- Title
- A 'goodly sample': exemplarity, female complaint and early modern women's poetry.
- Creator
- Smith, Rosalind
- Relation
- Early Modern Women and the Poem p. 181-200
- Relation
- http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719090721
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- This chapter examines how a crime's enduring narrative and affective energy has been mobilised through the rhetorical figure of exemplarity across different forms of true-crime writing, with particular reference to a ballad, 'The Wofull lamentation of Mistress Anne Saunders,' which relates to a 1573 murder plot. Feminine exemplarity has a volatility in this text, and other gallows confessions like it, that raises the possibility that exemplarity might have offered not only a heuristic flexibility to readers but also a model to writers, including early modern women who incorporated a rhetoric of feminine exemplarity into their own complaints. Heroidean complaint has become newly central in early modern studies for understanding questions of gender, voice and authorship, yet, to date, early modern women writers' use of the complaint genre has received limited consideration. But as these gallows confessions indicate, the models of exemplarity, affect and inference at work in popular complaint could, at the very least be imagined as a 'rhetoric of the possible' for women writers in the period. This argument contests the current critical construction of the female complaint as a 'phobically imagined female vocality' that operated to control disruptive patterns of women's behaviour, to contain transgressive subjects and to allow female speech 'primarily as a means of silencing it'. Instead, I examine what rhetorical possibilities popular complaint forms such as gallows confession might have opened up for early modern women writers of poetry, and explore the complex ways in which those possibilities were interpreted by male and female readers.
- Subject
- early modern women writers; exemplarity; complaint; true-crime
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1054406
- Identifier
- uon:15745
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780719090721
- Language
- eng
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