SOURCE: Goldberg, Jonathan. “Canonizing Aemilia Lanyer.” In Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples, pp. 16-41. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Goldberg provides a favorable evaluation of Lanyer's contribution as a female poet and considers the importance of sexuality and gender roles in her life and work.

In the opening paragraph of an essay offering an important rejoinder to the emphasis on “idealized sisterhood” in “current studies devoted to early modern women writers” (an intervention that guides the pages that follow), Ann Baynes Coiro notes a remarkable fact about one of these writers: in the most recent (sixth) edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1993), Aemilia Lanyer appears “as a major author,” ready for, if not granted, canonization by her inclusion.¹ Coiro does not mention the fact that the headnote introducing Lanyer is, save for a single phrase, identical to the one that prefaced...