ABSTRACT
The Urania's narrative structure tends to compound the fear of being forgotten by being confused for another family member. The work consistently employs common signs of genealogical identity in ways that challenge rather than support clear lines of descent and inheritance, and clear distinctions, as well as links, between individual family members. In the first 150 pages of the Urania, narratives that feature genealogically doubled and counterfeited characters are also those narratives that are told piecemeal, in different circumstances, to different audiences, and with different purposes, increasing our sense of how the histories of families, their genealogical inheritance in short, is always as much in the hands of others as it is in their own, and the more powerful and prominent a family is, the more likely that accounts of its past, present, and future will multiply, given the larger public and political stakes involved in the writing and disseminating of these accounts.
