We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
argues that Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611) participates in an oppositional brand of religious politics associated with the poem’s female dedicatees. Building on the system of correspondences in which wife was to husband as subject was to ruler, Lanyer issues a call for “libertie” not as protofeminist appeal but as defense of the rights of the Church and the nation at a time when both were threatened by James’s growing use of his royal prerogative. Reviving the woman-centered discourse of the Protestant Reformation, Lanyer champions an ultra-Protestant corrective to masculine tyranny, the true Church of the persecuted elect represented by the oppressed collective of women. In “Cooke-ham,” Lanyer pays tribute to her primary patron and zealous Puritan Margaret Clifford by representing her as a virtuous monarch whose intimate relation to Christ in her rural retreat recalls the Song of Songs and offers pointed anticourt critique.
The female voice was deployed by male and female authors alike to signal emerging discourses of religious and political liberty in early Stuart England. Christina Luckyj's important new study focuses critical attention on writing in multiple genres to show how, in the coded rhetoric of seventeenth-century religious politics, the wife's conscience in resisting tyranny represents the rights of the subject, and the bride's militant voice in the Song of Songs champions Christ's independent jurisdiction. Revealing this gendered system of representation through close analysis of writings by Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Mary Wroth and Anne Southwell, Luckyj illuminates the dangers of essentializing female voices and restricting them to domestic space. Through their connections with parliament, with factional courtiers, or with dissident religious figures, major women writers occupied a powerful oppositional stance in relation to early Stuart monarchs and crafted a radical new politics of the female voice.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.