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Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England,
1550-1700: Volume 3
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women
Writers
in England, 1550-1700
Series Editor: Mary Ellen Lamb
The opportunities offered by the explosion
of
knowledge about early modern women writers
in
the past two decades also pose a sometimes formidable challenge. For some sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century English women
writers-Mary
Sidney, Mary Wroth, Aemeila Lanyer,
Margaret Cavendish, Anne Clifford, and Elizabeth
Cary-the
critical literature has already
become voluminous. For others, such as Anne Lock and Lucy Hutchinson, recent editions
of
exceptional work provide good reason to foreground them as likely figures soon to assume
prominence
in
the field.
Drawing together essays and articles from a disparate group
of
scholarly journals and collective
volumes, some now difficult to obtain, this series
of
seven volumes offers a selection from
the best work
in
this field. Presented
in
a compact, easy-to-access format, this series will be
especially useful for scholars new to the area as well as for experienced scholars who may have
overlooked an important essay published
in
a journal with limited circulation.
Each
of
the seven volumes listed below has been edited by a recognized authority
in
the area.
Volume editors provide a substantial introduction surveying the current state
ofthe
field; a
brief
biographical account
ofthe
life
of
each writer covered
in
the volume; and a select bibliography
for additional reading. In order to provide the most coverage without losing depth, some volumes
cover multiple early modern authors. Every volume is published
in
hardcover and printed on
acid-free paper suitable for library collections.
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women
Writers
in England, 1550-1700: Volume 1
Early
Tudor Women
Writers
Elaine
V.
Beilin
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women
Writers
in England, 1550-1700: Volume 2
Mary
Sidney, Countess
of
Pembroke
Margaret P Hannay
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women
Writers
in England, 1550-1700: Volume 3
Anne Lock, Isabella
Whitney
and Aemilia
Lanyer
Micheline White
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women
Writers
in England, 1550-1700: Volume 4
Mary
Wroth
Clare
R.
Kinney
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women
Writers
in England, 1550-1700: Volume 5
Anne
Clifford
and
Lucy Hutchinson
Mihoko Suzuki
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women
Writers
in England, 1550-1700: Volume 6
Elizabeth
Cary
Karen Raber
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women
Writers
in England, 1550-1700: Volume 7
Margaret
Cavendish
Sara
H.
Mendelson
Ashgate Critical Essays on
Women Writers in England,
1550-1700:
Volume 3
Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney
and Aernilia Lanyer
Edited by
Micheline White
Carleton University, Canada
First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Third Avenue, New York, NY l 00
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USA
Routledge is an imprint
of
the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright© 2009 Micheline White. For copyright
of
individual articles please refer to the
Acknowledgements.
All rights reserved. No part
of
this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Wherever possible, these reprints are made from a copy
of
the original printing, but these can themselves
be
of
very variable quality. Whilst the publisher has made every effort to ensure the quality
ofthe
reprint,
some variability may inevitably remain.
British Library Cataloguing
in
Publication Data
Ashgate critical essays on women writers in England,
1550-1700
Vol.
3:
Ann Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer
l.
English literature- Early modern, 1550-1700- History
and criticism
2.
English literature -women authors
I. White, Micheline
820.9'9287'0903
Library
of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer I edited
by
Micheline White
p.
em.-
(Ashgate critical essays on women writers in England, 1550-1700;
v.
3)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-7546-6086-6 (hard
cover:
alk. paper)
l.
English literature-Early modern, 1500-1700-
History and criticism.
2.
English literature-Women authors-History and criticism.
3.
Women and
literature-England-History-16th century. I. White, Micheline, 1967-
PRll3.E275
2009
820. 9'92870903l-dc22
2008029997
ISBN 9780754660866 (hbk)
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Series Preface xi
Introduction xiii
Bibliography xxxi
Chronology xxxvii
PARTI ANNE LOCK PRO WSE
1 ‘In a mirrour clere’: Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok’s Miserere mei Deus
Rosalind Smith 3
2 Anne Lock’s Meditation: Invention Versus Dilation and the Founding of Puritan
Poetics
Roland Greene 23
3 ‘An Englishe box’: Calvinism and Commodities in Anne Lok’s A Meditation o f a
Penitent Sinner
Christopher Warley 41
4 Curing the Soul: Anne Lock’s Authorial Medicine
Susan M. Felch 19
PART II ISABELLA WHITNEY
5 Oppositional Ideologies of Gender in Isabella Whitney’s Copy o f a Letter
Paul A. Marquis 113
6 Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay
Laurie Ellinghausen 125
7 The Maid’s Lawful Liberty: Service, the Household, and ‘Mother B ’ in Isabella
Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay
Patricia Phillippy 147
8 Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy
Wendy Wall 171
vi Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
PART III AEMILIA LANYER
La n y e r a n d E a r l y M o d e r n P a t r ia r c h y
9 ‘Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe’: Amelia Lanier’s 17th-Century Leminist Voice
Lynette McGrath
10 Aemilia Lanyer and the Invention of White Womanhood
Barbara Bowen
11 Woman’s Desire for Man in Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Theresa M. DiPasquale
12 ‘To Undoe the Booke’: Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer and the Subversion of
Pauline Authority
Esther Gilman Richey
13 A Woman with Saint Peter’s Keys?: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum (1611) and the Priestly Gifts of Women
Micheline White
14 The Gendering of Genre: Literary History and the Canon
Marshall Grossman
La n y e r a n d the P a t ro n a g e S y s t e m
15 Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia
Lanyer and Ben Jonson
Ann Baynes Coiro
16 Breaking ‘the rule of Cortezia’: Aemilia Lanyer’s Dedications to Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum
Lisa Schnell
17 An Arbor of One’s Own? Aemilia Lanyer and the Early Modem Garden
Christine Coch
18 To Play the Man: Aemilia Lanyer and the Acquisition of Patronage
Pamela Joseph Benson
La n y e r a n d P o e t i c A u t h o r i t y
19 Prophecy and Gendered Mourning in Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Elizabeth M.A. Hodgson
20 Remembering Orpheus in the Poems of Aemilia Lanyer
Kari Boyd McBride
201
219
249
273
297
317
333
353
379
401
423
439
Index 461
Acknowledgements
The chapters in this volume are taken from the sources listed below, for which the editor
and publishers wish to thank their authors, original publishers or other copyright holders for
permission to use their materials as follows:
Chapter 1: Rosalind Smith (2000), ‘“In a mirrour clere”: Protestantism and Politics in Anne
Lok’s Miserere mei D eus\ in Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (eds), 4This Double
Voice': Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, pp. 41-
60. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Chapter 2: Roland Greene (2000), 4Anne Lock’s Meditation: Invention Versus Dilation and
the Founding of Puritan Poetics’, in Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (eds), Form and
Reform in Renaissance England, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, pp. 153-70.
Copyright © 2000 by Associated University Presses, Inc.
C hapter 3: Christopher Warley (2001), 444An Englishe box”: Calvinism and Commodities
in Anne Lok’s A Meditation o f a Penitent Sinner’, Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry
Annual, 15, pp. 205^11. Copyright © 2001 by AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
C hapter 4: Susan M. Felch (1997), 'Curing the Soul: Anne Lock’s Authorial Medicine’,
Reformation, 2, pp. 7-38.
Chapter 5: Paul A. Marquis (1995), 'Oppositional Ideologies of Gender in IsabellaWhitney’s Copy
o f a Letter’, Modern Language Review, 90, pp. 314-24. Copyright © 1995 Paul A. Marquis.
C hapter 6: Laurie Ellinghausen (2005), 'Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella
Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay', Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 45, pp. 1-22. By
permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Chapter 7: Patricia Phillippy (1998), 'The Maid’s Lawful Liberty: Service, the Household,
and 'Mother B ’ in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay', Modern Philology, 95, pp. 439-62.
Copyright © 1998 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
C hapter 8: Wendy Wall (1991), 'Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy’, English Literary
History, 58, pp. 35-62. Copyright © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted
with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chapter 9: Lynette McGrath (1992), '"Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe”: Amelia Lanier’s
17th-Century Feminist Voice’, Women’s Studies, 20, pp. 331^18. Copyright © 1992 Gordon
and Breach, Science Publishers SA.
viii Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
Chapter 10: Barbara Bowen (1999),4 Aemilia Lanyer and the Invention of White Womanhood’,
in Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (eds), Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens, New
York: Oxford University Press, pp. 274-303. By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Chapter 11: Theresa M. DiPasquale (2000),4 Woman’s Desire for Man in Lanyer’s Salve Deus
Rex Judaeorum', Journal o f English and Germanic Philology, 99, pp. 356-78. Copyright ©
2000 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Chapter 12: Esther Gilman Richey (1997), 444To Undoe the Booke”: Cornelius Agrippa,
Aemilia Lanyer and the Subversion of Pauline Authority’, English Literary Renaissance, 27,
pp. 106-28.
Chapter 13: Micheline White (2003),4 A Woman with Saint Peter’s Keys?: Aemilia Lanyer’s
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and the Priestly Gifts of Women’, Criticism: A Quarterly
for Literature and the Arts, 45, pp. 323^11. Copyright © 2003 Wayne State University Press,
with the permission of Wayne State University Press.
Chapter 14: Marshall Grossman (1998), 4The Gendering of Genre: Literary History and the
Canon’, in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, Lexington, KY: University Press
of Kentucky, pp. 128^12. Copyright © 1998 by the University Press of Kentucky.
Chapter 15: Ann Baynes Coiro (1993),4 Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position
in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson’, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and
the Arts, 35, pp. 357-76. Copyright © 1993 Wayne State University Press, with the permission
of Wayne State University Press.
Chapter 16: Lisa Schnell (1997), 'Breaking “the rule of Cortezia”: Aemilia Lanyer’s
Dedications to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, Journal o f Medieval and Early Modern Studies,
27, pp. 77-101. Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by
permission of the publisher.
Chapter 17: Christine Coch (2004), 4An Arbor of One’s Own? Aemilia Lanyer and the Early
Modem Garden’, Renaissance and Reformation, 28, pp. 97-118.
Chapter 18: Pamela Joseph Benson (1999), 4To Play the Man: Aemilia Lanyer and the
Acquisition of Patronage’, in Peter C. Herman (ed.), Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early
Modern Studies; Essays in Honor o f James V. Mirollo, Newark, DE: University of Delaware
Press, pp. 243-64. Copyright © 1999 by Associated University Presses, Inc.
Chapter 19: Elizabeth M.A. Hodgson (2003), 'Prophecy and Gendered Mourning in Lanyer’s
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 43, pp. 101-16.
Chapter 20: Kari Boyd McBride (1998), 'Remembering Orpheus in the Poems of Aemilia
Lanyer’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900,38, pp. 87-108. Copyright © 2002 EBSCO
Publishing.
Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer ix
Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently
overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first
opportunity.
Series Preface
The opportunities offered by the explosion of knowledge about early modem women writers
in the past two decades also pose a sometimes formidable challenge. This series of seven
volumes presents a selection from the best work in this field for the use of scholars new to
the area as well as for experienced scholars who may have overlooked an important essay
published in a minor journal. The most difficult challenge is one of selection. As we decided
to attend to depth rather than breadth of coverage in a seven-volume set, inevitably some
early modem writers and some significant critical essays become excluded. It seems fitting
to provide some sense of our general principles of selection. For most of the selected early
modem writers - Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, Aemeila Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Anne
Clifford, and Elizabeth Cary - the critical literature has already become voluminous. For
others, such as Anne Lock and Lucy Hutchinson, recent editions of exceptional work have
moved us to foreground them as figures who we believe will soon assume prominence in the
field. In the coming years, additional writers whose names we do not even yet know will, we
are sure, become newly visible. It will be exciting to review, some decades in the future, how
the field will continue to shift in interesting and perhaps unpredictable ways.
The editors of individual volumes also confront a difficult selection process determined
by material factors as well as by quality of work. Essays are to be drawn primarily from
periodicals and from some anthologies, but not from single-authored books. Since all
essays are reproduced in their entirety, long essays dealing with several authors are usually
not included; and there is a tendency to choose shorter essays. Widely-reprinted essays are
discouraged. While editors may select frequently-cited work from prominent journals, the
series is somewhat biased in favor of essays published in some less well-known journals not
readily available in academic libraries. Given the financial restraints of publishing any series,
permission fees exceeding a certain limit have caused the exclusion of some articles. Perhaps
most frustrating to our editors, the sheer abundance of excellent work makes it impossible to
include all deserving articles. Some of these omissions are addressed in the introductions and
select bibliographies of individual volumes. While we whole-heartedly celebrate the essays
our editors have selected, we also note that these are not the only significant articles.
MARY ELLEN LAMB
Series Editor
Introduction
Anne Vaughan Lock Dering Prowse (c. 1533-d. 1590-1602)
Anne Lock was a fervent and energetic Calvinist whose spiritual commitments inspired a life
of religious activism promoting reformed doctrine, refuting Catholicism, and supporting the
puritan community. She was the author of two religious translations, two prose dedications,
and probably three poems, and although she has long been known to religious historians, it is
only recently that her works have been carefully examined on their own terms.1 Lock is now
best known for her first volume, a translation of Sermons o f John Calvin, upon the songe that
Ezechias made after he had bene sicke (1560) printed with a dedication to Katherine Bertie,
dowager Duchess of Suffolk, and A Meditation o f a Penitent Sinner, an unsigned sonnet
sequence often attributed to her. This volume was reprinted in 1569 and 1574, and an extant
polyphonic setting of the first psalm sonnet was commissioned by Christopher Goodman
sometime before 1571 (Felch, “Lock”). In 1572, more than a decade after the appearance
of her first volume, Lock contributed a short Latin poem to an Italian manuscript that was
probably designed to reconcile her husband, Edward Dering, to the queen (Schleiner). Many
years later, she undertook another translation that proved to be very popular: her version of
Jean Taffin’s O f the Markes o f the Children o f God (1590) appeared with a dedication to
Anne Russell Dudley, Countess of Warwick, and a short poem, “The necessitie and benefite
of affliction,” and it was reprinted at least seven times before 1634. Although Lock’s lengthy
religious translations address issues quite remote from the concerns of contemporary feminism
and literary theory, scholars are fruitfully investigating the rhetorical dexterity of her prose
and verse, her response to the challenges of female authorship, her innovative contributions
to the development of the sonnet, and her lifelong involvement in the earnest, heady, and
sometimes belligerent puritan movement.
Lock was bom into a merchant class family with reformist sympathies and appears to
have spent her adult life promoting reformist texts, causes, and ministers. Many historians
have commented on the letters John Knox wrote to her between 1556 and 1562 and on her
experiences as a Marian exile,2 and Patrick Collinson brought to light her marriage to the
controversial puritan minister Edward Dering, and her collaborations with John Field. The
recent recovery of additional information enhances our understanding of the intellectual
1 Susan Felch’s scholarly edition of all of Lock’s works, including the translated sermons,
appeared in 1999 with a lengthy introduction to Lock’s life and works. A second edition is currently in
preparation. White, “Women Writers”, offers new information about Lock’s life in Exeter. See White,
“Recent Studies,” for an annotated bibliography of other editions and excerpts printed between 1993 and
1999.
2 Morin-Parsons provides an annotated bibliography that includes the many religious historians
who refer to the relationship between Lock and Knox (Meditation). Felch examines Knox’s letters for
what they tell us about Lock and concludes that they illuminate her prominent and relatively unrestricted
role in the nonconformist community (“Deir Sister”). The letters are printed in Knox’s Collected Works.
xiv Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
milieu in which she wrote: we now know that Lock’s mother had court connections to Anne
Boleyn and Katherine Parr; that she collaborated with the Cooke sisters in the 1570s; that she
was praised as one of England’s “learned” women in 1576 and for her “rare learning” in 1602;
that she and Richard Prowse promoted puritan causes in Exeter; and that her intellectual life
and legacy involved not just Knox, Dering, Field, and her son, Henry, but female writers like
Dorcas Martin, Anne Dowriche, Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Lock Moyle
(her daughter), and Lady Margaret Cunningham (see Felch, “Lock,” Collected Works, “Noble
Gentlewomen”; Hannay, “‘Unlock my lipps’”; Schleiner; White, “Biographical Sketch,”
“Renaissance,” “Women Writers”; and Woods).
