By Raylee Foster | Staff Writer
Dr. Laura Knoppers, English professor at the University of Notre Dame, will be giving a lecture Thursday at Armstrong Browning Library at 2:30 p.m. on the contributions of poet Aemilia Lanyer in religion, English and art at the Medieval Renaissance Research Seminary.
Dr. Katie Calloway, professor in the English department, said there will be an opportunity for attendees to ask questions after the lecture.
“This is one of our Medieval Renaissance Research Seminary talks, so we do get emeritus faculty, and possibly faculty from other universities, but it’s for the Baylor community, certainly including students of all levels,” Calloway said.
The details of the poet’s life are predominantly unknown. Knoppers said Lanyer was not of an aristocratic class, and it is unknown where she received her education. In 1611, she was the first woman to publish an English volume of poetry with the intention of attracting patronage from nine aristocratic women. Her work, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” was seen as one of the early approaches to feminism.
“It’s very much a defense of women, so when critics first discovered it, they were all about the proto-feminist,” Knoppers said. “Scholars are looking at how she’s actually trying to negotiate class and to make a place for herself with these aristocratic women.”
Knoppers approached Lanyer’s work in a different way. While noting the importance of her poetry as an advancement for women, the English professor focuses on the religious message of the poem. She said people discredited the significance of the religious message because it was believed to be an appeal for patronage; however, she believes it is much more than that.
“The religious part was mostly taken, for a long time, as an excuse to write to women to whom the religious part would be appealing to get them to give her patronage. Now it’s being taken more seriously,” Knoppers said.
To better understand the work’s religious component, Knoppers said she looked to artistic representations of the Crucifixion. In her lecture she will not only dissect Lanyer’s poem, but also the art of Michelangelo de Caravaggio, specifically his painting Entombment of Christ.
“I started looking at representations of the crucifixion and looking at those sacred scenes that she treats to see if that would help me,” Knoppers said. “I think one of the takeaways is to think about the way that these devotional techniques are shared between artists and poets, and they’re also shared between Catholic and Protestant.”
Historians studying Lanyer’s poem have long debated what religious denomination she is. The nine women she dedicated her poetry to were of both Protestant and Catholic denominations.
Knoppers said she looks forward to compare the response to her lecture at Baylor as a Baptist university with the response she will receive at Notre Dame, a Catholic university.
“I’m interested to see how people respond to the argument about shared devotional techniques between poetry and painting from Catholic and Protestant,” Knoppers said.
Calloway said Knoppers was originally supposed to give a lecture at Baylor in the spring of 2020 but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Though coincidental that her lecture falls in Women’s History Month, her lecture applies to the celebration all the same.
“We’ve had our eye on having her come; she’s fantastic, a top international scholar of early modern English, religion and culture, and literature,” Calloway said. “We’ve got this amazing woman scholar talking about this amazing early modern woman writer.”
After Knoppers’ lecture in the Lewis-Birkhead Lecture Hall in the Armstrong Browning Library, there will be a reception in the Cox Reception Hall. Attendance is free and requires no reservation.
