Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Renaissance Examples. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997. 16- 41. Print.
https://books.google.it/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Z7vKvN7bwNgC&oi=fnd&pg=PA16&dq=
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Canonizing Aemilia Lanyer. 16(Goldberg 16)
Critiquing Coiro
An undifferentiated sisterhood among contemporaries and stretching across centuries is
the mark of Lanyers feminism and the sign of her value as a woman writer.
(Goldberg 18)
Lanyers suspicious deployment of conventional male/strength, female/weakness
equations suggests that the seemingly tautological women . . . as women formulations
that seek to guarantee Lanyers feminist value are not quite Lanyers terms.
Janel Mueller Lanyer questions Adams strength
(Goldberg 19)
the possibility of a separate sphere of female value, uncontaminated by masculinity,
must inevitably arise
the familiar dilemma attending any radical break with prior systems of
conceptualization and social organization that cannot entirely frame itself without
using the very terms it seeks to evade
Are Lanyers arguments as women centered as they appear to be
(Goldberg 20)
paraphrases CoiroLanyers address to patrons represents not one good woman
speaking to others but a negotiation across highly differentiated positions of power.
Community, if achieved, must be a socially mediated activity . . . class resentment cannot
be overcome
Lanyer offers Eve to Anne as an example of a great lady (79) who reflecting back her
majesty even as she serves as a kind of exemplary mirror for the Queen
nexus of class and gender is defining good women
elements of power that are conventionally treated simply as an attribute of gender
need to be rethought.Adam blood of Kings (18) Mother of succeeding Kings
(Goldberg 21)
Lanyers attempt to find a ground of address across the divide of social position
Equalization here, like the mirroring relationship between Eve and Queen Anne, is part
of Lanyers project to put herself on a footing with her patrons as a good woman.
the gifts of the Holy Ghost, producing a composite ideal Christian, a context in which
the Countess of Bedford emblematizes knowledge and understanding (pp. 188-89).
Lanyers poem may be paralleled by male writers seeking patronage
? both male/female writers will flatter their patrons
self-promotion
(29)
reconstitution within a sphere of exalted and exclusive feminity
role of patronage poetry as part of a system in which she performed as a consummate
courtier
court is factionalized
assiduously
gender limits of her efficacy
sublimation
transcendent social position
(31)
Patronage strategy painting the dedicatee as a good spiritual woman
`~~~playing off of gender/social rank relations
(32)
inverted homosociality
(36)
religion vehiculates many things, not all simply to be understood as religion: power
relations, gender relations, patronage, and sex among them
sexualized religious passion provides the mediating language to overcome social
disparity and to put Lanyer on some kind of footing with her patrons (36-37)
(37)
**The textual/sexual body as go between, as Wendy Wall has argued, is not unexpected
in the period, and Lanyer, as she argues, goes about as far with the trope as any author
does; but here, Lanyer seizes upon male prerogative both to vehiculate her desire (for
patronage, etc.) and to imagine her place in the company of aristocratic women. To
this extent, and in this highly mediated fashion, one could call this community.
(38)
The possibility that female service of a patron could involve sexual services can be
discerned as a subtext even in Lewalskis chapter on the Countess of Bedford
Lanyers test is a site of authorial projection
(39)
[Pallas/Muses etc. Queen is place in an all-female company that Lanyer seeks to
join by way of the book she offers]
negotiation of class is obvious in Queenes
The point here is simply this: That just as male friendships in the period oftern cross
over into a terrain that involves sexual relations, such, too, must have been the case amng
women, and especially among powerful aristocrats and those who served them, or whom
they served.
hagiographic gestures
adduce