| Sumario: | This essay reassesses Aemilia Lanyer's "The Description of Cooke-ham" to propose a new account of the relationship between intimacy and textual minutiae. From her positioning of "Cooke-ham" as a quasi-paratextual appendage within Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum to her more granular formal choices, Lanyer refuses to let readers overlook constructions they may be tempted to flag as superfluous. Her craftsmanlike attention to minor effects models an effortful intimacy, which she theorizes most flagrantly through her experiments with the simile: a figure of speech that works in a minor key, forging links that are simultaneously transparent and tentative. The multivalently intimate logic of the simile surfaces repeatedly in "Cooke-ham," both in literal similes and across a range of simile-like constructions, including chiastic lines that combine repetition with reversal, double syntax that allows us to unfold the same sentence in two different ways, and descriptions of love triangles that scramble their agents into unexpected configurations. While scholarship on Lanyer typically charts how her texts grapple with class hierarchy through her bids for patronage, the simile and its attendant intimacies make possible a series of extrahierarchical relationships between Lanyer, the noblewomen she addresses, and her readers. Interpreting Lanyer's poetics from the inside out unveils a mode of connection that does not rest on simply eliding class difference in favor of gendered similitude. Rather, her poetry prompts us to develop an understanding of intimacy that hinges on close reading.
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