SOURCE: Lewalski, Barbara K. “Seizing Discourses and Reinventing Genres.” In Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, edited by Marshall Grossman, pp. 49-59. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

In the following essay, Lewalski views Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as an appropriation and rewriting of patriarchal ideology and discourse.

Aemilia Lanyer—gentlewoman-in-decline, daughter and wife of court musicians, cast-off mistress of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain, Henry Hunsdon (to whom she bore an illegitimate child)—is the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of original poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). These poems are now beginning to accumulate the kind of scholarship and criticism that will enable us to assess and properly value their cultural significance and their often considerable aesthetic merit.¹ My interest here is in Lanyer's appropriation and rewriting, in strikingly oppositional terms, of some dominant cultural discourses and a considerable part of the available generic repertoire...