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

Incarnation as Social Protest 102
complex reasoning and arguing, thereby supporting her argument for the equality of the
sexes and making ‘the Lutheran promise of the priesthood of all believers genuinely
meaningful for women’. 18
At the same time, however, she recognises that she cannot be
seen rising above her station and so includes lines which apologise for her attempt, as a
woman, to produce serious theological and philosophical discussion in verse. 19
Lewalski
makes this argument when she states, ‘Aemilia’s several apologias for her poetry excuse it
as faulty and unlearned by reason of her sex, but her disclaimers seem closer to humilitas
topos than to genuine angst.’ 20
Acknowledgment of the paradox of the Incarnation is paramount to a proper
understanding of Lanyer’s central poem, ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’. The Christological
and incarnational focus of the poem has been remarked upon by many, but once again, this
is often used to discuss the community of women or the incarnating aspect of her language
rather than the actual doctrine of the Incarnation and its importance to the power of the
poem’s arguments. 21 Once the centrality of incarnational theology is acknowledged in the
poem, it becomes clear that it is the downward and upward movement of the Divine in
humanity that she uses to undermine the social and sexual politics of her time. That the
creator of the universe would be a weak man suffering and being tried upon false charges
is an absurdity that Lanyer found great strength and liberation in; so it should not be
surprising that she could also realise the bankrupt and illegitimate ordering of social rank
and wealth while still trying to ensure that she would have a voice and place within the
structure of those very ranks of the nobility.
18 Gary Kuchar, ‘Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon’, English Literary Renaissance 37.1 (2007), 48.
19 ‘To the Queenes most Excellent Majesty’ lines 35-6, 61-6; ‘The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the
Countesse Dowager of Pembrooke’ lines 217-24; ‘To the Ladie Anne, Countesse of Dorcet’ line 9; ‘Salve
Deus Rex Judaeorum’ lines 273-88, 319-20.
20 ‘Of God and Good Women’, p. 208.
21 For example see ‘Of God and Good Women’ or Theresa M. DiPasquale’s Refiguring the Sacred Feminine
(Pittsburgh, 2008), pp. 126-37.