Chapter 4 - “Not Sparing Kings”: Aemilia Lanyer

Summary

argues that Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611) participates in an oppositional brand of religious politics associated with the poem’s female dedicatees. Building on the system of correspondences in which wife was to husband as subject was to ruler, Lanyer issues a call for “libertie” not as protofeminist appeal but as defense of the rights of the Church and the nation at a time when both were threatened by James’s growing use of his royal prerogative. Reviving the woman-centered discourse of the Protestant Reformation, Lanyer champions an ultra-Protestant corrective to masculine tyranny, the true Church of the persecuted elect represented by the oppressed collective of women. In “Cooke-ham,” Lanyer pays tribute to her primary patron and zealous Puritan Margaret Clifford by representing her as a virtuous monarch whose intimate relation to Christ in her rural retreat recalls the Song of Songs and offers pointed anticourt critique.