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

Incarnation as Social Protest 120
stripping them of their humanity, because it is the flesh and the human that is the source of
the justification of their sex and the means by which they are able to identify with God. So
in the midst of Lanyer’s retelling of the central story of the Christian religion for the
purpose of social revolution, she also includes a brief narrative discussing one of the other
primary biblical tales for social ordering, and in this she does not support the theological
view of her day which blamed women for causing the fall of all humanity and nature.
Instead, she shows men to be the greater transgressors.
The movement of Lanyer’s ‘Salve’ is a movement towards ‘Eves Apologie’, rather
than the death and resurrection of Christ, and as Catherine Keohane states of Lanyer’s
insertion of extra-biblical narration such as the ‘Apologie’, ‘These are not “digressions”
but Lanyer’s attempts to involve women in the story, and moreover, to declare that women
tried to change its outcome’. 49
But where Keohane is correct in seeing the ‘Apologie’ as
something other than a ‘digression’, she forgets that women were already in the biblical
narrative, and what Lanyer does is not ‘involv[ing] women in the story’, but emphasising
their involvement and in so doing, highlighting the recognition by women of the Incarnate
God in their presence. In addition to this, Lanyer’s ability to include a discussion of the
origin of sin at the point of its defeat shows that she is like Pilate’s wife and the women
who weep for Jesus, because she has seen the work of the Incarnation when the men of her
own time continue to misconstrue the Passion tale and the biblical Gospels in such a way
that allows for the oppression of women, and so it is in the ‘Apologie’ that Lanyer’s
rhetoric becomes most direct. As Lyn Bennett states, ‘Certainly in its dramatic
presentation, and perhaps also in the intensity and directness of its argument, “Eves
Apologie” is unique within Lanyer’s volume’. 50 And it is this directness that allows Lanyer
49 ‘“That Blindest Weakenesse be not Over-Bold”’, p. 363.
50 Lyn Bennett, Women Writing of Divinest Things (Pittsburgh, 2004), p. 207.