SOURCE: Woods, Susanne. “Lanyer and English Religious Verse.” In Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet, pp. 126-62. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Woods discusses Lanyer's religious verse and places her among several key religious poets, including John Donne and John Milton.

Religion defined the social, political, and intellectual life of medieval and Renaissance Europe. From the imperialist folly of the Crusades to individual sacrifices, from cathedrals and epics to vestments and sonnets, religion also infused and transported the period's artistic imagination. Today many find it hard to grasp the ubiquity and power of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It underlay virtually every assumption about the nature, purpose, and value of life, and what appear to us as small differences within a hegemonic worldview were reasons for debate, imprisonment, and even martyrdom.

The seventeenth century is the great age of English religious verse. Stimulated...