ABSTRACT
In the first part of Mary Wroth’s romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), the proud princess of Stalamine, Nereana, finds herself at the mercy of a deranged shepherd. Alanius suffers from the delusion that Nereana is a goddess in disguise:
Presently, Alanius changes tack and becomes convinced that Nereana is Arethusa-transformed into a spring in Ovid but now returned to her “naturall body.” This misidentification prompts her vehement denial: “I am not a Nimph Arethusa, nor a Goddesse, but a distressed woman” (1:200).
