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

Incarnation as Social Protest 126
power, rather, like Christ, a person’s greatness comes from the recognition of the
Incarnation.
While much of the critical attention given to Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum has focussed on the introductory and concluding poems, it is the Passion of
Jesus that is at the centre of the book, and it is the person of Jesus who is at the centre of
her arguments for liberty. In her poems, it is the Incarnation that must be the focus of
attention, or else her message is lost. The significance of one person being fully God and
fully human must have great significance in the lives of those who follow the Incarnation.
She rightly realises the importance of theotokos and the ‘communication of attributes’, and
through her retelling of the story, she forces her readers to confront how they must respond
to the Gospels if they believe that they are a record of the life and death of the Incarnation.
Through her insistence upon the continued applicability of the life of Christ to her own
time, she not only incarnates the Word to her readers but she also incarnates society as a
whole. Aemilia Lanyer’s presentation of the Incarnation is one, as with Donne, that places
great emphasis upon the physical nature of God in man, but instead of trying to create an
assurance of the permanent unity of individuals after death, she tries to create unity and
equality in her own time through the treatment of the body of the Incarnate Jesus.
Likewise, the redemption of the physical through the actions of Jesus allows her access to
the Divine, because as she writes, ‘the Weaker thou doest seeme to be | In Sexe, or Sence,
the more his Glory shines’.