Women and Religious Authority: Passion and Reason in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's The Seraphim, and Other Poems and Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Abstract
Elizabeth Barrett Browning challenges traditional poetic conventions within the patriarchal realm
of religious devotional poetry in The Seraphim, and Other
Poems (1838).1
This essay examines Browning’s striking
connection to her seventeenth-century predecessor Aemilia Lanyer, author of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611).
Browning and Lanyer rework the male-centric devotional
poetic mode in order to destabilize the social restrictions
and biases placed upon women within the genre. Both poets
ultimately argue that the concord of emotion and reason establishes women’s authority in religious devotional poetry
over their male-poet contenders.
Any submissions made by the author to the Albatross are in agreement of release under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license. This license permits The Albatross as well as others to share this work through any means for non-commercial purposes given that proper attribution is given to the author as well as the publisher.
Authors retain copyright of their work.
By submitting their article to The Albatross, the author grants the The Albatross the rights for first publishing.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
