Aemilia Lanyer

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Standard Name: Lanyer, Aemilia
Used Form: Emilia Lanier
Birth Name: Aemilia Bassano
Married Name: Aemilia Lanyer
AL is an important poet, technically sophisticated and powerfully expressive. Her single known work is a composite volume dated 1611, which handles religious narrative (expanded from the gospel story), theological and feminist argument, natural description, and poems of compliment to her female patrons, with equal skill. The same volume contains the earliest country-house poem published in English.
Photograph of a miniature painting of Aemilia Lanyer by Nicholas Hilliard, shown from the shoulders up, wearing a white gown with gold and black lacing, white and black beaded necklaces, and a broad lace ruff that fills most of the oval portrait. Her dark curly hair is pulled back by a low crown of white and black beads and gold.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Mary Carey
Mary Jackson (later Carey) married Pelham Carey (son of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon , whose mistress was Aemilia Lanyer ).
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Family and Intimate relationships Lady Anne Clifford
LAC says her mother (born Lady Margaret Russell , daughter of the second Earl of Bedford) had read most books of worth translated into English,
Clifford, Lady Anne. Lives of Lady Anne Clifford Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery (1590-1676) and of Her Parents. Editor Gilson, Julius Parnell, Roxburghe Club, 1916.
19
the only language she knew. She was a devout...
Friends, Associates Anne Locke
AL was also a friend of Catherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk (who shared her religious exile in Geneva before moving on to Lithuania), and of Catherine Killigrew, née Cooke . Her later collaboration with Killigrew...
Friends, Associates Rachel Speght
RS 's important friendship with Mary Moundford may feasibly have offered her a role model of a woman writer in the person, or at least the text, of Aemilia Lanyer .
Speight, Helen. “Rachel Speght’s Polemical Life”. Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol.
65
, No. 3/4, pp. 449-63.
454
Intertextuality and Influence Michelene Wandor
It proclaims: this is the story of two people // this is the story of two peoples // and one God / your God or mine?
Wandor, Michelene. The Music of the Prophets. Arc Publications, 2006.
34
In tracing the story to before the Act...
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Locke
Charles A. Huttar has praised AL 's sermon translation as readable, clear, and energetic—qualities in her original which it would have been easy to lose in translating. Editor Kel Morin-Parsons calls the sonnets her most...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
The fact that Mary Sidney did not print the psalms, as she did her brother's poems, says something about her attitudes both to print and to her own ranked and gendered identity as an author...
Literary responses Lady Arbella Stuart
Aemilia Lanyer connected her with the Muses, though it is hard to be sure if this refers to writing or patronage.
Stuart, Lady Arbella. “Introduction and Textual Introduction”. The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, edited by Sara Jayne Steen, Sara Jayne Steen, and Sara Jayne Steen, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 1-113.
56-7
Occupation William Shakespeare
From spring 1599 the company acted at the rebuilt Globe in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames. From 1594 the company was known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men , and acted...
Textual Features Katharine Tynan
KT opens this volume (like her Ballads and Lyrics) with a prefatory poem that is modest, if not apologetic: A small monotonous song I sing, / My notes are faint and few.
Tynan, Katharine. Cuckoo Songs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894.
ix
The...
Textual Features Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
The preface by L anticipates criticism, defends the title, and admits borrowing from Gilpin 's Hints for Sermons. LMH returns here to the much-discussed questions of women's education and social behaviour (she deplores the...
Textual Features Mary Russell Mitford
This topographical poem deals with the traditional concerns of the genre, from Aemilia Lanyer 's Description of Cooke-ham onwards: life centred on a country house and estate, and pastimes including hunting.
Textual Features Christina Rossetti
Critics have noted the extent to which CR , without excusing Eve for her disobedience, mitigates her guilt and represents her with a degree of sympathy that both counters contemporary portrayals, and anticipates later work...
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
This poem sequence has been performed to music by Henry Purcell and John Hingeston . The other works in the sequence were York, a poem-libretto commemorating a massacre of Jews in York in 1190...
Textual Production Mary Basset
The title that appears at the head of MB 's own prose is Of the sorowe, werinesse, feare, and prayer of Christ before hys taking . . . ,
More, Sir Thomas, and Sir Thomas More. “Of the sorowe, werinesse, feare, and prayer of Christ before hys taking”. Early Tudor Translators, edited by Lee Cullen Khanna, translated by. Mary Basset, Ashgate, 2001.
13[51]
This page is misnumbered 1319...

Timeline

About 1606
Anna Walker beautifully transcribed a copy of her devotional work A Sweete Savor for Woman, designed for presentation to its dedicatee, James I's queen, Anne of Denmark .
November 1616
Ben Jonson published his Works, including (unconventionally) nine plays, as well as masques and two poetry collections.

Texts

Woods, Susanne, and Aemilia Lanyer. “Introduction”. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, Oxford University Press, 1993, p. xv - li.
Lanyer, Aemilia. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Richard Bonian, 1611.
Lanyer, Aemilia. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer. Editor Woods, Susanne, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Lanyer, Aemilia. The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. Editor Rowse, Alfred Leslie, Jonathan Cape, 1978.