Gnosis in Aemilia Lanyer's "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum"

Abstract

The problem of introducing Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum into literary history, Marshall Grossman poses, is that “if, as appears to be the case, Lanyer’s publication had, in fact, no historical consequence, failed to cause anything at all, in what sense (if any) was it a literary historical event?” (“Gendering” 128). This question pierces the center of Lanyer scholarship: if Lanyer did not participate “in any great way in the construction of English literature” (Grossman, “Gendering” 129), what do we do with her? Reconstructing the historical and cultural situation with hopes of discovering her place in the literary community has been one avenue. Another has been using her work to help in the task of negation: “to allow us to hear differently and for the first time the heretical voice that the canonical form suppresses” (Grossman, “Gendering” 140). I utilize biblio-historical research with the intention of “doing” something with Lanyer that is specifically not placing her work within the canon. Instead, her work resides within a literary tradition of sorts, one embracing a counter hermeneutic that undermines the Christian reading of the Bible undergirding English literature. Though Lanyer’s work might not qualify as a literary historical event within the confines of the canon, it participates in the coun ter-religious tradition Gnosticism that has been a subversive force in the literature of Christianity, constructing an alternative to the narrative of Christendom. Kari McBride and John C. Ulreich have convincingly demonstrated that one of the most important influences on Lanyer’s work was Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex), which helps account for Lanyer’s radical arguments in favor of women’s superiority and a reversed sex-gender system as opposed to an egalitarian model. Agrippa’s De nobilitate was birthed from his philosophical skepticism and conviction that every argument can be overturned with a stronger argument to the contrary. The claim of women’s inferiority could be reasonably overturned with arguments for women’s superiority because, for Agrippa, science and reason could not lead to truth, only to opinion and arbitrary custom. Whether he actually believed his arguments that became extremely influential on the development of the