Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia

Abstract

This paper seeks to explicate the imaginary geographies of Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) by tracing conflicting early modern genealogies of the Tartar—conventionally represented as issuing from Central Asia during the Middle Ages and threatening Western Europe up to the early modern period—in relation to English engagement with the Ottoman and Safavid empires around the turn of the seventeenth century.1 Wroth’s Urania is significant as the first original, as opposed to translated, prose romance by an English woman to appear in print.2 She was forced to withdraw the first part from circulation shortly after its initial publication under pressure from powerful men for whom her depictions of the patriarchal abuse of wives, daughters, and servants struck too close to home; however, she continued with an equally substantial second part, which remained in manuscript until its publication as a scholarly edition in 1999.3 In this second part, Wroth shifts from the classical emphasis of the first part to an increasingly belligerent assertion of a universalistic Christian identity, albeit one primarily in service of political expansionism and not presented as a spiritual practice or doctrine.4 Ultimately, the Urania links this identity to a polity encompassing “East” (Asia) and “West” (Europe) under the auspices of an imaginary Holy Roman Empire, which in Wroth’s era was “a phantom” of “a universal imperialist hope” for Western Europeans and not a political reality.5