The Early Modern Women’s Complaint Poetry Index is one of the outcomes of Early Modern Women and the Poetry of Complaint, a project jointly funded by the Australian Research Council and the Marsden Fund. I worked with Prof Ros Smith, Sarah Ross, Michelle O'Callaghan and Jake Arthur to develop this 'generous interface' to the index, which reimagines the digital first-line index for early modern poetry.
Three years in the making, the index presents the evidence of women’s extensive and diverse engagement with complaint poetry. There are 512 individual poems in our index, and 43 women are listed as agents, across a range of authorial and extra-authorial roles encompassing author, translator, transcriber and compiler. The index highlights new forms in which women wrote, uncovers new texts and new authors, and reclassifies known texts by women writers as complaints for the first time.