Lanyer Description of Cookham
The Description of Cook-ham
Lanyer's Description of Cooke-ham is the first known printed poem identified as the country house poem, predating the publication of Ben Jonson's “To Penshurst”. It was adressed to Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberband, as a bid for patronage. It describes an idyllic summer Lanyer once spent with Clifford on the estate at Cookham where Lanyer composed poetry to please her patron and the countess's daughter Anne. Manipulating pastoral conventions, Lanyer actually chalenges the masculine values of the country house genre, emblematic of the lord's influence and of conservative claims of land control by depicting an edenic locus amoenus where three women live symbiotically without males . Indeed in Cook-ham she praises in panegyric terms her patron and her rightful claim to the land. But by reappropriating pastoral conventions into a new mold – that of the country house poem- Lanyer also justifies female authorship and creativity at a time where women were barely given the possiblity to write at all. So typically Lanyer seems to establish a tradition and yet she simultaneously subverts it.
What is clever about Lanyer is the fact she uses convention : she writes a very conventional poem to convey unconventional ideas about women. Thus we'll discuss to what extent we can portray Lanyer as a protofeminist writer : first by creating a representational and poetic female refuge from male-dominated world and discourse and then by questionning gender roles and male dominance through authorship.
I. The Cooke-ham garden : both the depiction of a matriarchal autarcic society and an edenic garden where women are empowered and redeemed.
Lanyer's poem aims at creating a symbolic space for women : that of the garden of Cooke-ham where Lanyer and two other women can find community with one another. In fact, with the use of garden imagery, Lanyer erects a feminine space within literature where women can be freed
Lanyer's Description of Cooke-ham is the first known printed poem identified as the country house poem, predating the publication of Ben Jonson's “To Penshurst”. It was adressed to Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberband, as a bid for patronage. It describes an idyllic summer Lanyer once spent with Clifford on the estate at Cookham where Lanyer composed poetry to please her patron and the countess's daughter Anne. Manipulating pastoral conventions, Lanyer actually chalenges the masculine values of the country house genre, emblematic of the lord's influence and of conservative claims of land control by depicting an edenic locus amoenus where three women live symbiotically without males . Indeed in Cook-ham she praises in panegyric terms her patron and her rightful claim to the land. But by reappropriating pastoral conventions into a new mold – that of the country house poem- Lanyer also justifies female authorship and creativity at a time where women were barely given the possiblity to write at all. So typically Lanyer seems to establish a tradition and yet she simultaneously subverts it.
What is clever about Lanyer is the fact she uses convention : she writes a very conventional poem to convey unconventional ideas about women. Thus we'll discuss to what extent we can portray Lanyer as a protofeminist writer : first by creating a representational and poetic female refuge from male-dominated world and discourse and then by questionning gender roles and male dominance through authorship.
I. The Cooke-ham garden : both the depiction of a matriarchal autarcic society and an edenic garden where women are empowered and redeemed.
Lanyer's poem aims at creating a symbolic space for women : that of the garden of Cooke-ham where Lanyer and two other women can find community with one another. In fact, with the use of garden imagery, Lanyer erects a feminine space within literature where women can be freed