SOURCE: McBride, Kari Boyd. “Remembering Orpheus in the Poems of Aemilia Lanyer.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 38, no. 1 (winter 1998): 87-108.

In the following essay, McBride examines Lanyer's use of pastoral conventions in her poetry.

Writing in 1611, Aemilia Lanyer, like other women poets of the era, faced the challenge of professing a poetic vocation in a cultural context that, rather than providing models for female poetic subjectivity, denounced women writers and belittled their efforts, largely reserving poetic profession to men. Lanyer used many means in the Salve Deus Rex Judæorum to countermand this “anti-tradition”: by writing about religion, one (perhaps limited) means of authorial empowerment open to seventeenth-century women; through the patronage poems that begin her work, where she positions herself favorably in relationship to the titled women they address;¹ and by her identification throughout the Salve Deus with Christ, a figure at once lowly, like Lanyer, and...