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Chapter 6 - Mary Wroth and the Politics of Liberty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2022

Christina Luckyj
Christina Luckyj
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
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Summary

situates Lady Mary Wroth’s romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) in the political crisis of 1618-21 to argue that its domestic discourse of legitimate rule grounded in consensual contract and liberty of conscience has political meaning. Carefully policing the boundaries between anarchic libertinism and “lawfull and Juditiall libertie,” Wroth echoes contemporary parliamentary debates about the freedom of the subject. Figuring the danger of false counsel and the threat of tyranny within both marriage and kingdom, Wroth repeatedly stages princesses liberated from threatened or real captivity to become powerful political forces in their own right. Their struggles for outward liberty are matched by struggles for freedom from inner captivity evident in female-voiced poetic complaints that move from lamenting the abandoned and betrayed Calvinist subject to seeking redress against tyranny.

Keywords

Mary WrothUraniaromancelibertycaptivitycomplaintGeorge WitherPamphiliaFideliaBohemia crisis
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Liberty and the Politics of the Female Voice in Early Stuart England , pp. 175 - 215
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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