Tokens of Love

Contextualist scholars working on the rhetoric of corporeal presence in seventeenth-century English religious lyrics have naturally focused their attention on sacramental discourse of the Reformation era. As part of the Common Knowledge symposium on the future of contextualism, this full-length monograph, serialized in installments, argues that the contextualist focus on a single and time-limited “epistemic field” has resulted in a less than adequately ramified understanding of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. What the contextualist approach misses is that even the religious discourses of the period were tied to a long and in no way local epistemological debate about signs and their meaning, whose roots are to be found in Greek and Latin rhetorical theory. This first installment of “Tokens of Love” commences a discussion of the role of classical pagan sign-theory in the development of Reformation sacramental discourse.

Protestant Baroque

Much traditional scholarship on the Baroque sees the notion of the Protestant Baroque as contradictory. This chapter explores ‘emergent’ or ‘partial’ Baroque characteristics in two Protestant poets, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer, followed by the Protestant women of Little Gidding, the ‘Arminian nunnery’, whose ‘storying’ and biblical harmonies show how broader cultural dynamics could permeate even a marginalised group of women, who have only recently attracted critical attention. I look across the Atlantic to examine the English equivalent of the colonial Baroque prominent in Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic culture, and consider two New England writers – briefly, Anne Bradstreet and more thoroughly, Anne Hutchinson – to analyse the extent to which New England can be set within the scope of not just colonial but specifically Protestant colonial Baroque.

Aemilia Lanyer

Aemilia Lanyer (b. 1569–d. 1645) was one of the first women in England to publish her original literary compositions. Her book, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, printed in 1611, was the first volume of English poetry that appeared with the female author’s full name on its title page. The book set other precedents as well: its final poem, “The Description of Cooke-ham,” is the earliest known English “country house poem.” The volume contains nine dedications in verse and prose, all addressed to prominent women, making it the first English publication both written by and exclusively dedicated to members of the female sex. One of these, “The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembrooke,” addressed to the poet Mary Sidney, is the earliest extant poem in English written by a female author in praise of another woman’s literary achievements. The topic of the volume’s title poem, a retelling of Christ’s Passion, is less unusual; however, Lanyer takes a distinctively gendered approach to the story. In her version, the men surrounding Jesus repeatedly prove themselves obtuse, weak, unreliable, or treacherous, while the women, in contrast, are perceptive, caring, and loyal. At the climactic moment when Pontius Pilate condemns Jesus to death, Lanyer inserts a defense of Eve, claiming that the male sex’s culpability for Christ’s crucifixion cancels out any guilt women once bore for original sin. On this basis the narrator calls for the end of female subordination and a new era of gender equality. In addition to its significance for the histories of authorship and feminism, Lanyer’s work has received critical attention for its engagement with religious authority, including conventions of devotional poetry and scriptural interpretation. Scholars have further examined how Salve’s author navigates differences of gender, religion, race, nationality, class, and desire to achieve a public voice. This scholarly interest has been recent, however: only one edition of Lanyer’s book was printed in her lifetime, and there is no evidence that it had a wide influence. Since then, her work was forgotten until the 20th century, when she became one of many neglected female writers to be reclaimed for literary history. Thus, with the exception of one dissertation from the 1930s, the research on Lanyer begins in the 1970s.

Doubtful Readers

Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers’ efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers’ strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers’ interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.