Literary scholars have naturally been most interested in A Meditation o f a Penitent Sinner:
Written in Maner o f a Paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme o f David, an innovative and anomalous
sequence of twenty-six sonnets appended to her translation of Sermons o f John Calvin, upon
the songe that Ezechias made. This work is singular in several regards: it is the first sonnet
sequence in English; it is the first Psalm versification to employ the sonnet form; it stands
in relative isolation between the sonnets of the 1540s and those of the 1590s; and it appears
in a volume produced by a woman from the merchant class. There is, however, a good deal
of uncertainty regarding the authorship of the sequence itself since it is preceded by a note
that reads: “I have added this meditation folowyng unto the ende of this boke, not as parcell
of maister Calvines worke, but for that it well agreeth with the same argument, and was
delivered me by my frend with whom I knew I might be so bolde to use and publishe it as it
pleased me” (Felch, Collected Works 62). It is unclear whether the note was written by Lock
or John Day (the printer) or whether the “frend” is one of Lock’s acquaintances, one of Day’s
acquaintances, or a cover for Lock herself. This literary mystery has not been solved, nor may
it ever be. While historians often assumed that the sonnets were written by Knox, literary
scholars began attributing the sonnets to Lock in the early 1990s, but without offering much in
the way of evidence (Greene, Post-Petrarchism; Roche; Spiller, Development). More recently,
Susan Felch has demonstrated that “substantive connections” between Lock’s dedication and
sonnets can be identified in terms of images and unusual lexical choices, and she argues that
although we cannot confirm that Lock is the author, it is “reasonable” to assign the sequence
to her (Collected Works liii, liv). Rosalind Smith is more circumspect about the attribution, but
she too observes that the dedication and the sonnets draw on similar Petrarchan language to
underscore the physicality of Hezekiah’s and David’s suffering and to admonish the queen.
Many of the scholars who approach the Meditation focus their attention on Lock’s response
to gendered notions of literary authority: indeed, the sequence upends many commonplaces
about women’s limited authorial agency and calls for explanatory contexts. Margaret Hannay,
for example, posits that early modem psalm discourse offered women a unique means of
asserting a public voice, and she argues that in paraphrasing Psalm 51, Anne Lock and Mary
Sidney Herbert were able to present their public participation in doctrinal and political
disputes as a duty rather than a breach of cultural norms (“‘So May I with the Psalmist Tmly
Say’”; “‘Unlock my lipps’”). Kel Morin-Parsons takes a different tack by exploring the
interplay between Protestant theology and gender norms in the five prefatory sonnets. These
sonnets, she argues, record the demolition of the body and the emergence of the voice in
ways that promulgate reformed theology, erase notions of bodily gendered superiority, and
create the “possibility of an eloquent Christian female voice” (279). She suggests further
that the struggle between the two voices represents the speaker’s struggle against despair
Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer
and, more subtly, against patriarchal structures, and she concludes that the surviving voice is
“representative of any Christian” preparing to ask for mercy (284). In Chapter 1 (this volume),
Rosalind Smith grapples at length with the implications of the disclaimer for considering the
gender of the text, arguing that those who either quickly accept or ignore the note overlook
the complex “textual practices” of mid-century manuscript and print culture (4). Although she
outlines similarities between the dedication and the sonnets, she insists that the disclaimer
should not erased and can in fact prompt us to read the text as “gendered” in ways beyond the
straightforward identification of Lock as the author of the sonnets. Lock’s edited volume, she
concludes, is gendered in the way it applies political pressure through female patronage and
in the way it reworks literary conventions to offer a “genderless” and “subjective experience
of sin” (15).
Scholars are also working to integrate the Meditation into the received histories of English
sonnets and psalm versifications, and recent studies enhance our understanding of Lock’s
response to specific literary precedents. Michael Spiller, for instance, identifies Lock’s
development of poetic techniques found in Wyatt and Surrey and provocatively suggests
that “generic innocence” rather than sophistication may account for some of the text’s most
innovative features (“Literary ‘first’” 50). Felch compares Lock’s marginal prose psalm text
with earlier translations of Psalm 51 and demonstrates that her rendition is a unique translation
from the Vulgate that is not particularly indebted to earlier English translations (“Vulgate”).
Lock’s place in the complicated development of English devotional poetry is also the subject of
several detailed studies. In Chapter 2, Roland Greene argues that the formal features of Lock’s
sequence complicate the received history of devotional poetics in several ways. He observes
that while Elizabethan poetics placed great value on “invention,” the Meditation “refuses
invention to a degree almost unprecedented at the time” as it expands “its model twelvefold
while struggling to say almost nothing new” (28). Connecting literary form and reformed
theology, he also observes that while the individual sonnets lack the “turn” and psychological
particularity found in their Petrarchan antecedents, the sequence as a whole represents a “single
turn to God that is their speaker’s sole constitutive experience” (36). Greene speculates that
Lock’s articulation of a poetics of “dilation,” rather than invention, illuminates the gendering
of poetic practice and argues that her work reverberates in the works of later puritans such as
John Milton and Edward Taylor. More recently, Kimberly Coles offers a very different reading
of Lock’s place in the development of sixteenth-century religious poetry. Coles argues that
while scholars correctly note the distinction between collective, ritual verse on the one hand,
and lyric, individualistic poetry on the other, they greatly underestimate the obstacles that
Calvinism posed for the development of imaginative, lyric treatments of scripture, and she
suggests that Lock’s lack of university education may have facilitated her original response
to these pressures. Lock, she posits, follows Surrey in pursuing the devotional potential of
the lyric sonnet but follows Calvin in her restrictive dilation of scripture; most importantly,
Lock deliberately constructs a “collaborative” rather than an individual poetic voice (132), a
response that addresses aesthetic anxieties and “allegorises the Presbyterian congregation”
(136). Lock’s aesthetic vision resonates in the years that follow as it is rejected by Thomas
Norton but is developed by her son, Henry Lock.
While many critics note Lock’s mercantile background, Christopher Warley offers the most
detailed analysis of the Meditation's engagement with class dynamics and changing modes
of social and religious authority. Warley also provides a detailed discussion of the sermons
xvi Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
on Hezekiah, sermons that are often overlooked in analyses of the sonnets. In Chapter 3,
Warley notes that Lock claims the sonnet for the urban, mercantile class and argues that
the sequence articulates tensions between “external” institutional authority and an “internal”
authority that emerged “‘in the perception of meaning as process’” (46). More specifically,
while Calvin’s treatment of writing and Lock’s use of the lyric “I” offer an understanding of
authority located in the individual interpretation of scripture and the circulation of texts (53),
the volume reveals that those transactions are made possible by external forms of authority
located in the monarch. The tension between these two modes of authority culminates in
the concluding sonnets as the lyric speaker resists the authority of the monarch found in the
narrative of the Psalm. Lock’s work, Warley concludes, is historically significant not only for
what it teaches us about female authorship but because it gives voice to an “emergent sense of
authority both enabled by and resistant to monarchical authority” (71).
Lock’s volume contains a second item of considerable interest to literary scholars, a dedication
to the prominent Marian exile and Protestant patron Katherine Bertie, dowager Duchess of
Suffolk. The dedication is signed “A.L.” and scholars concur that there is no real difficulty
in attributing it to Lock, particularly since the copy in the British Museum has an inscription
from 1559 with her name. The dedication is lengthy, and it differs from many sixteenth-
century dedications in that it offers didactic instruction rather than effusive flattery. Warley
and Smith treat the dedication as an important context for reading the sonnets, and Susanne
Woods argues that it displays Lock’s youthful disregard for social and gender hierarchies. The
most detailed examination of the dedication is provided by Felch who describes it as a “lovely
gem of mid-sixteenth-century devotional writing” (“Curing,” Chapter 4, this volume, 94).
As she demonstrates in Chapter 4, Lock’s piece reveals a confident author with an excellent
education and considerable literary skills, and it combines nonconformist language, advanced
medical terminology, and traditional prose and exegetical techniques. This mingling of old
and new, she argues, is not unusual for mid-century literary endeavors and reminds us that we
need not drive a “wedge between Calvinistic and traditional orthodoxy” (95).
Lock’s four-line Latin poem from 1572 was discovered by Louise Schleiner and was first
printed in 1994 with an English translation (40, note 11). A corrected transcription and new
translation are in Felch’s Collected Works. The poem is found in a beautiful Italian manuscript,
Giardino cosmografico coltivato, a compendium of scientific knowledge by Doctor Bartholo
Sylva of Turin, a recent Protestant convert (Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.5.37).
Lock’s poem is one of several prefatory poems praising Sylva, and it appears along with
poems by Edward Dering and the four Cooke sisters. Schleiner suggests that the manuscript,
which was dedicated to the earl of Leicester, was an attempt to repair the rift between the
queen and Dering by presenting him and his supporters as cultured, loyal subjects. Lock’s
contribution to this manuscript has not received extensive treatment, but her facility with
Latin poetry has been seen by some scholars to support the view that she was the author of the
Meditation (Felch, “Public Roles”; Spiller, “Literary ‘First’” 45). Lock apparently transmitted
her appreciation for Latin poetry to her daughter, Anne Moyle, who was praised in 1601 for
her “Greek wit” and “Latin song” (White, “Women Writers”).
Lock’s final known work is her 1590 translation of Jean Taffin’s O f the Markes o f the
Children o f God, a treatise on suffering originally penned by Taffin as a consolation to the
Calvinists of the Low Countries. This work has been less interesting to literary critics, and
while some scholars stress the continuity between this volume and her prior religio-political
Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer xvii
activism, others detect a more conservative acknowledgment of the literary and gender norms
she had previously challenged. Lock’s dedication to the Countess of Warwick, for example,
contains the often-cited passage about her “sex” and “poore basket of stones”: “Everie one
in his calling is bound to doo somewhat to the furtherance of the holie building; but because
great things by reason of my sex, I may not doo, and that which I may, I ought to doo, I have
according to my duetie, brought my poore basket of stones to the strengthning of the walles of
that Jerusalem, whereof (by grace) wee are all both Citizens and members” (Felch, Collected
Works 77). This marvelously modulated passage has yielded multiple readings: it has been
interpreted as an expression of “frustration at gender restrictions (Hannay, “‘Strengthning’”
72); an acknowledgement of her duty to work within existing hierarchies (Felch, Collected
Works lxiii; Woods 178); or a carefully phrased understatement designed to facilitate her
entry into religious debates (Coles 127; White, “Renaissance” 400). This passage was
apparently also striking to her contemporaries, for it is cited almost verbatim by the Scottish
gentlewoman Fady Margaret Cunningham in a 1607 letter to her husband (Felch, “Fock”).
Fock’s simple, ballad meter poem “The necessitie and benefite of affliction” has also elicited
different assessments: Felch and I note that it avoids formal complexity to foreground themes
germane to the puritan community, and Coles suggests that the common meter form reveals
an increased awareness of and deference to the concerns surrounding the religious lyric (141).
In a study of the dedication, translation, and poem, I demonstrate that Fock draws selectively
on Taffin’s discussion of “external” persecution and I examine the volume’s engagement in
the rhetorical struggle over the government’s suppression of puritanism. I also argue that the
volume’s thinly veiled political agenda challenges the view that translation was a safe, passive
activity thought to be suited to women (“Renaissance”). More recently, I observe that Fock’s
dedication and poem share formal and thematic elements with the works of Anne Dowriche,
and I suggest that the two women probably influenced each other directly since they shared
significant ideological, familial, and geographical ties (“Women Writers”).
Isabella Whitney (b. probably late 1540s or early 1550s-d. after 1624)
Isabella Whitney was the first woman to publish volumes of popular, secular verse in
England, and her self-professed economic need has led to her designation as England’s first
“professional” female writer. Whitney’s first volume, The Copy o f a Letter, Lately Written
in Meeter, by a Younge Gentilwoman, appeared around 1567 and was followed in 1573 by
A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posye? Scholars have proposed that Whitney was the author
of unsigned poems found in volumes from 1566?, 1578, and 1600 (Fehrenbach, “Isabella
Whitney (fl. 1565-75)”; Fyne, “Aeneas”; Martin). Her signed volumes include genres such
as the female lament, moral complaint, moral maxim, familiar verse epistle, and mock
testament, and they voice a decidedly feminist perspective on topics such as love, sexuality,
friendship, education, economic injustice, and urban experience. The few details we know
about Whitney’s life and social milieu are gleaned from several sources: her two published
volumes; legal and parish records from Cheshire; an emblem book published in 1586 by
her brother Geoffrey; and Geoffrey’s will of 1600 (Fehrenbach, “Isabella Whitney, Sir
3 See White for an annotated bibliography of editions and excerpts of Whitney printed between
1993 and 1999.
xviii Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
Hugh Plat”; Lukic). According to Averill Lukic, Whitney’s parents were from the younger
branch of a well-established Cheshire family and were tenants on an estate in Ryles Green
(404, 396). The fact that Isabella and Geoffrey wrote dedications to members of prominent
Cheshire families suggests that they may have been educated in their households (404). The
purportedly autobiographical content of Isabella’s second volume suggests that she had lost
her job serving a lady living near London and was somewhat estranged from her siblings, but
it is uncertain whether all these details should be taken as facts (Ellinghausen, Chapter 6, this
volume, 128). Lukic has recently discovered that Whitney gave birth to a daughter in Ryles
Green in 1576 and that she was still alive in 1624 (397, 406).
The Copy o f a Letter is an entertaining and feisty volume of ballad stanza verses in which
jilted female and male lovers vent about romantic betrayal and lambaste the opposite sex. It
contains two pieces penned by Whitney: “The Copy of a letter, lately written in meeter, by a
yonge Gentilwoman to her inconstant lover” and “The admonition by the Auctor, to all yong
Gentilwomen.” These are followed by two epistles written from a male perspective, one by
“W.G.” and one by “R.W.”, and critics have speculated that “W.G.” refers to William Gruffith
(Fehrenbach, “Isabella Whitney (fl. 1565-75)”; Martin). Whitney’s engagement with amatory
discourse so often eschewed by women has prompted investigations of her reworking of the
male/female debate, her engagement with print culture, and her treatment of marriage and sex
from a female perspective. Ann Rosalind Jones, for example, observes that while Whitney
capitalizes on the contemporary interest in Ovid’s Heroides, her female speaker rejects the
histrionic grief found in Ovid and turns the tables on her lover by assuming the role of a male
divine and dispensing marital advice (Jones, Currency; see also Krontiris). In Chapter 5, Paul
Marquis examines the volume’s indebtedness to Renaissance controversia and discusses all
four pieces in the volume. Marquis argues that The Copy o f a Letter forms a dialogic “diptych”
that juxtaposes two views of gender relations (113): while the female speakers criticize male
exploitation of women and advocate gender equality, the men reassert a hierarchal ideology
that demands subordination and sexual compliance. The greatest achievement of the volume,
he concludes, is that it subtly privileges the female voice even while it appears to offer an
unresolved debate. Elizabeth Heale briefly suggests that Whitney continues the tradition of
female-voiced defenses and responses that had flourished in early Tudor miscellanies but had
disappeared from mid-century miscellanies produced by aspiring men. Lynette McGrath, by
contrast, points to the ambiguities and “double-speak” in Whitney’s volume suggesting that
they reflect the “doubleness of early print culture” as well as her strategic self-representation
as a female poet who is “both abject and authoritative” (134-35). Ilona Bell takes a very
different approach by including Whitney in a study of real courtship practices, arguing that
her female speaker is distinctive because she assumes an active role in her courtship and
warns other women about male rhetoric, premarital sex, and secret marriage contracts.
Whitney’s second volume, A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posye (1573), is arguably
more complex and has attracted more critical attention. It contains a dedication to “George
Mainwaring, Esquier” from Cheshire; an epistle from the author to the reader; commendatory
verse by a friend, Thomas Birch; 101 Pseudo-Senecan verse adages on subjects such as
fortune, love, poverty, and friendship drawn from Hugh Plat’s The Flowers o f Philosophy
(1572); a collection of epistles exchanged between the author and her family and friends;
and the mock “Wyll and Testament” in which the destitute speaker bids farewell to London’s
neighborhoods. As Richard Panofsky notes, Whitney redirects Plat’s moral sentences from the
Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer xix
“academy” to the world of popular print (xiv), and she arranges them with other material so as
to create an innovative personal narrative about fortune and friendship (xii-xiii).
