a lyrically? way), but it is sooo interesting to pay attention to the criticism in there. Basically, Aemilia is saying that if Adan was first and "better?" than Eve, why is he not recieving all the blame? "her sin was small to what do you commit". She writes this to "Pilate" as an apostrophe so she sees him and God as "men", and Pilate's wife and Eve as womankind.

THE DESCRIPTION OF COOKHAM
This was the first country-house poem published and as the Norton says "it celebrates in elegiac mode the crown estate occasionally occupied by the countess of cumberland- portraying it as an Edenic Paradise of women, now lost
i really hate that academics keep saying that even though this poem was first published, because it was not "first written", it is not the one who inaugurated the genre (country-house) but it was Jonson's instead.
no, for me it was the amazing Aemilia, let's credit her.

[Leslie Wexler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm still hung up on Donne and it is truly RUINING all subsequently read poets. Aemilia Lanyer is probably, more than likely even a great read that gives you some intersections between culture and gender in 1611, and lets you in on the female patronage model and how its dedicatory arts or encomia (if we want to look at it that way) complicate any kind of proto-feminist rhetoric. The lurking question being, did the patron have more than a gendered lexicon of power in rhetoric? Were they actually respected empowered women? And if these were limited (excepting the queen) in their expression of power and femininity, then what could they offer a poetess of lower station? Perhaps, in spite of the extensive bid for patronage, what is more important to focus on is her cultural positionality - Lanyer is a poetess for hire, and in that economic reconfiguration in a different class level of society the potential for the ontological position of the emergent feminist may be borne after her.

[Hannah Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Then let us have our Libertie again [...] If one weake woman simply did offend/ This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end."

Emilia Lanyer, writing 400 years ago, and raging against misogyny.
One of the first ever female poets in English, her poetry is sharp, beautiful, funny, angry, devotional, and genuinely moving. Her place in the slowly-diversifying canon and the constant attempts to undermine her by linking her to Shakespeare are only the beginnings of recognising this absolute force of literature. She is bloody wonderful and deserves to be appreciated in her own right.

"I do but set a candle in the sunne," she writes. Yes, and it's still burning.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a must-read for Early Modern literature enthusiasts. Lanyer the author is very much a product of her time. She flatters her patrons and *everything* she wants to call good is "fair." It's hard to imagine a poet today rewriting a biblical story in epic poetry form. But Lanyer also stands out from her time because she is one of very few women writers of the time. Her poems reflect her concerns as a woman. Her patrons are all women and she praises them for the way they act out their femininity.

[mimo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Religion has never been my thing, but I can appreciate the way that religious discourses provide this rich text on which writers draw. Lanyer gives some really powerful passages here, reflecting not only how she locates women at the centre of her worldview, but also a woman's perspective on the relationship between God and humankind. Quite the achievement.

[ava]

no rating

content warnings
- none that I noticed

review
I'm going to be honest, I am unsure if I understood this whole thing. But I will say this: a woman in 1611 wrote an 1840 lines long poem about why women should not be treated like shit because of the bible. That's definitely something.

[Danela · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best poem in all the world. I like how she defends all women from Adam's sin. I used to like old English poems but Eve's Apology is the best of all. I recommended this book to all the person who agrees that Eve was not guilty about the sin.

[Tary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting from an historical perspective, but otherwise just boring. I found it disingenuous that her tributes to court ladies glorified their chastity while she, now generally accepted as the dark lady of Shakespeare's sonnets, lived a life that was anything but chaste.

[BinchReading · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women

[caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

the complete ferocity that emanates from lanyer's writing is incredible WOW i love women

[Molly Cooper Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Not Eve, whose fault was only too much love.”

“Yet men will boast of knowledge, which he took / From Eve’s fair hand, as from a learned book.”

“When I am dead thy name in this may live.”

[Nicholas Zacharewicz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find the title of this book pretty misleading. After all, the bulk of the collection is split between personalized dedications that Lanyer sent out with her big poem about Christ’s Passion and the “Passion” poem itself. None of the poetry is bad, though the repetitive sonnet stanza structure of the Passion did more to lull me into floating through it rather than paying too much attention. Except for when there were extensive passages on the women in the orbit of the story. Like Pilate’s wife’s extended discussion of her dream and the blame her husband will take on if he doesn’t let Jesus go. Even Lanyer’s look at Mary and her comparing her own patroness to the most important woman in Christianity pulled me out of the droning monotony the rest of the poem dropped me into.

