SOURCE: Ng, Su Fang. “Aemilia Lanyer and the Politics of Praise.” ELH 67, no. 2 (summer 2000): 433-51.

In the following essay, Ng contends that Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum illustrates how Lanyer used both religious and feminist rhetoric as a means for securing patronage for her writing.

The religious core of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611) has been too easily dismissed by some critics as at best peripheral to her true subject of the “commendable qualities of women” and at worst merely self-serving “art for lucre's sake.”¹ But compare, for instance, George Herbert's “Submission,” from his very popular devotional work The Temple (1633), in which the poet pleads before God: “Were it not better to bestow / Some place and power on me? / Then should thy praises with me grow, / And share in my degree.”² God's grace is figured here in profane terms of earthly advancement. Herbert immediately recants: “Perhaps great...