Amelia Lanyer - Lecture notes 22 PDF

Preview

Summary

These notes are from Literary Periods with Sarah Hasselbach studying the 16th and 17th centuries of literature....

Description

Aemilia Lanyer 1569-1645 Excerpt from Salv Deus Rex Judaeorum (981) ● Title=Hail God, King of the Jews ○ She got the title in a dream ● To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty ○ Audience: court ladies ○ Patron: Countess of Cumberland ○ Addressed to Anne of Denmark, James I’s queen ○ Nature and femininity ○ She is worried that her poetry of praise will not do the queen proper justice ○ Talks about Eve’s apology/defense: like the original woman? Why is she apologizing? ■ “And if it do, why are poor women blamed,/Or by more faulty men so much defamed” (77-78). ○ She is unworthy of the queen’s praise, but she wants her to bless the book ■ She wants to be pardoned because she wants to do something (praise Anne of Denmark) that others could do better ■ “And pardon me, fair queen, though I presume/To do that which so many better can;/Not that I learning to myself assume,/Or that I would compare with any man:/But as they are scholars, and by art do write,/So Nature yields my soul a sad delight” (145-50). ○ The act of writing the queen’s worth is to fail at expression and therefore cover her perfection ■ “To write your worth, which no pen can express,/Were but t’eclipse your fame, and make it less” ((162-62). ● To the Virtuous Reader ○ She talks about how women have to uphold virtue ■ “It is the property of some women, not only to emulate the virtues and perfections of the rest, but also by all their powers of ill speaking, to eclipse the brightness of their deserved fame” (982). ■ “All women deserve not to be blamed though some forgetting they are women themselves, and in danger to be condemned by the words of their own mouths, fall into so great an error, as to speak unadvisedly against the rest of their sex; which if it be true, I am persuaded they can show their own imperfection in nothing more: and therefore could wish [...] they would refer such points of folly, to be practiced by evil-disposed men, who forgetting they were born of women, nourished of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world, and a final end of them all” (982). ■ God gave power to wise and virtuous women to bring down man’s pride and arrogance ■ Jesus was also born from a woman, and healed, pardoned, and comforted by women ■ In his last hour of death, he was taken care of and disposed by women ■ She wants men to speak “reverently of our sex” (983). ● Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women ○ Narrator presents her apology--Eve is not speaking here ○ Pilot’s wife wrote to her husband to save Jesus ○ Doesn’t want women to glory in men’s fall--Adam’s fall ■ “Let not us women glory in men’s fall,/Who had power given to overrule us all” (15-16). ○ Eve was simply good and could not see the harm that was coming ○ We blame her but what about adam ■ He was more guilty than she was ■ “What weakness offered, strength might have refused” (35). ■ Adam has been around longer than Eve--Eve is a product of Adam ○ Women must endure it all ■ The serpent did not trick adam ■ And if she did have evil--it is initially an evil from Adam because she came from him ● The Description of Cookham

○ ○ ○

For Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland and celebrates royal estate leased to her brother grace= god’s and the countess’s Spends a long time describing beauty in the natural world

Class Discussion ● To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty ○ Men are most often to blame in what is wrong with society while women are blamed for their problems ○ Self-criticism: she doesn’t believe in her own grace, always claims how she is less than the queen ○ Showing how women are undervalued, but also trying to please the queen and princess, but also putting herself down

○

●

○ Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women

●

○ Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum ○ Lanyer’s protestantism ○ Pious project de-emphasized ■ Her piety was always in question ■ This title is the most ostentatiously religious title in any poem we have looked at ■ She is no one-trick pony ■ No one questions the men about their piety ■ Critical awareness… ○ Frontmatter ■ Valued the opinion of women and wanted to surround herself to them ■ Not the route to quick publication ○ Original title page for Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum ○ “To the Virtuous Reader” ■ Speaking to women ■ Women should get credit too ■ Even Christ honored and valued women! ○ “To the Doubtful Reader” ■ She got the title in a dream ■ Don’t blame her for the title, it was granted in a dream ■ Kind of like being ordained by god to be your monarch (Queen Elizabeth) ○ “Eve’s Apology” ○ “The Description of Cooke-ham”: country-house poem genre...