ABSTRACT
Lanyer employs typology as well as assumptions about time and human history embedded in eschatological and apocalyptic exegesis in the service of writing women's past and future. The longest and most generically unusual of the many dedications which begin Salve, “The Authors Dreame” uses the ancient genre of the dream vision to write women's literary tradition as part of the great apocalyptic movement of the world, of women, and of Lanyer's book. The verse itself models the emotional effect of Mary Sidney Herbert (MSH's) psalms on future readers, as the poet-dreamer's own emotional and spiritual “overflowing” causes the last line of the first quoted stanza to spill over into the next, a rhetorical effect familiar to people from MSH's “To the Angell Spirit.” Traditional genealogical practices, in short, gave spurious but widespread “scholarly” legitimation to the othering, torture, and mass murder of a racialized people.
