Andrea Davidson has just finished her undergraduate studies the University of Toronto. As the Milton Harris Undergraduate Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute this year, she has been thinking and writing about Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum for a very long time! 
It is my absolute pleasure to bring Brianna’s blog from medieval to early modern…and back! Let me tell you about a remarkable book of sacred and secular poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, written by a woman named Aemilia Bassano Lanyer. Notoriously little is known about Lanyer, which has made her a prime suspect for many possible identities. Was she Catholic, Jewish, black, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, or Shakespeare herself? I don’t have any answers, so I’ll stick to Salve Deus and let Lanyer be.
There are nine known first editions of Salve Deus, printed by one Valentine Simmes near St. Paul’s Churchyard, London in 1611. Each copy has a unique combination of dedicatory poems, but all copies contain Lanyer’s long Passion meditation, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” and all but one includes her short elegiac lyric, “A Description of Cooke-ham.” You can find an e-text transcription of one of those copies at Luminarium. You can also find an audio version at LibriVox. My edition of Salve Deus, edited by Susanne Woods in 1993, amalgamates all nine first editions into one master copy. Binding all of Lanyer’s known poems in one edition is almost like recreating Salve Deus’ manuscript form—Lanyer’s own version, her complete creation, recreated.
Whether you access Salve Deus through Woods’ edition or by any of the links I have listed above, you are contributing to a readership that is continually amalgamating and linking the many versions, copies, and editions of the single book that is Lanyer’s complete literary corpus.
Links, interlinks, and hyperlinks are also rhetorical structures; as a symbol, Philomela the nightingale represents them all. Her song and silence transport us from text to text to text. I argue that Philomela appears at three crucial moments in Salve Deus. Linking these appearances to Philomela’s ancient, medieval, and early modern literary history lets us see what conventions Lanyer preserved or modified in Salve Deus.
No matter which version of Salve Deus you have (except the Bodleian Library copy, which is missing “Cooke-ham”), it is obvious to see that Lanyer carefully counted out Philomela’s three appearances so that they would form two mirroring chiasms that interlink the first and last poems of the book. In lines 103-106 of the first dedicatory poem, “To Her Queenes Most Excellent Majestie,” Lanyer describes herself as such a troubled poet that
[her] untun’d voyce the dolefull notes doth sing
Of sad Affliction in an humble straine;
Much like unto a Bird that wants a wing,
And cannot flie, but warbles forth her paine (lines 103-106).
The warbling bird who represents the poet is undoubtedly the nightingale. [For proof, see below on Philip Sidney, “The Nightingale!”] Mirroring this passage, 105 lines from the end of the last poem, “Cooke-ham,” Lanyer answers the complaint in this passage. She explains that the lowly poet-nightingale has cause to be distressed, because Lanyer’s lower social rank keeps her separated from her noble patroness:
Unconstant Fortune, thou art most to blame,
Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame:
Where our great friends we cannot dayly see,
So great a difference is there in degree (lines 103-106).
These passages form the nightingale’s first chiasmus. The next one interlinks with it.
| “To the Queenes…” | “Cooke-ham” | “Cooke-ham” | |
| “Bird that wants a wing”
lines 103-106 |
“sundry leyes”
lines 31-34 |
“Unconstant Fortune” 103-106 lines from end | “mournefull Ditty”
31-34 lines from end |
Thirty-one lines from the beginning of “Cooke-ham,” when Lanyer is describing the vivacious flora and fauna of her patroness’ estate, she adds:
And Philomela with her sundry leyes,
Both You and that delightfull Place did praise.
Oh how me thought each plant, each floure, each tree
Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee (lines 31-34).
Thirty-one lines from the end of “Cooke-ham,” this passage’s echo shifts in tone:
Faire Philomela leaves her mournefull Ditty,
Drownd in dead sleepe, yet can procure no pittie:
Each arbour, banke, each seate, each stately tree,
Lookes bare and desolate now for want of thee (lines 189-192).
