Plaintive Words: Legal and Literary Complaints, 1550-1625

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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).