Early Modern Women:

An Interdisciplinary Journal
2013, vol. 8

“Did Women Have a Renaissance?”

A Medievalist Reads Joan Kelly and Aemilia Lanyer
Theresa Coletti

T he past four decades of humanities scholarship attest to the vital

intellectual commitments that Joan Kelly’s famous question both
anticipated and mobilized. When Kelly identified four criteria — attitudes
toward female sexuality, women’s economic and political roles, women’s
cultural roles, and ideologies about women — for gauging the social power
and historical experience of Renaissance women, she furnished a blueprint
for that scholarly response.1 With impressive economy, her essay provided
paradigm-shifting analyses of intersections of gender and social class and
laid the groundwork for the interdisciplinary scholarship that continues to
advance her field of inquiry. The very existence of the journal Early Modern
Women fulfills the promise of Kelly’s foundational research.
Decades of scholarship on early modern women have also exposed
the complexities of Kelly’s question. Whereas Kelly responded to her own
query with an unvarnished “no,” research inspired by her rhetorical chal-
lenge has offered more nuanced assessments. The extraordinary range and
variety of early modern women’s cultural agency and creativity have come
into focus in ways that Kelly could hardly have imagined. Theoretical and
methodological developments in the humanities have also underscored the
need to revisit the analytic categories informing Kelly’s investigation. Chief
among these are ideas of the Renaissance and Middle Ages that structure

1
  Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Women, History, and Theory:
The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 20. Subsequent
quotations from this essay are cited in the text.

249
250  EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Theresa Coletti

her argument. My contribution to this forum examines Kelly’s elabora-

tion of these categories in order to consider how conceptions of historical
periods have framed the study of early modern women in the decades since
Kelly first posed her question about women’s putative Renaissance. Recent
understandings of medieval and early modern periodization, I suggest,
can animate contemporary approaches to early modern women, extending
Kelly’s scholarly legacy by revising the central terms of her analysis.
Kelly challenged historians of women to interrogate  “accepted
schemes of periodization” (19). Her provocative question — “ Did women
have a Renaissance?” — assumed the fundamentally Burckhardtian formu-
lation that, ca. 1350–1530, social, economic, and political developments
in Europe, and Italy in particular, brought about a decisive break with
the medieval past and ushered in the modern world. Her intervention
in this narrative lay not in the terms of her question but rather in her
response. Resisting Burckhardt’s “notion of the equality of Renaissance
women with men” (20), Kelly’s critique drew a sharp dividing line between
a medieval era that encouraged women’s “sexual and affective rights” (22)
and a Renaissance in which women “experienced a contraction of social
and personal options” (20). Kelly’s comparative argument provocatively
re-signified traditional associations of both historical periods. In her analy-
sis, the customarily unenlightened Middle Ages produced a moment of
progressive possibility for women that eventually would be negated by the
domestic and cultural politics of the Renaissance. Juxtaposing the relative
autonomy of eleventh- and twelfth-century French aristocratic women,
especially as represented in medieval courtly ideology, with what she
deemed the more circumscribed experience of women under the influence
of Renaissance humanism, Kelly charted — in gendered terms — the “great
transition from medieval feudal society to the early modern state” (21).
Four decades of scholarship in the humanities provide a new analytic
purchase on Kelly’s question and the temporal divide that it embraced.
Theoretical attention to philosophies of history and modernity has brought
increasing scrutiny of periodization itself, especially of the Middle Ages
and Renaissance as historical and conceptual categories whose relationship
to each other formed the basis for one of Western culture’s dominant orga-
nizing narratives. As every medievalist and early modernist knows, the very
Did Women Have a Renaissance? 251

