Appropriating A Female Voice: Nicholas Breton And The Countess Of Pembroke

The sixteenth century author Nicholas Breton appropriates a female voice in many of his writings, among which Marie Magdalens Loue and The Pilgrimage to Paradise joyned with the Countesse of Penbrookes Loue feature prominently. The Countess of Pembroke, celebrated by Aemilia Lanyer in her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as a paragon of female religious devotion, is often associated in Breton's texts with Mary Magdalene. This paper will analyse some of the anxieties engendered by this appropriation of voice and of the Magdalene figure, anxieties that prove to be disruptive of Elizabethan gender hierarchies.