Table Of ContentREDEEMING COMPLAINT IN TUDOR AND STUART DEVOTIONAL LYRIC
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate School
of the University of Notre Dame
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
by
Emily Ann Ransom
_____________________________________
Susannah Brietz Monta, Director
Graduate Program in English
Notre Dame, Indiana
July, 2016
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
ProQuest Number:10308182
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
All rights reserved
(cid:3)
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
Thequality of this reproduction is dependent upon the qualityof the copy submitted.
(cid:3)
In the unlikely event that the authordid not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages,these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a notewill indicate the deletion.
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
ProQuest 10308182
(cid:3)
Published by ProQuest LLC ( 2017). Copyrightof the Dissertation is held by the Author.
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
All rights reserved.
This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code
Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC.
(cid:3)
(cid:3)
ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346
© Copyright 2016
Emily Ann Ransom
REDEEMING COMPLAINT IN TUDOR AND STUART DEVOTIONAL LYRIC
Abstract
by
Emily A. Ransom
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
Emily A. Ransom
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.
To my grandmothers whose name I bear:
Helen Ann Hayek (1919–2014) and Ann Mae Ransom (1923–2012),
the short, sturdy, one-armed Polish woman who never said a word of complaint
and the tall, elegant Southern belle who made complaint an art.
I wish y’all could have seen me finish.
ii
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS …………………………………………………………….iv
INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………….1
CHAPTER 1: VANITY OF VANITIES: THE COMPLAINT OF THE PREACHER ...
…………………………………………………………………………... 27
CHAPTER 2: WATER FROM THE ROCK: THE COMPLAINT OF PETER …… 86
CHAPTER 3: THE MAN OF SORROWS: THE COMPLAINT OF CHRIST …. 149
CHAPTER 4: THOSE WHO SOW IN TEARS: THE COMPLAINT OF MARY… 208
CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………. 269
BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………274
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I stand on the shoulders of innumerable giants. I am deeply grateful for the
tireless mentorship, inspiration, and encouragement of Susannah Monta under all her
many hats: teacher, editor, boss, collaborator, director, and model. She, Stephen Fallon,
Brad Gregory, Jesse Lander, Sr. Ann Astell, Robert Young, Reid Barbour, and Jessica
Wolfe have all expanded the limits of my imagination for rigorous scholarship in the
humanities and wholehearted engagement in humanity while living fully human lives.
Thank you to all who guided my formation at Notre Dame, NC State, UNC
Chapel Hill, University College Cork, and the International Association for Thomas
More Studies. I am indebted to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for the Charlotte W.
Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship that allowed me to finish with fervor.
I am also profoundly grateful for the support of all who have heard my
complaints, particularly to Sr. Diana Marie who first introduced me to Southwell, to
Jacob Riyeff who shared the pilgrimage, to the community of Communion and
Liberation who taught me Italian language and Italian love, to the Jesuits of Henri de
Lubac House who taught me Ignatian spirituality both academically and pastorally, and
to the parishioners at St. Augustine’s who put devotion into action.
Were I to thank my family adequately, I would need another dissertation. Mom,
Dad, Giff, Ashley, Byron, Sonali, Esther, Sam, Gideon, Samwise, Peter, and Joseph,
thank you for the gift of loving and being loved. If I speak with the tongues of men and of
angels, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, but have not love, I am nothing.
iv
INTRODUCTION
Ah my deare angrie Lord!
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sowre-sweet dayes
I will lament, and love.
“Bitter-sweet”
When George Herbert asserted to his “deare angrie Lord” that he would respond
to divine paradoxes with one of his own—“I will complain, yet praise”—he combined not
only contrasting postures to his lord but also contrasting poetic modes. It was a statement
of generic expansion, combining poetic complaint with hymnody. Herbert was not
unique among his contemporaries for stretching the boundaries of poetic prayer to
include the mode of complaint; a generation before the great flowering of devotional lyric
in the Jacobean period, poets across confessional and national boundaries invited the
voices of dejected shepherds and abandoned women into their prayers and biblical
versifications. In this artistic exchange they shaped an emerging mode of poetry I call
devotional complaint, a particular English expression of a devotional aesthetic at least as old
as the Hebrew psalms and prophets. The poetic voice of this mode is characteristically
English—employed throughout the later Middle Ages by Chaucer, Lydgate, and
Hoccleve, and refashioned into the most popular lyric form in the Renaissance by poets
1
like Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare—while the devotional emphasis behind it can be
traced to the roots of Christianity, the sometimes overlooked precedent of the people of
God to follow him with the full fury of their grief, anger, and fear. In the midst of the
upheavals of the English reformations, as political and social anxieties gave new
expressions to medieval literary complaint, devotional poetry explored a combative piety
that combined discontent and devotion into a redemptive expression of human passions.
In order to understand the literary movement of devotional complaint, 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 in order 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
2
