‘Poetry of Complaint’ Project Wins Digital Innovation Award

Trinity DPhil student and lecturer Jake Arthur is part of a team whose literature project examining how 16th and 17th century British women wrote in the popular genre of ‘complaint’ has won an award for digital innovation from the Renaissance Society of America (RSA).

The RSA  Digital Innovation Award recognizes excellence in digital projects that support the study of the Renaissance, and was awarded to Early Modern Women and the Poetry of Complaint, 1540-1660. Led by Professor Rosalind Smith of the Australian National University, the five-member team sought to challenge the narrative that the popular Renaissance genre of complaint was an exclusively male-authored tradition. The project won the RSA award for its online Index – a searchable visualisation of the data we collected about these writings, including 512 poems with 43 women involved as authors, translators, or compilers.

Jake Arthur says of his involvement in the initiative: ‘My part of the project was to read all the poetry written by women in English in the 16th and 17th centuries and to hunt for “complaint” poems within that body of texts. I also had to sort those poems in meaningful ways, deciding on taxonomies and sub-genres that govern how the Index now works and looks. This work aligned very well with my doctoral thesis which is about women’s writing in translation in the same period. I ended up doing this work across the world, from New Zealand, to Spain, and in Oxford. When we were concluding the project at the end of 2020, I was actually in a New Zealand quarantine hotel, and my colleague sent me a photocopy of a 300-page poem which was delivered to my room by one of the soldiers running the facility. So it’s been a varied experience to say the least!

‘Our hope is that the Index will make this untapped corpus of literature more accessible to scholars, but also give people a vivid sense of just how varied women’s writing was in this period in British history. Winning the Digital Innovation award from the Renaissance Society of America is a real endorsement of that aim and also a great opportunity for us to promote the Index as a tool for teaching and research. So I'd encourage people to take a look!’

Early Modern Women and the Poetry of Complaint documents and explores a newly expanded corpus of female-authored complaints deriving from the traditions of amatory, Ovidian, and devotional complaints and its Complaint Index is available online.