Abstract This essay considers the iconography of sleep in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). It argues that in her dedication to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and in the titular poem on the passion and death of Christ, Lanyer deploys the physiological imperfection of human sleep as an embodied means of intersubjective imitation. In the prefatory text, early modern conceptualizations of sleep as an image of death allow the poet to mimic Pembroke’s selfhood defined by mourning Philip Sidney; and in the title poem “Salve Deus” embodied sleep establishes commonality between the apostles’ mortal bodies and Christ’s humanity. In Lanyer’s handling, sleep works as a catalyst for fashioning human bodies across class, gender, and ontology. With this imitative model, Salve Deus constructs its literary subjectivity in opposition to the dominant, Apollonian scripts of poetic vocation, leveraging physiological vulnerability as a crucial strategy of Lanyer’s poetic project.
Abstract The dedications of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum reveal a sophisticated optics as Aemilia Lanyer forges relationships based on emulation and grace between herself and potential patrons, between her dedicatees and other women, and between her readers and Christ. Harnessing intromissive theories of vision, Lanyer depicts her dedicatees as luminous celestial bodies whose virtue and light replicate in those who view them. However, such replicating legacies are only possible through Lanyer’s book—a mirror that captures her dedicatees’ “light” and reflects their virtue back out to readers. Lanyer, therefore, aims to secure patronage by establishing a legacy of virtuous women and making herself and her work indispensable to that endeavor. Ultimately, she frames the bestowal of patronage as a spiritual imperative since it will enable the production of women’s virtues for generations to come.
Abstract Scholars have consistently turned to representations of the body in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum to consider issues of genre, religion, gender, race, social status, poetics, and poetic authority. Yet, despite scholars’ frequent attention to topics of corporeality and embodiment, “the body” has not been recognized in Lanyer studies as a central subject of inquiry. The introduction to this special issue surveys how the corpus naturale has undergirded Lanyer scholarship over the past fifty years. Whereas previous studies have identified the body’s importance at discrete moments or in specific mechanisms in Lanyer’s poetry, this introduction emphasizes how the form and content of Salve Deus is fundamentally rooted in the body and bodily experience. This special issue, thus, reconceptualizes the categories of “women writers” and “women’s writing,” highlighting how we might consider the female body not as a historical identity but rather as a formal model in early modern English literature.
Abstract Historically grounded approaches to the Renaissance “death arts” can be used to illuminate Lanyer’s mobilizing and transforming of standard rhetorical tropes and poetic conceits—most notably the blazon—to reconceptualize and represent the bliss-imbued chiastic movement from Jesus’s incarnation and death by crucifixion to the resurrected Christ’s making possible the prospect of eternal life. Consonant with Lanyer’s participation in the querelle des femmes (the longstanding controversy over women’s ontological and social status in a patriarchally organized world-system), Salve Deus partakes of earlier traditions of female piety like those popularized in The Golden Legend , and also the Christus Mortuus contemplative technique brought to prominence in Reformation England by Katherine Parr. Lanyer’s poem thus provides a rich case study in the death arts to promote a novel, reconfigured form of female piety predicated on a series of stunning memory images of the grotesquely maimed and blood-drenched male body.
This article explores what Thomas Hobbes saw as the political purpose of immaterial ideals. Late in Leviathan , Hobbes describes past religious images, absurd in that they referred to nothing real. He suggests that the worship of images must be converted from harmful to salutary. The article explores how Hobbes performs that conversion with a religious name, the Kingdom of Heaven. I argue that Hobbes guts the name of its physical referent, but maintains the name itself. Simultaneously, he offers various images representing the name and attaching diverse sects to an immaterial ideal. This transformation serves a political purpose: it defangs spiritual fervor of its practical danger and directs that fervor towards a minimal agreement supportive of an ordered civil society. While this article contributes to the study of Hobbes’s religious thought, Hobbes’s thought also speaks to political theorists inquiring into the purpose of abstract ideals in societies of moral conflict.
