Beyond Ovid: Early Modern Women's Complaint

Calling attention to the diversity and breadth of early modern women's engagement with complaint, this chapter considers how complaint might be understood as a mode available to the woman writer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It outlines the formal parameters of complaint, as well as the ways in which its Renaissance forms have been shaped by a largely male-authored Ovidian tradition in which women's voices have been appropriated and ventriloquised. Rather than reinforcing women's exclusion from the mode, however, this chapter introduces the ways in which women have drawn on a range of traditions, amatory, political, and devotional, to produce a rich and diverse corpus. The volume as a whole introduces new complaint writers, new complaint texts, and new complaint forms, and explores the complex ways in which women deployed the mode for personal, religious, political, and literary purposes. Rather than an overdetermined, Ovidian tradition off-limits to the woman writer, complaint emerges through this chapter as a foundational vehicle for early modern subjects both male and female to express grief, protest, abandonment, and loss, to generate compassion for their cause, and to engage wider communities in sympathetic support. This chapter argues for the centrality of complaint to the early modern writer, focusing on women's role in shaping its traditions, modes of circulation, and political, cultural, and religious impact.