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

Incarnation as Social Protest 117
might save them. As B. R. Siegfried writes, ‘She reminds her reader that Christ’s
suffering, and the blatant cruelty which provoked that suffering, must be traced to
powerful men who abused God, ignored God’s authority, and had no real authority of their
own’. 44
Because the incarnation is a movement from high to low and low to high, divinity
to flesh and flesh brought up to divinity, the incarnational paradox is inherent in the
humble station of Christ before his judges. He is both divine power and weak flesh, the
male judges are powerful humans and ignorant of the divinity standing before them. The
women in the tale, however, are like Christ. They are of a humble station on earth, and
yet, by devotion to Jesus, are brought up to his divine nature. They see Jesus’s divinity
when the men do not. Lanyer makes this explicitly clear when she contrasts the fact that
Jesus remained silent during his trial before Caiaphas and Pilate and Herod, but was
willing to speak to the women who wept for him. Lanyer recounts that Jesus could not be
moved
To speake one word, nor once to lift his eyes
Unto proud Pilate, no nor Herod, king;
By all the Questions that they could devise,
Could make him answere to no manner of thing;
Yet these poore women, by their pitious cries
Did moove their Lord, their Lover, and their King,
To take compassion, turne about, and speake
To them whose hearts were ready now to breake (977-84)
44 B. R. Siegfried, ‘An Apology for Knowledge: Gender and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation in the Works of
Aemilia Lanyer and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’, Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (2001), paragraph 17.