SOURCE: Rogers, John. “The Passion of a Female Literary Tradition: Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum.” Huntington Library Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2000): 435-46.

In the following essay, Rogers delineates the social and cultural conditions that influenced the creation of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and regards the volume as an “unprecedented achievement.”

As the first significant book of original poetry published by an Englishwoman, Aemilia Lanyer's 1611 volume of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, bears a considerable burden. The volume self-consciously assumes the task of delivering to posterity a new literary tradition, a newly public, because published, tradition of poetry by women. Intimately tied to this unprecedented achievement is the stunning claim for her poetic vocation that Lanyer makes in that volume's title poem, a narration of the Passion, the events surrounding the crucifixion of Christ. Literary history has traditionally assumed Lanyer's younger contemporary, John Milton, to be the first...