SOURCE: Cook, Patrick. “Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Description of Cooke-ham’ as Devotional Lyric.” In Discovering and (Re)Covering the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric, edited by Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson, pp. 104-18. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Cook argues that “The Description of Cooke-ham” belongs to the poetic genre of the devotional lyric rather than that of the country-house poem.

Recent studies of “The Description of Cooke-ham,” the concluding poem of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, have reclaimed Amelia Lanyer's priority in the generic tradition of the English country-house poem. Published in 1611, five years before the poem long taken to initiate the genre in England, Ben Jonson's “To Penshurst,” “Cooke-ham” demonstrates its author's awareness of a poetic “kind” established by Martial, Horace and other Roman writers. But “Cooke-ham” locates itself within this generic heritage more by the conventions it excludes and revises than by those it imitates...