Abstract
This chapter argues that women poets of the Renaissance (Lanyer, Southwell, Hutchinson) deliberately avoid engaging the Ovidian model of female-voiced complaint with its focus on sexuality and body, preferring instead to deploy other traditions―lament, petition, elegy. Women poets turn to forms of complaint that are embedded within other forms and genres, which enables them to control the reception of women’s words. In particular, this chapter focusses on the ways in which women poets utilise the voice and example of Eve as a way of reimagining the relationship between voice, fallen sexuality and virtue.
Grateful thanks are due to the generous community of scholars who have provided commentary, critique and suggestions on this piece: the “Woe is She” seminar at SAA, in Los Angeles, March 2018; respondents at Complaint and Grievance: Literary Traditions, Wellington, New Zealand, February 14–15, 2019. Particular thanks are due to Sarah Ross, Christina Luckyj and Helen Wilcox, whose insights and help made this a much better essay.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, ed. Jean Klene (Folger MS.V.b.198), Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 147 (Tempe, AZ, 1997); John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler, 2nd edition (Abingdon: Longman, 1997); Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). All subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the body of the text, by title/page/line number or book/canto and line number.
- 2.
See Danielle Clarke, “‘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, 2000), 41–60; and Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- 3.
See Three Renaissance Women Poets, ed. Danielle Clarke (London: Penguin, 2001).
- 4.
Rosalind Smith, Michelle O’Callaghan, and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Complaint,” in A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 339–59.
- 5.
Susan Wiseman, “Researching Early Modern Women and the Poem,” in Susan Wiseman, ed. Early Modern Women and the Poem (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 15, citing this phrase from Rosalind Smith’s essay in the same volume. See Rosalind Smith, “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, 2013), 195.
- 6.
Jane Grogan, “Style, Objects, and Heroic Values in Early Modern Epic,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 57, no.1 (2017): 23.
- 7.
See Peter Auger, “The Semaines’ Dissemination in England and Scotland until 1641,” Renaissance Studies 26, no.5 (2012): 625–40. He notes the importance of the poems’ “non-fictional content and close links to other branches of learning: the Semaines intertwine poetry, classical learning, natural philosophy, world history and rhetoric” (626). Auger’s detailed survey of the reception of Du Bartas does not include women writers, although he notes Anne Bradstreet’s praise of the poet, and that Milton certainly knew the Semaines (640). See also Robert Applebaum, “Judith Dines Alone: From the Bible to Du Bartas,” Modern Philology 111, no. 4 (2014): 683–710 and Peter Auger, “Printed Marginalia, Extractive Reading and Joshua Sylvester’s Devine Weekes (1605),” Modern Philology 113, no. 1 (2015): 66–87.
- 8.
Guillaume de Salsute du Bartas, His Devine Weekes and Workes Translated, trans. Joshua Sylvester (London, 1605). All subsequent references are to this edition, and are included in the text.
- 9.
See Smith, O’Callaghan and Ross, “Complaint,” 339–59.
- 10.
Text in Poems, ed. Woods, 128–138. See John Kerrigan, ed., Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and “Female Complaint”: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) for an overview.
- 11.
See Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Erica Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Biblical Women in Early Modern Literary Culture 1550–1700, ed. Victoria Brownlee and Laura Gallagher (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015) and Victoria Brownlee, Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England 1558–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
- 12.
David Norbrook’s edition of Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder has a useful introduction to this topic, xliii–lii. See also Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry and Culture 1640–1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Ch. 5.
- 13.
See Elizabethan Minor Epics, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1963).
- 14.
See Hutchinson, “Eve, quickly caught in the foul hunter’s net” (O&D, 4.203).
- 15.
See Elizabeth Isham, Book of Remembrance, http://web.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/Isham/bor_p31r.htm, accessed 25 January 2019; Ann Bowyer’s commonplace book, Bodleian MS Ashmole 51. See Peter Auger, “British Responses to Du Bartas’ Semaines” (D Phil thesis, Oxford 2013).
- 16.
- 17.
Auger, “Dissemination,” 634.
- 18.
In Poems, ed. Woods, subsequently abbreviated as SDRJ.
- 19.
See also the Ovidian figure of Philomela, here turned lamenter, in “Description of Cooke-ham,” ll. 31; 189.
- 20.
See Madeline Bassnett, Women, Food Exchange and Governance in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016).
- 21.
Cf. Southwell “Darest thou my muse thy Battlike winge/before the eyes of Brittanes mighty kinge,” BL Lansdowne MS, in Klene, ed. 124, ll.2–3 and on Lanyer’s use of birds, see Anne Beskin, “The Birds of Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’,” Modern Philology 114, no.3 (2017): 524–551.
- 22.
