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20484-Article Text-48577-1-10-20131126
20484-Article Text-48577-1-10-20131126
An Interdisciplinary Journal
2013, vol. 8
1
Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History, and Theory:
The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 20. Subsequent
quotations from this essay are cited in the text.
249
250 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Theresa Coletti
2
For an overview that engages essential theoretical discussions of the issue, see
Margreta de Grazia, “The Modern Divide: From Either Side,” Journal of Medieval and
Early Modern Studies 37 (2007): 453–67; for an analysis from the perspective of English
literary studies, see David Matthews, “The Medieval Invasion of Early-Modern England,”
New Medieval Literatures 10 (2008): 223–44. Julia Lupton discusses what is at stake in
debates about the valences of “Renaissance” and “early modern” in Afterlives of the Saints:
Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1996), 4–6.
3
See the extensive bibliography in Matthews, “Medieval Invasion.”
252 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Theresa Coletti
the impact of print and of the Protestant reformation, the increased vol-
ume of women’s writing in the early modern period, and greater numbers
of known, named women authors.4
A more deliberate look at women’s literary culture in medieval and
early modern England, however, can identify reasons to engage in remem-
bering rather than forgetting. Despite the differences that I have just noted,
one can easily point to fundamental similarities. Scholars of medieval and
early modern women, for example, collectively recognize that, across the
period divide, women’s participation in literate culture involves a definition
of literacy more capacious than an individual’s ability to read and write.
Communal and mediated forms of reading and writing characterize the
literate practices of both medieval and early modern women. This broadly
distributed conception of literary activities, especially those involving textu-
al production, also informs medieval and early modern ideas of authorship.
Margaret Ezell’s observation that we see “a much livelier literary landscape
for early modern women” “[o]nce we leave behind the notion of authorship
as an act defined by solitary alienation and the text as an isolated literary
landmark” just as readily applies to the scene of medieval women’s literate
activities.5 Across the period divide, the material conditions of women’s
reading and writing, especially the persistence of manuscript culture well
after the advent of print, provided opportunities for collaborative creation
and reception of texts.6
4
For a more theoretical approach to the woman writer across the medieval and
early modern divide, see Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English
Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
5
Margaret J. M. Ezell, “Women and Writing,” in A Companion to Early Modern
Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 77–94; quote on
p. 92. See also Margaret W. Ferguson, “Renaissance Concepts of the ‘Woman Writer,’” in
Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 143–68; Julia Boffey, “Women Authors and Women’s Literacy in
Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–
1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 159–82.
6
For example, see Melinda Alliker Rabb, “The Work of Women in the Age
of Electronic Reproduction: The Canon, Early Modern Women Writers, and the
Postmodern Reader,” in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, 339–60.
Did Women Have a Renaissance? 253
Joan Kelly focused her analysis on secular elites and their literary
texts, but much of the scholarship following in her wake has established
that attending to medieval and early modern women’s religious culture
and experience can produce different answers to her question.7 English
studies over the past few decades has recognized the religious sphere as
a major resource for medieval and early modern women’s construction of
spiritual subjectivities as well as texts.8 Cultural productions by women
in that sphere, I contend, contribute compelling evidence of the reinven-
tion, appropriation, endurance, and revival of the medieval within the
early modern that marks the new thinking about periodization in English
literary history. Recent studies by medievalists David Wallace and Nancy
Bradley Warren illustrate the promise of this revisionary approach.9
Whereas Wallace tracks correspondences between the lives and literary
projects of heroic, historical religious women across the medieval and early
modern divide, Warren argues that the incarnational pieties, epistemolo-
gies, textualities, and politics of medieval English religious women furnish
an important continuity with early modern women. I would like to sketch
some implications of Warren’s groundbreaking study by focusing on one
piece of her inter-period tapestry of early English women’s religious and
textual cultures, Aemelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611).
The religion represented in Salve Deus is a hybrid creation. It thus
resembles other features of a work that, generically, frames a Passion
meditation with dream vision and panegyric, a work that can employ, with
comparable verve, images of Cleopatra and the Crucifixion. As Lanyer
7
So Kelly acknowledges in “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes,”
in Women, History, and Theory, 68–69.
8
For an excellent overview of recent medieval materials, see David Bell, “What
Nuns Read: The State of the Question,” in The Culture of English Monasticism, ed. James
G. Clark (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2007), 113–33. For a useful assessment
of what religion means for the study of early modern women’s literary culture, see Diane
Willen, “Religion and the Construction of the Feminine,” in A Companion to Early
Modern Women’s Writing, 22–39.
9
David Wallace, Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory 1347–1645 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011); Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word: Female
Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
254 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Theresa Coletti
10
On Lanyer’s complex confessionalism, see Warren, Embodied Word, 12;
Catherine Keohane, “‘That blindest weakenesse be not over-bold’: Aemilia Lanyer’s
Radical Unfolding of the Passion,” ELH 64 (1997): 359–90; Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A
Renaissance Woman Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 126–62, 186–90;
and Achsah Guibbory, “The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred,” in
Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington, KY:
University of Kentucky Press, 1998), 191–211.
