Sleep and Sleepers in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum

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中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为失眠研究、睡眠质量改善、昼夜节律等高价值睡眠研究添加中文说明。

Original abstract

Abstract This essay considers the iconography of sleep in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). It argues that in her dedication to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and in the titular poem on the passion and death of Christ, Lanyer deploys the physiological imperfection of human sleep as an embodied means of intersubjective imitation. In the prefatory text, early modern conceptualizations of sleep as an image of death allow the poet to mimic Pembroke’s selfhood defined by mourning Philip Sidney; and in the title poem “Salve Deus” embodied sleep establishes commonality between the apostles’ mortal bodies and Christ’s humanity. In Lanyer’s handling, sleep works as a catalyst for fashioning human bodies across class, gender, and ontology. With this imitative model, Salve Deus constructs its literary subjectivity in opposition to the dominant, Apollonian scripts of poetic vocation, leveraging physiological vulnerability as a crucial strategy of Lanyer’s poetic project.

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• Official / arXiv page

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