SOURCE: Rienstra, Debra. “Dreaming Authorship: Aemilia Lanyer and the Countess of Pembroke.” In Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric, edited by Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson, pp. 80-102. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Rienstra examines the influence of Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, on Lanyer’s writing.

Twenty years after A. L. Rowse “discovered” Aemilia Lanyer's substantial, peculiar body of religious poetry, her work has recovered from its initial presentation as a Shakespeare-related curiosity to an established fixture in the sub-canon of early modern women's writing. Her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum exemplifies literary culture of the early seventeenth century with its multiple-dedication scattershot at patronage, its deploying of scriptural authority, and its keen attentiveness to the social differential between author and audience. At the same time, however, Lanyer's work has made a glaringly illuminating addition to the canon exactly...