Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics ed. by Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith (review)

Abstract

<p><i>Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics</i> is an exciting new collection of fifteen essays on early modern women's complaint which represents a welcome extension of current scholarship on early modern women's engagement with complaint, one of the most pervasive literary modes in English writing in print and manuscript over the years 1550–1700. Much scholarship to date has identified Ovid's Heroides as the locus classicus for early modern complaint, but Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith, the editors of this collection, argue that the mode is far more capacious. The volume traces the genealogy of female complaint through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious, political, legal, and philosophical discourses, and its critical reception and recent representation in digital scholarly resources. For early modern writers, Ovid's verse epistles voiced by heroines addressing the heroes who raped, entrapped, and abandoned them, paired with some replies, thematized the potentials of women's writing to overturn the priorities of hegemonic discourses. Although a number of early [End Page 253] modern women writers, including Isabella Whitney, cite this tradition, Ovid's Heroides was a troublesome legacy owing to its licentious subject matter and its male-authored ventriloquy of women's complaint. As Early Modern Women's Complaint shows, the Heroides was just one element in early modern women's complaint.</p>