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

Incarnation as Social Protest 119
This defence of Eve is Lanyer’s great innovation in the Passion tale. In the Gospel
accounts of the story, only one verse in the book of Matthew refers to Pilate’s wife, and it
reads, ‘when [Pilate] was set downe upon the judgement seat, his wife sent to him, saying,
Have thou nothing to do with that juste man: for I have suffered many things this day in a
dreame by reason of him’. 46
Lanyer takes this brief mention of the only person to defend
Christ’s innocence and expands the one sentence to create her apology for Eve. It is with
Pilate’s wife that Lanyer is able to use the concept of the Incarnation and the significance
of Jesus’s life and death as an opportunity to reinterpret the Eden story, and the concept of
original sin, as a means to subvert the social and religious ordering of the sexes. She
places in the mouth of Pilate’s wife the argument that she believes frees women from their
submission to men. Pilate’s wife looks back through scripture and points to the moment
when Adam eats the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as the moment
that original sin is created. As Wendy Miller Roberts reminds, ‘in the Early Modern
period, the Genesis story was a primary locus of discussion regarding the nature of the
world, government, and people’. 47
Moreover, Lanyer is not the first to return to the Eden
tale to redeem women from the curse of subjugation. Cornelius Agrippa used the Garden
of Eden and the Genesis narrative to argue for the supremacy of women in his work Of the
Nobilitie and Excellencie of Womankynde. Esther Gilman Richey has discussed the
similarity of the arguments in Lanyer’s and Agrippa’s writings, 48 but it is interesting to
note that while Agrippa used the Cabala and Gnosticism to justify women, therein making
them into purely spiritual beings, Lanyer’s approach to the same arguments looks to the
humanity of Jesus and the divine and in so doing she is able to redeem women without
46 Matthew 27.19, Lloyd E. Berry (ed.), The Geneva Bible (Peabody, MA, 2007), all quotations from this
edition.
47 Wendy Milller Roberts, ‘Gnosis in Aemilia Lanyer’s “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum”’, Rocky Mountain
Review of Language and Literature 59.2 (2005), 14.
48 Esther Gilman Richey, ‘“To Undoe the Booke”: Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer and the Subversion of
Pauline Authority’, English Literary Renaissance 27.1 (1997), pp. 106-28.