Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics

by Sarah C. E. Ross, Rosalind Smith

Overview

This collection examines early modern women’s contribution to the culturally central mode of complaint. Complaint has largely been understood as male-authored, yet, as this collection shows, early modern women used complaint across a surprising variety of forms from the early-Tudor period to the late-seventeenth century. They were some of the mode’s first writers, most influential patrons, and most innovative contributors. Together, these new essays illuminate early modern women’s participation in one of the most powerful rhetorical modes in the English Renaissance, one which gave voice to political, religious and erotic protest and loss across a diverse range of texts.

This volume interrogates new texts (closet drama, song, manuscript-based religious and political lyrics), new authors (Dorothy Shirley, Scots satirical writers, Hester Pulter, Mary Rowlandson), and new versions of complaint (biblical, satirical, legal, and vernacular). Its essays pay specific attention to politics, form, and transmission from complaint’s first circulation up to recent digital representations of its texts. Bringing together an international group of experts in early modern women’s writing and in complaint literature more broadly, this collection explores women’s role in the formation of the mode and in doing so reconfigures our understanding of complaint in Renaissance culture and thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030429454
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	07/25/2020
Series:	Early Modern Literature in History
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	370
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Sarah C. E. Ross is Associate Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (2015), the editor, with Paul Salzman, of Editing Early Modern Women (2016), and the editor, with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, of Women Poets of the English Civil War (2017).

Rosalind Smith is Professor of English at the Australian National University, Australia, and convenor of the Early Modern Women Research Network. Her publications include Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621: The Politics of Absence (2005) and the edited collection (with Patricia Pender) Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2014).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Beyond Ovid: Early Modern Women’s Complaint; Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith.- 2. Anne Lock and the Instructive Complaint; Susan M. Felch.- 3. Katherine Parr and Royal Religious Complaint: Complaining for and about Henry VIII; Micheline White.- 4. “Ane wyfis quarrel”: Complaining Women in Scottish Reformation Satire; Tricia A. McElroy.- 5. The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint; Lindsay Ann Reid.- 6. Acts of Will: Countersovereignty and Complaining in The Tragedy of Mariam; Emily Shortslef.- 7. The Politics of Complaint in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and Urania Part Two; Paul Salzman.- 8. Animating Eve: Gender, Authority and Complaint; Danielle Clarke.-9. Complaint’s Echoes; Sarah C. E. Ross.- 10. Aphra Behn’s “Oenone to Paris,” John Dryden, and the Ovidian Complaint in Restoration Literary Culture; Gillian Wright.- 11.Complaint in the Wilderness: Mary Rowlandson Speaks with Job; Susan Wiseman.- 12. Anne Killigrew and the Restoration of Complaint; Kate Lilley.- 13. From Manuscripts to Metadata: Understanding and Structuring Female-Attributed Complaints; Marie-Louise Coolahan and Erin McCarthy.- 14. Women’s Complaint, 1530-1680: Taxonomy, Voice and the Index in the Digital Age; Jake Arthur and Rosalind Smith.- 15. “Past the Help of Law”: Epyllia and the Female Complaint; Lynn Enterline.

Editorial Reviews

This rich and in many ways groundbreaking collection addresses a crucial gap in our knowledge of early modern women’s writing by recovering their multifaceted, often surprising, engagements … . The present volume provides an important corrective to the idea of women’s exclusion from complaint writing as well as to the singularity of focus on love. … while further work on recovery, description, and interpretation of these texts awaits, the present volume is a remarkably impressive opening gambit.” (Danila Sokolov, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 17 (2), 2023)

“Early Modern Women’s Complaint therefore opens up opportunities for assessing more deeply the networks of education and influence between Tudor boys and girls, and between public institutions and domestic pedagogical practices.” (Bonnie Lander Johnson, The Review of English Studies, October 28, 2021)

From the Publisher