terms that we employ to designate these ostensibly temporal categories

of pre-Enlightenment historiography (and indeed to designate ourselves)
are intensely fraught.2 If Kelly were posing her question today, she might
phrase it differently, aware of all the cultural and ideological freight that
the word “Renaissance” carries. Beyond this critique of terminology, recent
interrogations of the familiar historical divide have produced a complex
historiography of medieval and early modern, one that moves beyond ideas
of difference and dependence, rupture and continuity, in order to pursue
diachronic — and dialogic — notions of repetition, reinvention, appropria-
tion, renewal, revival, and reciprocity.3
How can these new perspectives on historical periodization and the
fresh analytic paradigms ushered in by them influence the study of medi-
eval and early modern women that inspired Kelly’s critique? I approach
this question from the field of English literary studies. For many years
I have taught and written about medieval women’s literary culture and a
more broadly construed medieval, feminine, religious sphere of represen-
tation and social practice. From the perspective furnished by this work, I
have more often found the Middle Ages absent or invisible in scholarship
on early modern women compared to Kelly’s focus on the medieval as one
side of the sharp period divide. One need not look far to identify good
reasons for this situation. First, there is the narrative trajectory of forget-
ting that inevitably attends our scholarship, with its accompanying need to
privilege the difference of our intellectual engagements and argue for the
new rather than elaborate prior traditions. In the particular case at hand,
moreover, important attributes of early modern women’s English literary
culture genuinely distinguish it from its medieval predecessors, including

2
  For an overview that engages essential theoretical discussions of the issue, see
Margreta de Grazia, “The Modern Divide: From Either Side,” Journal of Medieval and
Early Modern Studies 37 (2007): 453–67; for an analysis from the perspective of English
literary studies, see David Matthews, “The Medieval Invasion of Early-Modern England,”
New Medieval Literatures 10 (2008): 223–44. Julia Lupton discusses what is at stake in
debates about the valences of “Renaissance” and “early modern” in Afterlives of the Saints:
Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1996), 4–6.
3
  See the extensive bibliography in Matthews, “Medieval Invasion.”
252  EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Theresa Coletti

the impact of print and of the Protestant reformation, the increased vol-
ume of women’s writing in the early modern period, and greater numbers
of known, named women authors.4
A more deliberate look at women’s literary culture in medieval and
early modern England, however, can identify reasons to engage in remem-
bering rather than forgetting. Despite the differences that I have just noted,
one can easily point to fundamental similarities. Scholars of medieval and
early modern women, for example, collectively recognize that, across the
period divide, women’s participation in literate culture involves a definition
of literacy more capacious than an individual’s ability to read and write.
Communal and mediated forms of reading and writing characterize the
literate practices of both medieval and early modern women. This broadly
distributed conception of literary activities, especially those involving textu-
al production, also informs medieval and early modern ideas of authorship.
Margaret Ezell’s observation that we see “a much livelier literary landscape
for early modern women” “[o]nce we leave behind the notion of authorship
as an act defined by solitary alienation and the text as an isolated literary
landmark” just as readily applies to the scene of medieval women’s literate
activities.5 Across the period divide, the material conditions of women’s
reading and writing, especially the persistence of manuscript culture well
after the advent of print, provided opportunities for collaborative creation
and reception of texts.6

4
  For a more theoretical approach to the woman writer across the medieval and
early modern divide, see Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English
Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
5
  Margaret J. M. Ezell, “Women and Writing,” in A Companion to Early Modern
Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 77–94; quote on
p. 92. See also Margaret W. Ferguson, “Renaissance Concepts of the ‘Woman Writer,’” in
Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 143–68; Julia Boffey, “Women Authors and Women’s Literacy in
Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–
1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 159–82.
6
  For example, see Melinda Alliker Rabb, “The Work of Women in the Age
of Electronic Reproduction: The Canon, Early Modern Women Writers, and the
Postmodern Reader,” in A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, 339–60.
Did Women Have a Renaissance? 253

Joan Kelly focused her analysis on secular elites and their literary
texts, but much of the scholarship following in her wake has established
that attending to medieval and early modern women’s religious culture
and experience can produce different answers to her question.7 English
studies over the past few decades has recognized the religious sphere as
a major resource for medieval and early modern women’s construction of
spiritual subjectivities as well as texts.8 Cultural productions by women
in that sphere, I contend, contribute compelling evidence of the reinven-
tion, appropriation, endurance, and revival of the medieval within the
early modern that marks the new thinking about periodization in English
literary history. Recent studies by medievalists David Wallace and Nancy
Bradley Warren illustrate the promise of this revisionary approach.9
Whereas Wallace tracks correspondences between the lives and literary
projects of heroic, historical religious women across the medieval and early
modern divide, Warren argues that the incarnational pieties, epistemolo-
gies, textualities, and politics of medieval English religious women furnish
an important continuity with early modern women. I would like to sketch
some implications of Warren’s groundbreaking study by focusing on one
piece of her inter-period tapestry of early English women’s religious and
textual cultures, Aemelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611).
The religion represented in Salve Deus is a hybrid creation. It thus
resembles other features of a work that, generically, frames a Passion
meditation with dream vision and panegyric, a work that can employ, with
comparable verve, images of Cleopatra and the Crucifixion. As Lanyer

