Esther Gilman Richey's article ""To Undoe the Booke": Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer, and the Subversion of Pauline Authority" (English Literary Renaissance, vol. 27, no. 1, 1997, pp. 106–128) is a study of intellectual influence that traces a specific hermeneutic method from Agrippa's Declamatio de nobilitate (1529) into the feminist poetics of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). The article contributes simultaneously to Agrippa scholarship — as a detailed study of the Declamatio's reception in Jacobean England — and to the growing literature on early modern women's writing and feminist hermeneutics.

Aemilia Lanyer and the Salve Deus

Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645) is now recognized as a significant early modern English poet — the likely "Dark Lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets in some biographical reconstructions, the dedicatee of a series of patronage relationships with noble and royal women, and the author of the first substantial original poetry collection published by an English woman. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) is her single published volume: a long Passion meditation structured around the events of Holy Week and surrounded by an elaborate series of dedicatory poems and prose epistles addressed exclusively to women (the Countess of Cumberland, the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Susan and others).

The all-female dedicatory apparatus is itself a feminist gesture: by dedicating every poem to a woman and writing the prose "Epistle to the Virtuous Reader" explicitly addressing women's spiritual authority, Lanyer creates a textual community of women readers organized around the experience of the Passion. The Passion meditation itself — the long poem that gives the collection its title — is structured around the failure of the male disciples (who flee, deny, betray) and the faithfulness of the women (who stand at the foot of the cross, who come first to the empty tomb, who witness the resurrection). In this reading, the women of the New Testament are the true Christians, and the male disciples are the true failures of faith.

Agrippa's Hermeneutic Method and Lanyer's Use of It

Richey's central argument is that Lanyer's interpretive strategy — the systematic recovery of women's scriptural testimony against the tradition of male authority that had suppressed it — is structurally identical to the hermeneutic method Agrippa deploys in the Declamatio. Agrippa's method can be characterized as: (1) identify the standard proof-text used to establish feminine inferiority or subordination; (2) show that on close reading the text says something different from what the tradition has claimed; (3) identify neglected or marginalized scriptural passages that counter the proof-text tradition; (4) argue that the weight of scriptural evidence, properly assessed, supports the opposite conclusion from the one the tradition has reached.

Lanyer applies this method to the Passion narrative with remarkable consistency. The Fall narrative — the standard proof of Eve's culpability and hence of women's inherent moral weakness — is reread by Lanyer in ways that recall Agrippa's own reading in the Declamatio. Eve's sin, in both Agrippa and Lanyer, is the result of the serpent's intellectual sophistication, not of moral weakness or pride: she was deceived by a being with greater cognitive resources, which is not a moral failing but a cognitive one. And if Eve's sin was a product of deception rather than malice, it was less serious than Adam's sin, which was committed in full knowledge. This revaluation of the Fall narrative — from the standard reading (Eve sinned through weakness, establishing feminine moral inferiority) to an alternative reading (Eve was deceived by superior intelligence; Adam sinned knowingly and is more culpable) — is one of the most striking parallels between Agrippa and Lanyer.

Similarly, both Agrippa and Lanyer emphasize the women of the New Testament — the Samaritan woman, Mary of Bethany who listened rather than busied herself with service, Mary Magdalene who was the first witness of the resurrection, the women at Golgotha who did not flee — as counter-testimonies to the Pauline injunctions about female silence and submission. The argument in both cases is: Paul may have said that women should be silent in churches, but the gospels show women as the primary witnesses and messengers of the resurrection, which suggests that the Pauline prohibition was contextual rather than universal and is outweighed by the testimony of the gospel narratives themselves.

The Question of Direct Influence

Richey addresses the difficult question of whether Lanyer had direct access to Agrippa's text or was working from similar intellectual traditions through independent channels. The Declamatio was not translated into English until Henry Care's 1670 rendering (published as Female Pre-eminence), which is nearly sixty years after Lanyer's 1611 publication. Direct textual access to the Latin original is possible but requires evidence that Lanyer had Latin, which her biography does not clearly establish.

Richey argues for indirect influence: Agrippa's arguments had sufficiently wide currency in early seventeenth-century English learned culture — through Latin-literate intermediaries, through translations of other works that recapitulated the arguments, and through the general currency of the querelle des femmes in the humanist tradition — that Lanyer could have encountered them without having read the Latin text. The structural parallels are too specific to be coincidental, but they are also not the kind of borrowings that require direct textual dependence: they are parallel deployments of the same hermeneutic method applied to overlapping scriptural materials.

Significance for Agrippa Reception Studies

For Agrippa scholars, the article's primary value is its documentation of a specific channel through which the Declamatio's hermeneutic method passed into early modern English feminist writing. It complements Barbara Newman's (1993) analysis of the theological dimension of Agrippa's feminism by demonstrating the practical rhetorical impact of the method: the same moves that Agrippa made with scriptural proof-texts were made by Lanyer, independently or dependently, and they proved productive in a specifically poetic and devotional context as well as in the humanist-academic one for which they were developed.

The article also contributes to understanding of the Declamatio's specific rhetorical innovation. Both Agrippa and Lanyer are doing something more precise than "defending women": they are demonstrating that the scriptural tradition, properly read, contains within itself the resources to overturn the patriarchal reading that has been imposed on it. This is what Richey means by "subverting Pauline authority" in her title: not rejecting Paul but showing that the pauline proof-texts are outweighed or recontextualized by the wider scriptural testimony. The hermeneutic is from within the tradition, not against it — which is precisely what makes it effective as feminist argument in a culture where scriptural authority is non-negotiable.