Analysis Of Eve's Apology By Aemelia Latigy

“Microscopic rhetoric” is the word granting sentience to Aemilia Lanyer’s purpose for her poem, “Pilate’s Wife Apologizes for Eve” otherwise known as “Eve’s Apology”. Lanyer, a poet during the Renaissance, guides her writing with the intent of proposing a strong, morally sound argument in defense of her sex. Evaluating the work “Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry” one can carefully examine Lanyer’s precisely constructed logic in “Eve’s Apology.” This poem influenced not only the period in which Lanyer lived, but have held valuable notions related to present problems of feminism and women’s state in society. These valuable notions brought forth discussion of the “place of women” in the beginnings of the modern British era. Executing “microscopic rhetoric” through biblical analogies and figures, Aemelia Lanyer’s poem “Eve’s Apology” is anything but an apology; it is an early feminist movement targeting the Catholic church and gender injustice amongst society. Besides viewing women as inherently “immoral,” women of the

Referring to the vastly male dominated society, Lanyer beckons her fellow men to “let [women] have our liberty again/ And challenge to your selves no sovereignty” (825-826). In order to master this technique, Lanyer incorporates religious figures to immortalize her argument, “turning the tables” on the opposing sex in possibly one of the earliest feminist movements of literary history. Moreover, religious material was commonly found in literature concerned with gender, with similar works such as Donne’s “The Flea” and “Holy Sonnets” following Lanyer’s poetry. This material appears to relate with most of general society, agreeable to both lower and higher classes, as Christianity was widely practiced across early northern