Religion

The question of Lanyer’s religious faith has dominated scholarship on her work for generations. Most scholars of the period believe that the Lanyers were of Jewish descent. Her father, Baptiste Bassano, was a Venetian-born court musician. The Bassano (or Bassanio) family was, at some point in Italian court records, recorded as having converted from Judaism. However, Lanyer lived within just a few decades of severe persecution of Italian Jews under Pope Pius. Though matters began to improve in the Renaissance proper, and the Bassanos seem to have emigrated for economic reasons and not as political refugees, it nonetheless remains the case that most conversions from Judaism to Christianity in medieval and early modern Europe were either outright forced (as with the Spanish conversos) or at least heavily encouraged by social, political, and economic pressures. Even in the relatively tolerant Italian Renaissance, Jews were barred from...