Redeeming Complaint in Tudor and Stuart Devotional Lyric

This dissertation explores an emerging fascination with devotional complaints in Tudor and Stuart poetry, written in the voice of the Preacher from Ecclesiastes, Peter, Christ, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene.This popular devotional mode was exercised by poets as diverse as Edmund Spenser, Robert Southwell, George Herbert, William Crashaw, Richard Verstegan, Elizabeth Grymeston, Nicholas Breton, Aemilia Lanyer, William Alabaster, Gervese Markham, John Davies, Henry Constable, and Henry Vaughan, to name a few.In order to understand this literary movement, this study recognizes two significant but easily overlooked facts. First of all, the complaint was one of the most important poetic modes in the sixteenth century. Rather than being a marginal space for second-string poets and disempowered malcontents to vent their social frustration, it was a dynamic voice for advocating real political and social change, employed by nearly all poets of the English Renaissance.Secondly, the dynamism of the complaint is not reducible to a secular-religious binary, and the widespread use of devotional complaint across confessions and continents indicates that it was a surprisingly cosmopolitan poetic voice.

Ultimately, in addition to providing a much-needed theoretical model for the early modern complaint, I use this dominant poetic mode of the English Renaissance to bring together several scholarly conversations that do not often merge.First of all, I bring the plentiful inquiries about the history of the emotions in the early modern period into the realms of lyric poetry and Reformation theology.Secondly, I place debates about confessional poetics in the broader context of secular lyric by expanding the scope of sacred parody and prayer into complaint.Finally, I allow historical research on gender and social reform to enrich our understanding of early modern prayer and devotion, applying recent work on female and political complaint to devotional poetry.In the cosmopolitan space of complaint, Catholic and Protestant poets shape an inconclusive discourse about the theology of passions and feminine spirituality that uses human anguish and feminine excess as points of access to Christ, flying in the face of some contemporary neo-Stoic consolation literature.Complaint poetry with its characteristic pathos and suspension of resolution was an ideal medium for this cross-confessional discourse about theologically ambiguous topics in which doctrine and imagination are often in tension.This study thus “redeems” complaint from reductive binaries even as it demonstrates a discourse that sought to redeem both the mode and the act of complaint.