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.
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.
"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)
"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)