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

Incarnation as Social Protest 112
make her argument, she also ensures that her argument can be supported by the Genesis
tale and various other passages in the Old Testament, thereby showing that the theme of
her argument can be found to run throughout Scripture. This then is a devotional text that
also acts as a theological and political treatise on the place of women in society. Lanyer is
creating a text that appropriates the devotional poetry genre for her attack on society, but
in doing so she still ensures that she surrounds her writings with the texts and people that
can both protect her arguments from attack and give them greater legitimacy in the public
sphere.
The very layout of the ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’ is an attempt to begin to shift
the reader’s understanding of what devotional and dedicatory verse can look like. The
narrative poem begins in a manner that does not seem revolutionary, and in this it seems as
if the structure of ‘Salve Deus’ is created to protect Lanyer. There is a bookend device
being used in the poem as Lanyer frames her Passion tale with commendatory sections
which, like the dedicatory poems, praise the wealthy – in particular, Lady Margaret,
Countess Dowager of Cumberland. The poem opens with a few lines in honour of the
memory of Queen Elizabeth and then proceeds to praise Lady Margaret, and subsequently
dedicates the work to her. The dedication to the Countess begins in the normal fashion of
a compliment. Lanyer begins by calling attention to the greatness of Lady Margaret, but
then she quickly moves to a long sequence of lines in which it is the greatness of God, and
more specifically Christ in heaven that becomes the focus of praise. While it would be
easy to read these lines as Lanyer equating the greatness of the Countess to God in heaven,
there is in fact something much more subtle taking place. Lanyer is not equating Lady
Margaret with God; rather, she is preparing both her and the reader to move from a place
in which the physical and material is a place of power worthy of praise to a place where
only the immaterial – such as personal virtue or God in heaven – is to be considered