Abstract
By presenting the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as ‘the first fruits of a womans wit’ Aemilia Lanyer foregrounds, and trades on, the novelty of female authorship in the English literary tradition. Published almost forty years later, Anne Bradstreet’s 1650 volume of poetry, The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America, utilizes a similar strategy. It does so with what initially seems — given the example of Lanyer’s earlier sophisticated deployment of this concept — a perhaps surprising naivety.1 The single-author volumes of poetry by Aemilia Lanyer (1611) and Anne Bradstreet (1650) provide us with two polarized approaches to the marketing of women’s poetry, and to the cultural discourse surrounding women’s printed publication in the early modern period. While Lanyer manipulates the gendered discourses of modesty to multifarious ends in the Salve Deus, she unapologetically claims ownership of, and responsibility for, her text. In contrast, Bradstreet’s volume of poetry is notoriously held to have been published without her permission when, in 1649, her brother-in-law John Woodbridge took a manuscript copy of her poems to London and printed them at his own expense.
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Notes
Margaret Ezell, ‘Literary Pirates and Reluctant Authors: Some Peculiar Institutions of Authorship’ in her Social Authorship and the Advent of Print ( Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 ), 45–60.
See Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship, 48–9. In Anne Bradstreet Revisited (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), Rosamund Rosenmeier characterizes this community as ‘not simply family and close friends–indispensable to life in a small community; they were also a significant audience for poetry. They composed an important part of the intellectual group that nurtured Bradstreet’s talents’ (131).
Elizabeth Wade White, Anne Bradstreet: ‘The Tenth Muse’ ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1971 ), 256.
Adelaide P. Amore, A Woman’s Inner World: Selected Prose and Poetry of Anne Bradstreet (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982), xxv–xxvi.
See Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Elaine V. Beilin ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 );
Katherine Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner, in The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Part 1, Printed Writings, 1500–1640. Volume 3: Katherine Parr, ed. Janel Mueller ( Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996 );
Katherine Philips, Poems (London: Printed by J.G. for Rich. Marriott, 1664)
Katherine Philips, Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda; to which is added Monsieur Corneille’s Pompey & Horace, tragedies; with several other translations out of French ( London: Printed by J.M. for H. Herringman, 1667 ).
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, ‘Fool,’ said my muse to me; ‘look in thy heart, and write.’ Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, I, in Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 ), 153.
Aemilia Lanyer, dedicatory poem to Queen Anne in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 ).
See James Fitzmaurice, Josephine A. Roberts, Carol L. Brash, Eugene R. Cunnar, and Nancy A. Gutierrez, eds, Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-Century England ( Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 ), 177–80.
Adrienne Rich, ‘Foreword: Anne Bradstreet and her Poetry,’ in Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), xii. All further references to this essay will be cited by page number in the body of the chapter.
Kenneth A. Requa sums up this position: ‘The public voice is imitative, the private voice is original.’ ‘Anne Bradstreet’s Poetic Voices,’ in Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet, eds Pattie Cowell and Ann Stanford (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983), 4. For elaborations of this argument
see Josephine Piercy, ed., Anne Bradstreet ( New York: Twayne, 1965 )
Agneiszka Salka, ‘Puritan Poetry: Its Public and Private Strain,’ Early American Literature 14 (1984): 107–20
Patricia Caldwell, ‘Why Our First Poet Was a Woman,’ Prospects 13 (1988): 1–35
Wendy Martin, An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984 )
Bethany Reid, ‘“Unfit for Light”: Anne Bradstreet’s Monstrous Birth,’ New England Quarterly 71.4 (1998): 517–42
Ivy Schweitzer, ‘Anne Bradstreet Wrestles with the Renaissance,’ Early American Literature 23 (1988): 291–312. For recent scholarship which starts to challenge these simplistic divisions
see Nancy E. Wright, ‘Epitaphic Conventions and the Reception of Anne Bradstreet’s Public Voice,’ Early American Literature 31. 3 (1996): 243–63
and Jane D. Eberwein, ‘Civil War and Bradstreet’s “Monarchies,”’ Early American Literature 26. 2 (1991): 119–44.
Jennifer R. Waller, ‘“My Hand a Needle Batter Fits:” Anne Bradstreet and Women Poets of the Renaissance,’ Dalhousie Review 54 (1974) 444–5. Subsequent references to this essay will be cited by page number in the body of the chapter.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own ( New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981 ).
Margaret J.M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 ).
Emily Stipes Watts, The Poetry of American Women from 1632–1945 ( Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977 ), 10.
Dianne Purkiss, ‘Introduction,’ Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), xi.
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© 2012 Patricia Pender
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Pender, P. (2012). ‘To be a foole in print’: Anne Bradstreet and the Romance of ‘Pirated’ Publication. 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_7
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