Speculation and Multiple Dedications in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

Abstract

Scholars have treated Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) as a feminist book, as a failed attempt to earn patronage, and, most unfortunately, as a book that is interesting only because of its author's gender. 1 But in spite of being contemporaneous with a number of other printed poetry books of which, in many cases, Lanyer seems to have been aware, scholars have not treated it as a publication that Lanyer's publisher, Richard Bonian, hoped would be profitable in the expanding market for printed poetry books. This oversight has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the book's most remarkable feature: its eleven dedicatory and prefatory poems. Salve Deus is not a particularly short book, but nearly half of the volume is made up of what seems to be dedicatory material.In this essay, I argue that Lanyer's extensive prefatory poems were not merely attempts to solicit patronage for the author, as the publisher would not have had an incentive to make such a large investment in material without a tangible benefit to him. Nor were the prefatory poems there to authorize the book's content, as religious and moral subjects were among the limited range of acceptable topics for women's writing and, indeed, the most popular for both male and female authors. 2 Rather, Bonian included Lanyer's expansive paratextual material because, in addition to