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

Incarnation as Social Protest 111
feminine is not, however, a capitulation to a weakened position. It is, on the contrary, a
startlingly radical attempt to rewrite the nature of power’. 36
The reader see this when at
the trial of Jesus, marking one of the most important moments of the incarnational
paradox, the women recognise Jesus for who he is, and he rewards by reaching out to
them, while rejecting the male figures in authority at his trial, as Susanne Woods has
stated, ‘Lanyer’s identity is with the women of the New Testament who understand a God
who enters his own creation in order to save it’, 37 and shows that ‘God himself has
affirmed women’s moral and spiritual equality or superiority to men’. 38
Before Lanyer
even begins her retelling of the Passion, she directs her readers’ attentions to the honour
that God has bestowed upon women in the past. As she says,
God . . . gave power to wise and virtuous women, to bring downe their
pride and arrogancie. As was cruell Cesarus by the discreet
counsell of noble Deborah, Judge and Prophetesse of Israel: and
resolution of Jael wife of Heber the Kenite: wicked Haman, by
the divine prayers and prudent proceedings of beautifull Hester:
blasphemous Holofernes, by the invincible courage, rare wisdome,
and confident carriage of Judeth: & the unjust Judges, by
the innocency of chast Susanna: with infinite others, which for
brevitie sake I will omit. (31-40) 39
What is interesting about this passage is that all of the illustrations are taken from the Old
Testament and the Apocrypha. So while Lanyer primarily uses the Passion of Christ to
36 Lynette McGrath, Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2002), p. 230.
37 Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford, 1999), p. 150.
38 Lanyer, p. 212.
39 ‘To the Vertuous Reader’