Selling the Illusion of Access

Abstract

This chapter argues that Aemilia Lanyer’s publisher Richard Bonian published the extensive dedicatory material in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum to appeal to an emerging female reading public. The volume’s permeable boundary between text and paratext also anticipates the replacement of dedicatory poems with commendatory verses in the coming decades. The chapter therefore closes by considering two additional books with an unusual investment in dedicatory and commendatory verse: Coryats Crudities (1611), which inspired a competing book that only reproduced its preliminary verses, and Mary Fage’s Fames Roule (1637), a collection of anagrams and acrostics on court figures. Together, these books reveal authors and their publishers navigating poetry’s uneasy transition from a pursuit driven by patronage to one oriented toward the commercial book trade. In the process, the books also give the reader new insight into the privileged social networks of their authors and addressees.