In^4 Sweet Nosegay, Whitney presents herself as an unmarried gentlewoman turned published
poet, a persona that has prompted extended discussion of her reworking of normative models of
female authorship and her relationship to the print market. Several studies focus on Whitney’s
engagement with humanist discourse, noting how she capitalizes on and transforms humanist
values in garnering authority for her unlikely poetic speaker. Elaine Beilin, for instance, notes
that while Whitney explicitly positions her work outside the domestic sphere advocated by
humanists, she authorizes her publicly-oriented volume by moving between a range of popular
humanist genres and authorial stances. Patricia Brace also observes that Whitney resists
humanist ideals and argues that she parlays social disenfranchisement into textual authority
by drawing on the humanist conception of “transformative textual labour” and displaying her
adherence to social order (99). Other scholars focus on Whitney’s relation to the competitive
world of printing and print culture: Jane Donawerth and Wendy Wall suggest that Whitney
offsets the anxieties of print publication by depicting her poems as wholesome gifts within a
gift-exchange system and by imitating a manuscript designed for circulation between family
members and friends (Wall, Chapter 8, this volume, 183). Laurie Ellinghausen and Jill Ingram,
by contrast, are struck by places where Whitney explicitly distances herself from coterie
circulation and literary patronage. In Chapter 6, Ellinghausen contends that Whitney actually
represents herself as one largely isolated from family and service, and she reads this persona
in relation to nascent concepts of professional authorship. Whitney, she elaborates, employs
the figure of the solitary author to explore the contradictory discourses that governed literary
labour in a pre-market economy and boldly imagines professional authorship long before the
copyright laws of the eighteenth century made it possible (see also Ingram and McGrath).
Several studies investigate Whitney’s decision to write from the unusual literary perspective
of a woman-in-service, but there is some debate about her class allegiance and ultimate goals.
Louise Schleiner, for example, views the volume as evidence that non-aristocratic gentlewomen
with literary aspirations were enabled by the “reading circles” formed in wealthy households
and argues that Whitney’s primary aim is to win back her post as a gentlewoman-in-waiting
(4). Jones and Patricia Phillippy, by contrast, read Whitney’s volume in relation to pamphlets
about lower-class female laborers. For Jones, Whitney’s text provides a rare instance of
a serving woman defining herself as a member of an economic group and speaking in its
interests, and she claims that Whitney offers oblique criticism of the terms of maidservants’
employment (“Maidservants”). In Chapter 7, Phillippy details the contradictory discourses
surrounding migrant female laborers and contends that although Whitney partially confirms
the views of conservative moralists, she also defends women’s right to physical, verbal, sexual,
and economic “liberties.” Importantly, Phillippy concludes that Whitney deploys the liminal
position of the maidservant to emblematize her own precarious position as a female poet.
Whitney’s most popular work, the “Wyll and Testament,” has been the focus of several
detailed studies: it has been discussed in relation to testamentary ballads (Ellinghausen, Chapter
6, this volume), mother’s legacies (Wall, Chapter 8, this volume), and the “mock-testament”
(Ingram), and its tone has been described as playful, ironic, and angry. In an important early
study reprinted here as Chapter 8, Wall outlines the paradoxical forms of authority inherent in
the tradition of the mother’s literary legacy and argues that Whitney fuses the authority of that
genre with the rhetoric of the complaint and the logic of Petrarchism. Whitney offers social
Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
criticism as she employs the blazon to describe the city of London as the cruel but desirable
Other, yet in presenting the city as her possession she also exposes the disturbing connection
between description and objectification. Jones adds to Wall’s analysis by noting that Whitney
combines the form of the legal will with utopian urban fantasy and offers a vision of a more
equitable economic system for exchanging and circulating goods (“Apostrophes”). Most
recently, Ingram has argued that Whitney’s poem properly belongs to the “mock-testament”
genre, a satiric genre used to address economic woes and one that Whitney adapts to articulate
her conflicted attitude towards the debt and credit networks underpinning London’s economy.
She further suggests that Whitney seizes on the mock-testator’s “outsider” status as a means
of representing female literary ambition and reminds us that Whitney’s volume must be
recognized as an actual commodity in the credit economy she both criticizes and desires
access to.
In addition to the material in these two volumes, scholars have examined other pieces
that Whitney may have written. Robert Fehrenbach briefly suggests that she may have been
the author of three anonymous poems found in Thomas Proctor’s A Gorgeous Gallery o f
Gallant Inventions (1578) and Clement Robinson’s A Handful o f Pleasant Delights (1566?;
1584) (“Isabella Whitney (fl. 1565-75)”), and Randall Martin provides a detailed discussion
of “The Lamentation of a gentlewoman upon the death of her late-Deceased Friend, William
Gruffith, Gentleman,” one of the pieces from A Gorgeous Gallery. In addition to providing a
transcription of the poem with modem punctuation, Martin lays out the textual evidence that
supports Whitney’s authorship, and he discusses the ways in which the speaker overcomes
the social pressures that are hostile to her grief and her poetic aspirations. More recently,
Raphael Lyne has observed that Ovidius Naso His Remedie o f Love (1600) by “F.L.” contains
a translation of Ovid’s “Dido to Aeneas” (Heroides VII) followed by an original reply poem,
“Aeneas to Dido,” and he argues that Whitney is most likely the unnamed “Sapho” who penned
them (“Aeneas and Isabella”; “Writing Back”). Lyne posits that the Renaissance practice of
writing responses and counter-responses to classical texts is a key context for understanding
Whitney’s work: in the 1600 volume, the practice provides her with an opportunity to
experiment with male ventriloquism, and in A Sweet Nosegay it provides a framework within
which she can exchange poems with male friends (“Writing Back”).
Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645)
Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) commands attention as one of the most
fascinating volumes of poetry produced in Jacobean England.4 Although varied and wide-
ranging, its intellectual achievements are considerable: the dedications grapple with the
conventions of patronage and the disparities caused by economic and gender hierarchies; the
main poem, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” is an unorthodox versification of the Passion that
demands female “Libertie” (Woods, Poems 825); and the concluding poem, “The Description
4 Lanyer’s poems were made widely available in a lightly annotated and reliable volume edited by
Susanne Woods and published by Oxford University Press in 1993. An extensive bibliography of other
editions and of scholarly criticism can be found at the website maintained by Kari Boyd McBride: http://
www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/mcbride/lanyer/lanyer.htm. There is also an annotated bibliography compiled by
Karen Nelson in Grossman, Aemilia Lanyer.
Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer xxi
of Cooke-ham,” is one of the earliest (if not the earliest) country-house poems and focuses
exclusively on women’s experience. It is a testament to the complexity of Lanyer’s vision
that scholars of the last twenty years have worked with the volume to pursue a broad range
of secular, religious, historical, and theoretical topics including conceptions of gender, class,
and racial hierarchies; patronage discourse; textual authority; the confluence of theological
and sociopolitical concerns; the erotic dimension of spiritual and social relationships; and
Lanyer’s response to her literary predecessors, particularly Mary Sidney Herbert.
Critical responses to Lanyer’s volume are often inflected by details about her life, social
milieu, and cultural heritage, although the interpretation of some of this evidence is contested.
Aemilia was bom in 1569 to Margaret Johnson (d. 1587), an Englishwoman, and Baptist
Bassano (d. 1576), a court musician of Italian and possibly Jewish origins.5 According to
Lanyer, she was the mistress of Henry Cary, Lord Hunsdon for several years and enjoyed the
pleasures and privileges associated with court life. In 1592, after becoming pregnant with
Hunsdon’s child, she was married to Alfonso Lanyer, her cousin and an ambitious musician
and adventurer of Huguenot descent.6 In May 1597 she began consulting the astrologer
Simon Forman, and his diaries and casebooks reveal that she desperately longed to become a
“Lady” and enjoy the social and financial privileges that accompanied titles. The diaries also
reveal that Forman was sexually attracted to her, that they shared some degree of physical
intimacy, and that he became angry when she refused to have sexual intercourse with him.
Scholars have offered very different interpretations of this physical relationship, the light it
might shed on Fanyer’s character, and its relation to her literary treatment of female sexuality
(see DiPasquale, Chapter 11, this volume; Goldberg; Rowse; and Woods, Lanyer). Fanyer’s
poems claim that she spent time in the service of Fady Susan Wingfield, Countess Dowager of
Kent, and Fady Margaret Clifford, the Countess Dowager of Cumberland, and scholars have
speculated about the dating, location, and nature of this service (Barroll; Benson, “To Play
the Man,” Chapter 18, this volume). Fanyer’s references to classical myths, religious figures,
and contemporary literature reveal that she was well read, and her poems display a familiarity
with a considerable range of genres and poetic techniques. Susanne Woods notes that she had
connections to Ben Jonson and Anne Fock, the latter being an older female writer who may
have served as a literary mentor (“Aemilia Fanyer”; “Anne Fock”).
While current scholarship on Fanyer encompasses a rich array of secular and religious
topics, there are several interpretive cruxes that have shaped the evolution of the field and
5 Lasocki and Woods, Lanyer, provide the most detailed accounts of Lanyer’s life and social
milieu. Benson, “To Play the Man” (Chapter 18, this volume) elaborates on Lanyer’s Italian background.
There is much discussion about Lanyer’s possible Jewish origins, but it is important to note that the
evidence supporting the view that Baptist Bassano was Jewish and that Aemilia Lanyer identified herself
as partly Jewish is suggestive rather than definitive. For summaries and assessments of the historical
evidence, see Lasocki 92-98; Woods, Lanyer 5-6; and Bowen (Chapter 10, this volume). Bowen, Coiro
(Chapter 15, this volume), Keohane, McBride, “Gender and Judaism”, and Mueller assess the possibility
that Lanyer’s poems were influenced by a Jewish heritage.
6 There has been some confusion about Alfonso’s religious background: although he has been
identified as a Catholic (Coiro, Chapter 15, this volume; Keohane), his father was almost certainly a
Huguenot (Woods, Lanyer 19; Lasocki 106). The key piece of evidence is found in a letter from 1561
stating that Nicholas Lanyer was content to serve the English queen so as to “live otherwise to the
contentation of his conscious than he can easily do” in France (Calendar 229).
xxii Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
continue to guide its development. Most crucially, there are differing views about Lanyer’s
primary objective and the way that objective shapes other aspects of the volume, views
reflected in the organization of the essays in this volume. It is now well known that Lanyer’s
volume was first appraised by an unlikely and rather uncongenial reader: A.L. Rowse, a
historian and Shakespeare biographer, believed that Lanyer was the tyrannical Dark Lady
of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and in a 1978 edition of the Salve, he noted Lanyer’s “rampant
feminism” with amusement and attributed the volume’s composition to her desire to exact
revenge on Shakespeare (20). Early feminist scholars such as Barbara Lewalski and Woods
rejected the connection to Shakespeare as mere conjecture, and began the process of defining
and contextualizing Lanyer’s spirited rejection of early modem gender norms. As the first
group of essays in this volume reveals, many scholars concur that Lanyer’s volume is driven
by a complex feminist agenda and that her attempt to redefine women’s social, sexual,
religious, and literary status provides the essential framework for analyzing the dedications,
her interpretation of scripture, and her reworking of literary genres. Since the early 1990s,
however, the view that Lanyer is focused primarily on rethinking gender relations has been
challenged by those who approach her volume as an ambitious patronage project. For the
scholars included in the second section of this volume, the Jacobean patronage system provides
the crucial matrix for interpreting Lanyer’s treatment of gender, epideictic conventions, and
religious tropes, and her complex response to patronage relations and social inequities is her
greatest achievement. Finally, as the third group of essays demonstrates, there are scholars
who view Fanyer’s authorial self-fashioning as the most notable aspect of the volume, one
that requires detailed consideration of her gender and class status as well as her response to
conceptions of textual authority, poetic inspiration, and literary tradition.
In addition, scholars offer very different assessments of Fanyer’s attitude towards the
religious content of her volume: while some view her religious views as sincere and integral
to her sociopolitical and literary agenda, others believe that she carefully deploys religious
discourse to disseminate radical social ideas. Fanyer’s engagement with religious debates
and traditions has also elicited very different responses, and although this topic requires
further investigation, it is becoming increasingly evident that Fanyer’s eclectic volume resists
confessional pigeon-holing and displays multiple influences: her social milieu included radical
Protestants, moderate Protestants, Italian Catholics, and Jews; her dedications are addressed
to Protestants and Catholics; and her poems manifest an intriguing commingling of elements
from Protestant, Catholic, Gnostic, and possibly Jewish traditions (see especially Kuchar;
McBride, “Gender and Judaism”; Roberts; Trill, “Feminism”; Woods, Lanyer).
Lanyer and Early Modern Patriarchy
Aemilia Fanyer is best known for her attack on early modem patriarchy, a critique
foregrounded in “Eves Apologie” in the “Salve Deus” poem (753-832) but evident in the
many passages where she chips away at the conceptual cornerstones underpinning the social,
sexual, literary, and economic oppression of women. While scholars have been particularly
drawn to topics such as Fanyer’s treatment of male/female relations, female desire, female
literacy, women’s religious roles, and women’s relationship to landed property, they offer
very different interpretations of Fanyer’s “feminism” and the specific sociopolitical changes
it envisions.
Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer xxiii
Lanyer’s volume has prompted many descriptions of the strategies she uses to attack
the traditional conception of a male/female hierarchy and to argue for women’s equality or
superiority to men. This goal is most obviously expressed in the prose dedication “To the
Vertuous reader” and “Eves Apologie,”7 passages often read as contributions to the pan-
European querelle des femmes. W. Gardner Campbell, Janel Mueller, Esther Richey, Wendy
Roberts, and Kari McBride and John Ulreich (“‘Eves Apologie’”) discuss the important texts
that may have influenced Lanyer, and virtually all scholarly studies include some assessment
of the cogency or inconsistencies of her arguments. These polemical assertions of women’s
right to be “free” from male “tyranny” (830) do not stand in isolation, but are buttressed,
extended, and developed in her innovative treatment of Christ’s Passion, of biblical women,
and of her dedicatees’ virtues. In Chapter 9, for example, Lynette McGrath argues that
Lanyer not only discredits notions of female subjection by aligning women with Christ,
but prompts her dedicatees to engage in a process of “self-discovery” by creating a female
textual community (207). Drawing on the acceptable “cover” of female piety, she offers her
dedicatees a feminized Christ and encourages them to see “themselves as subjects of their
own [religious] experience” (211). McGrath concludes that Lanyer’s volume is particularly
noteworthy for the way it registers the link between “individualist” and “relational” feminisms
- that is, between “an ‘individualist’ feminist consciousness and the community in which such
a consciousness may struggle to birth” (204) (see also McGrath, “Metaphoric Subversions”).
Janel Mueller, by contrast, focuses on the “essentialist” notions of femininity and masculinity
at work in Lanyer’s volume, arguing that Lanyer seeks to transform existing gender relations
by disclosing the social implications of the incarnation and crucifixion. Mueller observes
that Lanyer contrasts the biblical men who misread and kill Christ with the women who
incarnate and defend him, and she posits that this understanding of scripture leads Lanyer to
argue for women’s spiritual superiority as well as for their “personal and social autonomy”
(103). In a similar vein Michael Schoenfeldt argues that Lanyer confronts patriarchal social
structures with the language of Christian “devotional desire,” and he submits that Lanyer’s
poem displays an unresolved tension between a view of female moral superiority and a desire
for gender and sexual equality (221).
While many scholars have elaborated on these influential discussions of Lanyer’s treatment
of male/female relations, others have challenged or complicated this basic analytic framework.
