“Then tooke she a knife, and in the rine of an Oake insculped a sypher”: acts of writing in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania
Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (part I and part II) is peppered with various writings such as inscriptions on the barks of trees, letters and numerous poems inserted in the prose romance. Paradoxically, most of these writings are related to strategies of concealment and someti...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Institut du Monde Anglophone
2012-04-01
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| Series: | Etudes Epistémè |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/episteme/410 |
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| Summary: | Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (part I and part II) is peppered with various writings such as inscriptions on the barks of trees, letters and numerous poems inserted in the prose romance. Paradoxically, most of these writings are related to strategies of concealment and sometimes even to strategies of destruction. Indeed, the act of writing is often linked with images of physical violence. For a woman, writing is thus envisaged as a potentially transgressive activity — although less so than public speech, because of its close association with silence. This paper will attempt to examine the various acts of writing in the Urania in order to assess the complexity of authorship for an early modern woman writer, caught between concealment and disclosure. |
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| ISSN: | 1634-0450 |