ABSTRACT
As we have seen of Aemilia Lanyer’s poetry, so too does Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) provide a window into how women writers might draw conceptual power from some of the ways that women had made advances in the domain of gardening. Rather than focusing on the way gardens signify a potential recuperation of women’s dispossession and material loss, though, as Lanyer’s poetry does, Wroth’s sonnet sequence develops a different theme found in women’s gardening (and foundational to the argument of the Salve Deus). Wroth’s sequence situates gardening as one among other domains to which women had access during the period and uses the relative mobility women had in them to forge mobility in another that was in general off-limits to them: writing. Like gardening, needlework (another spatial practice) was associated with creativity, agency, and feminine identity; at the same time, writing original material was routinely held at crosspurposes with the development of feminine identity endorsed by male writers, philosophers, politicians, and religious authorities alike.
