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

Incarnation as Social Protest 109
Half of that sacrifice which ransomed us? (30-2)
As Donne sees Mary as a co-redemptrix with God for the salvation of humanity, so too
does Lanyer, and then we also see that through the use of the Incarnation, theotokos, and
the ‘communication of attributes’ the work of the Mother Mary is moved beyond the
reproach of Protestant hesitations about focussing on Mary as Lanyer reaches back to the
pre-Roman Catholic era of Christianity and shows that God used lowly women in an
elevated manner in the time period in which Protestants claim was the true church, a point
that Gary Kuchar misses when writing of the Virgin Mary’s presence in the poem. 32
Although the use of these two theological concepts in devotional poetry is not exclusive to
Lanyer’s work, the way in which she uses the concepts is hers alone. She uses orthodox
theology and a literal interpretation of the Bible to substantiate all of her claims for social
change, and since the established church of her day insisted on orthodoxy and a literal
reading of the Scriptures, her arguments gain great weight through the fact that one is
continuously led back to Scripture by her, so to disagree with Lanyer is to not only quibble
with her arguments but to quibble with the Word of God. Therefore, from the very
beginning of the poem, ‘Salve Deus’, the reader is presented with a steady movement from
Lanyer’s contemporary environment back through history to the central point of
Christianity, the life of Jesus.
Lanyer’s devotional text moves the act of devotion out from her readers’ hearts and
into the greater society as a whole; it is a movement from the intangible to the tangible,
and in this it mirrors the movement of Jesus in the Incarnation. This movement of the
Incarnate Jesus that Lanyer presents to her reader is the movement from heaven to death,
32 Gary Kuchar, ‘Aemilia Lanyer and the Virgin’s Swoon: Theology and Iconography in Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum’, English Literary Renaissance 37.1 (2007), 47-73.