Abstract
This paper seeks to explicate the imaginary geographies of Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) by tracing conflicting early modern genealogies of the Tartar—conventionally represented as issuing from Central Asia during the Middle Ages and threatening Western Europe up to the early modern period—in relation to English engagement with the Ottoman and Safavid empires around the turn of the seventeenth century.1 Wroth’s Urania is significant as the first original, as opposed to translated, prose romance by an English woman to appear in print.2 She was forced to withdraw the first part from circulation shortly after its initial publication under pressure from powerful men for whom her depictions of the patriarchal abuse of wives, daughters, and servants struck too close to home; however, she continued with an equally substantial second part, which remained in manuscript until its publication as a scholarly edition in 1999.3 In this second part, Wroth shifts from the classical emphasis of the first part to an increasingly belligerent assertion of a universalistic Christian identity, albeit one primarily in service of political expansionism and not presented as a spiritual practice or doctrine.4 Ultimately, the Urania links this identity to a polity encompassing “East” (Asia) and “West” (Europe) under the auspices of an imaginary Holy Roman Empire, which in Wroth’s era was “a phantom” of “a universal imperialist hope” for Western Europeans and not a political reality.5
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Notes
For the origins of this representation, see C. W. Connell, “Western Views of the Origin of the ‘Tartars’: An Example of the Influence of Myth in the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3, no. 1 (1973): 115–37
On the Western misnomer, “Tartar,” for Tatars, see Robert Ralston Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 188.
Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Jose-phine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995)
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 243–307
Mary Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Jose-phine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999).
Sheila T. Cavanagh, “’she Is but Enchanted’: Christianity and the Occult in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,’ in Things of the Spirit: Women Writers Constructing Spirituality, ed. Kristina K. Groover (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 69–89
Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 30–52.
Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975), 1.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 49, 50
John Michael Archer uses Said’s concept of “imaginative geography” in Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 4.
Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 10
Daniel Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642–1660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 4.
Said, Orientalism, 71, 73; Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 17.
T. S. Willan, The Muscovy Merchants of 1555 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953; repr. Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley, 1973), 10, 46, 122.
Sheila T. Cavanagh, Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 39.
Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2.
Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 206
Cf. Mary Ellen Lamb’s description of Rodomandro as “darkly handsome” in Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 233.
Hall, Things of Darkness, 206; Sheila T. Cavanagh, “Prisoners of Love: Cross-Cultural and Supernatural Desires in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Prisoners of Love: Cross-Cultural and Supernatural Desires in Lady Mary Wroth’s UraniaProse Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640, ed. Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 97
Cavanagh, “’What ish my nation?’ Lady Mary Wroth’s Interrogations of Personal and National Identity,” in Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading, ed. Naomi Conn Liebler (New York: Routledge, 2007), 98–114.
Barbour, Before Orientalism, 4. In a parallel case, Jack D’ Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991)
On wish-fulfillment as a characteristic of the genre, see Barbara Fuchs, Romance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 6
Helen Hackett focuses on “Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’ in Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 159–93
Hall, Things of Darkness, 187-210. For a general discussion of this shift, see St. Clair Drake, Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, UCLA, 1987, 1990)
Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, Introduction to Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994), 1–14
Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
Richard Hakluyt, “The Epistle Dedicatorie” (“To the right worshipfull and most vertuous Gentleman master Phillip Sydney Esquire”), in Divers voyages touching the discoverie of America, and the Ilands adjacent unto the same, made first of all by our Englishmen, and afterward by the Frenchmen and Britons (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1582)
Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Roger Savory, Iran Under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 27–30.
In elaborating a “reciprocal comparison,” Jonathan Burton, in “The Shah’s Two Ambassadors: The Travels of the Three Sherley Brothers and the Global Early Modern,” in Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700, ed. Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009)
Middleton quoted in Boies Penrose, The Sherleian Odyssey (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1938), 174.
Penrose, The Sherleian Odyssey, 175, 184, 186. See also Nabil Matar, “Renais-sance England and the Turban,” in Images of the Other: Europe and the Muslim World Before 1700, ed. David R. Blanks (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1997), 39–54.
On this spirit, see Sheila T. Cavanagh, “Mystical Sororities: The Power of Supernatural Female Narratives in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England, ed. Corinne S. Abate (Alder-shot: Ashgate, 2003), 151–65.
