Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Incarnation as Social Protest 98
theotokos and ‘communication of attributes’ will be discussed at length in regards to how
Lanyer uses the suffering and death of Jesus as her argument for emancipation, it is helpful
to first discuss the primary theological approaches to Salve Deus as they currently stand.
Although Lanyer’s Salve Deus is a work of devotional verse, there has been very
little critical work written to try and explain the overarching theology of the book.
According to Barbara K. Lewalski some sections of the books show Lanyer ‘Marshalling
biblical evidence with rhetorical force and flair, she claims that God himself has affirmed
women’s moral and spiritual equality or superiority to men’. 4
The reason for this may be
as Lynette McGrath states that, ‘although the title of Lan[y]er’s poem suggests a fairly
straight-forward project of Christian praise which would have been regarded as appropriate
for a woman of her period, the work itself deviates considerably from the conventional
norms for women’s sacred poetry’. 5
The book’s arrangement is eleven dedicatory pieces
(mostly written to women of high social standing), the central poem ‘Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum’, ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ (a country-house poem), and finally ‘To the
doubtful Reader’ which is a short, prose piece describing the inspiration for the central
poem. The majority of criticism primarily focuses on the dedicatory poems and ‘The
Description of Cooke-ham’ as these poems provide valuable historical insight into the
society of powerful women that existed at the time of the book’s composition, so great
attention has been given to this ‘community of good women’. 6
When the theology of
‘Salve Deus’ is discussed there are largely two topics considered, firstly, that Lanyer
created a ‘new Gospel’, and, secondly, that the book performs an incarnating work in the
readers.
4 Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Of God and Good Women’, in Margaret Patterson Hannay (ed.), Silent But for the
Word (Kent, OH, 1985), p. 212.
5 McGrath, Lynette, ‘“Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe”: Amelia Lanier’s 17 th -Century Feminist Voice’,
Women’s Studies 20.3-4 (1992), 341.
6 ‘Of God and Good Women’, p.207.