Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-2001

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Robert E. Stillman

Committee Members

D. Allen Carroll, Joseph Black, Karen Levy

Abstract

The Sidney family has long been recognized for its literary endeavors and for its involvement in the religio-political debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Studies of Mary Sidney Wroth, however, have cast only sidelong glances at the religio- political level of Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (1621). This dissertation examines how Wroth, within the boundaries of Urania, investigates her own questions and convictions regarding the religio-political debates of Jacobean England. Wroth witnessed King James's attempts to promote the unification of Christian Europe through pacific negotiation and strategic marriage alliances. Ultimately, the goal of a unified Christian Europe was one shared by Wroth and King James; however, the two did not agree on the best means of achieving such union. Thus I suggest that Wroth constructed Urania as the narrative site in which to engage imaginatively and freely with her own religio-political opinions. In this study, Wroth's Urania is reevaluated as the Sidney family challenge to James's failed attempts to unify Christian Europe.

The dissertation suggests that, in order to issue this challenge, Wroth focuses the heart of Urania on the mythic goal of a restored Holy Roman Empire. Looking back to the irenic court of Emperor Maximilian II (ruled 1564-1576), Wroth explores the emperor's attempts to create a unified empire and tests his policies and those of James through her own fictional emperor, Amphilanthus. Simultaneously, Wroth tests the religio-political ideals she viewed as potential alternatives to the previously failed policies of both Maximilian and James. Specifically, this study evaluates the tenets of Protestant resistance theory and monarchomachist intervention that Urania appears to privilege. Further, it examines the neostoicism of Justus Lipsius and how its advocation of Constancy and world citizenship also figure into Wroth's formula for a successfully united Christian Europe.

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