University of Virginia Library

A short bibliography

Primary works
Wroth, Lady Mary Sidney. The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania. Written by
the right honorable the Lady Mary Wroath. Daughter to the Right Noble
Robert Earle of Leicester. And Neece to the ever famous, and renowned
Sr Phillips Sidney knight. And to the most exelent Lady Mary Countesse
of Pembroke late deceased. London: Printed for John Marriott and John
Grismand And are to bee sould at theire shoppes in St Dunstans Church
yard in Fleetstreet and in Poules Ally at the signe of the Gunn [1621].
A second part exists in manuscript only.

An etext edition of the Urania, including the sonnet cycle, exists in the collection of the Women Writer's Project at Brown University: contact Elaine Brennan at womwrite@brownvm.brown.edu. There is currently no paper edition available, other than the original, of the Urania. Some nineteen copies are known; the one used for this edition of the sonnet sequence makes its home in the Folger Library, and is available in microform from University Microforms, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Its call number in the University of Oregon Library is AC 1 .E5 Reel 980. Josephine Roberts is said to be working on a new authoritative edition as a follow-on to her excellent edition of the poems, cited below. —. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Ed. Gary Waller.
Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universitat
Salzburg, 1977.
—. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Ed. Josephine A.
Roberts. Baton Rouge, LA: LSUP, 1983. Bibliography, index. The
authoritative edition of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Roberts has done
an excellent job, working from Wroth's manuscripts, which are greatly
superior to the print edition of 1621, and supplying copious footnotes
which are especially strong on influences and sources, notably those of
Philip and Robert Sidney; the latter has not been published.
Works cited and other secondary works
Beilin, Elaine V. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English
Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: PUP, 1987.
—. "'The Onely Perfect Vertue': Constancy in Mary Wroth's
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus." Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry
Annual 1981: v2, 229-245. Wroth's identification of reciprocity as the
means to gender equality.
Castiglione, Baldasar. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Charles S.
Singleton. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
Foxe, John. Actes and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs. London, 1563.
Hannay, Margaret Patterson. "Mary Sidney: Lady Wroth." Women Writers of
the Renaissance and Reformation. Wilson, Katharina M., ed. Athens, GA:
UGP, 1987. A short biographical and interpretive introduction.
Lamb, Mary. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison, WI: UWP,
1990. Bibliography, index. Gender studies; critical interpretation;
Countess of Pembroke and Lady Mary Wroth.
MacArthur, Janet "'A Sydney, Though Unnamed': Lady Mary Wroth and Her
Poetical Progenitors." English Studies in Canada March 1989: v15(1),
12-20. Consideration of sources for Wroth's poems, with discussion of
her adaptation of Petrarchan conventions to her own purposes.
McLaren, Margaret A. "An Unknown Continent: Lady Mary Wroth's Forgotten
Pastoral Drama 'Loves Victorie'." The Renaissance Englishwoman in
Print: Counterbalancing the Canon. Haselkorn, Anne M., and Betty S.
Travitsky, eds. Amherst, MA: UMP, 1990. A study of the ms. of Love's
Victory in the Huntington Museum.
Miller, Naomi J. "'Not Much to Be Marked': Narrative of the Woman's Part in
Lady Mary Wroth's Urania." SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-
1900 Winter 1989: v29(1), 121-37. Discussion of gender roles,
especially regarding woman-to-woman relating, in the Urania.
—. and Gary F. Waller, ed. Reading Mary Wroth: Representing
Alternatives in Early Modern England. Knoxville, TN: UTP, 1991.
Bibliography, index. Studies of Wroth's project of breaking with
tradition on male-defined gender roles.
—. "Rewriting Lyric Fictions: The Role of the Lady in Lady
Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus." The Renaissance
Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon. Haselkorn, Anne M.,
and Betty S. Travitsky, eds. Amherst, MA: UMP, 1990. Discussion of
