Abstract
Aemilia Lanyer employs a vast array of modesty tropes in the prefatory apparatus to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ostensibly to excuse her presumption in writing, but effectively to impress the reader of her 1611 book with the scale of the apparently insurmountable task she has set herself. At the same time that she draws attention to the formidable proportions of her poetic project, Lanyer also implicitly underscores the stakes and the status of the enterprise she has undertaken. Focusing on the dedicatory poems to the Salve Deus, this chapter explores the ‘inexpressibility’ topoi Lanyer employs to impress the reader with the scope of her epidiectic endeavor. I suggest that a renewed, rhetorical analysis of Lanyer’s modesty tropes helps draw attention to the dramatic, conflicted, and phantasmatic nature of the relationships she stages with literary history, with would- be female patrons, and with Christ, the subject of her title poem. Ongoing critical responses to the Salve Deus have focused on the community of ‘good women’ Lanyer celebrates throughout the volume and that she is thought to have created in her dedications to powerful aristocratic women. These debates raise important methodological questions about the types of relationship that can be constructed and construed from literary labor and evidence.
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Notes
See Elaine V. Beilin, ‘The Feminization of Praise: Aemilia Lanyer,’ in her Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987 )
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘Of God and Good Women: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer,’ in Silent But For the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay ( Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985 ), 203–24
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘The Lady of the Country House Poem,’ in The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops, Gordon J. Schochet, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Elisabeth Blair MacDougall ( Hanover and London: National Gallery of Art, 1989 ), 261–75
and Janel Mueller, ‘The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’ in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, eds Lynn Keller and Christianne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993 ).
Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve; Barbara Lewalski, ‘Of God and Good Women: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer’ and ‘Rewriting Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer,’ in Patronage and Literature in England 1558–1658, ed. Andrew Gurr, The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 87–106
Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Ann Baines Coiro, ‘Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer,’ Criticism 35 (1993): 357–76
Lisa Schnell, ‘“So Great a Difference Is There in Degree”: Aemilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism,’ Modern Language Quarterly 57 (1996): 23–35
Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Patronage and Class in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’ in Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, eds Mary E. Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Love, and Karen Nelson ( Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000 ), 38–57.
Marshall Grossman, ‘Introduction,’ in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 1. On the copy prepared for presentation to Prince Henry, see Leeds Barroll’s essay ‘Looking for Patrons,’ from the same anthology.
Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 ), 94.
Micheline White, ‘Introduction,’ Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700: Volume 3, ed. Micheline White (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), xxix.
Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples ( Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997 ), 5.
Judith Sherer Herz, ‘Aemilia Lanyer and the Pathos of Literary History,’ in Representing Women in Renaissance England, eds Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth ( Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997 ), 121–35.
A.C. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976 ), 5–6.
Kate Lilley, ‘“Imaginarie in Manner: Reall in Matter”: Rachel Speght’s Dreame and the Female Scholar-poet,’ in Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night, eds Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan, and S.J. Wiseman (New York: Michelle O’Callaghan, and S.J. 2008 ), 97–108, 97.
Debra K. Rienstra, ‘Dreaming Authorship: Aemilia Lanyer and the Countess of Pembroke,’ in Discovering and Recovering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, eds Eugene Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001 ), 6.
Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art ( London: Scribner, 1953 ), 413.
Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999 ), 23–4.
Frederick Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967 ), 4–5.
Steven Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 ), 137.
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© 2012 Patricia Pender
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Pender, P. (2012). ‘This triall of my slender skill’: Inexpressibility and Interpretative Community in Aemilia Lanyer’s Encomia. In: Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008015_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008015_6
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