Wroth's Urania Research Articles

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller

Reviewed by: The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller Jaime Goodrich (bio) The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn Gary Waller Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 288 pp. €105, cloth. Over the past fifty years, scholarship on early modern women writers has grown exponentially as critics have discovered, edited, and analyzed a significant corpus of previously unknown works. Gary Waller was an early pioneer in this field, and he continues to break new ground with a new book that applies Julia Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque to key texts by early modern female authors. In the first two chapters, Waller lays the groundwork for the rest of his study by conceptualizing the Baroque. Admitting that it is difficult to define this term, Waller focuses on five key "Baroque tendencies" (20, his emphasis), as follows: 1.) "fictionalizing" (29), or narrative multiplicity; 2.) "le pli" (31), or acts of folding that move into infinity; 3.) paradoxical juxtapositions of hyperbole and melancholy; 4.) kitsch, with its emphasis on duplication; 5.) "plateauing" (31), or the indefinite postponement of climax. The second chapter then turns to Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque, itself based on Teresa of Avila, in order to redress the lack of scholarly attention to the role of gender in the Baroque. Surveying different early modern exemplars of femininity (the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, the Petrarchan mistress), Waller poses a key question: "Given the dominance of these largely oppressive models for women,…how were Baroque women writers and artists able to explore their own lived experiences as providing an 'owned' source of meaning" (66)? He finds an answer in Kristeva's theory of the semiotic mode, in which a feminine subconscious erupts through patriarchal language. The remainder of the monograph analyzes the ways that various Englishwomen rebelled against patriarchal domination through writings that display Baroque characteristics. Chapter three covers the Catholic female Baroque, by way of Gertrude More and Mary Ward. In the next chapter, [End Page 218] Waller turns to the Protestant Baroque with a discussion of Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, the women of Little Gidding, Anne Bradstreet, and Anne Hutchinson. Chapter five considers works by women associated with the court, with special attention to the role of masques and country house drama: Mary Wroth, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Hester Pulter. The next chapter is the strongest in the book, providing a compelling and fascinating analysis of labyrinths, narrative multiplicity, plateaus, and folds in Wroth's Urania. Finally, chapter seven considers how Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn moved beyond the Baroque toward the Enlightenment. The project of situating English literature—and especially works by women writers—in relation to the Baroque is an intriguing and timely one, particularly since scholars such as James E. Kelly have recently begun to consider the role of Englishwomen on the continent (English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600-1800, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Yet the very indeterminacy of the Baroque becomes problematic, as this key term is frequently paired with qualifiers that are never defined. Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalms are "emergent or incipient Baroque" (121), Anne Bradstreet's poetry is "'accidentally' Baroque" (150), Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley's dramas are "at least 'pale' Baroque" (186), and Aphra Behn's Love Letters is "clearly if superficially Baroque" (268). As variants of the Baroque proliferate, the concept itself takes on a multiplicity that is aptly ironic and may leave readers wondering what, if anything, truly constitutes the Baroque. Furthermore, the inclusion of authors whose works are "accidentally," "pale," "incipient," or "superficially" Baroque serves as a distraction from the more successful analysis of writers such as Wroth and the women of Little Gidding. Indeed, what unites all of the writers covered in this book is not their connection to stylistic traits of the Baroque but rather to the Kristevan female Baroque described in chapter two. As Waller observes in the postscript, "in the Baroque…women were able, to greater or lesser extents, to give voice to counter-dominant surges and explorations of 'intimate revolt,' discovering many means by which paternal realms might...

