SOURCE: Grossman, Marshall. “The Gendering of Genre: Literary History and the Canon.” In Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, edited by Marshall Grossman, pp. 128-42. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

In the following essay, Grossman investigates Lanyer's place in and influence on English literary history.

In what ways does Aemilia Lanyer solicit us to think about the theory and practice of literary history? In general, when we write the history of literature we construct a variety of narratives to connect events, works, styles, writers, genres—what have you—over time. The narratives so constructed serve not only to represent the past, but to represent it to the present, and, the past being past, it is in the present that these narratives must have their effect. The very small number of surviving copies of the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the lack of contemporary reference to it...