A woman with Saint Peter's Keys?: Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the priestly gifts of women

Criticism, Summer, 2003 by Micheline White

Most importantly, Lanyer edits her account of the Agony and arrest so as to omit Christ's comforting assertion that he would be reunited with his disciples after his resurrection. In Mark, Christ says: "All ye shall be offended by me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepheard, and the sheepe shall be scattered. But after that I am risen, I will goe into Galilee before you" (Mark 14:27-28). (33) In her account of Christ's arrest, Lanyer does refer to his prediction that his sheep would be scattered, but she does not refer to any future reunion, and she rephrases the Biblical text to stress that the disciples are to blame for their separation from Christ: "[the soldiers] find the way, / To take the Shepheard whilst the sheep doe stray" (559-60, my emphasis). (34) Lanyer also omits the well-known episode in which Peter follows Christ to the High Priests' Hall, exchanges glances with him, and weeps at the crowing of the cock. This omission is striking because Peter's weeping is found in all four Gospels, and it was interpreted as the beginning of Peter's (and man's) spiritual rehabilitation. (35) Thus, in pointed contrast to Rowlands and other poets, Lanyer does not remind readers of Peter's repentance and empowerment as the leader of Christ's flock, but depicts him as a violent coward who abandoned Christ in the garden.

In the place of Peter's tears and his rehabilitation as leader of the church, Lanyer celebrates the tears of Biblical women, and moves from the tears of the Daughters of Jerusalem and the Virgin Mary to the climactic and subversive representation of the tears of the Maries at the tomb. (36) Indeed, if the first half of Lanyer's Passion has castigated the male disciples, the second half praises the women who are Christ's true disciples. They understand that Christ must suffer a humiliating death; they follow him to the cross with pity and faith; and, most importantly, they continue his ministry of healing. Moreover, Lanyer urges her female dedicatees to see their virtues reflected in the Biblical women who suffered for Christ. In "To the Ladie Susan, Countesse Dowager of Kent," the Countess's mother is lauded for having tasted "part of [Christ's] woe" and the Countess for treading in his "humble paths" (30, 41), and in the "Salve Deus," the Countess of Cumberland is praised for bearing Christ's cross (1436).

Lanyer's rendering of the "teares of the daughters of Jerusalem," an incident not often included in Passion poems, is unusual for she reinterprets the content and significance of Christ's exchange with the women. In Luke, Christ warns the women to re-direct their tears, and commentators such as John Calvin argued that he was warning them that their tears were vain unless they "accept and dread the awful judgement of God, which hangs over the wicked." (37) In Lanyer's version, Christ does not warn the women to weep for themselves; instead, she stresses that the women succeed where the male disciples failed: they share Christ's suffering rather than abandon him, and they urge Christ's oppressors to forebear with tears rather than with violence. (38) In contrast to Christ's one-sided interaction with his disciples in the garden, Christ and the women engage in an exchange of empathy and imitation: the women's grief causes Christ to "turne about" as though forgetting his own "griefe"; their pity elicits his pity; their eyes behold "his eies more bright"; and they are raised by his grace so that they reflect his "heav'nly Light" (971,972, 988,990). Through their loving gestures, these women have become "images" of Christ.