ABSTRACT
Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania has engendered a continuous output of scholarly articles, book chapters or even book-length studies since the 1990s.1 Yet the text continues to challenge modern academic readers due to its “length and complexity” (18), as noted by Sheila T. Cavanagh in Cherished Torment, and also due to its otherness. Comparatively few scholars, I would assume, have taken the work off a library shelf for recreational reading – because they felt like reading a long early modern romance – or for narratological reasons – because it had been recommended to them as a text displaying “a fascinating approach to narrative structure” (186), to quote Paul Salzman’s description of French heroic romances in English Prose Fiction. Instead, whoever does pick up the Urania soon notices that the text resists easy appropriation and, by upsetting our reading expectations, invites us to become aware of the historically contingent nature of these expectations.
