Refiguring the Sacred Feminine
The Poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton

Theresa DiPasquale

April 2008
ISBN: 0-8207-0405-9 / $60.00s Cloth
ISBN-13: 978-0-8207-0405-0

Book Information

Theresa DiPasquale’s study of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton demonstrates how each of these seventeenth century English poets revised, reformed, and renewed the Judeo-Christian tradition of the sacred feminine.  The central figures of this tradition — divine Wisdom, created Wisdom, the Bride, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Ecclesia — are essential to the works of Donne, Lanyer, and Milton. All three poets are deeply invested in the ancient, scripturally authorized belief that the relationship between God and humankind is gendered: God is father, bridegroom, king; the human soul and the Church as corporate entity are daughter, bride, and consort.

Yet for each of these three poets, the essential femininity of the human vis-à-vis the divine is complicated by the fact of an individual person’s biological sex; a soul’s encounter with God and his or her place in the economy of redemption are indelibly stamped by the sex of the body in which that soul is housed. All three poets, DiPasquale demonstrates, thus engage in literary projects that modify, expand upon, challenge, or rethink the natures of men and women, the duties and privileges of the female sex, and the essential role played by feminine powers and influences in healing the sin-forged rift between God and humanity.

Each author resists and modifies the strict Calvinist belief that fallen Nature is radically depraved; each counters Reformed theology’s tendency to diminish the role of the Blessed Virgin and of the sacred feminine more broadly; each portrays the feminine gender as a reflection of the divine, and Woman herself, at her best, as an agent of redemption or conduit of grace. 

This important study not only casts new light on the poetry of Donne, Lanyer, and Milton and on the history of Christian doctrine and belief, but also makes enormous contributions to our understanding of the feminine more broadly. It will be of interest to scholars who study the literature, religion, and culture of early modern England, to feminist theologians, and to any reader grappling seriously with gender issues in Christian theology and spirituality.

Author Information

Theresa DiPasquale is associate professor of English at Whitman College. She is the author of Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne, which won the John Donne Society’s Award for Distinguished Publication as the best book on Donne published in 2000.