7
  So Kelly acknowledges in “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes,”
in Women, History, and Theory, 68–69.
8
  For an excellent overview of recent medieval materials, see David Bell, “What
Nuns Read: The State of the Question,” in The Culture of English Monasticism, ed. James
G. Clark (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2007), 113–33. For a useful assessment
of what religion means for the study of early modern women’s literary culture, see Diane
Willen, “Religion and the Construction of the Feminine,” in A Companion to Early
Modern Women’s Writing, 22–39.
9
  David Wallace, Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory 1347–1645 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011); Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word: Female
Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700 (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
254  EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Theresa Coletti

scholars often observe, hybridity also characterizes its author’s confes-

sional allegiances. The daughter of an English mother and a Venetian
father, possibly of Jewish heritage, and the acquaintance and poetic peti-
tioner of Protestant aristocrats as well as those with Catholic sympathies,
Lanyer had ample opportunity to cultivate the complex understanding of
religious language and belief that she articulates in Salve Deus.10 As she
exploits the ideas and idioms of the capacious religious sphere available
to her, Lanyer moves imaginatively beyond confessionalism. Incorporating
biblical precedent to make a case for women’s agential and embodied
connections to the crucified Christ, Lanyer’s primary argument in Salve
Deus Rex Judaeorum suggests the limits of confessional commitments for
gendered projects such as hers. In so doing, Lanyer offers an alternative
way of thinking about gender and historical change in the medieval and
early modern periods. Warren’s attention to Lanyer’s evocation of the “old
religion” in Salve Deus and this work’s affinities with locutions of medieval
women’s monastic devotion help us to think about what these historical
relationships might mean.11 Her analysis of Lanyer’s incarnational pieties
and textualities sheds important light on confessional complexity itself as a
crucial index to women’s literary and cultural relations across the medieval
and early modern divide.
Locating Lanyer’s work within the frame of reference provided
by recent revisions of medieval and early modern periodization tempt-
ingly invites broader considerations. Lanyer’s imaginative recreation of
scriptural narrative — in one critic’s account, her “radical unfolding of the
Passion” — is rhetorically and exegetically reminiscent of medieval efforts

10
  On Lanyer’s complex confessionalism, see Warren, Embodied Word, 12;
Catherine Keohane, “‘That blindest weakenesse be not over-bold’: Aemilia Lanyer’s
Radical Unfolding of the Passion,” ELH 64 (1997): 359–90; Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A
Renaissance Woman Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 126–62, 186–90;
and Achsah Guibbory, “The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred,” in
Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington, KY:
University of Kentucky Press, 1998), 191–211.
11
  Warren, Embodied Word, 52. For the complete discussion, see 47–59, 260–62.
Did Women Have a Renaissance? 255

to tell and retell that story.12 Her expansion of biblical roles, such as that of
Pilate’s wife, and her sympathy with other subject positions, such as that of
the Virgin Mary, repurpose rhetorical strategies of late medieval devotional
texts in various genres. Lanyer’s commentary on the silent Christ’s treat-
ment by his judges and persecutors echoes the implicit critique of these
figures in medieval English dramatic stagings of the Passion; the bibli-
cal plays of York that come to mind in this context, like Salve Deus, also
include an attempt by Pilate’s wife to stop the Crucifixion. By interpreting
scripture along gendered lines and fashioning novel readings for the ben-
efit of women and humanity, Lanyer tacitly stakes out her place in a prior
tradition of medieval women, English and continental, who analogously
occupied sites of religious experience, speech, and even writing to make
their claim on cultural and spiritual authority.13 Whether or not Lanyer
had explicit knowledge of this tradition, her Salve Deus recalls — and
renews — a past that likewise recognized the creative and critical potency
of women’s speech and writing from a religious ground.
My inclusion of Lanyer in this tradition gains support from other
features that link Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum to the circumstances and the
idiom of medieval women’s literate cultures. These include Lanyer’s inter-
est throughout the work in female communities.14 It would be difficult
to overestimate the importance that Lanyer accords to communities of
women. The verses to friends, patrons, and “all vertuous ladies in generall”
(12–16) that lead up to Lanyer’s poetic account of the Passion express
her desire for an actual society of like-minded women that in some sense

