ABSTRACT
Women function then in the Urania as the producers, guardians, disseminators, and interrogators of genealogical memory, its material sites and rituals, as well as the life narratives through which the family and community construct their present, past, and future. The phrase “to forget oneself” occurs, in fact, many times in the Urania, but particularly in the context of the events leading up to the resolution of several relationships at the Leucadian Rock, where Amphilanthus casts his sister Urania from a dizzying height into the sea, a condition of her release from her hopeless love for Parselius, who has not just fallen in love with but actually married another, the Lady Dalinea. In the interlude with Dalinea, Parselius and the narrator are granted an utter and complete forgetting of the past, an oblivion that is not only brief, but in terms of the arts of memory in early modern England a frank impossibility.
