Special Issue on “Aemila Lanyer and the Body”

Explorations in Renaissance Culture (Fall 2025)

Guest editor: Brice Peterson

The editor invites 300-word abstracts for a special issue of a journal dedicated to exploring the topics of body and embodiment in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.

When scholars have discussed “the body” in Lanyer’s poetry, they have primarily focused their attention on three specific bodies: Christ’s, the poet’s, and that of the poem’s readers. In particular, they have interrogated the Eucarsitic relationship between these bodies, considering issues of spectacle, desire, communion, textuality, and consumption. This special issue aims to expand this conversation by shifting focus from these three specific bodies in SDRJ and considering instead Lanyer’s interest in the human body and embodiment more generally. Essays in the collection might consider a number of questions: How do issues of health and healing, sickness and woundedness shape Lanyer’s poetics or the poem’s form and thematic preoccupations? How does Lanyer rethink the anatomy or physiology of the body and to what end? How might Lanyer re-envision the world as macrocosmic body (and how humans inhabit it) by scrutinizing the microcosmic corpus naturale? And how does Lanyer use the body as a vehicle for reconsidering questions of selfhood, experience, knowledge, and being? Article topics might include but are not limited to:

• Medicine and health
• Disease and sickness
• Wounds, injury, and trauma
• Healing and restoration
• Anatomy, physiognomy, and bodily members (hands, feet, etc.)
• Physiology
• Embodiment and corporeality
• Sensation, senses, and sensuousness

Proposals should include the following:

• Paper title
• Abstract (300 words)
• CV

Dates:

• Deadline for submitting article proposals: 1 July 2024
• Notification of acceptance: 15 July 2024
• Deadline for final submissions (7,000-9,000 words): 1 February 2025

Please send proposals or queries to Brice Peterson (brice_peterson@byu.edu) no later than July 1, 2024.