In Chapter 10, for example, Barbara Bowen notes the historical complicity of feminism and
racism and argues that Lanyer positions “woman” in relation to racial others as well as in
opposition to men. Bowen posits that Lanyer occupied the position of a “racialized outsider”
(221), and she examines her treatment of Cleopatra, her representation of herself as “dark,”
and her insistence that men (not Jews) were the villains of the crucifixion. Bowen concludes
that the “political unconscious” of the poem connects Lanyer’s “darkness” with her exclusion
from circles of power and in doing so reveals the ways in which “new discursive formations
of collective English womanhood were dependent on a racialized Other” (238-9). More
recently, several studies have challenged the view that Lanyer’s text offers a fundamentally
“feminine” or “feminist” perspective that pits women against men: Suzanne Trill argues
that the text offers too many structures of desire and identification to offer a straightforward
7 In this passage Pilate’s wife contrasts Eve’s actions with Pilate’s, reinterprets the Fall, and
demands female liberty.
xxiv Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
“female” perspective (“Reflected Desire” 103), and Erica Longfellow contends that Lanyer
offers a “model of ungendered virtue” for men and women (62) and supports the ideals of
social hierarchies when enacted with Christ-like benevolence (69).
Lanyer’s treatment of female desire - erotic, spiritual, and emotional - has also been
recognized as a key component in her rethinking of early modem gender norms. Scholars
variously observe that Lanyer offers configurations of female desire that challenge the ideals
of passivity and subjection found in Petrarchism and Christian social theory as well as the
heteronormativity assumed in much contemporary criticism. Critics have offered detailed
analyses of the dynamics of desire at work in Lanyer’s treatment of Christ’s beauty, of the
Virgin Mary, of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, and of the affective bonds between
Jacobean women. McGrath (“Let Us”, Chapter 9, this volume) and Wendy Wall, for example,
observe that Lanyer deploys the trope of Christ-as-Bridegroom to create a female gaze and to
validate women as desiring subjects rather than desired objects. Achsah Guibbory, by contrast,
focuses on the connections between female desire and marital subjection noting that Lanyer
praises women whose desires are fulfilled by Christ, rather than husbands, and draws on the
language of the Song o f Songs to implicitly reject earthly marriage (202^1). In Chapter 11,
Theresa DiPasquale concurs with much of Guibbory’s analysis, yet she argues that Lanyer
imagines a world in which active female desire might be compatible with “freedom and heroic
action” (250). Examining Lanyer’s portraits of well-known female figures, DiPasquale posits
that her unconventional treatment of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon offers a glimpse
of a heterosexual encounter characterized by equality and mutual desire, even if such an
encounter is not yet possible in Jacobean England (268; see also Schoenfeldt). More recently,
scholars have highlighted the homoeroticism at work in Lanyer’s text and have asked why so
many studies presume a heterosexual model of desire. Michael Morgan Holmes, for instance,
observes that Lanyer forthrightly depicts same-sex erotic, spiritual, and affective bonds that
offer women an alternative to heterosexual marriage, procreation, and “men’s proprietary
claims” (167). In contrast to those critics who see Lanyer’s Christ as socially female but
erotically male, Holmes argues that Lanyer combines the “female and the erotic in Christ” and
imagines him as “the locus of triangulated eroticism between women themselves” (179-80;
see also Goldberg; Schoenfeldt; and Trill, “Reflected Desire”).
Lanyer’s understanding of female “libertie” is further developed in her treatment of
literary practices and her innovative representations of women reading, interpreting, and
writing. Loma Hutson, for example, argues that Lanyer revises central humanist metaphors
by celebrating “woman as an effective reader and agent, rather than offering her as a dark
secret to be disclosed” (14). Hutson views the praise of Margaret Clifford’s “interpretative
virtue” as Lanyer’s primary goal (30) and reads her Passion as a hermeneutic exercise that
proves the superiority of women’s response to suffering. Wall supplements this analysis by
focusing attention on the gendered rhetoric of print culture. She argues that Lanyer overcomes
the ideological obstacles posed by this rhetoric by revising the “techniques of corporal
representation” so as to represent women as writing subjects rather than as written texts (53).
Brandie Siegfried and Richey focus instead on the theological foundations of Lanyer’s “defense
of women’s desire for knowledge” (Siegfried 5.8) and of her “feminist theory of reading and
writing” (Richey, Chapter 12, this volume, 279). In Chapter 12, Richey argues that Lanyer
builds on Cornelius Agrippa’s rejection of Pauline hermeneutics, contrasts male and female
“ways of reading” (286), and depicts women as uniquely able to reproduce Christ (the logos)
Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer xxv
in action, speech, and writing. Scholars have also positioned Lanyer’s depictions of women
reading in relation to early modem debates about female literacy: Jacqueline Pearson briefly
observes that Lanyer represents women’s literacy as essential to salvation, while Edith Snook
demonstrates that Lanyer defends the role of female passions in the pursuit of knowledge and
promotes the transformation of such knowledge into political action.
As many scholars have observed, Lanyer also challenges patriarchal assumptions by
describing her project and her dedicatees’ actions in clerical language, an unusual feature of
the text that has been analyzed in relation to medieval traditions and the Protestant notion of
the “priesthood of all believers.” Guibbory and Siegfried, for example, observe that Lanyer
assumes priestly authority to interpret the Bible, and McGrath (“Metaphoric”) and McBride
(“Sacred Celebration”) underscore her use of eucharistic imagery. In Chapter 13,1 consider
Lanyer’s appropriation of clerical language in light of the traditional arguments that barred
women from the priesthood, and I argue that her treatment of women’s priestly powers is
consistent with her treatment of women as the founding disciples of Christ’s healing church.
However, in her “attempt to uncover a tradition of female priestly gestures and symbols”
Lanyer both displaces and invokes the authority of the male disciples, and in doing so, she
registers the difficulty of envisioning female priests from within a patriarchal ecclesiastical
tradition (310-11). Gary Kuchar furthers this study by positing that Lanyer’s representation
of Mary as priestly co-redemptrix is central to her goal of imagining women in ministerial
roles. Documenting Lanyer’s invocation of a pre-Tridentine tradition that understood Mary’s
swoon as integral to human redemption, Kuchar argues that Lanyer locates women’s poetic
and priestly authority in a form of “sad delight” connected to maternal suffering (49).
Finally, Lanyer’s exploration of women’s tenuous relationship to landed property has
figured in many studies of the elegiac “The Description of Cooke-ham.” Scholars have
often compared this poem to Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” for although the poems record
the particular circumstances of their authors and dedicatees, they also reveal much about
women’s relationship to land in a society based on patrilineal succession. In a series of
articles culminating in a book chapter, Barbara Lewalski observes that Lanyer’s poem depicts
a mythic female Eden sustained by the Lady of the house that “suffers a new Fall when the
structures of a male social order force its women inhabitants to abandon it” (241). In Chapter
14, Marshall Grossman pursues this argument in greater detail by examining Lanyer’s critique
of patrilineal inheritance and its poetic conventions. Grossman submits that while Jonson’s
tropes “assimilate patrilinearity to nature” by substituting the land for women and celebrating
the relation between “land and lord” (323, 320), Lanyer depicts women’s unmediated access
to nature and celebrates their experience of timelessness and community before they are
dispersed by patriarchal demands. Patrick Cook supplements this analysis by contending that
Lanyer’s treatment of the Cooke-ham estate can best be understood by recognizing that she
is drawing on the conventions of the devotional lyric as well as those of the country-house
poem. Lanyer’s poem offers a “contemplative itinerary of purgation, illumination, and union”
(106), and rather than celebrating a male landowner’s mastery of his estate, it depicts women’s
response to a landscape that fosters spiritual growth.
xxvi Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
Lanyer’s Dedications and Jacobean Patronage: Community-building, Class Critique, or
Career Advancement?
While Lanyer’s plea for female liberty may be the most well-known portion of her text, the
layout of her volume plainly reveals that she had other pressing goals: with its dedications to
nine aristocratic women and its concluding country-house poem, Lanyer’s volume announces
its entree into the competitive, unpredictable, and murky world of early modem patronage.
Although we have no concrete evidence regarding the success or failure of Lanyer’s project,
she clearly cast a wide net in her search for preferment or financial reward. It is fair to say that
there is considerable disagreement about the tone, goals, and significance of the dedications
as well as about the relationship between the spiritual content of the volume and its material
aims.
For many of the scholars discussed above, Lanyer’s dedications serve to further her
overarching feminist agenda: they foster a sense of female community across class lines; they
create a venue for female artistry; and they work in various ways to undermine hegemonic
gender norms. In this view, Lanyer’s tone is hyberbolic, yet sincere, as she rewrites “the
institution of patronage in female terms” (Lewalski 221; see also Woods, “Aemilia”). Other
scholars reject these interpretations of Lanyer’s dedications, arguing that such a narrow
emphasis on gender ideology subordinates Lanyer’s real patronage goals, overlooks the
economic realities of patronage relations, and obscures Lanyer’s explicit criticism of
England’s class hierarchy. For these scholars, Lanyer’s volume must be approached as a
patronage project, and the dedications are noteworthy for their innovative, edgy, and perhaps
even angry engagement with the commonplaces of epideictic rhetoric. Ann Baynes Coiro
was the first critic to emphasize Lanyer’s marginal social status, and in Chapter 15, she
draws attention to the passages where Lanyer criticizes the class structure that gives rise
to patronage relations. Lanyer’s dedications, she concludes, register irony and resentment
of her aristocratic dedicatees rather than straightforward praise: “the irony of the prefatory
poems is at least triple: criticism of the aristocratic ladies studded with inestimable wealth,
promotion of a leveling Christian radicalism, and, at the same time, a wonderful degree of
self-promotion” (344). Coiro’s criticism of scholarship that falsely imagines an “idealized
sisterhood” between women of different classes has been very influential (334), and many
scholars have followed her lead in examining Lanyer’s conflicted approach to her potential
patrons. In Chapter 16, for instance, Lisa Schnell examines Lanyer’s engagement with the
tropes of “courtly” desire, a patronage discourse that requires the complete servitude of the
poet to the patron. Schnell argues that while many of Lanyer’s dedications seem to present
themselves as acts of courtship, they actually criticize the power wielded by patrons and
suggest that Lanyer enjoys epistemological superiority over her dedicatees. Lanyer, she
concludes, is much like Shakespeare in rejecting the demands of courtly desire, and to ignore
her response to class divisions is to display “willful blindness” (370). In Chapter 17, Christine
Coch, by contrast, views Lanyer’s approach as more moderate and subtle, and she reads “The
Description of Cooke-ham” as an ambivalent “meditation” on the experience of writing as
a woman in the service of an aristocratic patroness (386). Coch focuses on Lanyer’s use of
the garden, a cultural space often aligned with female artistry and viewed as both a private
and a social arena. Lanyer, she argues, reworks the “trope of the woman in the garden” in
ways that allow her to depict an ideal, symbiotic relationship between a devoted artist and
Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer xxvii
a grateful patroness and to protest against the plight of the poetess who is abandoned when
her patroness submits to the conventions of the patriarchal social order (386). Mary Ellen
Lamb complements these studies by historicizing Lanyer’s criticism of patronage relations
and noting that Salve was produced at a time when feudal models of literary patronage were
giving way to a capitalist economy. Lanyer, she contends, appeals to both systems, and while
the existence of the anonymous “buyer-reader” enables her to criticize patronage relations
(44), she is unable to escape the older model of feudal family poet.
A second, but related, question runs through studies of Lanyer’s patronage poems: how does
the celebration of poverty, godliness, and other-worldly triumph function in a text that solicits
financial support from wealthy women in the here-and-now? For some critics, Lanyer’s praise
of spiritual virtues is hypocritical, while for others, her careful handling of selected Christian
tropes facilitates her approach to her social superiors. McBride, for instance, argues that
Lanyer establishes a transgressive poetic authority by establishing the patronage relationship
in a “religious” rather than “courtly” sphere: by combining traditional forms with a radical
theology and privileging Christian humility over landed titles, she grants herself a “station”
that is “equal - or perhaps even superior - to that of the patrons she celebrates” (“Sacred
Celebration” 60, 64). Marie Loughlin, by contrast, questions the tendency of scholars to see
an irreconcilable tension between material and spiritual goals and to produce readings that
privilege one at the expense of the other. Lanyer, she argues, faces considerable challenges
in representing women’s worldly and spiritual desires, and she draws on a typological model
of “promise, fulfillment, and supersedure” (135) to imagine women’s worldly and spiritual
inheritance.
Finally, recent studies of Lanyer’s cultural and social milieu explore the specific conditions
in which she lobbied for support and offer hypotheses about the kind of professional or financial
advancement she hoped to achieve. Leeds Barroll, for example, stresses the real difficulties
Lanyer would have had accessing court circles and suggests that she may have failed because
she appears to have made a serious social blunder in arranging her dedications. In Chapter 18,
Pamela Benson takes a different tack suggesting that Lanyer’s musical background and Italian
heritage are what enabled her to imitate male “amateur” poets described by Richard Helgerson
(414). Benson underscores the self-promotion of Italian female artists and cortegiane oneste,
documents the musical interests of Lanyer’s dedicatees, and speculates that Lanyer was a
musical professional (perhaps even a cortegiana onesta) whose ultimate goal was to secure
another musical appointment. Barroll and Theresa Kemp offer yet another approach by
positioning Lanyer’s patronage goals alongside those of her husband: Barroll points out that
Alfonso may have been better positioned than Aemilia to promote her bid at court, and Kemp
proposes that Lanyer’s volume should be viewed as part of a collaborative effort that sought
favor for her husband as well as herself.
Lanyer, Literary Authority, and Poetic Vocation
Recent scholarship of the early modem period has placed a great deal of emphasis on the
ways in which published poets struggled to establish their literary authority as they navigated
the difficulties associated with print culture, approached aristocratic patrons, and positioned
themselves within existing literary traditions. As a non-aristocratic woman with no obvious
literary connections, Lanyer faced particular challenges in garnering such authority, and as
xxviii Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
the preceding essays demonstrate, she responded to this challenge by drawing on resources
from the patronage system, from Christian theology, and from literary genres and tropes. As
many scholars have noted, however, Lanyer goes beyond typical authorial claims and makes
the surprising assertion that she has a poetic vocation: she announces that she was “appointed”
to write her work (“To the doubtfull Reader”),8 and she implies that her interpretation of the
Bible is divinely inspired (265ff). These unusual claims distinguish her poetic self-fashioning
from that of most of her contemporaries and have inspired studies of her engagement with
specific conceptions of poetic inspiration and literary tradition.
For example, Lanyer’s intimation that she writes with a kind of prophetic authority is
remarkable. In Chapter 19, Elizabeth Hodgson argues that Lanyer defends her stance as
poet-prophet by drawing on the cultural image of the grieving woman: Lanyer, she contends,
connects suffering with prophetic insight and strategically aligns herself with biblical and
contemporary women whose suffering is accompanied by powerful forms of prophetic and
poetic inspiration. McBride and Ulreich connect Lanyer’s prophetic claims to her exegetical
method: in a study of Lanyer and Milton, they posit that she adapts the practice of “conferring
place with place” in ways that authorize extra-biblical prophetic interpretation, and they note
that she submits herself to the Holy Spirit rather than the literal biblical word (“Answerable
Styles” 340). For Debra Rienstra, Mary Sidney Herbert provides an important precedent for
Lanyer’s prophetic identity, for although Herbert does not claim prophetic authority for herself
she drew Lanyer’s attention “to the possibility of claiming the prophetic power of the Psalms
by creating a female, psalmic T ” (82). Most recently, Wendy Roberts reads Lanyer’s claim to
enjoy special access to divine truth in relation to Gnosticism noting that her interpretation of
the Tree of Knowledge resembles Gnostic exegesis.
In claiming a poetic vocation, Lanyer also encountered the challenge of addressing and
positioning herself in relation to exalted poetic predecessors. In Chapter 20, McBride examines
the pastoral conventions male poets used to represent their poetic debuts, and she contends
that Lanyer modifies motifs from the myth of Orpheus to express a female vocation. McBride
observes that Lanyer was faced with the strange task of creating a world of female mentor
poets and then enacting their symbolic deaths to make “space for her poetic profession,” and
in examining the dedication to Mary Sidney Herbert and “The Description of Cooke-ham,”
she concludes that Lanyer constructs her vocation on “the loss of place, of person, and of
community” (443, 450). Benson also recognizes the important place that Herbert occupies
in Lanyer’s artistic self-representation, but she views Lanyer’s dedication as a celebratory
“triumph in the Petrarchan mode,” one that aims to make Herbert famous while also securing
a place for herself in literary history (“Stigma” 147). Benson suggests that Lanyer’s piece
“marks a major moment in the development of a canon of English women writers” for it
imitates Herbert’s translation of Petrarch, raises Herbert’s poetry to canonical status, and
promotes her own career all at the same time (154). John Rogers similarly notes Lanyer’s
problematic relationship to “traditio” (442) and posits that her vocational claim is grounded in
the Protestant doctrine of justification through sacrificial substitution. He suggests that Lanyer
recounts Christ’s death “in order to effect the sacrificial substitution whereby her womanly
obligation to passivity could be traded for the glorious redemptive activity” of Christ (442),
and he argues that Lanyer also draws on this logic in addressing her dedicatees.