11
Warren, Embodied Word, 52. For the complete discussion, see 47–59, 260–62.
Did Women Have a Renaissance? 255
to tell and retell that story.12 Her expansion of biblical roles, such as that of
Pilate’s wife, and her sympathy with other subject positions, such as that of
the Virgin Mary, repurpose rhetorical strategies of late medieval devotional
texts in various genres. Lanyer’s commentary on the silent Christ’s treat-
ment by his judges and persecutors echoes the implicit critique of these
figures in medieval English dramatic stagings of the Passion; the bibli-
cal plays of York that come to mind in this context, like Salve Deus, also
include an attempt by Pilate’s wife to stop the Crucifixion. By interpreting
scripture along gendered lines and fashioning novel readings for the ben-
efit of women and humanity, Lanyer tacitly stakes out her place in a prior
tradition of medieval women, English and continental, who analogously
occupied sites of religious experience, speech, and even writing to make
their claim on cultural and spiritual authority.13 Whether or not Lanyer
had explicit knowledge of this tradition, her Salve Deus recalls — and
renews — a past that likewise recognized the creative and critical potency
of women’s speech and writing from a religious ground.
My inclusion of Lanyer in this tradition gains support from other
features that link Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum to the circumstances and the
idiom of medieval women’s literate cultures. These include Lanyer’s inter-
est throughout the work in female communities.14 It would be difficult
to overestimate the importance that Lanyer accords to communities of
women. The verses to friends, patrons, and “all vertuous ladies in generall”
(12–16) that lead up to Lanyer’s poetic account of the Passion express
her desire for an actual society of like-minded women that in some sense
12
Excellent analyses of what Lanyer does with biblical story can be found
in Keohane, “Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding”; Guibbory, “Gospel According to
Aemilia”; and Janel Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” in
Grossman, Aemilia Lanyer, 99–127.
13
Guibbory’s notice of Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on medieval holy women
makes this connection briefly; “Gospel According to Aemilia,” 207. For an overview of
that tradition, see Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden, eds. Medieval Holy Women
in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). Lanyer, to be sure,
hardly qualifies as a “holy woman,” and her distinctly literary ambitions also set her apart
from religious women speaking and writing well before her time. It is, rather, what religion
affords to women’s expression that interests me here.
14
Warren, Embodied Word, 50.
256 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Theresa Coletti
15
Karen K. Jambeck, “Patterns of Women’s Literary Patronage: England, 1200–ca.
1475,” in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCash (Athens,
GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 228–65; Carol M. Meale, “‘. . . alle the bokes
that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch’: Lay Women and their Books in Late Medieval
England,” in Meale, Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, 128–58. On Lanyer’s
relation to her imagined community, see Kimberly Coles, “Aemilia Lanyer’s Passion for a
Professional Poetic Vocation,” in Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 152.
16
See Warren, Embodied Word, 47–50. Lanyer’s metaphors textualizing Christ’s
body become figures of her own text. For example, see Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 7, line
85; 17, lines 8–12; 31, lines 217–22; 35, lines 27–31, etc. Here I cite Aemelia Lanyer,
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993).
17
Felicity Riddy, “‘Women talking about the things of God’: A Late Medieval Sub-
culture,” in Meale, Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, 104–27.
18
On the elite population and literary culture of Campsey Ash, see Jocelyn
Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture c. 1150–1300: Virginity
and Its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially chap. 1; and
Virginia Blanton, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695–
1615 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), chap. 4. Both
Did Women Have a Renaissance? 257
Sweet Jesus . . . was abandoned by all except women. The entire-
ty of the faith remained in a single woman. Therefore anyone
who defames women is extremely foolish, if only because of the
reverence required by the Queen of Heaven, in memory of her
goodness, which was so noble and worthy that She was elected
Keohane (“Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding,” 366) and Warren (Embodied Word, 51)
link Lanyer’s vision of female community with that of nuns.
19
Carla Ricci, Mary Magdalene and Many Others: Women Who Followed Jesus,
trans. Paul Burns (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994).
20
Mueller, “Feminist Poetics,” 102–4.
258 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Theresa Coletti
to carry the son of God. God the Father conferred great honor
on women by choosing a woman to be his wife and mother. . . .
[And] he who mocks women . . . can find no instance where
the good Jesus reproached women; rather he loved and valued
them.21
21
Christine de Pizan, The God of Love’s Letter, in The Selected Writings of Christine
de Pizan, trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee and ed. Blumenfeld-
Kosinski (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 25.
22
See Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and
Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 155–66.
23
See The Revelations of Saint Elizabeth in Women’s Writing in Middle English, ed.
Alexandra Barrett (London: Longman, 1992), 76–83.
Did Women Have a Renaissance? 259
24
Warren, Embodied Word, 12.