12
  Excellent analyses of what Lanyer does with biblical story can be found
in Keohane, “Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding”; Guibbory, “Gospel According to
Aemilia”; and Janel Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” in
Grossman, Aemilia Lanyer, 99–127.
13
  Guibbory’s notice of Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on medieval holy women
makes this connection briefly; “Gospel According to Aemilia,” 207. For an overview of
that tradition, see Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden, eds. Medieval Holy Women
in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). Lanyer, to be sure,
hardly qualifies as a “holy woman,” and her distinctly literary ambitions also set her apart
from religious women speaking and writing well before her time. It is, rather, what religion
affords to women’s expression that interests me here.
14
  Warren, Embodied Word, 50.
256  EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Theresa Coletti

draws spiritual sanction from the community of biblical women who

remained loyal to Christ. In its social composition, the external reading
community of historical acquaintances that Lanyer envisions recalls medi-
eval aristocratic women’s networks of literary patronage.15 And, as was
often the case for those networks, communicating religious subject mat-
ter — the life of Christ — also inspires the formation of Lanyer’s female
community. The poet unites friends and patrons through a shared longing
for the Bridegroom (Isa. 62:5, Matt. 25:1–13) that her work not only cel-
ebrates but in effect incarnates for them in the form of her text.16 Felicity
Riddy borrows a phrase from Bunyan to characterize those medieval net-
works; they involve “women talking about the things of God.”17 In medieval
England, elite convents like the Augustinian foundation at Campsey Ash,
Suffolk, provided both opportunities for such conversation among the
aristocratic women who primarily populated it and served as centers for
literary production.18 Lanyer gestures toward a virtual female community
united along similar lines.

15
  Karen K. Jambeck, “Patterns of Women’s Literary Patronage: England, 1200–ca.
1475,” in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCash (Athens,
GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 228–65; Carol M. Meale, “‘.  .  . alle the bokes
that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch’: Lay Women and their Books in Late Medieval
England,” in Meale, Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, 128–58. On Lanyer’s
relation to her imagined community, see Kimberly Coles, “Aemilia Lanyer’s Passion for a
Professional Poetic Vocation,” in Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 152.
16
  See Warren, Embodied Word, 47–50. Lanyer’s metaphors textualizing Christ’s
body become figures of her own text. For example, see Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 7, line
85; 17, lines 8–12; 31, lines 217–22; 35, lines 27–31, etc. Here I cite Aemelia Lanyer,
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993).
17
  Felicity Riddy, “‘Women talking about the things of God’: A Late Medieval Sub-
culture,” in Meale, Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, 104–27.
18
  On the elite population and literary culture of Campsey Ash, see Jocelyn
Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture c. 1150–1300: Virginity
and Its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially chap. 1; and
Virginia Blanton, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695–
1615 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), chap. 4. Both
Did Women Have a Renaissance? 257

The community of biblical women whose loyalty and devotion to

Christ underwrite Lanyer’s gendered critique of the Crucifixion likewise
looks back to medieval interpretations of these shadowy scriptural pres-
ences, even as it presciently glances forward to contemporary feminist
biblical scholarship. Carla Ricci’s study of women “forgotten by exegesis”
capitalizes on Lanyer’s intimations by arguing for the important female
community that gathered around Jesus.19 On the medieval side of this long
argument, not surprisingly, we find Christine de Pizan anticipating Lanyer’s
view by two hundred years. I am not the first to cite Lanyer’s important
relationship to the person often identified as medieval Europe’s first pro-
fessional woman writer. Janel Mueller makes a persuasive case for thinking
comparatively about the respective projects and ambitions of Lanyer and
Christine.20 Appropriately figuring in Mueller’s comparison is Christine’s
Livre de la cité des dames. This work not only addresses the construction of
authorial identity and defense of women that Mueller discusses but also,
in its third book focusing on women saints and especially Saint Christine,
gestures toward the embodied female, spiritual, and writerly authority that
draws its power from holy women’s closeness to divinity — the very topic
that motivates Lanyer. The relationship between these two professional
women writers merits further investigation. Here, though, I want to stress
that Lanyer’s bold assertions in “To the Vertuous Reader” (48–50) regard-
ing Christ’s personal, social, and spiritual intimacies with and favoring of
women echo an important moment in Christine de Pizan’s L’epistre au
Dieu d’Amours. Christine’s God of Love observes:

