ABSTRACT
Romance is one of the most visible literary forms associated with a female readership in the Renaissance. Henrietta Maria's confessor, assumed that the queen's reading of the Argenis would conform to the stereotype of women reading romance. As a result, romance reading and writing by women in the Jacobean and Caroline periods manages to be seen simultaneously as dangerously immoral, and as politically significant. The earliest condemnations of romance came from the pens of sixteenth-century humanists, concerned with reintegrating the classics into vernacular culture. Judith Man's version of the Argenis is in marked contrast to Long's and Le Grys' translation. Her Urania displays a concern with issues of reading and writing, not, the author would argue, in the context of providing positive role models as Man does, but, in the tradition of Barclay's Argents. The politicisation of romance depends upon interpretative strategies which announce that the text 'says' something other than what it appears to say.
