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

Incarnation as Social Protest 123
“Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke | From Eves faire hand, as from a
learned book”’. 58 Lanyer realises that this reasoning may be insufficient for her case, so
she then contrasts Eve’s, and thereby women’s, first eating of the apple with men putting
Jesus to death. Pilate’s wife says
Her weakenesse did the Serpents words obay;
But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray.
Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die,
Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit;
All mortall sinnes that doe for vengeance crie,
Are not to be compared unto it:
If many worlds would altogether trie,
By all their sinnes the wrath of God to get;
This sinne of yours, surmounts them all as farre
As doth the Sunne, another little starre. (815-24)
Lanyer makes the point that women did indeed take the first bite of the apple, but men are
going to kill God – surely the greater sin. 59
Looking to Luther once again, one reads
Anyone who kills a man may be called a murderer of a being who belongs to God
and in whom God is present, but he who kills Christ has killed God’s Son, indeed,
God and the Lord of Glory himself. 60
58 Su Fang Ng, ‘Aemilia Lanyer and the Politics of Praise’, ELH 67 (2000), 438.
59 Theresa M. DiPasquale, ‘Woman’s Desire for Man in Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, Journal of
English and German Philology 99.3 (2000), 358; ‘A Woman with Saint Peter’s Keys?’, p. 332.