Abstract
In Part One, Book Two, of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (pub. 1621), the titular heroine excuses the shift of her attentions from Parselius to Steriamus by insisting that, because Steriamus had “wonne [her] first,” her refocused devotion to her original love is not a change, “but as a booke layd by, new lookt on, is more, and with greater judgement understood.”1 The capstone of an episode of confessing and excusing second love, Wroth’s metaphor of re-reading emphasizes the importance of looking anew to enhance understanding and improve judgment. In another of the romance’s many episodes of re-reading, Pamphilia, suffering from love insomnia, opens her cabinet. Looking over some of the “many papers” therein, she is prompted by dissatisfaction to write new verses—with which she is, again and predictably, dissatisfied (62–3). Re-reading here prompts a different reaction than in the first episode, generating the activity of writing a new poem as a response to the original text. Kathryn DeZur has recently argued that in its examples of reading and writing Urania trains its readers in how to read.2 If Urania teaches us to read, however, it also guides its own re-readings. These two episodes suggest apposite perspectives on the activity of re-reading. In the first, we re-read for greater understanding—something akin to the conventional scholarly and critical work of understanding a text within its context. In the second, re-reading prompts activity—praxis and poesis, contemporary acts of making.
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Notes
Lady Mary Wroth, The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: RETS/MRTS, 1995), 333. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
Kathryn DeZur, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Reading of Romance,” in her Gender, Interpretation, and Political Rule in Sidney’s Arcadia (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2013), 83–104.
Josephine A. Roberts’s seminal edition of Wroth’s poetry, The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), was published a decade earlier. As noted in the introduction to Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), however, “not one of the five major collections of critical essays concerned with early modern women which appeared in the second half of the 1980s included an essay on Mary Wroth … and the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, does not even mention Wroth, in spite of the notable variety and length of the works to her name” (3).
Alluding to the critical novelty of treating Wroth as a subject in her own right, as well as considering the striking range of subjects represented by Wroth across genres, Naomi Miller’s first monograph on Wroth was titled Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
See Margaret P. Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010);
Mary Ellen Lamb, ed., Mary Wroth: The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (Abridged) (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2011);
Clare Kinney, ed., Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700, Volume 4: Mary Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Mary Ellen Lamb, ed., Sidney Journal 31 (2013); Paul Salzman, ed., Mary Wroth’s Poetry: An Online Edition (http://wroth.labrobe.edu.au/); Ilona Bell and Steven May, eds, Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: A Reappraisal (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming); Naomi Miller, The Tale-Teller (under submission).
For a comprehensive review of Wroth scholarship, see Katherine R. Larson, “Recent Studies of Mary Wroth,” ELR 44, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 328–59.
Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990);
Gary F. Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1993);
Margaret P. Hannay, Michael G. Brennan, and Mary Ellen Lamb, eds, The Ashgate Research Companion to the Sidneys, 2 vols (Farnham: Ashgate, forthcoming 2015). Also worthy of note is the recent conference, “Dramatizing Penshurst: Site, Script, Sidneys,” hosted at Penshurst Place, June 8–9, 2014.
Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Patricia Demers, Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005);
Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987);
Barbara K. Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
See, for example, Katherine R. Larson, Early Modern Women in Conversation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice, eds, Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006);
and Marion Wynne-Davies and Paul Salzman, eds, Mary Wroth and Shakespeare (New York and London: Routledge, 2014). On the range of Wroth’s engagement with classical and early modern writers, including Ovid, Catullus, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne, see “Dialogues with Other Writers,” in Larson, “Recent Studies,” 342–5.
For valuable explorations of form in relation to gender and women’s writing in the period, see Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture, 1640–1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013);
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton, eds, The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014);
and Diana Henderson, “Where Had All the Flowers Gone? The Missing Space of Female Sonneteers in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et réforme 35, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 139–65. For formal approaches to Wroth’s writings, see Larson, “Recent Studies,” esp. “Form and Style,” 350–2.
See Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle, eds, Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007);
and Micheline White, ed., English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
See Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009);
Joan Fitzpatrick, ed., Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010);
and Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
See Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010);
and Jennifer Munroe, Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
Victoria Burke, ed., Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004);
Ann Hollinshead and Chanita Goodblatt, eds, Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women and the New Textualism (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009).
Thomasin K. LaMay, ed., Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
See also Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson, eds, Gender and Song in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen & Co., 1934), 47–59.
Ramona Wray, “Anthologising the Early Modern Female Voice,” in The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 55–72.
Betty S. Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff, eds, Attending to Women in Early Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 301–39.
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© 2015 Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller with Andrew Strycharski
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Larson, K.R., Miller, N.J., Strycharski, A. (2015). Introduction. In: Larson, K.R., Miller, N.J., Strycharski, A. (eds) Re-Reading Mary Wroth. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137473349_1
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