Abstract
This chapter discusses the development of a digital database that shows the breadth and depth of women’s engagement with complaint poetry between 1530 and 1680. The database provides basic bibliographic data alongside information about the role of female agents (such as author, translator, transcriber, and compiler), and the type of complaint or complaint topoi the texts engage in, including the gender of the poetic speaker(s). This chapter examines major complaint strands identified in the database, as well as key decisions in its design and taxonomies, namely the complexities of deciding a workable definition of complaint; the meaning and decision-making process behind the concept of “female agents”; and why and how we identified the gender of poetic speakers. We further consider the ramifications of these decisions for our data model, situating those decisions and the database itself within a context of other resources about early modern women’s writing and within evolving debates in the field of digital humanities.
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Notes
- 1.
Helen Hackett has now identified this second hand as Father William Smith (William Southern), a Jesuit priest. “Unlocking the Mysteries of Constance Aston Fowler’s Verse Miscellany (Huntington Library MS HM 904): The Hand B Scribe Identified,” in Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England, ed. Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 91–112.
- 2.
See, for example, Danielle Clarke’s argument that the limited space Heroidean constructions of femininity leave for women writers and female speakers. “‘Formd into words by your divided lips’: Women, Rhetoric and the Ovidian Tradition,” in “This Double Voice”: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 61–87.
- 3.
Danielle Clarke, “‘Signifying, But Not Sounding’: Gender and Paratext in the Complaint Genre,” in Renaissance Paratexts, ed. Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 135.
- 4.
“Complaint,” and “Elegy,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, and Paul Rouzer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 287 and 397–98.
- 5.
Rosalind Smith, Michelle O’Callaghan, and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Complaint,” in A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2018), 339.
- 6.
George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 303–4 and 137.
- 7.
Searching the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) for “complaint” gives a strong indication of this.
- 8.
“Pitties Lamentation for the cruelty of this age.” 1625? Magdalene College, Pepys Library, Pepys Ballads 1.162–163, EBBA 20071. Accessed 15 March 2019, https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20071/image
- 9.
Smith, O’Callaghan, and Ross, “Complaint,” 339.
- 10.
Puttenham discusses the healing power of lamentation in Galenic terms of expulsion, noting that “one short sorrowing [can be] the remedy of a long and grievous sorrow.” The Art of English Poesy, 136–37.
- 11.
Smith, O’Callaghan, and Ross, “Complaint,” 339.
- 12.
Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 137 and 303–4. “Existential” complaint is discussed in more detail later in this chapter.
- 13.
Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 116.
- 14.
Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1.
- 15.
Keywords are taken from the poems but modernised across the database to ensure they are consistently searchable.
- 16.
In “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.104, fols. 4r-4v, ll. 23–28.
- 17.
Our policies for the inclusion of poems such as this one, which is male-voiced and ascribed to the putatively male W. G. (EEBO tentatively suggests Geoffrey Whitney), is discussed later in this chapter.
- 18.
Isabella Whitney, The copy of a letter, lately written in meeter (London, 1567), sig. B3v, ll. 65–68.
- 19.
v/u have been modernised here and throughout.
- 20.
Lady Mary Wroth, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (London, 1621), 2.
- 21.
See Susan Felch’s distinction between penitential and petitionary (religious) complaint in her chapter in this volume.
- 22.
University of Leeds Library, Brotherton MS Lt. q. 32, fols. 64v-67r, ll. 21–22.
- 23.
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, (trans.). The Tragedie of Antonie. Doone into English by the Countesse of Pembroke. (London, 1595), sig. Alr, II. 1–7.
- 24.
Ibid., l. 11.
- 25.
Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedie of Mariam, the Faire Queene of Iewry (London, 1613), sig. B3r, ll. 41–50.
- 26.
See, for example, Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and the recent collection edited by Patricia Pender, Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
- 27.
This decision reflects Danielle Clarke’s key work in revising our understanding of women’s translation, a mode whose “relative marginality or slipperiness of ownership can be exploited as a form of agency to figures who otherwise lack it.” See “Translation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 170.
- 28.
Pender, ed., Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Collaboration, 1.
- 29.
Brotherton MS Lt q 32, fol. 42r, ll. 1–5.
- 30.
Ibid., fol. 48r, ll. 1–5.
- 31.
These issues are additionally complicated by the uncertain authorship of this sequence. See Steven W. May’s recent article, “Anne Lock and Thomas Norton’s Meditation of a Penitent Sinner,” Modern Philology 114, no. 4 (2017): 793–819.
- 32.
It quickly became apparent we were not lacking material for inclusion.
- 33.
Poems from manuscript sources were entered in the database with the folio numbers of their primary “iteration,” in addition to the basic identificatory information of title, first and last lines and number of lines.
- 34.
Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things,” 215.
- 35.
Sarah C. E. Ross, “Coteries, Circles, Networks: The Cavendish Circle and Civil War Women’s Writing,” in A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Patricia Phillippy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 338.
- 36.
Rosalind Smith has discussed the lack of discussion of performance as a “particularly problematic critical lacuna in the case of poetry, which was the subject of both written and oral modes, read aloud, sometimes memorised and made the speaker’s own in the moment of performance.” “A ‘goodly sample’: exemplarity, female complaint and early modern women’s poetry,” in Early Modern Women and the Poem, ed. Susan Wiseman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 182.
- 37.
Jonathan P. Lamb, “Digital Resources for Early Modern Studies,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 58, no. 2 (2018), 445.
- 38.
In contrast with Perdita Manuscripts, Perdita collects metadata about early modern women’s writing in manuscript. Lamb, “Digital Resources for Early Modern Studies,” 450.
- 39.
Ibid., 465.
- 40.
For a useful recent survey of research on visualisations that support close and distant reading, see Stefan Jänicke, Greta Franzini, Muhammad Faisal Cheema, and Gerik Scheuermann, “On Close and Distant Reading in Digital Humanities: A Survey and Future Challenges,” Eurographics Conference on Visualization (EuroVis) – STARs. (Cagliari: The Eurographics Association, 2015.) https://doi.org/10.2312/eurovisstar.20151113
- 41.
Foundational studies in distant reading include Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (New York: Verso, 2005) and Distant Reading (New York: Verso, 2013); Matthew L. Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
- 42.
Julia Flanders, “Leaning, Reading, and the Problem of Scale: Using Women Writers Online,” Pedagogy 2, no. 1 (2002), 55.
- 43.
Mitchell Whitelaw, “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2015). Accessed 21 October, 2019. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/00205/000205.html
- 44.
For an expanded account of the function of the apparatus digitally, see Sarah Connell, Julia Flanders, Nicole Infanta, Elizabeth Polcha, and William Reed Quinn, “Learning from the Past: The Women Writers Project and Thirty Years of Humanities Text Encoding,” Magnificat Cultura i Literatura Medievals 4 (2017), 1–19.
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Arthur, J., Smith, R. (2020). Women’s Complaint, 1530–1680: Taxonomy, Voice, and the Index in the Digital Age. In: Ross, S., Smith, R. (eds) Early Modern Women's Complaint. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_14
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