ABSTRACT
Robert Southwell’s literary strategy of fashioning himself as an English complaint poet gave his devotional works credibility and resonance to Protestant readers, even as it challenged theological expectations regarding sin, passion, and doubt. This chapter describes that strategy amid a surging revival of the complaint mode in sixteenth-century English poetry, and traces it through his portrayals of three key biblical lovers: Peter, Mary Magdalene, and Joseph. By translating his Ignatian aesthetic into English complaint, Southwell affectively invited Protestant readers to reimagine repentance as love, vindicate human passion, and reconcile faith and uncertainty in a time of intense religious violence.
