ABSTRACT
Lady Mary Wroth’s lengthy romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania consists of two parts. The printed Urania, which appeared in 1621, contains innumerable interconnected stories relating the lives and adventures of a group of royal families and their friends, featuring the offspring of the Kings of Morea, Naples, and Romania most prominently. In the printed text, these characters are generally young and ambitious — both politically and romantically. The Urania was composed during a time of extensive exploration and Rodomandro’s Tartarian origins reveal Wroth’s fictive attempt to complete an imaginative circle around the entire globe, with Tartaria serving as a route for circumnavigation. The narrative morass at the end of the Urania, part two, does not erase the ambitious vision of the world presented in the earlier sections of the romance, however. The intertwined personal and geographic considerations reflect central aspects of Wroth’s ambitious world vision.