This sad passage suggests that Philomela drowns-sleeps-dies because Lanyer’s patroness has left Cooke-ham at the summer’s end. You should go read “Cooke-ham” to see if you agree! I think that Philomela dies because she has witnessed disruptive transgression at Cooke-ham: jealously, Lanyer steals the kiss that her patroness left on the bark of her favourite tree…and Cooke-ham’s entire ecosystem falls to pieces. Dying first, Philomela is the indicator species of that ecological crisis.
As the hyperlink of these four interlinking passages, Philomela indexes the progress of Salve Deus as her own process of metamorphosis. As a broken-winged bird who “cannot flie, but warbles forth her paine” at the beginning of the book, until she drowns “in dead sleepe” at the end, Philomela also prompts my ethical concern for the religious and social claims that Lanyer makes in Salve Deus. Why is Philomela wounded? Why is she silenced? Why must she die?
By way of an answer, I’ll treat Lanyer’s Philomela as a single link in the series of hypertexts that constitute the literary nightingale. There are nightingale corpses and wounds strewn throughout pre- and early modern literary history. Prepare to witness a flock of battered birds! Their injuries testify to different literary-historical circumstances and priorities. Their (im)mortalities enable narratives far greater than the nightingales themselves. Their separate sufferings are violently incidental to supernatural, transcendental, romantic, or poetic purposes. Poor Philomela! Here she is, in four genres.
1. Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Written in Latin, 8 BCE. First English version was a translation from the French by William Caxton, 1480. First full English translation from the Latin was by Arthur Golding, 1567.
Philomela does not die in the Metamorphoses, although she is raped and mutilated. Tongueless, she weaves a tapestry that recounts her violation, then wreaks horrible revenge on her violator. At the end of the myth, Philomela, her sister, and her rapist all turn into birds. Ovid does not specify that Philomela metamorphoses into a nightingale.
Golding’s translation of Philomela’s complaint (prior to terrible glossectomy) aligns her sexual violence with the language of mortality:
But to th’ intent, O perjurde wretch, no mischiefe may remaine
Unwrought by thee, why doest thou from murdring me refraine?
Would God thou had it done before this wicked rape. From hence
Then should my soule most blessedly have gone without offence (VI, 686-689).
2. Philomena Praevia by John Pecham (???)
Written in Latin, 13th century. John Pecham was an English Franciscan friar. He may also be John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury? French translation called Le Livret du Rossignolet, 14th century.
Philomena Praevia uses the nightingale as an allegory for the pious soul who embraces suffering as a form of devotional imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ). This illustration of the nightingale imitating Christ is from one copy of Le Livret du Rossignolet in the Légiloque manuscript (BnF, NAF 4338, 176r, ca. 1325-1350). Compare Christ on the cross to Philomela perched in the tree. See how the devotional reader is listening to the nightingale’s song? Her prayer book—the Livret du Rossignolet itself—is at her knees. The figure in the bottom right corner is the poet—holding the manuscript!
Philomela’s song marks the hours of Christ’s Passion, intensifying along with Christ’s suffering,
Sic quassatis organis huius philomenae,
Rostro tantum palpitans fit exsanguis paene,
Sed ad nonam veniens moritur iam plene,
Cum totius corporis disrumpuntur venae (stanza 10).
The medieval French translation, Le Livret du Rossignolet, reads:
Quant elle a tant chanté que sa voix en est mue,
Elle remuet le bec, tout le corps ly tressue ;
Quant vient l’eure de nonne de mort elle est vainque,
Qu’elle n’a vaine ou corps qui ne luy soit rompue.
J.L. Baird and John R. Kane’s modern English translation reads:
And when it had sung so vigorously that it can sing no more,
It shakes its beak, all its body drenched with sweat,
And as the hour of Nones arrives, it is finally conquered by death,
With every vein in its body burst asunder.
Burst veins, sweat-drenched, conquered—the nightingale’s death at the hour of Christ’s death is her ultimate achievement. Philomena Praevia valorizes Philomela’s suffering and death as acts of pious decorum.