8 See also 1457-62 and the dedication “To the Ladie Katherine Countesse of Suffolke.”
Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer xxix
Lanyer’s Text/Our Text
Lanyer’s struggle to situate herself in narratives of poetic development and achievement is
mirrored in contemporary reflections on the recent recovery and canonization of the Salve
Deus and on the successes or limitations of this critical enterprise. As studies by Grossman
and Judith Herz have emphasized, Lanyer’s volume had no discemable literary impact in
the years following its publication, a fact that prompts us to scrutinize the critical criteria we
employ to make claims for its value. As Grossman so provocatively asks, “what does it mean
- now - for Lanyer so belatedly to enter literary history?” (Chapter 14, this volume, 317). As
the essays above demonstrate, there is no straightforward answer to this question. Since the
early 1980s, Lanyer has been treated and valued as a feminist trailblazer, angry social critic,
racial outsider, prophetic visionary, and skillful artist, and while these designations enrich
our understanding of her literary achievement, they also reveal much about our own critical
preoccupations and literary investments.
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Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer
— . “Reflected Desire: The Erotics of the Gaze in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” Culture
at the Courts o f the Stuart Queens. Ed. Claire McManus. London: Palgrave, 2003. 103-21.
Wall, Wendy. “Our Bodies/Our Texts?: Renaissance Women and the Trials of Authorship.” Anxious
Power: Reading, Writing and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women. Ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan
Elizabeth Sweeney. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993. 51-71. Rev. and rpt. in The Imprint o f
Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.
Woods, Susanne, ed. The Poems o f Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Ed. Susanne Woods.
New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
— . “Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson: Patronage, Authority, and Gender.” Ben Jons on Journal 1 (1994):
15-30.
— . “Anne Lock and Aemilia Lanyer: A Tradition of Protestant Women Speaking.” Form and Reform
in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor o f Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Ed. Amy Boesky and Mary
Thomas Crane. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000. 171-84.
— . Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Chronology
Anne Vaughan Lock Dering Prowse
Circa 1534
Circa 1551
1552-53
May 1557
June 1559
January 1559 (1560)
1571
1572
1572
1576
1579
1583
1590
1593
1597
1601
1602
bom in London to Stephen Vaughan, a mercer and diplomat, and
Margaret Guinet, a silkwoman at court.
Anne marries Henry Lock, son of a wealthy London merchant,
the Locks host John Knox in London. There are fourteen letters from
Knox to Anne Lock written between 1556 and 1562. Knox urges
Anne Lock to join the Protestant exiles in Geneva.
Anne Lock arrives in Geneva in May with two children and a maid.
She is in exile for two years.
Anne Lock returns to London.
Anne Lock’s translation of Sermons o f John Calvin, upon the songe
that Ezechias made is entered in the Stationers’ Register and printed
shortly thereafter. Appended to it is the first English sonnet sequence,
A Meditation o f a Penitent Sinner: Written in Maner o f a Paraphrase
upon the 5 L Psalme o f David.
Henry Lock dies.
Anne Lock marries Edward Dering, a puritan minister who finds
himself in conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities.
Anne Lock contributes a Latin poem to an Italian manuscript
dedicated to the Earl of Leicester. Other contributors include Edward
Dering and the four Cooke sisters.
Edward Dering dies. In his Houres o f Recreation, James Sanford
praises Anne Lock and three of the Cooke sisters as “Gentlewomen
famous for their learning.”
Anne Lock marries Richard Prowse of Exeter.
John Field publishes a copy of a sermon by John Knox that he
had borrowed from Anne Lock and he dedicates the text to her. A
donation by a “mistress Lock” is made in Exeter to a fund for the city
of Geneva.
Anne Lock’s translation of Jean Taffin’s Ofthe Markes o f the Children
o f God is printed.
Anne’s son, Henry Lock, publishes his Sundry Christian Passions.
Henry Lock’s Ecclesiastes in printed.
Anne Lock’s daughter, Anne Moyle, is praised for her literary skills
by Charles FitzGeffrey.
In The Survey o f Cornwall, Richard Carew refers to Anne Lock’s
“rare learning” and indicates that she was deceased by this date.
xxxviii Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
Isabella Whitney
Bom to Geoffrey and Joan (Cartwright) Whitney of Ryles Green, Cheshire.
1566?
1566-67
157
1576
1578
1586
1600
1624
Isabella Whitney may have contributed to Clement Robinson’s A
Handful o f Pleasant Delights (reprinted 1584)
Isabella Whitney’s The Copy o f a Letter is printed.
Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay or Pleasant Posye is printed.
Isabella gives birth to Elinor Lovekin who is baptized at Audlem
church, Cheshire. John Lovekin is named as the father and Isabella’s
father is fined because she was unmarried.
Isabella Whitney may have contributed to Thomas Proctor’s A
Gorgeous Gallery o f Gallant Inventions.
Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice o f Emblems is printed.
Isabella Whitney may have contributed to F.L.’s Ovidius Naso His
Remedie o f Love. Isabella is not named in Geoffrey Whitney’s will,
but he does refer to a “sister Evans” and a “sister Eldershae.”
Brooke Whitney leaves a bequest to his “sister Isabell.”
Aemilia Lanyer
1569 bom in London to Margaret Johnson and Baptist Bassano, a court
musician of Italian origins.
1576 Baptist Bassano dies.
1587 Margaret Johnson dies. Anne Lock’s brother, Stephen Vaughan, is the
overseer of the will. Around this time, Aemilia becomes the mistress
of Henry Cary, Lord Hunsdon, and enjoys favor at court.
1592 Pregnant with Cary’s child, Aemilia is married to Alfonso Lanyer, a
court musician.
1593 Aemilia Lanyer gives birth to a son, Henry Lanyer.
1597 Aemilia Lanyer makes several visits to the astrologer Simon Forman
about the prospect of her becoming a “Lady” and her husband being
knighted.
1598 Aemilia Lanyer gives birth to a daughter, Odillya, who dies nine
months later.
1610-11 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum is printed. There are nine known copies.
Four volumes are missing many of the pieces found in the five longer
volumes.
1613 Alfonso Lanyer dies and Aemilia is embroiled in twenty years of
litigation with his relatives over his patent for income from the
weighing of hay and grain.
1617-19 Aemilia Lanyer runs a school in St. Giles in the Field, but is evicted
and litigates with the landlord.
1645 Aemilia Lanyer is buried at St. James, Clerkenwell and is described
as a “pensioner.”
Part I
Anne Lock Prowse
‘In a mirrour clere’: Protestantism and Politics
in Anne Lok’s Miserere mei Deus
Rosalind Smith
1
In 1560, Anne Lok p ub lished a tran sla tion of four of C alvin's serm ons
on Isaiah 38, prefaced by a ded icato ry ep istle to C ath erin e B rand on
an d follow ed by a so n n et seq uence in tw o parts - five son n ets
'expressing th e passioned m ind e of th e p e n ite n t sin ner', follow ed by
a lon ger sequence p a rap h rasin g th e 51st p sa lm .1 It is an u n se ttlin g
tex t in a n um b er of ways. G enerically anom alou s, it contain s th e first
so n n et sequence n o t o n ly to be w ritte n in English, b u t to com bin e
th e P etrarchan genre of th e so n ne t sequence w ith th at of psalm p a ra
phrase. C om piled by a m iddle-class w o m an from th e c o m m u n ity of
P rotesta nt exiles in G eneva, it em erges from b eyo n d th e E nglish
court, in c ontrast to th e texts of aristo cratic w om en su rro u n d ing
C ath erin e Parr w hich form th e m ajor p re ced e nt for w om en's p u b lica
tio n in E ngland before 1560. The te xt's strangeness disturbs th e p rac
tice w h ic h u n d e rp in s criticism on early m od e rn w om en 's w ritin g of
th is period: c ha ra cte rizin g w o m en 's te x tu al activity in term s of a
restricted class of aristo cra tic au th o rs, in a sec on dary or deriv ativ e
rela tio n ship to m ale-au th o re d texts, an d co nfine d to religious genres
and to po i. Lok's tex t draw s u p o n largely m ale -au th o red French
C alvinist a nd A nglo-G enevan trad itio n s of psalm paraph ra se to co n
stru ct a tex t in w h ic h te x tu a l v irtu o sity w orks to o u t-trop e th e
so n n ets an d psalm p araph ra ses of T h om as W y att, Lok's m ain po etic
predecessor in England.
The text's recent critical reception has been characterized by a
reluctance to analyse its anom alous position, its rhetorical am bition, or
to engage w ith its problem s of a ttribu tio n .2 A ttentio n to th e tex t's
disruptions provides a way of repositioning it w ithin th e divergent male-
auth ored traditions w ith w h ich it engages, as well as suggesting a
context for its radicalism in th e d eplo ym en t of Petrarchism in the
4Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
42 Rosalind Smith
pursuit of a specific political purpose: th e prom otion of Calvinist
religious policy in th e early Elizabethan state. C ontrary to its recent
reception as an obscure or private 'fem inized' text, th e sequence engages
in genres, traditions and political projects closely aligned w ith canonical
m ale-autho red P rotestan t texts, an d questions an unproblem atic
separation of m en an d w o m en 's w riting in this period. The e ntry of a
female voice into these m ale-authored traditio ns is n either straig h t
forward n or a direct assum ption of an established subject position, and it
dem ands different discursive strategies w hich rewrite th e fields in w hich
th e tex t circulates. The ap parent anom alies of Lok's text, rath er th an
characterizing the tex t itself, challenge th e categories by w hich a
gendered voice m ig ht be understoo d, and suggest th a t a broader, m ore
flexible, and historically specific construction of gendered voice in this
period is required to accom m odate its diversity.
The attrib u tio n p rob lem s attac hed to Lok's so nn e t sequence m ean
th a t it already occupies an un stab le p ositio n as a gendered text. N ot
only is th e text as a w hole published un der Lok's initials, w hich m e ant
th a t it was n o t a utom atically read in gend ered term s by an early
m o d ern audience, b u t its conclu ding sequences are preceded in the
text b y a disclaim er of authorship:
I h ave add ed th is m ed itatio n folow yng u n to th e ende of this boke,
n o t as a parcell of m aister Calvines worke, b u t for th a t it well
agreeth w ith the sam e argum ent, and was delivered m e by m y frend
w ith w h om I knew I m ig h t be so bolde to use & p ublishe it as
pleased me. (Aalv)
The disclaim er raises interpretive problem s of its own, attracting two
consistent responses. The first takes th e statem ent at face value and
identifies th e T rend' w ho delivered th e text as J o h n Knox; the second
expediently ignores the statem en t in m aking an uncom plicated attribu
tion of the sequence to Lok. Both readings are destabilized by the textual
practices of th e overlapping m anuscript an d prin t cultures in th e
sixteenth-cen tury court. A literal reading fails to register its rhetorical
status, and its place w ithin th e culture of the court, w here th e circulation
of a tex t in p rint carried class im plications th at a w riter m ig ht w ish to
disguise. Theories of th e 'stigm a of p rint' argue th at participatio n in
coteries of m anuscript exchange in the late sixteenth century upheld the
boundaries of aristocratic culture against a rising m iddle class.3 However,
contem p orary textu al disclaim ers generally differ from Lok's assertion
th at th e sonnets were supplied by a friend; Tottel justifies publication in
Volume 3: Ann Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer 5
Protestantism and Politics in A nne Lok's Miserere mei Deus 43
term s of a nationalistic p ro m otio n of th e vernacular, associating
m anuscript circulation w ith 'un gen tle horders,' w hile early w riters such
as Barnabe Googe an d Nicholas G rim ald assert th at th ey pu blished
throug h the urgings or actions of friends.4 Unlike Lok, th ey claim
authorship of their texts, bu t m inim ize their responsibility for circulating
them in print. The presence of a disclaimer at all in the text w ritten from
the em ergent m iddle class against w hom the m echanism s of aristocratic
m anu script circulation were a protectio n m ight, of course, be related
to gendered fears of social censure attach ed to th e unm ed iated w riting
and publication of po etry by a w om an. Little precedent exists w ithin
th e English tradition at this p o in t for Lok's publication of poetry:
C atherine Parr's two volum es of m ed itation s, th e lost text of psalm s
and proverbs by Lady Elizabeth Fane, and Elizabeth's m e ditation o n
psalm 13 following her tran sla tio n of A Godly Meditation o f the S ou l5 All
carry regal or aristocratic au thority . However, M argaret Ezell's work
issues a caveat against th e construction of disclaimers in w om en's texts,
arguing th at they were less m otiv ated by specifically gendered fears of
social censure th a n by their participation in a rhetoric of m odesty shared
by writers of both sexes.6 Lok's text is such an early example of a m iddle-
class w om an's publication of poetry tha t it increases the possibility th at a
disclaim er m ight have op erated as a protective m echanism , b u t this
arg um ent w ould be m o re co nvincing if th e tex t were circulated
under Lok's nam e ra th e r th a n h er initials. W heth er a reflection of
anxieties related to gender, class or th eir intersection, th e disclaim er
remains a sufficiently problem atic statem ent th at it cannot be ignored in
considering the question of the text's attribution.
Equally pro blem atic are th e literal readings of th e disclaim er
iden tify in g th e friend w h o deliv ered th e tex t to Lok as Jo h n Knox.