Lies, Evasions, and Friendly Networks in Mary Wroth's Urania

Lies, Evasions, and Friendly Networks in Mary Wroth's Urania

Editing Early Modern Women ed. by Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman

Reviewed by: Editing Early Modern Women ed. by Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman Margaret J.M. Ezell Editing Early Modern Women, ed. Sarah C.E. Ross and Paul Salzman. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2016. Pp. xii + 299. $99.99. This thought-provoking collection, produced by two highly regarded scholars of early modern women's writings and including contributions by established editors working with early modern women's texts, will be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of anyone who teaches critical bibliography, scholarly editing, and/or who works with women's texts as part of their scholarship and in the classroom. Ms. Ross and Mr. Salzman's useful introduction gives an overview of the varied traditions of editing of early modern women's works. It also draws attention to the ways in which, in the twentieth century, these texts forced new editorial issues to be considered and dealt with that diverged from those codified by editions of mainstream canonical authors such as Jonson, Milton, and Melville. These are editorial choices that continue to be problematic today. "How do we edit texts that have no editorial history, or whose editorial history is concerned with oddity and exemplarity rather than canonicity?" is the first of their guiding questions, followed by "how do we edit texts that do not fit easily into conventional taxonomies of 'literature,' and what contexts should we present for them?" Finally, "how can digital methods of editing, archiving, and amassing early modern texts facilitate multiple editorial and literary-critical aims?" These are important, central questions confronting twenty-first-century editors in general and not just those devoted to the recovery and preservation of works by women or lesser-known male authors. The volume is divided into four parts. The first deals with "Editorial Ideologies," followed by "Editing Female Forms: Gender, Genre, and Editing," "Out of the Archives, Into the Classroom," and "Editorial Possibilities," the last dealing with editing in the digital age. Many of the essays deal with major figures and familiar texts produced by women in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Danielle Clarke's "Producing Gender: Mary Sidney Herbert and Her Early Editors," Susan M. Felch's "The Backward Gaze: Editing Elizabeth Tyrwhit's Prayerbook," Ramona Wray on Elizabeth [End Page 166] Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam, Leah S. Marcus on editing Queen Elizabeth, and Mary Ellen Lamb on Mary Wroth's Urania. Other essays address generic issues, including editing women's letters for print publication by Diana G. Barnes and Marian WynneDavies's chapter on editing dramas for performance. Essays that will have particular interest for the readers of The Scriblerian include ones looking at women writing during the English Civil War, including Lucy Hutchinson, Anne, Lady Halkett, and Katherine Philips, as well as to what extent lesser-known women writing in the Interregnum and Restoration need modernization for the classroom. Elizabeth Clarke, Suzanne Trill, and Marie-Louise Coolahan tackle editing issues raised by individual texts and authors. Ms. Clarke, who is one of the team of editors producing the OUP complete works of Lucy Hutchinson, points out in "Contextualizing the Woman Writer: Editing Lucy Hutchinson's Religious Prose" that a male-authored, seventeenth-century theological treatise would be edited in the context of printed, public theological writings. However, Hutchinson's Principles is devised in the form of a long letter to her daughter Barbara. Hutchinson expects others will read her text, but she will not publish it: "I write not for the presse, to boast my owne weaknesses to the world but to imprint on your hart the characters I have received of God." Ms. Clarke thus argues the importance of situating the work in part in the context of the popular seventeenth-century women's genre, the "mother's legacy," suggesting that the choice of "a consciously feminized genre" is important in the assumptions the writer is making about her readers and the type of theological knowledge they will bring to the text. Similarly, in "Critical Categories: Towards an Archaeology of Anne, Lady Halkett's Archive," Ms. Trill looks at the way in which earlier editing of Halkett's "life and works" has created different "lives" in different times. She begins with...

Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature

1. Performing Privacy and Early Modern Women 2. Private Lament in Calvin, Knox, and Anne Lock 3. Privacy and Gender in Household Orders 4. Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well: Mastery and Publicity 5. Marriage and Private Lament in Mary Wroth's Urania 6. Interest and Retirement in Aphra Behn's Odes 7. Epilogue: Performing Privacy on Facebook

The immaterial book: reading and romance in early modern England

In romances--Renaissance England's version of the fantasy novel--characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insights into their readers' selves. The Immaterial Book examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres: Spenser's Faerie Queene , Shakespeare's Cymbeline and The Tempest , Wroth's Urania , and Cervantes' Don Quixote . It offers a response to material book studies by calling for a new focus on imaginary or immaterial books, and argues that early modern romance authors, rather than replicating contemporary reading practices within their texts, are reviving ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they use to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind.

Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature

Reviewed by: Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature Greg Bentley (bio) Melissa E. Sanchez . Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 283 + xi pages. $74.00. Erotic Subjects is a welcome addition to the continuing scholarly discussion of the relationship between sexuality and politics in early modern English [End Page 153] literature. Melissa Sanchez's unique and imaginative contribution to this discussion lies in her reversal of the traditional order. Rather than focus on the politics of sexuality, she addresses the sexualization of politics, focusing especially on how the political discourses that extend from the Renaissance through the Reformation and into the Restoration are infused with the language of eroticism. From this novel perspective, Sanchez illustrates the anagogical relationship between the production of imaginative literature and the practice of material culture, and most particularly she looks at how the politics and law of the latter inflect the former. Sanchez begins her exploration of the personal and public relationships between the individual subject and sovereign authority, as well as the tensions between concepts of monarchy and republicanism, by closely examining works of two of the Tudors' most prominent male authors: Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. She initiates her discussion of Sidney by focusing on a historical event: Sidney's gift to Queen Elizabeth of a "' jewel of gold, being a whip garnished with small diamonds in four rows, and cords of small seed pearle'" (31). This gift, Sanchez argues, "neatly encompasses the complex relation of power and pleasure that Sidney explores in detail throughout The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," a text, she claims, that "examines the possibility that martyrdom may be a powerful source of political, as well as religious, empowerment" (33). By illustrating how the relationship between Argalus and Parthenia functions as "a pattern for the romance's main plot of Pyrocles and Musidorus' courtship of Philoclea and Pamela," Sanchez demonstrates how Sidney's description of "political hagiography"—"tales of feminine suffering"—functions as a form of protest against conventionally masculinized tyranny (54). Turning from Sidney to Spenser, Sanchez argues that The Faerie Queene also "ponders the intricate relationship of authority and submission through images of assaulted female virtue," but she contends that "Spenser is less optimistic about the possibility of such principled resistance" (57). Sanchez asserts that "the martyrdom that Sidney saw as the source of both moral and political authority may give way to perverse pleasure" (57) Thus, as she writes, "Spenser tests the limits of the hagiographic politics that Sidney endorses" (57). By comparing the relationship between Sir Scudamore and the female characters in Books III and IV to Artegal's relationship with the female characters in Book V, Sanchez illustrates how "the elusiveness of chastity and friendship are closely tied to the ultimate failure of justice" (57). [End Page 154] Following her discussion of Sidney and Spenser, Sanchez takes up two works by Shakespeare: The Rape of Lucrece and Pericles. Working from contemporary legal cases that illustrate the fine line between rape and ravishment, Sanchez addresses Shakespeare's concept of personal and political agency to illustrate how "the gendered language of sexual assault provides Shakespeare a powerful idiom for analyzing political consent precisely because it depicts agency in . . . confused and paradoxical terms" (89). Rather than depict the limitations of individual choice that Sidney and Spenser portrayed, Shakespeare's texts, Sanchez claims, show how good subjects, like good women, cannot actively resist their superiors—even abusive ones—without raising the specter of anarchy. And if resistance is unthinkable, then consent is the only option, and so no longer a sign of the difference between prince and tyrant. (89) As Sanchez concludes, the struggle between will and law that these works address would have been all too familiar to Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. Sanchez shifts to the Stuart court and its sexualized politics by analyzing the works of two of the period's most prominent female authors: Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish. In contrast to recent criticism that has understood Wroth's Urania as a "mediation of the nature of governance," Sanchez writes, she depicts how "the extremity of submission in the romance...

