“Let Us Have Our Libertie”: John Milton and Aemelia Lanyer Read Eve’s Fall

Abstract

This essay compares two Renaissance poetic narratives that interpret the story of Eve’s fall in Genesis: Aemelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It explores how each uses Eve’s fall to ground a radical call to liberation from oppressive hierarchical structures. In Milton’s case, these oppressive structures are political and ecclesial, while in Lanyer’s case they are the hierarchies of gender. It goes on to argue that there is a chiasmic relationship between these two narrative exhortations to liberty. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s endorses a political autonomy for the male subject that not only retains, but actively depends on the subordination of women to men’s domestic and spiritual rule within marriage. In Salve Deus, Lanyer utterly rejects the idea that women can only relate to God in such a mediated fashion. Yet, because of her precarious position as a commoner, and as a woman writing about religious matters, she depends on a more traditional appeal to her social superiors. The essay concludes with a consideration of Lanyer’s and Milton’s position within the evolution of modernity and what philosopher Charles Taylor calls a “direct-access society.”