These are based on th e perso n al relatio nsh ip of Lok an d Knox, a n d
Lok's role in su pp lyin g som e of K nox's w ork to th e pub lish er Jo h n
Field in 1583.7 These speculative fo u n d atio n s for th e attrib u tio n to
Knox are even less likely given th a t his o nly po etic p ub licatio n
was th e psalm s in The Book o f Common Prayer, w h ich co rresp o nd so
closely to th e Ste rn ho ld an d H opkins Psalter th a t th ey are n o t c o n
sidered to be Knox's work. K nox's Psalms and Liturgy also c o n ta in s
41 psalm s specific to th e Scottish ed itio n, b u t th ese w ere w ritte n by
W illiam Kethe, W illiam W hittin g ha m , Jo h n Pulleyn, Robert P o nt an d
I.C. (probably th e E d in bu rgh m in iste r J o h n C raig).8 Lok's text was
prepared during her tim e in G eneva, betw een m id-1557 and 1559, yet
th e detailed and co n siste n t co rresp on den ce form Knox to Lok in this
period makes n o m e n tio n of th e te x t or th e so nnets. The on ly o th e r
6Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
44 Rosalind Smith
argu m en t suggested by critics in support of th e attribu tio n to Lok rests
w ith h e r later p ub lish in g h isto ry. Lok's 1590 tra n s la tio n of Jean
Taffin's Des Marques des Enfans de Dieu, ded icated to th e C o untess of
W arwick, is also co n clud e d by a long po em w h ich is n o t in th e copy-
text, Taffin's revised th ird e ditio n pu b lish ed in 1588.9 Further, th e
co pytext con tain s som e of Taffin's ow n po etry w hich could have been
used by Lok to co nc lu de h er translatio n, b u t instead was re pla ced by
th e p oe m T h e nec essitie an d benefite of afflic tio n.' The 1560 so n n et
sequence an d th e 1590 lo ng poem share som e th em atic an d structural
sim ilarities, dram atizin g th e affliction of th e sinn e r th ro u g h th e O ld
T estam e nt figures of D avid an d Job, b u t th e sim ilarities b etw een th e
tw o pieces sto p there. The con trast b etw een th e dram atiz ed an d
in tern a liz ed e x p lo ratio n of th e speaker's exp erience of sin th ro ug h
David's voice in th e son nets, an d the flat, th ird-p erson exem plary use
of Job in th e later poem , m ake the pieces seem closer to m odels of
au th orship by writers w ithin a Protestant traditio n th a n to in dividu al
ized a u th o rship . The later poem , itself of un ce rtain attrib u tio n ,
pro vides little su p p o rt for th e attrib u tio n of th e so n n e t sequences to
Lok; how ever, a L atin lyric in th e B artholo Sylva m an u scrip t
a ttrib u ted to Lok an d su p p orting th e radical religious politics of
her seco nd h u sb a nd , Edward Dering, provid es m ore secure proof of
her facility w ith po etic co m p ositio n .10
More significant su ppo rt for the attribu tion , however, can be located
in overlooked c o nn e ctio n s w ithin th e different sections of th e 1560
text itself: b etw een Lok's dedicatory epistle to C atherine B randon, her
tra nslation of th e serm ons and the so n ne t sequence. C alvin's serm ons
on Isaiah 38 focus u p o n the figure of H ezekiah, his physical affliction
an d divine cure, an d th e ram ifications for the p olitical state of th e
godly king. In th e epistle, Lok specifically links Hezekiah a nd David,
th e focus of th e so n ne t sequence, as com p le m en ta ry exam ples of the
same principle:
And th a t yo u m aye be assured, th a t th is kinde of m edicine is n o t
hurtfull: tw o m oste excellent kinges, Ezechias an d David, beside an
infinite nu m b re hau e tasted th e lyke before you, an d h aue fou nd e
he alth therin. (A4r)
Hezekiah and David are offered as th e m odels th ro u gh w hich th e text's
m edicin e is adm inistered, and by w hom the reader should be assured
of its efficacy. T heir link in g in the epistle, in a tex t w hic h goes on to
offer Hezekiah in th e serm ons an d David in th e psalm paraphrase as
Volume 3: Ann Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer 7
Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok's Miserere mei Deus 45
exam ples of th ose suffering affliction redeem ed and cured by God's
mercy, is a strong in d ica tio n th at th e co nc lu ding sonn et sequences
were in clud ed by Lok as a com ple m en t to her tran sla tio n of the
serm ons on H ezekiah. This conn e ctio n is n o t necessarily evidence for
au th orsh ip of th e sequence, b u t m ay be a gloss on h er editorial
m eth od , rein forcin g h er lin e in the disclaim er th a t she has add ed the
m editatio n Tor th a t it well agreeth w ith th e same arg um e nt.' The co n
nection is supplem ented by a sim ilar use of Petrarchan imagery in bo th
the epistle and sequences. Calvin's account of Hezekiah's suffering and
restoratio n to h ealth in th e serm ons works largely m etapho ric ally in
presenting a m odel of rig h t and godly go vern m ent. Lok's text, o n th e
other h and , expands u p o n th e C alvin ist tex t in b o th the ded ica tion
and so n ne t sequence in stressing th e physicality of th a t affliction, its
effects up on the body of th e king. C alvin's recreatio n of H ezekiah's
suffering is given this gloss in Lok's dedicatory epistle:
So here this good soules Physiciajn] h a th b ro ug h t you w here you
m aye se lyinge before you re face th e good king Ezechias, so m tim e
chillinge an d ch atterin g w ith colde, som tim e lang uish ing &
m eltyn g aw ay w ith heate, now e fresing, now fryeng, now e speche-
lesse, nowe crying o ut ... You se him som etym e yeldyngly stretch
oute, som etym e struglinglye th row e his w eakned legges n o t able to
sustein his feble body: som etim e he casteth abrode, or h o ld e th up
his w hite & blodless h a n d tow ard the place where his soule longeth.
(A7v-A8r)
This anatom izing of H ezekiah's body in illness offers a particularly
Petrarchan blason: his sick body is dism em bered in the second section of
the quoted passage, follow ing the use of Petrarchan tropes of freezing
and burning, repeated to th e point of ubiquity in the Renaissance. But in
1560 in th e Elizabethan court, such tropes w ould have had a freshness
w hich th ey later lost, and the ir appearance in Lok's epistle suggests an
interest in Petrarchism co nsistent w ith her com position of a Petrarchan
sonn et sequence at th e en d of th e text. The sonnets constru ct David's
sinful body in the same term s of a physically detailed account of disease:
'leprous bodie and defiled face', 'splat m y ripped h ert' (Aa4r~v). Lok's
em phasis on the reconstruction of the diseased body, its m aterial rather
th an m etaphoric aspect, in a text seeking to present the figures of
Hezekiah and David as adm onitory m odels of princeliness, constructs an
anxiety around the body of the ruler tha t exceeds Calvin and reinforces a
sense of instability at the be ginning of Elizabeth's reign. Following the
8Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
46 Rosalind Smith
early death s of Edward VI and Mary Tudor, th e illness of the sovereign
carried w ith it p o ten tial for political and religious change deeply
disturbin g to a P rotestant co m m un ity still in exile following M ary's
reign. The C alvinist m od el of godly kingship is therefore invested w ith
an anxious m aterialism in b oth the m arginal sections of the text,
expressed th ro u g h an idiosyncratic use of Petrarchan discourse w hich
suggests a com m on authorsh ip of bo th sections.
The use of th e son ne t form for the m editations conclud ing Lok's text
has no precedent in th e English trad itio n of psalm paraphrase, and this
very an om aly m ay also be recruited as some su pp ort for Lok's a u th o r
ship of th e sequences. The m ajor sonneteers in th e English tradition up
to 1560 were Surrey, an d m ore particularly W yatt, w ho also translated
th e psalm s, including a paraph ra se of Psalm 51. A lth oug h W y att and
Surrey w rote in th e earlier h alf of th e six teenth century , th e delay in
th eir p ub lication gives an orig inality to th e form for a reader such as
Lok, w ho se m iddle-class up brin g in g m ay have excluded h er from
access to or know ledge of th e m anu scrip t versions of these poem s
circulating in the court. W y att's Penitential Psalms were first prin te d in
1549, b u t m ore significantly, th e first editio n of TotteVs Miscellany was
pu blished in 1557. This c o n tex t m akes th e choice of th e son n e t form
for Lok's m e d itatio n seem less unfashio nable. Six editions of Tottel
were p ub lished by th e e nd of 1559; its influ ence on th e sequence in
Lok's tex t is in dicate d by th e sequence's ad o p tio n of th e specifically
'E nglish' rh ym e schem e in v en ted and used by W yatt an d Surrey. Lok's
po sitio n in th e G enevan c o m m u n ity w ould also have provided her
w ith access to th e French and Anglo-G enevan traditions of so nn et and
psalm p araph rase. The p ub lication of Louise Lab's Oeuvres in 1556
offered th e o nly gen dered p re cede nt of p u blish ed and accessible
w om an -au tho red s o n n ets.11 Lok also w ould have ha d available to h er
th e published poem s of M argaret of Navarre, w ho, like C ath erine Parr,
pu blished a series of pio us m editation s. These m e d ita tio n s ad op ted a
variety of lyric form s, alth o u g h n o n e is a so nn et, displaying a level of
form al ex pe rim en ta tio n w hich exceeds th e Parr texts; a parallel can be
draw n w ith th e m ale-au tho red trad itio n of psalm parap hrase in France
and England, w here S te rn ho ld's co u nterpart in th e French court was
Clem en t M arot, w hose m etrical psalm paraphrases used a wide variety
of lyric form s and rhym e schem es an d a less literal in terpre tive
compass th a n th ose of S te rn h o ld .12 U nlike S ternhold, M arot p a ra
phrased th e 51st psalm , an d th e m etho d of aggregation of th e 1560
sonnets, each linked to an d expand ing on a line from th e psalm ,
follows a p a tte rn used in M arot's qu atrains on th e text. A ltho ugh this
Volume 3: Ann Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer 9
Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok's Miserere mei Deus 47
im pulse towards a m ore ex perim en tal tra d itio n of psalm p arap hrase
m ay have been d raw n u p o n by Lok if she w rote th e 1560 sequences,
scarcely m ore preced e nt exists w ith in th e French and Anglo-G enevan
tra dition s th a n th e English for the packaging of psalm m editation s as
sonnets. Bordier's collection of H ugu en ot songs co ntain s o nly one
sonnet: 'Angoisse de Lam e' by M alingre, first p ublished in Chansons
spirituelles a Vhonneur et louange de Dieu in 1555.13 As in England, th e
increased popularity of th e so nnet form in th e late sixteenth century in
France gave rise to some dev otio nal sequences, b u t it was far from a
stand ard generic c o m b in a tio n in 15 60.14 Nevertheless, th e m ore
in terp re tive cast of th e 1560 sequence an d its lyrical exp erim entatio n
m ay indicate th a t M arot's influence co m b in ed w ith the suggestive
exam ples of son ne ts in TotteVs M iscellany to prod uce son n et
m editation . A tran slato r such as Lok, w ith links to the gospelling
tra d itio n of th e c ourt of Edward VI a n d th e C alvinist psalm p ara
phrases of M arot an d Beza du ring h er tim e in the G enevan exile
com m un ity, seems perfectly p ositio n ed to produce a sequence th a t
seems strangely ano m alo us in its use of th e s on n e t genre if view ed in
term s of an English trad ition of psalm paraphrase alone.
Although there is a reasonable am o un t of evidence supporting Lok's
autho rship of the sonnets, Lok's disclaim er should n ot be expediently
erased: some of th e uncertainties surrounding the question of attrib ution
may illum inate the nature of a gendered text. The critical responses to the
disclaimer privilege authorship as the sole ground for determining w hat a
gendered text m ight be, and exclude other forms of textual agency - such
as editing - in a way th a t n o t only simplifies authorship in the sixteenth
century, b u t also unnecessarily restricts th e relationship of tex t and
gender. How im p ortant is th e determ ination of attribution to reading the
sequences as gendered texts? A ttribution has an im p ortant place in
establishing the existence of a body of early m odern w om en writers, a
political function essential to th e fem inist gynocritical project begun in
the 1970s. However, th e politics of recovering early m odern w om en
writers has resulted in a suppression of th e problems of attribution which
surround m any of these texts, and has restricted the definition of th e
gendered text to reductive identifications betw een author, text and
textual subject. Ignoring the problem atics raised by Barthes and Foucault
surrounding the reduction of m eaning in a text to the single interpretive
fram e of authorial in te ntion, gynocritical m odels of the gendered text
assume th a t th e gender of the a uth or unproblem atically inform s the
gender of th e text, w ithou t allowing for th e am biguities and slippages of
m eanin g in h ere nt in every act of reading an d interp retatio n. The sense
10 Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
48 Rosalind Smith
th a t gynocritical fem inism is out of step w ith a wider critical context
has been th e subject of m any critiques, and a set of fem inist critical
alternatives has been offered in response - defining a gendered text in
terms of its content, its style and the gender of its audience. But these
definitions also have their problem s. The construction of the gender of a
text's co n ten t identifies either a set of fem inine preoccupations, or a
feminine sensibility, bo th of which depend up on hom ogenizing 'w om en'
as a group. They are defined solely in terms of their relatio nsh ip to an
oppressive patriarchy, rather th a n in term s of their specific position in a
complex intersection of cultural discourses including, for example, race or
class. The identification of a particularly gendered 'style' meets sim ilar
problems, assum ing a consistently fem inine w riting positio n or relation
to language w hich again writes out local difference, and tend s to pre
em pt the political investm ents of such texts. The strategy of relating th e
gender of th e text to th e gender of its reader appears at first to sidestep
the essentialism in h e re n t in bo th gynocritical an d revisionary models,
but, as Elizabeth Grosz argues, it still depends up o n the idea of a con
tinuous, inten tio n al subject, reducing the m ean ing of a text to a single
destin ation .15 If there is n o way of defining a gendered text w ith ou t
recourse to a problem atic attribu tio n, sim plistic m odels of reading or
essentialist models of the feminine, m ust the question of gender be erased
in speaking about texts such as Lok's sonnet sequences?
I would suggest th a t there is a sense in w h ich Lok's text, edited by a
w om an w riter and dedicated to C atherine Brandon, is gendered at a
specific m o m en t in its circulation history - th a t is, it m ay be read as
gendered in term s of a co n tin g en t and local circulation w hich need no t
be extended to encom pass a universal identification of its gender nor to
im ply a single, unified reading subject. The text is gendered in tw o ways,
th ro ug h its activation of a particular, fem inized line of political pressure
directed tow ards th e sovereign, and thro ug h th e textu al negotiations
necessitated by th e entry of a middle-class gendered voice in to the
political sphere at this m om en t in history. The dedication to B randon
mobilizes h er status w ithin the court and as a po pular figure for a wider
Protestant readership for Lok's project of d issem inating G od's w ord
thro ugh Calvin: it also has a m ore specific political focus in addressing a
second gendered reader, Elizabeth I.
The Elizabethan state in 1559 and 1560 was characterized by anxiety
over Elizabeth's religious allegiances, especially am o ng the exiled
Protestant com m unities. The perceived fragility of Elizabeth's co m m it
m e n t to P ro testan tism a nd h er need for co rrectio n is articulated in
Calvin's letter to W illiam Cecil, 1559:
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Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok's Miserere mei Deus 49
But since it is scarcely possible th at in so disturbed an d confu sed a
state of affairs, she sho uld no t, in th e beg in n ing of her reign, be
distracted, held in suspense by perplexities, and often forced to ho ld
a vacillating course, I have tak en th e liberty of advising h er th a t
having once en tered u p o n the rig ht p a th , she should un flinchingly
persevere th erein.16
It has been argued th a t Elizabeth was a com m itted Protestant, who in
1559 achieved her preferred religious settlem ent in the face of con
servative C atholic op positio n.17 Recent revisions of th at po sition argue
th a t the religious settlem ent was m ade by a queen under constraint,
m an ipulated w ithin the court, and th a t a d ocum ent seen to register her
early Protestantism , such as her tran slation of A Godly Meditation o f the
Soul, was a conservative piece hijacked by Jo h n Bale for th e Protestant
cause. In contrast, her religious conservatism , w hich has been dismissed
by those arguing for her com m itm en t to Protestantism as expedient
public policy, was so consistently m anifested th at Patrick C ollinson
argues for it as a reflection of Elizabeth's own position.18 A po int of focus
for this personal conservatism was Elizabeth's reinstatem ent of th e cross
an d candlesticks in th e royal chapel in O ctober 1559 for the marriage of
one of her ladies, in th e face of official in junctions of the same
year calling for the removal of 'th in gs superstitious' from churches, a
designation interpreted by Protestants to include the cross. T he reaction
of Protestant bishops to Elizabeth's retention of the cross and candlesticks
in th e royal chapel indicates th e anxiety th a t her action provoked in
Protestant circles, and the uncertainty attachin g to her religious alliances
during this early period of her reign.19
C atherine Brandon specifically writes to W illiam Cecil in the early
m onths of 1559 expressing a parallel concern to th at expressed by Calvin
and th e wider Protestant com m un ity as to the extent of Elizabeth's
com m itm ent to Protestantism in th e ligh t of her engagem ent w ith th e
outw ard forms of Catholicism:
W herefore I am forced to say w ith th e P rop het Elie, 'H ow lo ng h alt
ye betw een tw o opinio ns?' If th e m ass be good, tarry n o t to follow
it, n o r take from it no p art of th at h o n o u r w hich th e last Q ueen in
her no table stoutness b ro u g h t it to and left it in, w herein she
deserved im m ortal praise, seeing she was so persuaded th at it was
good. But if you be n o t so persuaded, alas, w h o sh ould m ove th e
Q ueen to ho n o u r it w ith her presence, or any of her councillors.