Women, beauty and power in early modern England: a feminist literary history

Introduction PART ONE: COSMETICS 'The Beautifying Part of Physic': Women's Cosmetic Practices in Early Modern England 'Soveraigne Receipts,' Fair Beauty, and Race in Stuart England PART TWO: CLOTHES The Greatness in Good Clothes: Fashioning Subjectivity in Mary Wroth's Urania and Margaret Spencer's Account Book What Not to Wear: Children's Clothes and the Maternal Advice of Elizabeth Jocelin and Brilliana, Lady Harley PART THREE: HAIR The Culture of the Head: Hair in Mary Wroth's Urania and Margaret Cavendish's 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity' An 'absolute mistress of her self': Anne Clifford and the Luxury of Hair Conclusion Index

Erotic subjects: the sexuality of politics in early modern English literature

Introduction Hagiographic Politics in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia Tyrannous Seduction in The Faerie Queene Consent Without Agency in The Rape of Lucrece and Pericles Political Masochism in Mary Wroth's Urania Love and Liberty in the Caroline Masque Law and Desire in Margaret Cavendish's Romances The Erotics of Republicanism in Paradise Lost Index

Pirates and Politics in John Barclay's <em>Argenis</em> (1621)

The representation of piracy became more complex in Elizabethan and Jacobean romance, as a result of increasing generic sophistication and changing political circumstances. Generic developments in romance coincided with a period of intense English piracy, and as a result political changes concerning attitudes to the ideology and material practice of piracy shape the treatment of seaborne crime in Elizabethan and Jacobean writing. Through a discussion of piracy in John Barclay's Argenis (1621), examined in relation to its depiction in Philip Sidney's New Arcadia (1590) and Mary Wroth's Urania (Part 1, 1621; Part 2, written ?1621–26), this article explores how depictions of piracy do not alter simply in line with government policy regarding seaborne crime, but are also used to debate the merits of policy and leadership.

"[T]he art to desifer the true Caracter of Constancy": Female Silence in Wroth's Urania

Previous articleNext article No AccessEssays"[T]he art to desifer the true Caracter of Constancy": Female Silence in Wroth's UraniaElisa OhElisa Oh Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal Volume 5Fall 2010 Published for the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/EMW23541501 Views: 21Total views on this site © 2009 Center for Renaissance & Baroque StudiesPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Brian C. Lockey, Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature.

THIS book presents the engaging thesis that early modern English fiction reflected a position holding that only ‘transnational’ Roman-derived civilian law (and not English common law) was suited to sustain an English colonial enterprise. The book mainly considers chivalric, pastoral or allegorical romances, so the ‘English Renaissance Literature’ in its title is wider than the literary territory actually explored. Works considered include Sidney's Old Arcadia, Riche's His Farewell to Military Profession, Roberts's Pheander the Maiden Knight, Johnson's The Renowned History of the Seven Champions of Christendom, Warner's Pan his Syrinx, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Cymbeline, and Wroth's Urania. Lockey deplores a lesser valuing of romance than of epic, and indeed writes ‘of the way that the two forms are coterminous, virtually never existing in isolated form’ (p. 17). In accord with the usually exclusively political focus on imaginative literature in this book, my guess is that this suggests that these genres share political implications.

Gender and Power in Mary Wroth's Urania

Gender and Power in Mary Wroth's Urania

The Greatness in Good Clothes: Fashioning Subjectivity in Mary Wroth's Urania and Margaret Spencer's Account Book (BL Add. MS 62092)

The Greatness in Good Clothes: Fashioning Subjectivity in Mary Wroth's Urania and Margaret Spencer's Account Book (BL Add. MS 62092)

The Politics of Masochism in Mary Wroth's Urania

Mary Wroth's Urania registers a widening fissure in seventeenth-century England between royal claims to discretionary authority and a communitarian view of sovereignty emphasizing counsel and consent. The depictions of erotic torment in Wroth's romance literalize absolutist representations of political obligation as eager abasement to a beloved sovereign, and thereby show how such idealized narratives may compel subjects to assent to their own abuse. Yet even as the Urania relinquishes romanticized notions of rule in favor of a mixed monarchy, its fragmented, incomplete narrative suggests that there is no definitive solution to political discord, only a series of contingent, and necessarily imperfect, responses to the shifting Jacobean terrain.

