"Owning" in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum ("Hail God King of the Jews")

Abstract

S CHOLARS often discuss the literary significance of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaxorum in terms of its importance as the L_Jfirst original reinterpretation of scripture published by a woman in English. This work also functions as an important contribution to the early modern querelle desfemmes, the longstanding controversy over women's ontological and social status. The woman controversy, which has its roots in writings of the fourteenth century, was one outgrowth of humanist thought at a time when ideas about gender were taking shape within a shifting landscape of the Reformation, with its changes in laws concerning property rights and inheritance, its burgeoning print cul ture, and its increasing distinction between public and private spheres of activity. Debaters in the woman controversy frequently based their invectives or encomia on biblical and classical models of behavioral ideals, citing exempla of exceptionally strong or lascivious women.' One popular argument, for example, was that women are innately immoral as typified by Eve's role in the biblical account of original sin. Lanyer's work, published in i6ii, is a tour de force in the midst of this contro versy; Salve Deus is a spirited and lively rebuttal of standard misogy nist arguments that women are inferior and subject to men by God's will according to the Bible. Salve Deus engages key Christian tenets in