ABSTRACT
In The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (1621), Lady Mary Wroth uses the word "estate" to signify both "property" and "condition or state of being". Much recent work on early modern and modern theories of "the body" focuses on the body as matter that either intrudes upon or subverts the symbolic order. This chapter explores the disjunctions between the body and the material world. The connection between possession of property and possession of legal identity as autonomous individual becomes for the modern subject a question of matter. Yet the body of the subject, and even the estate as material possession, are not so easily reduced to their representation as inert matter, available for possession and serving to "materialize" the subject's representation of its own completeness. In managing the matter of romance Wroth reformulates her relationship with those who actually possess the Sidney estate, an entity that fits quite nicely into the topos of the "estate of loss".
