The imaginary geographies of Mary Wroth's Urania

The imperialist investments in Lady Mary Wroth's prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (1621), have been examined primarily in terms of the triangular traffic in slaves linking Africa and the Americas as sites of western European expansion. Yet, as I have emphasized from the beginning of this study, seventeenth-century England was only emerging as a global imperial power, whereas the Ottomans had established a centuries-old empire in Eurasia, the Arabian peninsula, and North Africa. This chapter therefore departs from the customary transatlantic focus by turning to the overlooked struggle between Islamic and Christian powers for the heartland of Europe extending from Vienna to Rome. Although this region traditionally delineated the Holy Roman empire, its status as the bulwark of universal Christendom remained largely imaginary throughout the early modern period, pressured externally by the expanding Ottoman empire and riven internally by the rise of modern nation states. This shift of perspective, which necessarily stresses the Ottoman empire's control over much of Europe (generally dismissed as “eastern” rather than “western”), thus challenges the frequent, and historically unfounded, conflation of the terms “Christian,” “European,” and “imperialist.” The Ottomans were also, though not the only, early modern imperialists. This chapter assesses how Wroth's Urania figures women's agency vis-à-vis these competing empires. As Gerald MacLean argues, the emerging anglocentric discourse of empire was enabled by lessons the English learned from their ties with the Ottomans, forged during the Elizabethan rapprochement of the late sixteenth century (see Chapter 1).