Plaintive Words: Legal and Literary Complaints, 1550-1625

抱怨文学正在重新引起批评界的兴趣。最近的学术界重新将其分析购买作为英国文艺复兴时期的一种重要文学模式，揭示了重新评估其在英国文学史上的地位的必要工作（罗斯和史密斯，2020）。这些研究为抱怨提供了重要的见解，抱怨是表达无力感或抗议以应对社会变革的普遍手段，因此是早期现代政治主体形成的基本模式（Ross，O 'Callaghan，Smith，2018）。最近的研究也挑战了这种女性发声的文学传统主要是男性创作的规范帐户，重新关注早期现代女性的抱怨，作为对作者身份和声音问题的批判性辩论的场合;翻译和古典模仿;接受和文本传输;以及促进对体裁本身边界的修正主义查询（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然没有得到研究，那就是，它与法律的文化和投诉语言的变化直接接触。它探讨了如何投诉作为一个普遍的文学模式的英国文艺复兴时期的色情，宗教或政治的表达哀痛偏离其中世纪和古典的先例蓬勃发展，作为一个合法的曲折修辞模式。具体而言，它表明，经常女性发声的文学投诉的传统，在英国法律的当代变化，改变了妇女的公共诉状的语言和文化的发展（Chaytor，1995年;贝恩斯，1998年;步行者，2003年;高英，2003年）。从1550年到1625年，这篇论文描述了英国法律的和文学史上的一个过渡时期，其标志是强奸作为一种明确的针对个人的性犯罪的概念的出现，它取代了中世纪的强奸作为一种同性社会财产犯罪的模式。妇女的法律的地位从财产到原告的这种转变产生了新的叙事形式和哀怨的剧本，本项目表明，本文的研究将有助于这一蓬勃发展的批评领域，首先为这一关键的文学模式开辟一种不同的解释模式，将抱怨文学重新置于其适当的法律的历史语境中上下文它通过将其与当代档案资料（如法律的论文、手册和词典）以及教会法庭记录的妇女哀怨的证词和证词放在一起，重新构建了文艺复兴时期的控诉传统。这个项目随后将追溯投诉传统的“模仿分离的策略”，从其前现代的先例（莱恩，2001年）。在其适当的法律的和历史背景下重新构建投诉传统后，该项目将对这种转变的文学模式进行修辞分析，并询问古老的修辞传统如何在文艺复兴时期学校的人文主义课程中制度化，影响了可信投诉的文学观念，从而建立在林恩恩特莱恩（2012），凯西伊登（2017），Lorna Hutson（1999; 2018）。最后，这个项目认为投诉的互文性，特别注意翻译和文学改编的古典和圣经故事的目的是促进正在进行的研究有关的认识论问题，代表性知识（Scozzaro，2021;凯莱赫，2022;霍姆斯，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).