ABSTRACT
The story of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus, the central narrative of the Urania as well as the closest parallel to Lady Mary Wroth’s own life as writer and as lover of William Herbert, is significantly not where the narrative of the Urania opens. Drawing upon crimes and punishments in the period linked to surveillance over female sexuality Wroth both flaunts and encourages the associations between sexuality and the production of texts. The external redirection of mental and physical violence will lead to an analogy for writing that recalls the erotic crimes of the Limena sequence while modifying the language of violence in Pamphilia’s poetry. The homology between sexuality and (public) writing prompts Pamphilia’s invocation of infanticide: Pamphilia’s action transforms her writing into a crime. Punishments for witchcraft stemmed from anxieties about unregulated female bodies because “witches embodied the essence of disorderliness, for they subverted the order of sexual and procreative practices.”.