Wroth's Lady in view of Wroth's life as a lady of the Court.
Parry, Graham. "Lady Mary Wroth's Urania." Proceedings of the Leeds
Philosophical and Literary Society 1975: v16, 51-60.
Paulissen, May Nelson. "Forgotten Love Sonnets of the Court of King James:
The Sonnets of Mary Wroth." Publications of the Missouri Philological
Association 1978: v3, 24-31.
—. The Love Sonnets of Lady Mary Wroth: a Critical
Introduction. Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Universitat Salzburg, 1982. Bibliography. The pioneering study of Lady
Mary's poems. Some of its conclusions are hampered by a lack of
biographical information not available at the time, so that her work is
dated by the appearance of Roberts' edition. Roberts, however, clearly
admires her achievement.
Pisan, Christine de. The Treasure of the City of Ladies, or the Book of
the Three Virtues. Trans. Sarah Lawson. Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin, 1985. Cited in the Introduction, above.
Pigeon, Renee. "Manuscript Notations in an Unrecorded Copy of Lady Mary
Wroth's The Countess of Mountgomeries Urania." Notes and Queries
March, 1991: v38(1 (236)), 81-82. A study of a copy of the Urania in
the libraries of the University of California at Los Angeles.
Quilligan, Maureen. "The Constant Subject: Instability and Female Authority
in Wroth's Urania Poems." Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory
and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Harvey, Elizabeth D., and
Katherine Eisaman Maus, ed. Chicago, IL: UCP, 1990. Wroth's use of the
Courtier/courtly love tradition and its reciprocal relationship of
fealty as the framework for her working out of a new femininity.
—. "Lady Mary Wroth: Female Authority and the Family
Romance." Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance. Logan,
George M., and Gordon Teskey, eds. Foreword by Northrup Frye. Ithaca,
NY: CUP, 1989. Consideration of gender roles in the extended family and
their influence on feminine discourse.
—. "Feminine Endings: The Sexual Politics of Sidney's and
Spenser's Rhyming." The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print:
Counterbalancing the Canon. Haselkorn, Anne M., and Betty S.
Travitsky, eds. Amherst, MA: UMP, 1990. Implications of the feminine
ending and feminine rhyme in Astrophil and Stella, The Faerie
Queene, and the Urania.
Roberts, Josephine A. "The Biographical Problem of Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature Spring 1982:
v1(1), 43-53. Consideration of the extent to which the poems may
reflect on Wroth's relationship with her cousin.
—. "The Huntington Manuscript of Lady Mary Wroth's Play,
Loves Victorie." Huntington Library Quarterly Spring 1983: v46(2),
156-74. An introduction to the manuscript pastoral drama.
—. "Labyrinths of Desire: Lady Mary Wroth's
Reconstruction of Romance." Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Journal 1991: v19(2), 183-92. Personae and allegory.
—. "Lady Mary Wroth's Sonnets: A Labyrinth of the Mind."
Journal of Women's Studies in Literature 1979: v.1, 319-29.
—. Radigund Revisited: Perspectives on Women Rulers in
Lady Mary Wroth's Urania." The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print:
Counterbalancing the Canon. Haselkorn, Anne M., and Betty S.
Travitsky, eds. Amherst, MA: UMP, 1990. Consideration of precedents for
Pamphilia in the Urania.
—. "An Unpublished Literary Quarrel Concerning the
Suppression of Mary Wroth's Urania (1621)." Notes and Queries 1977:
v222, 523-35.
Salzman, Paul. "Contemporary References in Mary Wroth's Urania." Review
of English Studies 1978: v29, 328-46.
Shaver, Anne. "A New Woman of Romance." Modern Language Studies Fall,
1991: v21(4), 63-77. Wroth and the articulation of new gender roles.
Swift, Carolyn Ruth. "Feminine Identity in Lady Mary Wroth's Romance
Urania." English Literary Renaissance Autumn 1984: v14(3), 328-46
Discussion of gender roles in theUrania, with emphasis on
construction of a self by Pamphilia.
—. "Feminine Self-Definition in Lady Mary Wroth's Love's
Victorie." English Literary Renaissance Spring 1989 v19(2), 171-
88. Identity, self-awareness, and authority in Lady Mary's drama.
Waller, Gary F. "Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance
Women's Writing." Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons,
Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Hannay, Margaret
Patterson, ed. Kent, OH: KSUP, 1985. Lady Mary Wroth, the Countess of
Pembroke, and literary activity.