ABSTRACT
Lady Mary Sidney Wroth's (MSW's) participation in the genealogical culture of her extended Sidney-Herbert families began, of course, long before her Urania as veiled family history was published in 1621. Like her aunt Mary Sidney Herbert (MSH), she was both written by and intervened in the genealogical scripts that applied to her gender, rank, and stages of life, influenced by the lived examples of her female kin and allies, especially MSH. The Sidney family genealogical culture involved, then, the processes not simply of inheriting and bequeathing, preserving and expanding, but of fragmenting and dissipating, as well as recuperating and repairing. Shaping MSW's sense of her family as continually engaged in the negotiation of the meaning of such genealogical tokens, it was also, as we have already seen, a culture embedded in the processes of communal and collaborative reading and writing.
