SOURCE: Huntington, John. “Postscript: The Presumption of Aemilia Lanyer.” In Ambition, Rank, and Poetry in 1590s England, pp. 147-53. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Huntington discusses the themes of social ambition and courtly ambition in the Lanyer's poetic work.

At the time of the publication of Jones's translation of Nennio and Chapman's “Ovids Banquet of Sence” in 1595, some poets could envision a moment of utopian promise when Fabricio's “virtues of the mind” might seem a viable form of cultural capital, when an intellectual might reject both the rules of courtly discourse, which however much they reward style never forget pedigree, and the abrasive opposition of puritan anger, inspired by a claim to reject the social world in the name of a higher truth outside of time, in order to define a space in which learning, wisdom, and even the very refusal to compete in...