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

Incarnation as Social Protest 99
The concept that Lanyer creates a ‘new Gospel’ with her book, one which
overthrows the patriarchal and canonical Gospels found in the Bible, is a problematic
theory. Although others have expounded upon this idea, the primary arguments for this
belief can be found in Achsah Guibbory’s essay ‘The Gospel According to Aemilia’. 7
While the title poem, ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, does appear to be an unique
contribution to seventeenth-century devotional poetry, it is difficult to read it as a ‘new
Gospel’ of Christ, most especially as it does not actually tell the Gospel story, rather only
one episode from Jesus’s life. Ultimately, Guibbory conflates the concepts of ‘inspiration’
and ‘revelation’. When Lanyer describes receiving the title for the poem in a dream (as
she does in ‘To the doubtful Reader’ when she relates that the she understood the dream as
‘a significant token, that I was appointed to performe this Worke’) 8 she is claiming divine
inspiration for her poem, but she is not claiming that it is divine revelation. Divine
inspiration is akin to an artistic muse, whereas divine revelation ‘does not mean merely the
transmission of a body of knowledge, but the personal self-disclosure of God within
history'. 9
The greatest point of revelation then is the Incarnation, in which Jesus was the
physical revelation of God to humanity, but this revelation is also found in the ‘Word’, and
the Bible then acts as written ‘self-disclosure’. This is of the utmost importance for
Lanyer’s ‘Salve Deus’ because the power of her arguments comes from the fact that the
Gospel narratives ‘reveal’ God as much as Jesus did when he walked the earth. It is vital
for Lanyer that the narratives provided by Scripture reveal God, because it is through the
text that she will argue that the treatment of Jesus is equal to how one treats God. Lanyer
7 Achsah Guibbory, ‘The Gospel According to Aemilia’, in Marshall Grossman (ed.), Aemilia Lanyer
(Lexington, KY, 1998), pp. 191-211; Catherine Keohane, ‘“That Blindest Weakenesse be not Over-Bold”:
Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding of the Passion’, English Literary History 64.2 (1997), 359-389; Kari
Boyd McBride and John C. Ulreich, ‘Answerable Styles: Biblical Poetics in the Poetry of Lanyer and
Milton’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100.3 (2001), 333-354.
8 Susanne Woods (ed.), The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (Oxford, 1993), p. 139. All quotations of Lanyer’s
works are from this edition.
9 Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology, 4 th ed., (Oxford, 2007), p. 154.