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

Incarnation as Social Protest 115
kindness and restraint and love in time of great duress. What marks Jesus as great is his
unquantifiable graces. And so the meditation on the Incarnate God‘s trial is prefaced with
a note of distrust in the physical world and its ranking of individuals’ importance. It is this
note of distrust that Lanyer hopes will move her readers, especially the Countess, from an
understanding of Christ’s life that affirms the current social structure, to one which calls it
all into question, and then proceeds to level it, for ‘yet the Weaker thou doest seeme to be |
In Sexe, or Sence, the more his Glory shines’. (289-90) Lanyer creates a horizontal
society where the only vertical relationship is between humanity and God, and through the
incarnational work of God, she also creates a level spiritual society in which all believers
can approach God and know that he will answer them, no matter what strife or trials exist.
Because of the incarnation, God is now both one of them and above them, leading them up
to him.
In her retelling of Jesus’s death, Lanyer presents Lady Margaret with a Jesus who
is fully human and God, who has been submissive to women, and who has continued to be
nurtured by women just as he has cared for and nurtured women, arriving at the moment of
greatest suffering in his life. At the point of the Passion tale, Jesus is at his most humble
and his most human, and it is here that the gender lines are most clearly defined by Lanyer.
As Mary Ellen Lamb has said, ‘Salve rereads the passion as a narrative of gender relations
– of continuing and characteristic male cruelty to Christ and other innocent victims,
especially women’. 42
The men persecute, abandon, and kill Jesus. The women weep for
him, defend him, and are rewarded with the first sight of the resurrected Lord. As Lanyer
says,
When spightfull men with torments did oppresse
42 Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Patronage and Class in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, in Mary E.
Burke, et al (eds.), Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain (Syracuse,
2000), pp. 49-50.