SOURCE: Guibbory, Achsah. “The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred.” In Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, edited by Marshall Grossman, pp. 191-211. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

In the following essay, Guibbory analyzes Lanyer's relationship to the sacred as expressed through her poetry.

In the history of Western religion, women have had a far more ambiguous relation to the sacred than men. Although women were celebrated in the Hebrew Bible for their heroism and devotion to God, it was men, we are told, who were the priests and prophets chosen for God's service. With the destruction of the temple in 70 c.e., the study of the sacred Torah became exclusively the province of males, and the rabbis replaced the priests, while women engaged in practical, domestic roles supporting the spirituality of the male scholars. In some ways, the advent of Christianity might have...