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LANYER: A RENAISSANCE WOMAN POET. By Susanne Woods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 198; 6 illustrations. $39-95.
Susanne Woods's Lanyer A Renaissance Woman Poet is the first book-length study of Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645), the author whom A. L. Rowse first proposed as William Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" in the 197os, having discovered Lanyer in the course of his work on Simon Forman (the astrologer whom Lanyer had consulted). Rowse published the first modern edition of Lanyer under the title The Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady: Salve Deus RexJudzeorum by Emilia Lanier (I 978); there her poems were accompanied by a widely (and deservedly) excoriated biographical introduction espousing, inter alia, Rowse's theory about the relationship between Lanyer and Shakespeare. The publication of that edition (which provided an accurate transcription of the poems and some useful information about Lanyer's life, pace its dismissive characterization of Lanyer and reductive textual analysis) coincided with the flowering of feminist literary scholarship that attempted to recover works by women authors and place them in the history of literary production. Rowse's edition was superseded in 1993 by the Oxford edition of The Poems ofAemilia Lanyer Salve Deus Rexjudceorum, edited by Woods; by then, Lanyer had achieved a kind of canonical status, evinced by the excerpting of her work in anthologies and her widespread inclusion in literature survey courses. A raft of articles on Lanyer has appeared over the past two decades, culminating in the first collection devoted to her work, Aemilia Lanyer: Gender Genre, and the Canon (1998), edited by Marshall Grossman.
In an essay in that collection, Grossman asked, "What does it mean-now-for Lanyer so belatedly to enter literary history?" (p. 128). This question goes to the heart of the issues that define the present state of Lanyer scholarship, asking not only how we understand the production of canonicity but, by implication, how we might develop theoretical and methodological tools that most effectively approach the works of early modern women authors. Many Lanyer scholars have attempted to read her work in terms of and/or as subversions of traditional literary forms. At its worst, this "add women and stir" method can leave the canon and its literary and cultural assumptions intact, valuing most those works that are seen to conform...