SOURCE: "Imagining Female Community: Aemilia Lanyer's Poems," in Writing Women in Jacobean England, Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 213-41.

In the following excerpt, Lewalski analyzes the three parts of Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: the dedications, the title poem, and her country-house poem, "The Description of Cooke-ham."

Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of original poems, and to make an overt bid for patronage as a male poet of the era might, though in distinctively female terms. Her volume of (ostensibly) religious poems, published in 1611, was entitled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. The author identifies herself on the title page as a married gentlewoman whose status is defined through her husband's position as an officer and court musician: "Mistris Aemilia Lanyer, Wife to Captaine Alfonso Lanyer Servant to the Kings Majestic" Besides containing some good poems and passages, the volume is of particular interest...