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

Incarnation as Social Protest 108
when Lanyer states that ‘without the assistance of man, beeing free from originall and all
other sinnes, from the time of his conception’ she reminds the reader that it is because
Jesus was born of a virgin, conceived without the aid of a man, that he is able to be free
from original sin. It is here, before the main poem begins, that the reader sees Lanyer
identifying men, rather than women, as the primary culprits responsible for the original sin
that required the death and resurrection of Jesus to overcome. Lanyer also ties this first
century identification of women with Jesus to her own seventeenth-century world when
she, as Helen Wilcox states that, ‘In the case of Lanyer’s “Salve Deus,” it is the countess
of Cumberland’s heart that is said to contain Christ’s “perfect picture” (108) drawn by the
poet’s pen. The countess’s role in the poem is therefore almost comparable to the function
of the Virgin Mary: she conveys the incarnate Christ to the world’. 30
When the narrative
of Jesus’s life is then returned to in the ‘Salve Deus’, there has already been this seed
planted in which the unique relationship of God to the socially inferior women will be
reinterpreted.
While the two theological beliefs of ‘communication of attributes’ and theotokos
are not often discussed in relation to devotional poetry, their appearance in the poetry of
the time is not unique to Lanyer as it also can be found in some of John Donne’s Divine
Poems, such as the lines ‘Whose womb was a strange Heav’n, for there | God clothed
himself, and grew,’ (41-2) 31 or in ‘Good Friday: Made as I was Riding Westward that Day’
in which Donne sees Mary as a kind of co-redeemer with God,
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was God’s partner here, and furnished thus
30 Helen Wilcox, ‘Lanyer and the Poetry of Land and Devotion’, in Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and
Garret A. Sullivan, Jr., Early Modern English Poetry (Oxford, 2007), p. 244.
31 ‘A Litany’ in Robin Robbins (ed.), The Complete Poems of John Donne. (London, 2010). All quotations
from Donne’s poetry are from this edition unless otherwise stated.