Well, it is so rep orted here th a t Her M ajesty tarried b u t the Gospel,
12 Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
50 Rosalind Smith
and so dep arted. I pray God th a t no p art of th e repo rt were true,
b u t th at you kn ow there is n o part of it good after th at sort as th ey
use it.20
This focus o n the mass in Brandon's letter indicates a Protestant political
activism w hich makes her choice as the object of Lok's dedication for her
tran slatio n of serm ons on Hezekiah p articularly po in ted. The biblical
m odel repeatedly recruited to Protestant iconoclasm was Hezekiah. His
rule was characterized by an active suppo rt for th e purge of idolatry
during his reign a n d his history, as M argaret Aston has show n, was
closely associated w ith th e typology and sym bolism of th e cross.21
Hezekiah's purge of idolatry was centred on the destructio n of The
brasen serp ent th at M oses had m ade.'22 This serpent, m ade by Moses at
God's co m m and, was set u po n a pole as a sign of God's grantin g of
eternal life to th e faithful, and in th e Old Testament prefigured th e body
of Christ u p o n th e cross as a sign of G od's salvation. But to early
Elizabethan Protestants, the brazen serpent and th e cross were linked as
im ages w hich h ad becom e idols, irredeem ably abused by false w orship.
Hezekiah's d estruc tion of th e serpent became a m odel directed by
Protestants tow ards th eir sovereigns, prom oting th e destruction of th e
idol of the cross. Calvin's dedicatory epistle in th e G eneva bible
specifically cites Hezekiah to Elizabeth as a w arning for rapid reform of
th e state to avoid G od's pu n ish m en t.23 Nicholas Udall's play Ezechiast
w ritten u nd er H enry VIII, was perform ed for Elizabeth w hen she visited
Cam bridge in 1564, an d contem porary accounts describe its opening
w ith Hezekiah's destruction of idols and restoration of the true religion.
These contexts reposition Lok's translatio n of th e serm ons on Hezekiah
as an adm onito ry text directed towards Elizabethan policy durin g 1559.
The translation makes reference to Hezekiah's purge of idolatry in th e
first serm on as an exam ple of 'how e he fram ed all hys lyfe to th e law of
God' and established th e Trewe and pure religyon' in the state. Lok's
tra nslation places no special gloss on this passage; it conform s alm ost
exactly to th e French edition of Calvin's sermons on Hezekiah published
by Francois Estienne in 1562.24 The text's in terve ntion com es n o t as a
gendered rew riting of Calvin's serm ons, b u t th rou g h the dissem ination
of Calvin's text in English at an historical m o m ent w here the policies of
Hezekiah could be seen as a com m ent u po n Elizabeth's religious actions.
Any a d m o n itory in stru ctio n of Elizabeth from a figure such as Lok,
w riting from b eyon d th e court, m ust be couch ed in less direct term s
th a n th e atte m p te d in terv en tion s by letter from Calvin or C atherin e
B randon. C onsequen tly, h er a d m o n itio n to Elizabeth is inferred
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Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok's Miserere mei Deus 51
ind irectly th ro u gh th e m odels of Old T estam e nt kingship an d c o n
structed as an in struction in duty to C atherine B randon rather th a n as
a direct address to th e qu een. Brandon, th e object of God's healin g
m edicine, en ters in to a re lation sh ip of 'rece ip t,' of bon dage to th e
physician an d messenger:
But we se dayly, w hen skilfull m en by arte, or h on e st neyghbou rs
hav yng g athered vn d e rstan d y n g of som e specyall dysease & th e
healing therof by theyr owne experim ent, do applie their knowledge
to the restorin g of h ea lth of an y m ans bo dy in any corporall
sicknesse, how e th an k fully it is taken, how e m uche th e releved
p atie n t acco m pteth h im selfe bo [u ]n d to him by m eane of w hose
aide an d m in istra tio n he find eth h im self h o lp e n or eased. W hat
th en deserveth he, th a t te ac h eth such a receipt ...? This receipte
God th e hea ven ly P h ysitian h a th ta u g h t, his m ost excelle[n]t
Apothecarie m aster Ioh n Calvine h a th co m p ounded, & I your graces
m ost b o u n d en & hum ble .have p u t into an Englishe box, & do
present u n to you. (A3r)
It is the receipt, the concep t of duty, rath er th a n th e message, w h ich is
packaged for B randon here; th e text invokes th e rela tion ship as m uch
as th e teachin g, an d in this m ove Lok seeks to m obilize B rand on 's
dem on strated political interests and agency w ith in th e court in the
service of h er te xt's project. The d uty ow ed slips from physician to
m essenger in th e looseness of th e phrase 'h im by m eane of w hose aide
and m in istra tio n he fin d eth him self h o lpe n or eased,' allow ing Lok to
invoke th e bo n ds of p erson al p atro na ge as w ell as a w ider d uty to the
p ro m otio n of C alvinism in th e figure of B randon. This re la tionship of
duty is ex tend ed from B rand on to Elizabeth th ro u gh th e text's m edia
tio n of its m essage th ro u g h the affliction visited on th e bodies of King
David an d King Hezekiah. W hile it does n o t attem p t to teach Elizabeth
her duty directly, th e tex t co ncerns itself w ith inv ok ing and defining
th e relatio nsh ip an d ex ten t of d uty b etw een au th o r an d ideally
P rotesta nt pa tro n in th e epistle, and betw een subjects and an ideally
Protestant sovereign in th e serm ons.
W ha t makes th e text partic ularly in teresting is th at it mobilizes a
fem ale p atro n to p ut po litical pressure u p on th e sovereign th ro u g h a
persuasive rhe to ric of service and duty, w h ich is analogous to th a t
practised in male p atron ag e relation ships. M oreover, th e message
packaged for th e sovereign is one w hich diverges little from its m ale-
au th o red copytext. It offers few grou nds for th e location of an
14 Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
52 Rosalind Smith
essentially 'fem in in e' sensibility w ith in th e text, and its eng agem en t
w ith th e p ublic sphere contests received n o tio n s of early m odern
w o m en 's co nfin em ent to th e private sphere of the ho u seho ld . Gender
does n o t preclud e th e possibility of political en gag em en t in th is
contex t, b u t it defines th e ways in w hich th a t political pressure is
exerted - th e patro na ge circles an d subject positio ns o p en to a p a rti
cular m iddle class w om an ed itor such as A nne Lok. These are avenues
exploited by Lok again in 1572, in a m an uscrip t p rodu ced by tw o of
th e Cooke sisters, Elizabeth Hoby an d M ildred Cecil, ded icated to
Leicester, an d aim ed again at Q ueen Elizabeth. Lok's Latin poem is a
P ro testant h u m a n is t a ttem p t to co nciliate E lizabeth a nd direct he r
tow ards a m ore radical p ositio n, in line w ith th e politics of Lok's
second h usb an d, Edward D ering.25 It is again a politica l text, b u t one
w hich is circulated in ways w h ich m ight be defined as gendered only
throu g h a particular, local circulation history; in this instance, thro u g h
a m obilization of a particula r patro na ge netw ork, an d th e p u rsu it of
Dering's, ra th er th an C alvin's po litical agenda. B oth tex ts resist
generalized definitions of The gendered tex t' and act as caveats against
th e lim itation s w hich such defin itions im pose up o n w ritin g by early
m ode rn w om en; th ey suggest th at a m ore open, less essentialist m odel
of th e gendered text m ight allow these texts to be seen to w ork in new
and surprising ways in the period.
The lim itatio n s of co nv ention al m odels of th e early m o d ern
gendered te xt do n o t only extend to a text's po litical eng agem ents in
th e period, bu t also to its literary position. It is a critical com m onplace
in discussions of th e Petrarch an son n e t sequence to characterize the
genre in term s of its strictly defined gender codes, in w hic h th e m ale
Petrarchan subject constructs his erotic subjectivity against th e body of
his silenced fem ale beloved, his desiring gaze reflected back u p o n
him self to create, according to Jo h n Freccero's analysis, a self-enclosed,
ido latro us trin ity .26 The en try of th e w om an subject in to these
configurations is clearly m ore com plex th a n direct appropriatio n, b u t a
tex t such as Lok's challenges th e received critical view th at the female
Petrarchan subject w rote texts confined to th e private sphere, if she
were able to assum e th at subject p ositio n at all. G ender shapes th e
engag em ent w ith th e genre and its political fun ction , b u t does n o t
preclude th e possibility of th a t engagem ent. In an English trad itio n
and to an English audience, th e tak in g up of b o th th e son n e t and
psalm paraphrase seems to be an ou t-trop ing of W yatt, w hose sonnets
were circulating in p rin t from 1557 and whose psalm s w ere p ub lished
in 1549. An em ph asis on th e place of th e sequence in term s of the
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Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok's M iserere mei Deus 53
gendered precedent in the traditio n of pe nitential m editation obscures
their generic inno v ation as sonn et sequences, a n d th e text's rhetorical
am b ition.
W hat m igh t this im pulse to o ut-tro pe signify? In Tottel, W yatt was
praised by Surrey as a psalm ist, w hose dep ictio n of David provided an
adm o nitory m odel for rulers: 'W here rulers m ay se in a m irrour clere /
The b itter frute of false co n cu piscen ce '.27 I suggest th a t th e tex t's
eng agem en t w ith W yatt's p oetry presents n o t o n ly form al parallels,
signalling a Petrarchan textu al over-reaching, b u t also parallels his use
of David as a m irror to th e sovereign in an ad m o n ito ry p roject w hich
m atches her de p lo y m en t of th e figure of H ezekiah in th e sermons.
The 1560 tex t p ositio ns itself w ith W yatt's p arap h rase o n th e 51st
psalm by ad opting W yatt's innovative structure of prefacing th e psalm
paraph rase w ith a short, orig inal sequence. W yatt presen ts David
'w earied,' at rear a n d alone, overcom e w ith grief a n d d eprived of
sense: 'D ow n from his eyes a storm of tears descends, / W ith o u t
feeling, th a t trickle on th e g ro u n d .'28 Lok's p e n iten t sin ner is similarly
co nfro nted and con fo u n ded by sin, an d re p rese nted in th e op ening
so n ne t of th e preface th ro u g h th e sam e tropes of b lo od an d tears:
'd im m ed and fordu lled eyen / Full fraugh t w ith teares' (Aa2r). The
rew orking of W yatt in this sectio n shifts from h is th ird-p erson,
descriptive observ ation of David, to a first-person exp an sio n on th e
now genderless p e n iten t sin ner's subjective exp erien ce of sin. This
shift stresses th e in d iv id u a l's in tera ctio n w ith G od in line w ith
C alvinist th eolo gy, and provides by d efault or o m ission a subject
po sitio n available to readers of b o th genders. But th e tex t does m ore
th a n rew ork W yatt's form al strategies for a gen de red reader. As Carl
Rasm ussen has argued, th e po etry of P etrarchism , w ith its in ten se
focus up o n the construction of th e speaking subject and th at subject's
psychological shifts, provides th e P ro testan t subject w ith a m odel for
th e co n struc tio n of subjectiv ity at a p o in t w here spiritu al d octrine
placed a new em phasis on th e subjective state of th e in divid ual
th rou g h th e psychologizing of its m ajor ten e ts .29 The 1560 rew orking
of W yatt's prologue to the 51st Psalm in term s of th e p en ite n t sinner's
subjective experience of despair extends a n ascen t shift in W yatt from
the divin e to th e secular, th ro u g h a sh ift in th e P etrarch an subject's
access to lines of sight. W ya tt's David has one refuge in despair, the
sight of G od - 'h e can n o n e o the r th in g / A nd look up still u n to th e
hea ven 's king '. However, Lok's new ly genderless p en ite n t sin ner is
blind, a blind ness elabo rated o n in detail in th e secon d so n n et of the
preface.30 The 1560 text picks u p o n a m o vem ent at the conclusion of
16 Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
54 Rosalind Smith
W y att's prefatory sequ ence of four poem s, w here th e gaze is av erted
fro m G od to self a n d leads in to th e release of th e desirin g voice in
psalm paraphrase:
Like as he w h om his own th o u g h t affrays
He turns his look. Him seem eth th a t th e shade
Of his offence again his force assays
By violence despair on him to lade.
Starting like h im w hom sudden fear dismays,
His voice h e strains and from his h eart outbrings
This song th at I n o t w heth er he cries or sings.31
The focus of the 1560 text o n W yatt's in tern al direc tio n of th e gaze of
th e pe n iten t subject shifts th e em phasis of th e sequence from G od to
self, privileging th e subjective ap preh ensio n of G od over his objective
presence, in a m o v em en t w hich is typically Petrarchan b o th in its
em phasis on th e textu al subject and its anx iety of influence. Its in n o v
ative generic c om bination of sonn et an d psalm paraph rase expan ds a
co n n e ctio n offered, b u t n o t exploited, by W y att's psalm p arap hrase
and its generic history.
The text's form al ou t-trop ing of W yatt is supplem ented in the longer
psalm paraphrase by a sim ilar Petrarchan dynam ic of poetic com petitio n
transferred to the role of adm onitory psalmist to sovereigns. The 'm irrour
clere', identified by Surrey in W yatt's work, is taken up in Lok's text to
su pplem ent th e exam ple of the iconoclast Hezekiah as a m odel for
Elizabeth. Sonnet 5 uses th e blason again to present a self-m otivated
display of the sinful body of the speaker, David:
My cruell conscience w ith sh arpned knife
D oth splat m y ripped hert, and layes abrode
The lothsom e secretes of m y filthy life,
And spredes the m fo rth before th e face of God.
(Aa4v)
The b od y is dism em bere d a n d displayed in o rd er th a t it m ig h t
bec o m e a vehicle for th e re d em p tio n of the ch u rch th ro u g h th e
bod y of its king, th u s re in fo rc in g a n d dilatin g th e m ale speak er's
su bjectivity in a m ov e m en t p arallel to P etrarch 's c o n stru ctio n of
his subjective self as lau reate over th e frag m en ted b o dy of Laura.
The sequen ce parallels D avid's brok e n bo d y w ith th a t of C h rist o n
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Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok's Miserere mei Deus 55
th e cross, recruiting even his objectification to a neo-Plato nic pro ject
w here th e speaker, like God, offers a pa rt of him self as a sacrifice to
redeem th e world:
But thy swete form e alone,
W ith one sufficing sacrifice for all
Appeaseth thee, an d m aketh th e at one
W ith sinfull m an, a nd h ath repaird our fll.
That sacred h oste is ever in th in e eyes.
The praise of th at I yeld for sacrifice.
(Aa7v)
The rede m ptio n w hich this sacrifice effects is for th e p olitical and
religious state of David's realm:
Shew mercie, Lord, n o t u n to me alone:
But stretch thy favor and th y pleased will,
To sprede th y b o un tie an d thy grace up o n
Sion, for Sion is th y holly hyll:
That thy H ierusalem w ith m ighty wall
May be enclosed u n d er th y defense,
And bylded so th a t it m ay neuer fall
By m yning fraude or m igh ty violence.
Defend th y chirch, Lord, an d advaunce it soe,
So in despite of tyrann ie to stand,
That tre[m ]bling at th y power the w orld m ay know
It is u p ho ld en by th y m ig hty hand :
That Sion an d H ierusalem m ay be
A safe abode for th em th a t h o n o r thee.
(Aa7v-Aa8r)
The reference to Thy chirch' represents a departure from the words of the
psalm , and the available paraphrases before 1560, w here religion is
couched in m ore general term s.32 The paraphrase dramatizes David's
spiritual and physical abasem ent in order to construct a parallel to
Christ's sacrifice by God to repair the fall of the m em bers of the Christian
C hurch. David's song is rew ritten in th e 1560 sequence as a sacrifice
th ro ug h which G od's grace will redeem no t only th e city of Jerusalem,
but th e Church. The inclusion of a reference to C hrist's sacrifice on th e
cross - 'But thy swete forme alone, / W ith one sufficing sacrifice for all' -
w hich allows David's despair to becom e redem ptive of C hurch as well as
18 Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
56 Rosalind Smith
state, is, of course, an anachronism , projecting David's voice forward to
describe an event in th e future: this substantial deviation from th e words
of th e psalm is m ade obvious by the practice of juxtaposing paraphrase
and psalm text. The prolepsis moves the sequence forwards to th e origins
of C hristianity and b eyond to the au tho r's own period, an d th e
exem plary figure of David, Elizabeth. The text works as a prosopopoeia
for Elizabeth's voice as a New Testam ent David.
