Plaintive Words: Legal and Literary Complaints, 1550-1625

抱怨文学正重新引起批评界的兴趣。最近的学术研究更新了其作为英国文艺复兴时期重要文学模式的分析购买，揭示了重新评估其在英国文学史上地位的必要工作（罗斯和史密斯，2020）。这些研究对抱怨作为一种普遍的表达无能为力或抗议社会变革的手段产生了重要的见解，从而成为“早期现代政治主体形成的基本模式”（Ross， O’callaghan, Smith, 2018）。最近的一些研究也对这种女性发声的文学传统主要由男性创作的规范说法提出了质疑，并重新关注了早期现代女性的抱怨，将其作为作者身份和声音问题的批判性辩论的场合；翻译与古典模仿；接收与文本传递；同时也促使修正主义者探究类型本身的界限（Reid, 2020; Clarke, 2020; Wiseman, 2020; Enterline, 2020）。然而，这个项目坚持认为，这种文学模式的一个关键因素仍未得到研究，即它与法律文化和投诉语言变化的直接关系。它考察了抱怨——作为英国文艺复兴时期普遍存在的表达情爱、宗教或政治哀叹的文学模式——如何与中世纪和古典的先例不同，作为一种法律上的修辞模式而蓬勃发展。具体来说，它表明频繁的女性发声的文学投诉传统是为了应对当代英国法律的变化而发展起来的，这些变化改变了女性公共投诉的语言和文化（查特尔，1995；贝恩斯，1998；沃克，2003；高英，2003）。从1550年到1625年，这篇论文了解了英国法律和文学史上的一个过渡时期，其标志是强奸作为一种明确针对个人的性犯罪的概念出现，取代了中世纪的强奸作为一种同性社会财产犯罪的模式。女性法律地位的转变，从财产到原告，产生了新的叙事形式和哀怨的剧本，这个项目表明，改变了文艺复兴时期文学抱怨的传统。因此，本研究将为这一蓬勃发展的批评领域做出贡献，首先为这一重要的文学模式开辟了一种不同的解释模式，将投诉文学重新置于其适当的法律历史背景中。它重新定义了文艺复兴时期的投诉传统，将其与当代档案资源（如法律论文、手册和字典）以及教会法庭记录的妇女的申诉证词和证词放在一起。本项目随后将从其前现代先例中追踪投诉传统的“模仿分离策略”（Lyne, 2001）。在适当的法律和历史背景下重塑投诉传统后，该项目将对这种变化的文学模式进行修辞分析，并探究在文艺复兴时期学校人文主义课程中制度化的古代修辞传统如何影响对可信投诉的文学认知，从而建立在Lynn Enterline (2012), Kathy Eden（2017）和Lorna Hutson（1999; 2018）的学术基础上。最后，本项目考虑投诉的互文性，特别关注经典和圣经故事的翻译和文学改编，目的是为正在进行的关于性知识表现的认识论问题的研究做出贡献（Scozzaro, 2021; Keleher, 2022; Holmes，即将出版）。

The literature of complaint is seeing a resurgent critical interest. Recent scholarship has renewed its analytic purchase as a crucial literary mode of the English Renaissance, revealing the necessary work of re-evaluating its place in English literary history (Ross and Smith, 2020). These studies have yielded vital insights into complaint as a pervasive means for expressions of powerlessness or protest in response to social change, and thus as an essential 'mode for the formation of the early modern political subject' (Ross, O'Callaghan, Smith, 2018). More recent studies have also challenged canonical accounts of this female-voiced literary tradition as predominantly male-authored, paying fresh attention to early modern women's complaints as occasions for critical debates on questions of authorship and voice; translation and Classical imitation; reception and textual transmission; as well as prompting revisionist enquiries into the boundaries of genre itself (Reid, 2020; Clarke, 2020; Wiseman, 2020; Enterline, 2020). This project insists, however, that a crucial element of this literary mode has still been left unstudied-that is, its direct engagement with changes in the legal culture and language of complaint. It examines how complaint-as a pervasive literary mode of the English Renaissance for the expression of erotic, religious, or political lamentation-diverged from its medieval and classical precedents to flourish as a legally inflected rhetorical mode. Specifically, it suggests that the frequently female-voiced tradition of literary complaint developed in response to contemporary changes in English law that transformed the language and culture of women's public plaints (Chaytor, 1995; Baines, 1998; Walker, 2003; Gowing, 2003). Spanning from 1550 to 1625, this thesis apprehends a transitional period in English legal and literary history, marked by the conceptual emergence of rape as an explicitly sexual crime against a person, which supplanted the medieval model of rape as a homosocial property crime. This transition in the legal status of women, from property to plaintiffs, gave rise to new narrative formations and plaintive scripts which, this project suggests, transformed the Renaissance tradition of literary complaint.This research will thus contribute to this flourishing critical field by firstly carving out a different model of interpretation for this crucial literary mode that recontextualizes the literature of complaint within its proper legal historical context. It reframes the Renaissance complaint tradition by positioning it alongside contemporary archival sources, such as legal treatises, manuals, and dictionaries, as well as church court records of women's plaintive testimonies and depositions. This project will subsequently trace the complaint tradition's "strategies of imitative disjuncture" from its premodern precedents (Lyne, 2001). Having reframed the complaint tradition within its proper legal and historical context, this project will conduct a rhetorical analysis of this shifting literary mode and enquire how the ancient rhetorical tradition, as institutionalised in humanist curricula of Renaissance schoolrooms, influenced literary perceptions of credible complaints, thus building on the scholarship of Lynn Enterline (2012), Kathy Eden (2017), and Lorna Hutson (1999; 2018). Finally, this project considers complaint's intertextuality, with particular attention to the translation and literary adaptation of classical and Biblical tales with the aim of contributing to ongoing research about the epistemological problems of representing sexual knowledge (Scozzaro, 2021; Keleher, 2022; Holmes, forthcoming).