Aemilia Lanyer

This chapter argues that links with visual art can help us see the craft, unity, and virtuosity of Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and illumine her formal and aesthetic decisions. Aligning Lanyer’s passion poem with Caravaggio’s Deposition (1600–1604) and The Taking of Christ (1602), we see how Lanyer uses visual language and forceful pointing (positional, temporal, and spatial deictics) to bring her readers into an imagined scene or composition as if it were taking place right in front of them. Her seemingly anomalous three-part form (dedications, passion poem, country-house poem) draws on the Renaissance altarpiece triptych to foreground patrons, frame a central sacred scene, and associate events and people widely separated in space and time. But Lanyer also genders her poetic space, and her rapidly shifting and at times ambiguous deictic markers unsettle the aesthetic, as well as the social-cultural environment in which she is grounded.