On Drayton and complaint see Danielle Clarke, “Ovid’s Heroides, Drayton and the Articulation of the Feminine in the English Renaissance,” Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 (2008): 385–400; and Alison Thorne, “‘Large complaints in little papers’: Negotiating Ovidian Genealogies of Complaint in Drayton’s Englands Heroicall Epistles,” Renaissance Studies 22, no. 3 (2008): 368–384.
- 23.
The title is derived from the marginal note, Woods, 84.
- 24.
Most complaint narratives voiced by women are responses to acts of violation—whether physical or symbolic—and as such they operate in an extra-juridical space (just as negative reaction to #metoo focussed on “trial by media” and repeatedly asked why “genuine” victims did not have recourse to legal process rather than the often anonymised calling out done over social media, where the act of testifying in that space was often seen by detractors to invalidate the complaint), precisely because legal redress with its focus on the burden of proof in response to acts which take place in hidden or private spaces, and with its need to give both parties a fair hearing even where profound inequalities of power exist between the two parties, proves an ineffective tool for women to find justice.
- 25.
“When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, ‘Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him’” [27:19]. Lanyer’s use of the Bible, quoted here from the 1599 Geneva Bible, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+2%3A22&version=GNV.
- 26.
See Du Bartas, Devine Weekes, 311, quoted above.
- 27.
Wiseman, “Researching,” 15.
- 28.
See, for example, the marginal address “To my Ladie of Cumberland,” Woods, 101, and similar addresses at 108 and 122.
- 29.
On Lanyer and female spirituality, see Anne-Marie D’Arcy, “Ecclesia, Anima, and Spiritual Priesthood in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Review of English Studies 66 (2015): 634–54.
- 30.
Gillian Wright, Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600–1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 27. This chapter is an invaluable account of the complexities of the Folger MS.
- 31.
On women and law, and petitioning see Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Naomi McAreavey, “An Epistolary Account of the Irish Rising of 1641,” English Literary Renaissance 42, no. 2 (2012): 90–118; and Marie-Louise Coolahan, Women, Writing and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Ch. 3 and 4.
- 32.
http://www.oed.com.ucd.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/58322?redirectedFrom=dulcify#eid. Southwell’s use of the multiple meanings of this term predates the OED examples.
- 33.
1599 Geneva Bible https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+2%3A22&version=GNV.
- 34.
See “All married men”: “When god brought Eve to Adam for a bride/the text sayes she was taene from out mans side/A simbole of that side, whose sacred bloud./flowed for his spowse, the Churches savinge good” (20, ll.5–8). I owe this connection to Christina Luckyj, who generously shared her insights on Southwell with me.
- 35.
Barbara K. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Ithaca: Princeton University Press, 1985) notes that various forms of the “complaint-lament” (106) spread throughout Books 9–12 (103). Most commentators focus on Milton’s use of Ovidian precedent, even though there is little in Adam’s speech to align him with this model specifically. Complaint has been activated as a frame to think about Paradise Lost to a relatively limited extent; Victoria Kahn’s suggestive article on Job’s complaint in Paradise Regained argues that Milton was “less interested in…hermeneutical closure than he was in the ongoing process of interpretation enjoined by scripture itself,” “Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained,” English Literary History 76, no. 3 (2009): 626.
- 36.
See Shannon Miller, “Maternity, Marriage, and Contract: Lucy Hutchinson’s Response to Patriarchal Theory in ‘Order and Disorder’,” Studies in Philology 102, no. 3 (2005): 340–377; and a response to this position in Lauren Shook, “‘Pious Fraud’: Genesis Matriarchs and the Typological Imagination in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder,” Modern Philology 112, no. 1 (2014): 179–204.
- 37.
Kilgour, Milton, 225.
- 38.
Contrast, for example, Southwell’s description of the rib as a “Piller” and thus the foundation of the Church: “God tooke a Marble Piller and did build/a little world with all perfection fill’d” (ll.9–14).
- 39.
Hutchinson, “Poor mankind at God’s righteous bar was cast/And set for judgement by” (5.ll, 57–8).
- 40.
OED, devolve v. 3 a + b, https://www-oed-com.ucd.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/51553?redirectedFrom=devolve#eid
- 41.
Scott-Baumann, Forms of Engagement, ch. 5.
- 42.
See Grogan, “Style, Objects,” “punctuated by interruptions, stoppages,” 23.
- 43.
Smith et al., “Complaint.”
- 44.
Hutchinson, “Elegies” (Nottinghamshire Archives) in David Norbrook, “Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘Elegies’ and the Situation of the Republican Woman Writer,” English Literary Renaissance 27 (1997): 490.
- 45.
See Norbrook, Order and Disorder: “It is Eve who is given the first human utterance in the poem that breaks away from the Biblical text to dramatize an individualized voice” (xlvi).
- 46.
Julius Hutchinson suggests that the poem was written while John Hutchinson was imprisoned in 1664 (O&D 79, n. ccxcvi).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clarke, D. (2020). Animating Eve: Gender, Authority, and Complaint. 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_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-42945-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-42946-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)