3. Lai du Laüstic, by Marie de France
Written in French, c.1155-1160. My analysis owes much to Danielle Quéruel’s analysis of the Lai du Laüstic as a variation of Ovid’s Philomela myth, “Silence et mort du rossignol : les réécritures médiévales de l’histoire du Philomèle”
In Marie de France’s sad song of courtly love, a lady secretly engages in an extramarital affair with a courteous, honourable, and generous knight. When her husband asks where she goes at night, the lady says that she likes to sit and listen to the song of the nightingale (laüstic). Philomela then represents the love between lady and knight. Jealous, the husband captures the nightingale, snaps its neck, and throws the broken body at his wife. The nightingale’s blood stains the lady’s chemise at the breast. At the end of the lay, the lovers honour Philomela’s body, ensconcing her in gold and entombing her in a golden cup.
Keep in mind the image of the lady with the bloody breast as my survey of literary nightingales shifts from medieval to early modern!
4. “The Nightingale” by Sir Philip Sidney
Sidney lived from 1554-1586. He was a superstar in the Elizabethan court. I can’t help being a huge fan of Sidney even four centuries later, but unfortunately his representation of Philomela makes me very uncomfortable…
Sidney’s poem elaborates a distinctly unpleasant tradition in Renaissance poetry, that the nightingale sings so sadly because she suffers physical pain. Reliving her rape, Philomela masochistically leans her breast against a thorn to pierce it. Sidney writes that she “Sings out her woes, a thorn her song-book making” (4).
In this poem, Sidney compares his own romantic misfortunes with Philomela’s. In the refrain, he argues that his suffering exceeds hers:
O Philomela fair, O take some gladness,
That here is juster cause of plaintful sadness:
Thine earth now springs, mine fadeth;
Thy thorn without, my thorn my heart invadeth (9-12, 21-24)
Apparently it does not matter to Sidney that this comparison trivializes Philomela’s sexual trauma, subjecting it to another appropriative violence!
Philomela: raped, tongueless, burst veins, broken bones, thorn in her side, dead. This is the hypertextual anatomy of Salve Deus’ wounded warbler: each injury marks a different part of her body, her literary identity, her symbolism. As a victim of sexual, devotional, tragic, and incidental violence, Philomela came to Aemilia Lanyer with her bones already broken and her breast already pierced.
Even if Lanyer had not read all of the poems that I have surveyed here, she was almost certainly aware of the classical, Christian, and romantic instantiations of the nightingale when she wrote her into Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. How did she become aware of them? I wish I could answer that question! What I can do is suggest how Lanyer modified the nightingale tradition to suit her needs and objectives in Salve Deus.
Lanyer’s Philomela is associated with the poet, like Sidney’s. Like Pecham’s, she is also paired with a Passion meditation, the long poem that gives Salve Deus its title. Like Marie de France’s nightingale, she dies in testimony to transgression and romantic violation. Lanyer’s Philomela also differs from these earlier nightingale prototypes: her song is the poet’s voice; she has broken wings instead of a bleeding breast; her death may cause or indicate environmental crisis at the end of Salve Deus. The crisis as consequence of Lanyer’s own transgressive kiss (stolen from the tree and her patroness) situates Philomela, doubly, in the ecosystem of Cooke-ham and in the interlinking symbolism of Salve Deus.
Does Lanyer’s Philomela have an Ovidian metamorphosis? Her death leaves little hope for resurrection. Her association with the image of Christ on the cross in Lanyer’s Passion meditation, as in Pecham’s Philomena Praevia, entangles the nightingale’s suffering in a Christian ontology of redemption, but I think that Philomela’s literary history poses its own resistance to that idea of redemptive suffering. When Lanyer bewails “Unconstant Fortune” to close her book’s first nightingale chiasmus, she refuses to condone the cause of her misfortune in silence. Unlike Ovid’s Philomela, Lanyer retains her tongue. When she kills off her nightingale (and the rest of the ecosystem) at the end of “Cooke-ham,” Lanyer punctuates her own exit from poetry without ever puncturing Philomela’s breast: “Drownd in dead sleepe,” perhaps the nightingale “can procure no pittie” because she actually, for once, does not suffer in death. In Salve Deus, Philomela’s metamorphosis has already happened, because Lanyer does not allow her nightingale to suffer anymore.
But we cannot read Philomela without reading her literary history. She is a hyperlink. Using the language of digital humanities to trace her literary history hypertextually, we pass from ancient to medieval to early modern periods easily, finding modifications or metamorphoses of the Philomela myth that link from text to text to text.