Contesting Love's tyranny: Socially outcast women and the marginalized female body in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsGeraldine WagnerGeraldine Wagner is Assistant Professor of Freshman Studies at Johnson & Wales University, Providence, USA.

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England Sally Parkin Abate, Corinne S., ed., Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003; hardback; pp. vii, 204; RRP £45; ISBN 0754630439. The essays in this collection present an English literary perspective on female spaces in Early Modern England. Through the medium of plays by Shakespeare, Wroth, Cavendish, Marvel, and Ford, female experience could transform the domestic and private sphere, providing agency and authority to English women. Though catalogued as English literature, the collection of essays is a welcome addition to gender studies, exploring 'indistinguished space', and presenting possibilities other than those of basic misogyny and the concepts often associated with vagina dentata. The essays propose that the Early Modern subculture of femaleness is more expansive and formative than has been previously understood or explored. Using the genre of plays, the book is divided into three parts or categories, each using a title from King Lear to provide a focus for the readings of privacy, domesticity and the 'indistinguished space' experienced by women in Early Modern England. Part I, 'Concealing Continent: Settings for Intimacy and Resistance', presents three essays which are contextualized within the physical and philosophical settings assigned to women in the period: marriage, the bedchamber, and interiors of the body. Lisa Hopkins, through The Duchess of Malfi, explores the interiors of women's bodies. Despite entombment, fashionable clothes and Ferdinand's fetishisation, the Duchess rises above patriarchal classification through her independent voice and spirit. Interiors represent safety to her, exteriors the dangerous world. Her death enables her to escape the world of exteriors but her interiority enables her to remain unmarginalized. Through The Taming of the Shrew, Corinne S. Abate analyzes marriage, seeing it not as a barrier to women's agency but a safe realm for female agency. The private and domestic spaces offered by marriage provide an avenue of removal from patriarchal restrictions. Katherine develops a marital interiority, a space that makes the public sphere immaterial, providing an escape from her father's domination and her poor public reputation, providing her with a private space. While both are inter-related, the lack of public existence becomes intensely beneficial. Kathryn Pratt takes the medium of Mary Wroth's Urania to [End Page 183] bridge the female private sphere and the public world that both repudiates and mirrors that world. Tree imagery, passion, possession, and the ownership of land emphasize the precarious position of self-ownership in a society that deprived women of legal rights pertaining to self and property. Wroth shows how the intersection of two notions, 'estate' as property and 'estate' as a mental, moral, or agentive status, reveal the subject's failure to achieve an identity which is unified. Pratt's exploration of the disjunctions between the body and the material world raises key issues faced by women in the Early Modern period. Part II, 'Hospitable Favors: Rituals of the Household', focuses on customary practices and family and household habits, and the opportunities which such spheres allowed women, either to resist or negotiate. Nancy A. Gutierrez explores the wider ramifications of arranged marriages through John Ford's The Broken Hearted. The dynamics of conflict can divide households, rupture the state, and threaten women's sanity. However, rather than portraying Penthea as a victim, Gutierrez shows that Penthea uses her victimisation to create her own space (by food refusal), thus establishing agency and concept of self. Theodora A. Janowski cites the poetry of Andrew Marvel and Margaret Cavendish to explore women's eroticism. Cooking was perceived by both as a highly erotic activity that challenged patriarchy. Although women were restricted to the domestic sphere, this did not deny them power to use their talents, needlework, voices, and culinary pursuits, for the pleasure of both themselves and other women. Their unwillingness to marry or reproduce imposed its own restrictions on inheritance and family dynasties. Catherine G. Canino explores female dominion over male identity in The Faerie Queen, portraying other ways in which patriarchal designs could be upset. The essay underlines the point that the power of the female characters and their domination of male identity in Spenser's work mirror that of the childless...