Surprising given its much more mundane topic, I enjoyed the “Description of Cookeham” much more. This, the other long poem in the collection, captures the feel of leaving a beloved place behind. That she kept this piece’s couplet structure lively where her stanzas in “Salve Deus” yawn on impressed me greatly.

In the end, I can’t help but think that Lanyer was writing at an inopportune time. Not that her subject matter would have turned off an Elizabethan audience. Rather, her focus on the beauty of god being man and the two communing and on the humanity inherent in those good followers of Christ that came after is the very essence of the gentler sort of explicitly Christian media of today.

That is undoubtedly why I connected more to her “Description of Cookeham.” It was a more unique piece that stood out to me thanks to its unexpected ordinariness.

And those are the two major flavours of this old album of poetry: 16th century piety with a 16th century edge, and beautifully written ordinariness. They are fine flavours, just not very varied.

[Hanna Brisbois · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m here after reading By Any Other Name and Hamnet, in which I became convinced that Shakespeare acted as more of an early editor and publisher than he did as a writer in his own right. Do I believe Aemilia is the true author of Shakespeares work? No, but I do think they knew each other and maybe even worked together. Think of plays and movies today. Are they usually written by only one person? No.

Too much of Aemilia’s own life is reflected in Shakespeare’s work to be coincidence. At a bare minimum, she told him of her life and he wrote about it. But I don’t think we are looking at the bare minimum. I think Shakespeare had help and I think Aemilia was one of those helpers.

Now, as for this text, I absolutely love the feminist critique of the Bible. My copy was actually previously owned and annotated by a man, and I could see that he missed much of the imagery, as it relates to women. He was confused at times by the suffering of women. He also took much of the work far too literally. I feel as though I deeply understood the message Aemilia was trying to convey. Maybe this is a work that only another woman can fully comprehend. That’s probably why she only dedicated it to other women. You would think, as an atheist, that I would have no interest in a book of poems about Jesus Christ. I think this only helped me to further examine the deeper message of the text.

As a feminist, it’s amazing to see such work from a woman of that time. And not just because it’s a published woman in the 1600s, but also because it’s a critique on the tyranny of men over women in the 1600s. I just know she sent this to those women as a kind of secret subliminal messaging and that’s what I love the most about it.

[Kristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four stars for the poetry, 1.5 for the essay by Rowse.

The poetry itself was sometimes radical and repetitive, with both simple and complex imagery, stunningly beautiful in places, harsh and bitter in others. The wealth of dedications is rather off putting and I came to think of it as a reminder to misogynist male readers that there are many many virtuous women who are far better than them. Eve's Apology is a fascinating approach to original sin and the image of the Risen Christ as a masculine snow white beauty was unexpectedly sexualized, fitting well with repeatedly images of him as the Bridegroom. (Apparently the H in Jesus H Christ stands for hottie!).

While pleased that Rowse provides biographical
Information (not without many layers of interpretation and assumption) and got this edition published, he's firmly mired in the first half of the 20th century as far as criticism is concerned, despite the publication date of 1979. Looking forward to reading scholarship that focuses on Lanier's work and not Rowse's desire to cast her as the object of Shakespeare's love and loathing in the Dark Lady sonnets.

[Liz Busby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this as part of my class on Ovid's influence in early modern texts. Poetry is not typically my genre, especially straight devotional poetry, but Lanyer makes some really interesting moves in a feminist religious direction that I found interesting. Her goal is ostensibly to portray the story of the passion, but she keeps making detours to talk about important women in scripture. Her apology for Eve argues against blaming her for the fall. The annunciation gets incorporated right before the crucifixion, bookending Christ's life with his mother's willingness to bare a similar burden. There are also discussions of Esther, the queen of Sheba, and several female characters from the apocrypha, and an extended allegory about the church as the bride of Christ and conversion as a sort of romance. Overall, I was interested by the effect and am considering writing my seminar paper on this one.

[Katlev · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Defense of Eve and The Description of Cookham are worth reading, the others, not so much