ABSTRACT
From the moment of its publication until the present day, Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum has aroused audience response at both extremes of the possible range for early modern women writers. Even in spite of recent political depredations, 'feminist' remains a useful ideological designation for Lanyer's mode of subjective representation, the term clearly needs particularization of its range of likely meaning in reference to this early seventeenth-century work. Lanyer's publication must have added its own fuel to the heated debate about the 'woman question' at the beginning of the seventeenth century, especially because of the poem's serious moral intent and its suggested female separatism. The claims made by Lanyer's poem on behalf of women as a disadvantaged class link it to twentieth-century feminist sympathies. Lanyer's biography exemplifies the prevailing 'reality' for women of her period, which her poetic representation resists, that their bodily and economic welfare typically depended on male identification and male control.