Sweet Jesus . . . was abandoned by all except women. The entire-
ty of the faith remained in a single woman. Therefore anyone
who defames women is extremely foolish, if only because of the
reverence required by the Queen of Heaven, in memory of her
goodness, which was so noble and worthy that She was elected

Keohane (“Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding,” 366) and Warren (Embodied Word, 51)
link Lanyer’s vision of female community with that of nuns.
19
  Carla Ricci, Mary Magdalene and Many Others: Women Who Followed Jesus,
trans. Paul Burns (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994).
20
  Mueller, “Feminist Poetics,” 102–4.
258  EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Theresa Coletti

to carry the son of God. God the Father conferred great honor
on women by choosing a woman to be his wife and mother. . . .
[And] he who mocks women .  .  . can find no instance where
the good Jesus reproached women; rather he loved and valued
them.21

My argument regarding what the recently canonical, thoroughly early

modern Aemilia Lanyer might contribute to revised understandings of
periodization in early English literature reverberates in additional direc-
tions to which I can only gesture. Chief among these is Lanyer’s brave
and fascinating invocation of the Virgin Mary. Her approach, as Susanne
Woods and others have noted, is cautious: Lanyer’s Mary never emerges
as intercessor or as subject of devotion. At the same time, Lanyer ventrilo-
quizes her praise of the Virgin through the scripturally sanctioned Gabriel
and prominently figures Mary in terms of tropes of enclosure, enflesh-
ing, and clothing of the deity that were central to late medieval traditions
representing the incarnational relationship of Christ and his mother.22
Lanyer’s imaginative occupation of Mary’s response to Gabriel’s visitation
calls to mind late medieval attempts to represent and even participate
in the Annunciation.23 Lanyer’s provocative, gendered interpretation of
Christ’s Passion, her venture into the realm of what can only be called
theology, reverberates with Julian of Norwich’s very different though com-
parably unique endeavor. Their respective engagements with rereading and
rethinking scripture merit comparative attention from the perspective of
English literary history.
I have attempted to situate Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
in the crucial revision of medieval and early modern periodization that
has emerged since Joan Kelly articulated her game-changing insights.

21
  Christine de Pizan, The God of Love’s Letter, in The Selected Writings of Christine
de Pizan, trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee and ed. Blumenfeld-
Kosinski (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 25.
22
  See Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and
Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 155–66.
23
  See The Revelations of Saint Elizabeth in Women’s Writing in Middle English, ed.
Alexandra Barrett (London: Longman, 1992), 76–83.
Did Women Have a Renaissance? 259

Remembering the medieval by gesturing in the direction of prior traditions

of English women’s literate activities and, more generally, recalling medi-
eval women’s impressive interventions in textual culture are relevant to the
reading of Aemilia Lanyer and to her position in English literary history.
Whether or not she knew it, Lanyer, in a distinctly early modern moment,
recuperated and revitalized medieval traditions of interpretation and repre-
sentation. That this effort also accompanies her equally complex response
to her contemporary, masculine literary culture only makes her situation
as a woman writer more intriguing. In light of the crossing of medieval and
early modern borders that she identifies in Lanyer’s work, Nancy Warren
observes that the “revisionary power” of incarnational modes of conceptu-
alization in medieval and early modern women’s writing may “prompt us to
rethink analytic categories and scholarly practices that are the ideological
scripts for our own critical and professional cultures.”24 In the spirit of this
observation and with a very respectful nod to Joan Kelly, I want to suggest
that much of what makes Aemilia Lanyer a “Renaissance woman poet,” to
echo Susanne Woods’ titular phrase, might also turn out to be medieval.

24
  Warren, Embodied Word, 12.