SOURCE: Woods, Susanne. Introduction to The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, edited by Susanne Woods, pp. xv-xli. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Woods provides an overview of Lanyer's life and works and analyzes several of her major poems.

Aemilia Lanyer's life, like the lives of the vast majority of her contemporaries, is mostly shrouded in the indifference of the past. Various public records offer some information, and we know or can reasonably induce more from two additional sources. The astrologer Simon Forman (1552-1611) kept a professional diary and detailed casebooks about the people who came to him for consultation, with Lanyer among those who visited him several times in 1597. Read carefully and critically, these works provide a close glimpse of one period of her life. In addition, Lanyer's poems assert or suggest some autobiographical facts, although these should be seen...