Aemilia Bassano Lanier (also spelled Lanyer) is the heroine of my new novel The Dark Lady’s Mask. Born in 1569, she was the highly educated daughter of an Italian court musician—a man thought to have been a Marrano, a secret Jew living under the guise of a Christian convert. She may have also been the mysterious, musical Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets, although most academic scholars dispute this. What we do know for a fact and what really matters is that she was the first woman in England to pursue a career as a published poet.
In Italy women such as Isabella Andreini published plays and poetry on a wide variety of secular subjects, but in England Lanier effectively had only one option—to write devotional Protestant verse. Her English literary predecessors, Anne Locke and Mary Sidney, wrote poetic meditations on the Psalms.
But Lanier turned this tradition of women’s religious poetry on its head. Published in 1611, her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail God, King of the Jews) is a radical, ground-breaking tour de force, a searing vindication of the rights of women—and of herself as a woman writer.
In this epic narrative poem, Lanier describes the passion of Christ from the viewpoint of the women in the Gospels. In comparing the sufferings of women in male-dominated culture to the sufferings of Christ, she upholds women as Christ’s true imitators.
Most significantly Salve Deus is dedicated and addressed exclusively to women, and is prefaced by nine praise poems dedicated to the royal and aristocratic women whose patronage Lanier sought. She also included a dedication in praise of all women.
Having thus established her female audience, Lanier attacks the theological roots of male domination, namely the blame attached to Eve—and by extension all women—for humanity’s fall from grace. In “Eve’s Apology in Defence of Women,” Lanier argues that the original sin was actually Adam’s for accepting the forbidden fruit. For he, unlike Eve, was fully aware of the consequences. Out of selfishness and desire for power, Adam let Eve take the fall.
If Eve did err, it was for knowledge sake,
The fruit being fair persuaded him to fall:
No subtle serpent’s falsehood did betray him,
If he would eat it, who had the power to stay him?
Not Eve, whose fault was only too much love.
Lanier contends that male culpability in crucifying Christ far exceeds Eve’s tragic misunderstanding. Therefore there is no moral or divine cause to justify women’s subjugation. Here Lanier explicitly champions women’s rights and freedoms:
Let us have our Liberty again,
And challenge to yourselves no Sovereignty,
You came not into the world without our pain,
Make that a bar against your cruelty;
Your fault being greater, why should you disdain
Our being your equals, free from tyranny?
If one weak woman simply did offend,
This sin of yours hath no excuse, nor end.
Lanier’s poetry lays claim to women’s God-given call to rise up against male arrogance, just as the strong women of the Old Testament rose up against their oppressors. While wooing her highborn female patrons, Lanier uses the scriptures to assert a sense of social egalitarianism that foreshadows the Levellers and the Quaker religious movement that emerged a few decades after her poetry’s publication. “God makes both even, the cottage with the throne,” Lanier writes in her dedicatory poem to her former pupil, Lady Anne Clifford. (Clifford was herself a feminist firebrand who fought long and hard to regain her properties after her father disinherited her because of her sex. Anne Clifford was an ancestor of Vita Sackville West and the historical inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando.)
Lanier’s book ends with “A Description of Cookham,” an elegiac ode to the country house where she lived for a time with Anne Clifford and her mother Margaret, who was Lanier’s greatest patron. Cookham was the blessed refuge where Lanier received both her spiritual epiphany and the confirmation of her vocation as a poet.
Farewell (sweet Cookham) where I first obtained
Grace from the Grace where perfect Grace remained,
And where the Muses gave their full consent,
I should have the power the virtuous to content.
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum is a corpus of poetry celebrating female and divine goodness, penned by a poet who found her own sense of salvation in a community of women who supported her and believed in her.
Mary Sharratt’s book Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen, won the 2013 Nautilus Gold Award, Better Books for a Better World. Her forthcoming novel, The Dark Lady’s Mask, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April 2016. Visit Mary’s website.
Last month I came face-to-face with a fisher.
The elevation difference brought us face-to-face. I found myself staring into a fierce, furry-brown, teddy bear face. It exuded a stout confidence and an instinctual danger thumped. Eye-to-eye, neither of us moved. What was this thing? Suddenly from the reservoir of memory a recognition emerged—it looked like a wolverine. But wolverines aren’t in these woods, right? Fifteen unflinching seconds passed and then it leapt back into the woods. I stood mesmerized by the beauty and surprise of it—this was not something ordinary. 
I have never understood the logic behind sexism. Why is half (or so) of the human race better than the other half? Of course, patriarchy and patriarchal religious traditions offer various seemingly logical reasons, sometimes even divine explanations for the inequality between the sexes. Still, the –isms of patriarchy, whatever their “reasons” or perhaps better excuses, puzzle me.
There are three vicious circles: patriarchy, samsara and wanton destruction of environment. All three lead ultimately to annihilation of life. All three are incredibly difficult to escape. One of the reasons for this difficulty is that there are pay-offs. Someone or something benefits from keeping the cycles going.
Dear Friends,
1 The beginning could not be reckoned in the time before time was reckoned. 2 For, what was had yet to know itself, and it could not know itself alone. 3 But, for its love, it could not be known. So it was that the beginning that could be reckoned was not the beginning but the beginning of loving, which was the beginning of knowing, which was the beginning of being. 4 And, in that beginning, a great ellipsis had already become of particle and light, and the particle and light thrummed through darkness forming a whole body. 5 Of the great ellipsis of particle and light, a body and a body and a body were formed, in and of the great ellipsis, thrumming through darkness. 6 The thrumming ellipsis pushed forward so far that its particle and light extended beyond itself and then beyond itself and then beyond itself, as though it were to separate, but it did not. 7 A whole body was formed, which was the beginning of the simultaneity of what was and what is and what will have been. 
As I write yet another email apologizing in advance that I will miss a deadline, I debate whether to provide a reason. Should I write that I am struggling with sometimes crippling anxiety, that I have physical symptoms related to that anxiety and to depression? Or should I stick with “some health issues”? Or is even that too much information? Is it better not to provide a reason at all? 
Last week I went out to eat with a group of insightful scholars at the American Academy Religion 2015 Conference 
One tradition I created 20 years ago was the tradition of “Pie Day” with a good friend of mine. We realized this year that we have been doing that for 20 years! Now that is my “tradition” and that is my “family.” We bake an inordinate amount of pies on Pie Day—a very specific recipe—green apple with golden raisin reduction— and people and friends come over. We celebrate. We eat pie with cheese (a New England tradition) and salad- I call it “a French meal” 
Both my sisters claim to have no regrets about their lives. I do. It’s not so much that I regret specific things that happened to me in my life or even some of the particular choices I made although both the “happenings” and “choices” are a result of a larger regret. Nor do I spend much time going over it all in my mind. I don’t believe that listing all the “if onlys” and ruminating about “wrong turns” is productive.
Feminism and Religion 