Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Writing Women in Jacobean England.

Cambridge: Harvard UP,

1998. Print.
Mistress of Henry Cary, Lord Hunson, Lord Chamberlain(Lewalski 241).
217- Lanyers vulnerability, given her insecure social and economic
status, to ill usage by fortune and by the men in her life
woman of considerable daring, independence of mind, and resource,
especially in her self-definition as a poet worthy of patronage and
publication.
(Lewalski 221)
her dedications rewrite the institution of patronage in female terms,
transforming the relationships assumed in the male patronage system
into an ideal community.
the patrons virtue descends through the female line, from mothers to
DaughtersQueen Anne and Princess Elizabeth and relected upon
Lanyer.
The qualities Lanyer associates with her gallery of good women
heroic virtue, extraordinary learning, devotion to the Muses, and high
poetic achievementimplicitly challenge patriarchal ideology and help
to justify her own undertaking
excusal of poems a ploy the humilitas topos
uses the fact that she, as a woman writer is an anomaly, something
seldom seen (Queen 3) although her focus on diuinest things
(Queen 4) is not as religious poetry is often considered the highest
genre, this claim gives an honorific, rather than a restrictive value to
the widespread assumption that women , if they write at all, should
treat religious subjects. (SEE FN 40 CHAPTER 8)
parallels her position as a woman poet with the worthiness of choice of
female subject.
Queen 6 line, pentameter stanza a b a b c c
Queen is another Juno, Venus, Pallas, and Cynthia, attracting Muses
and artists to her throne.
Queens oppositional politics and subversive masques
claims to derive her poetics not from classical learning but also from
Mother Nature, source of all the arts
(Lewalski 222).
Vertuous Ladies 7 line pentameter stanza a b a b a c c
(Lewalski 226)
In the Salve Lewalski purposes By defininf the attitudes toward
women which well-disposed men ought to hold, she undertakes to
reclaim some segment of the male sex from the evil mass, and so ends
by offereing her book to good Christians of both sexes.
-undermines patriarchy

-emphasizes women
(Lewalski 241)
As yet we can only speculate about the factorseducation, female
patronage, ambigious social status, somewhat unusual sexual freedom,
life experiencesthat led Lanyer to write and especially to publish
poetry
remarkable feminist conceptual frame that unifies her vision
egalitarian challenge to sexual and class hierarchy and its insistent
contrast of good women and evil men, past and present
her book projects and imaginative vision of an enduring female
community
The patronage poems present a female lineage of virtue from mother
to daughter, a community of good women
They also rewrite patronage in female terms, imagining for the poet
Lanyer a family of maternal and sisterly patronesses who will honor
and reward her celebrations of them and of the female sex.
Community is temporally traced through mythological and biblical
figures and spatially traces through the matrilineal blood line between
Queen Anne and Princess Elizabeth and natural genealogy between
Mother Nature (Mother of the Arts) and her children.
(Lewalski 314)
authenticates her writing through religious subject material, but
extends it.
How does she place herself in a female poetic line like men do? The
LINE is important.
texts are profoundly concerned with the politics of gender
focus attention on the stances possible at an earlier historical
moment
***No one can stand outside language or outside culture
the dominant ideology does not always define womens place and
womens speech with the rigid determinism seen by some theorists
at least when women take up a pen and write their own texts
In the Jacobean era women appropriated and rewrote available
literary and cultural discourses to serve their own needs and interests,
placing women at the center and exploring the consequences of that
move.
They seem to have approaches those discourses not as an exlusively
male preserve but common human property, ready to be reclaimed for
women