Holy estates: marriage and monarchy in Shakespeare and his contemporaries

This volume examines analogies between marital and political ideology in early modern culture, analyzing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century marriage tracts and the appropriation of their rhetoric by Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and John Webster. Just as the marriage tracts draw explicitly on political metaphors to prescribe marital decorum, early modern political treatises adopt the language of the marriage tracts, using their construction of the family unit as a model for exercising power. The book argues that the metaphors common to these tracts and treatises take on important, often subversive, meanings when they are redeployed in prose fiction and drama. The woman's place within these marital and political discourses and how she fares within early modern domestic and political hierarchies are the book's primary concerns. Included here are detailed discussions of Wroth's Urania, Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Othello, and The Tempest, Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, and Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Sid Ray is Associate Professor of English at Pace University in New York.

Textual Crimes and Punishment in Mary Wroth's Urania

Research Article| May 01 2005 Textual Crimes and Punishment in Mary Wroth's Urania Shannon Miller Shannon Miller Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2005) 35 (2): 385–428. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-35-2-385 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Shannon Miller; Textual Crimes and Punishment in Mary Wroth's Urania. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 1 May 2005; 35 (2): 385–428. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-35-2-385 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © by Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Pastoral, Temperance, and the Unitary Self in Wroth's Urania

Mary Wroth's Urania is usually described as a "pastoral romance," but there has been little attention given to that qualifying adjective other than to say that Wroth's work is a reworking of Philip Sidney's (at least partly) pastoral Arcadia. 1 Wroth's deployment of pastoral is certainly in part an answer to Arcadia's--one oft-noted example is her decision to open the romance with a declaration of presence by a shepherdess with the same name as she whose absence is lamented so eloquently by Strephon and Claius in the opening of the New Arcadia--but Urania's exploration of pastoral as a narrative tool is also firmly rooted in Jacobean theories of pastoral and tragicomedy. In this essay, I want to read Urania's pastoralism not as a gesture of nostalgia for a dying Elizabethan mode, but instead as an intervention in what critics and historians have recently been demonstrating to be a thriving Stuart debate about the scope and abilities of pastoral. 2 Wroth's romance proposes its version of pastoral temperance as a way for women in particular to embrace an ideal of constancy that allows for both rigor and openness to the flux of experience, and for pastoral itself, in a sometimes hostile climate, to maintain some of its time-honored virtues.

Cherished torment: the emotional geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania

Cherished Torment offers the first detailed account of the intellectual foundation of the first prose romance published by a woman in English: The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, written by Lady Mary Wroth, the niece of Sir Philip Sidney. Part one, printed in 1621, prompted an intense outcry due to Lady Mary Wroth's thinly veiled representation of actual events in the lives of prominent families. It was not republished until 1995. The remainder of Urania, published in 2000, marks the first opportunity for most readers to experience this 600,000-word romance firsthand. The Urania's lengthy text may initially appear daunting, but Cavanagh argues that the romance rewards its readers with a richly textured narrative that artfully engages with numerous aesthetic, literary and intellectual concerns from the early seventeenth century, including race relations, tensions between Christianity and the occult, global expansion and the composition of the universe. A sophisticated and erudite study, Cherished Torment moves beyond the intriguing and scandalous events of Wroth's personal life that have understandably captivated the attention of many modern readers to a closer look at the latter's masterful integration of the issues fueling her era's political, scientific and philosophical debates. Cavanagh's important study will enable readers to better recognize and appreciate Urania's intellectual heritage.