Hezekiah is offered in the serm ons as an exem plary kin g in his
destructio n of the brasen serpent, Old T estam ent type of th e cross; the
voice of David in the son n ets offers th e sin ner's redeem ed h ea rt as an
equiv alent to Christ's d ea th on th e cross, as an ap pro priate sacrifice to
God, a nd a m eans of redeem ing state and C hurch. B oth M arot an d
W yatt place a typically P rotestant gloss o n David's rejection of sacrifice
in th e 51st Psalm by suggesting th a t th e sacrifice w hich God desires is
in tern al and individual: 'sprite co ntrite; low hea rt in h um ble wise';
'u n e Ame do lente / Un coeur subm is, un e Ame p en iten te .'33 Both,
how ever, m aintain th at th ese reform ed hearts allow and authorize th e
'o u tw a rd deeds' of sacrifice in a parap hrase of the final lines of the
psalm . In the 1560 sequence, how ever, th e extern al deeds of th e
sacrifice becom e th e yieldin g of th e hea rt. The detailed in ven to ry of
'sacrifice of righteousness' in th e psalm - 'b u rn t offringes and oblations
... yo u ng bullockes' - w hich is m a in ta in ed in M arot's version of th e
psalm as 'O blatio ns telles que tu dem andes: / Adonc les Boeufz,' is
cha ng ed in the 1560 p arap hrase to a m etap ho ric al sacrifice of th e
reform ed heart:
T hen o n th y hill, and in th y w alled towne,
Thou shalt receave the pleasing sacrifice.
The brute shall of th y praised nam e resoune
In than kfu ll m ou thes, and th en w ith gentle eyes
Thou shalt beho ld u p on th in e altar lye
M any a yelden host of hu m bled hart,
And ro un d about th en shall th y people crye:
We praise thee, G od our God: th o u onely are
The God of m ight, of mercie, and of grace.
That I th en, Lorde, m ay also ho n o r thee,
Releve m y sorow, and my sinnes deface:
Be, Lord of mercie, mercifull to me:
Restore my feling of thy grace againe:
Assure m y soule, I crave it n o t in vaine.
(As8r)
Volume 3: Ann Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer 19
Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok's Miserere mei Deus 57
The p araph rase re tains som e p o in ts of reference to th e psalm - th e
term 'b ru te ' an d th e referen ce to G od's 'g en tle eyes' recall im ag ery
th a t m igh t be associated w ith sacrificial b ullocks - b u t th e literal
sacrifice is m ade th ro u g h th e 'yeld en h o st.' The h o st is rep resen te d in
term s of sigh t or kno w ledge of God - 'T ha t sacred h o st is ever in
th in e eyes' - rath er th a n a physical sacrifice, an d th e se quen ce
conclud es w ith a m o re am biguo us re ading of th e righ te ou sn ess of
phy sical sacrifice an d o u tw a rd deeds in favou r of a su staine d
em phasis o n th e sacrifice im plicit in th e reform ed an d h u m b led
heart. D avid's in terna l refo rm atio n has led to the parallel re form ation
of his subjects; bu t th is re sto red ch u rch is co n tin g en t u p o n his
perso nal re sto ratio n to grace. The sequ ence ag ain departs from th e
paraph rase and from earlier versions of the p salm in its conclusion in
unce rtain ty . It ends n o t w ith th e im agery of rig ht sacrifice bu t w ith
th e speaker's ind ividual desire for m ercy an d grace, w hich, if granted,
will restore his state a n d C h u rc h . If Lok's link ing of th e figures of
Hezekiah and David in th e epistle suggests th at b o th elem en ts of th e
tex t seek to direct th e sovereign as com plem entary exam ples of ideal
P rote stan t sovereignty, th e n th e message to Elizabeth in th e sonn ets
is clear. The reform ed h e a rt of th e m on a rch will lead to a sim ilar
re form atio n in th e h earts of th e p eople a n d a re sto ratio n of th e
C hurch an d state, b u t it in volves a hum ility, a y ield ing to G od an d a
pu rsu it of th e godly p a th on th e p art of th e ruler, w hich is seen as by
no m eans assured.
The sequence finishes by reinforcing the m odel of godly g overn m en t
and the iconoclastic message associated w ith Hezekiah by th e Protestant
com m un ity and outlined by th e serm ons. The so nnets fu nctio n as a
carefully constructed gloss on th e sermons. As if the veiled association of
Elizabeth with Hezekiah were n o t enough, th e figure of David is
recruited as a subjective restatem en t of th e m ona rch 's frailty and th e
consequences of his sin for the religious and political state. The 'b itter
frutes of false concupiscence' w hich W yatt sought to reveal th ro u gh
David's voice become n o t th e results of carnal desire th a t disturbed the
Henrician state, b ut the results of a nascent E lizabethan adherence to
'th ing s of th e w orld' in religion, th e material trappin gs of C atholicism ,
over the cultivation of a subjective godliness preferred by radical
Protestants. The text as a whole, edited by Lok and directed initially
towards a specifically feminized readership as a way of exerting political
pressure up on the sovereign, shows a gendered voice operating in
surprisingly am bitious and uncircum scribed ways in the political and
literary spheres of the early Elizabethan state. Surprising, however, only
20 Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
58 Rosalind Smith
in term s of m odels of gender w hich rely u p o n essentialist constructio ns
of the fem inine located either in the body of the auth or and reader, or in
the style of th e text. A m ore flexible an d con tin g en t m odel of gender
opens up the possibilities and limitations of th e gendered voice speaking
in the same con texts as the male voice, in ways w h ich reflect the
com plex specificity of each historical m om ent of a text's production and
circulation.
Notes
1. A[nne] L[ok], Sermons o f John Caluin, vpon the songe that Ezechias made after
he had bene sicke, and afflicted by the hand o f God, conteyned in the 38.
Chapiter ofE say (London, 1560).
2. See Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers o f the English Renaissance
(Princeton: P rinceto n U niversity Press, 1987), pp. 61-3; M argaret P.
H ann ay, "'S tren g th enin g th e walles of ... Ierusalem ": A nne V aughan Lok's
D edication to the C ountess of W arwick', ANO 5 (1992), 71-5, and "'U nlock
m y lippes": th e Miserere m ei Deus of A nne V aughan Lok and Mary Sidney
Herbert, Countess of Pem broke,' in Privileging Gender in Early Modern
England, ed. Jean R. Brink (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteen th C entury Journ al
Publishers, 1993), pp. 18-36; Susanne W oods, 'The Body P enitent: A 1560
Calvinist Sonnet S equ e n ce/ ANO 5 (1992), 137-40. Of these texts, only
M argaret H annay's 1993 essay considers th e a ttrib utio n problem s raised by
th e disclaim er, bu t she finds 'in te rnal evidence' to link th e sonnets and the
dedication in a sim ilarity of them e and in Lok's ow n parallel of th e songs of
H ezekiah an d David, and m akes th e attrib u tio n in th e face of a lack of
external evidence to th e contrary. H annay (1993), pp. 21-2.
3. J.W . Saunders, The Profession o f English Letters (London: R outledge an d
Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 44; W endy W all, The Imprint o f Gender: Authorship and
Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U niversity Press,
1993), p. 13.
4. H yder Rollins, ed., Tottel's Miscellany 2 vols. (C am bridge, Mass.: Harvard
U niversity Press, 1965) 1:2; Barnabe Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets,
ed. Ju dith M. Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Le Roy
Merill, ed., The Life and Poems o f Nicholas Grimald (New Haven, C onn.: Yale
University Press, 1925), pp. 100-2,
5. Catherine Parr, Prayers and Meditations (London, 1545) and The Lamentacion
o f a Sinner (London, 1547); Lady Elizabeth Fane, The Lady Elizabeth Fane's 21
Psalms and 102 Proverbs (L ondon, 1550); E lizabeth I, A Godly M editation o f
the Soul (London, 1548). A lthough E lizabeth Fane's text is now lost, it was
described by George Ballard as 'several psalm s and pious m ed itations, and
proverbs, in the English T on g u e/ George Ballard, Memoirs o f Several Ladies o f
Great Britain (London, 1752), p. 119.
6. M argaret J.M. Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History
o f the Family (C hapel Hill: U niversity of N orth C arolina Press, 1987),
pp. 62-100.
Volume 3: Ann Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer 21
Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok's Miserere mei Deus 59
7. Patrick Collinson makes th e attribution tentatively; as 'perhaps Knox's work',
in T he Role of W om en in th e English Reform ation Illustrated by the Life and
Friendships of Anne Lok/ Studies in Church History 2 (1965), p. 265; th e notes
to Mrs Lok's Little Book (London: Olive Tree, 1973), a reprint of the British
Museum text of the sermons, makes the attribution more definitely: 'No doubt
the second item in Mrs Lok's little book, "A m editation of a penitent sinner," a
metrical paraphrase of Psalm 51, was sent to her by Knox at the same tim e as
the first' (p. 127). W. Stanford Reid's biography of Knox follows Collinson's
more tentative position: Trumpeter o f God: A Biography o f John Knox (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), p. 141.
8. Laing glosses th e psalm s published in Knox's texts as 'alth o ug h sanctioned
by Knox, th ey ca n n o t be considered as form ing any part of the Reformer's
works.' David Laing. ed., The Works o f John Knox, 6 vols. (Edinburgh:
Bannatyne Society, 1846-64), 6: 284-5.
9. Jean Taffin, Des Marques des Enfans de Dieu (Harlem, 1588).
10. Cam bridge University Library MS. li.5.37, fol. 5r. I w ould like to th ank Jane
Stevenson for bringing this m an u scrip t to m y attentio n .
11. Pernette Du G uillet's Rymes of 1546 co n ta in s no son nets, alth o u g h it
provides a p receden t for th e p ub lic atio n of w om en's lyric poetry; th e first
ed ition of th e Oeuvres of C a th e rin e Des Roches, w h ich does c o nta in
sonnets, appeared in 1578.
12. For a discussion of M arot's form al inn o vatio n, see M ichel Jeanneret,
Poesie et Tradition Biblique au XVIe Siecle (Paris: J. Corti, 1969).
13. H enri-Leonard Bordier, Le Chansonnier Huguenot du XVIe Siecle (Paris:
Libraire Tross, 1870), p. 367.
14. Terence Cave, Devotional Poetry in France, c. 157 0-1613 (Cam bridge:
Cambridge U niversity Press, 1969), pp. 97-9, pp. 135-45.
15. For a full an d clear critique of definitio n s of a fem in in e text, see E lizabeth
Grosz, 'Sexual Signatures: Fem inism after the D eath of th e A uth o r/ in Space,
Time and Perversion: The Politics o f Bodies (London and New York: Routledge,
1995), pp. 9-24.
16. Jo h n Calvin, Letters o f John Calvin Selected from the Bonnet Edition
(Edinburgh, Pa.: Banner of T ruth Trust, 1980), pp. 207-8.
17. W allace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (L ondon: Edward A rnold, 1993),
pp. 49-51: Norm an L. Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement o f
Religion, 1559 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1982), p. 9; W in throp S.
H udson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement o f 1559
(Durham , NC: Duke U niversity Press, 1980), pp. 90-9, pp. 131-7.
18. Patrick C ollinson, 'W indow s in a W om an's Soul: Q uestions about th e
Religion of Queen E lizabeth I,' in Elizabethan Essays (London: H am bledon
Press, 1994), pp. 87-110.
19. Ibid., p. 112.
20. 'C atherine, duchess of Suffolk, to C ecil/ 4 M arch 1559. CSP I (1558-1559),
pp. 160-1.
21. M argaret Aston, The King's Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a
Tudor Group Portrait (Cam bridge: Cam bridge U niversity Press, 1993),
pp. 113-27.
22. 'A nd he did uprightly in th e sight of th e Lord, according to all th a t D auid
his father h ad done. He toke away th e hie places, and brake the images, and
22 Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700
60 Rosalind Smith
cu t dow n th e groves, & brake in pieces the b rasen serpent th a t M oses h ad
m ade': The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile o f the 1560 Edition, intr. Lloyd E. Berry
(M adison a n d London: University of W isconsin Press, 1969), 2 Kings 18:4.
All subseq uent biblical references are from this edition.
23. 'M oreover th e m arvelous diligence an d zeale of Ieh osh a p hat, Iosiah, an d
Hezekiah are by th e singuler p rovidence of G od left as an exam ple to all
godly rulers to reform e their countreys and to establish th e w orde of G od
w ith all spede, lest th e w rath of the Lord fall up o n th em for th e neglecting
thereof.' Ibid., iiv.
24. Jean Calvin, Sermons de Jehan Caluin Sur le Cantique que fa it le bon Roy
Ezechias apres qu'il eut este malade Sc afflige la main de Dieu (Geneva, 1562),
p. 20.
25. Edward Dering was suspended from preaching after he delivered a serm on at
court before Elizabeth in February 1570 indicting the clergy an d criticizing
Elizabeth for inaction in the face of their corruption. By 1572, how ever, he
was appoin ted divinity reader at St Paul's, a position w hich he used to renew
his attacks upo n the clergy, criticizing th eir ignorance an d internal disputes in
A briefe and necessarie Catechism (London, 1572).
26. Jo h n Freccero, T h e Fig Tree and th e Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics', Diacritics 5
(1975), pp. 34-40.
27. Tottel's Miscellany, 2:27.
28. R.A. Rebholz, Sir Thomas W yatt: The Complete Poems (New H aven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 206-9.
29. See Carl J. Rasmussen, "'Q uietnesse of M inde": A Theatre for Worldlings as
Protestant Poetics', Spenser Studies 1 (1980), pp. 3-27.
30. 'So I blinde w retch, w hom e Gods in flam ed ire / W ith pearcing stroke th a t
th row ne u n to the grou[n]d, / Amidde m y sinnes still groveling in th e myre,
/ Finde n o t the way th at other oft have found, / W hom e cherefull glim se of
gods abou n din g grace / H ath oft releved and oft w ith shyn in g lig h t/H ath
brought to ioy out of th e ugglye place' (Aa2r).
31. Rebholz (1978), pp. 206-7.
32. The copytext for the psalm paraphrased an d included in part at th e m argin
of each so nn et corresponds m ost closely to th e 1557 G enevan psalter
published by Jean Crespin, althou g h at p oin ts th e tex t in th e m argins
diverges from th e 1557 version an d corresponds to th e 51st psalm prin te d
in th e Genevan Bible of 1560. In th e final four sonnets, however, where th e
paraphrase deviates from the w ords of th e psalm an d previous paraphrases
m ost significantly, the text of th e psalm is a close translatio n of th e 1557
Genevan psalter.
33. Rebholz (1976), p. 209; Clem ent Marot, Oeuvres (Paris, 1551), p. 35 7r.
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The Huntington Library Quarterly 63 (2000): 435-46.
Rowse, A. L. “Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.” The Poems o f Shakespeare s Dark Lady: Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum by Emilia Lanier. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978. 1-37.
Schoenfeldt, Michael. “The Gender of Religious Devotion: Amelia Lanyer and John Donne.” Religion
and Culture in Renaissance England. Ed. Claire McEachem and Debora Shuger. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997. 209-33.
Siegfried, B.R. “An Apology for Knowledge: Gender and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation in the Works
of Aemilia Lanyer and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.” Early Modern Literary Studies 6 (2001): 5.1-47.
Snook, Edith. Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics o f Early Modern England. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2005.
Trill, Suzanne. “Feminism versus Religion: Towards a Re-Reading of Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum Renaissance and Reformation 25 (2001): 67-80.
Volume 3: Anne Lock, Isabella Whitney and Aemilia Lanyer
— . “Reflected Desire: The Erotics of the Gaze in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” Culture
at the Courts o f the Stuart Queens. Ed. Claire McManus. London: Palgrave, 2003. 103-21.
Wall, Wendy. “Our Bodies/Our Texts?: Renaissance Women and the Trials of Authorship.” Anxious
Power: Reading, Writing and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women. Ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan
Elizabeth Sweeney. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993. 51-71. Rev. and rpt. in The Imprint o f
Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.
Woods, Susanne, ed. The Poems o f Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Ed. Susanne Woods.
New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
— . “Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson: Patronage, Authority, and Gender.” Ben Jons on Journal 1 (1994):
15-30.
— . “Anne Lock and Aemilia Lanyer: A Tradition of Protestant Women Speaking.” Form and Reform
in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor o f Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Ed. Amy Boesky and Mary
Thomas Crane. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000. 171-84.
— . Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
