Full Description
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.
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.
