Complaint was a ubiquitous mode of expression in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, offering ways to protest grievance and injustice and to lament loss, grief, and discontent. Women took up this mode through poetry across a variety of forms and for diverse purposes from the early Tudor period, exploiting complaint’s availability to amorous, religious, and political contexts. Their use of poetic complaint in the sixteenth century draws upon vernacular, devotional, and Ovidian traditions, setting the coordinates for an expanded use of the mode in response to the dramatic political crises of the seventeenth century and an increased range of generic possibilities for recording protest and loss. Across the period, women inhabited a number of roles as complaint poets: as authors, translators, transcribers, compilers, and performers. Once thought to be a poetic form off-limits to women, complaint has emerged in recent criticism as one of the most important and generative poetic modes with which early modern women engaged.