Games, Web of Empire, 18-46. On the travels of men from the Islamic world to the West prior to the eighteenth century, see Nabil Matar, In the Land of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Hall, Things of Darkness, 128-41. See also Bernadette Andrea, “Black Skin, The Queen’s Masques: Africanist Ambivalence and Feminine Author(ity) in the Masques of Blackness and Beauty? English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 246–81.
On the validity of these vows, see Josephine A. Roberts, “’The Knott Never to Bee Untied’: The Controversy Regarding Marriage in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 109–31.
On Marlowe’s sources for Tamburlaine, see Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman, eds., Christopher Marlowe: The Plays and Their Sources (London: Routledge, 1994), 69–168
On the relationship of Purchas to Hakluyt, see C. R. Steele, “From Hakluyt to Purchas,” in The Hakluyt Handbook, vol. 1, ed. D. B. Quinn (London: Hakluyt Society, 1974), 74–96.
On Heylyn, see Archer, Old Worlds, 77-78, 87-88, 111. See also Robert Mark-ley, “Riches, Power, Trade and Religion: The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1720,” Renaissance Studies 17, no. 3 (2003): 494–516
Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Trafiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or over-land, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the Earth, at any time within the compasse of these 1600 yeres: Divided into three severall Volumes, according to the positions of the Regions, whereunto they were directed. The first volume containeth the worthy Discoveries, &c. of the English toward the North and Northeast by Sea…. The second volume comprehendeth the principall Navigations, Voyages, Trafiques, and discoveries of the English nation… to the South and South-east parts of the world (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newberie, and Robert Barker, 1599).
Linda McJannet, The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about the Ottoman Turks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 89
Margaret Meserve, “Tamerlane: Humanist Hero,” in Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 203–23.
Sheila T. Cavanagh, “’The Great Cham’: East Meets West in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review 18, no. 2 (2002),91
Beatrice Forbes Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4-5, 14–16.
Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 8
Adam Knobler, “Pseudo-Conversions and Patchwork Pedigrees: The Christianization of Muslim Princes and the Diplomacy of Holy War,” Journal of World History 7, no. 2 (1996)
Cavanagh, “The Great Cham,” 93; “Prisoners of Love,” 97. Cavanagh’s reliance on the early twentieth-century literary historian Robert Ralston Cawley (see note 1 above) leads her erroneously to assign a negative value to Tartars in Wroth’s era. Kenneth Parker, in his Introduction to Early Modern Tales of Orient: A Critical Anthology (London: Routledge, 1999)
Adam Knobler, “Timur the (Terrible/Tartar) Trope: A Case of Repositioning in Popular Literature and History,” Medieval Encounters 7, no. 1 (2001), 103
Knobler, “Timur the (Terrible/Tartar) Trope,” 103. Knobler states in “The Rise of Timur and Western Diplomatic Response, 1390–1405,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3, no. 5 (1995): 341–49
McJannet, Sultan Speaks, 81. Knobler, “Timur the (Terrible/Tartar) Trope,” mentions a “parallel between Timur and pre-Christian leaders of classical antiquity” in “a pageant written for the Drapers’ Company by Thomas Middleton,” The Triumphs of Integrity (1623; 104-5n13). Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1600) alludes to Timur as “Fortunes best minion,” but does not represent him as a character (105n15). Knobler also discusses English plays from the 1680s featuring Tamerlane as a character (106n18, 107n22). An intriguing “lost” source is recorded in the biography of Elizabeth Cary (ca. 1585–1639): “Of all that she then writ [in her early life], that which was said to be the best was the life of Tamberlaine in verse,” The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, with The Lady Falkland: Her Life, By One of Her Daughters, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 190
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 2, The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 369, 404–5
Cawley, Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama, 190. Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 87–121
Janet L. Abu-Lughod, “The Mongols and the Northeast Passage,” in Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 153–84
While it is not clear whether these Tartar stable hands are servants or slaves, Richard Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)
“The newe Navigation and discoverie of the kingdome of Muscovia,” Principall Navigations (1589 ed.), 281. Willan, Muscovy Merchants, 46, 122. Archer elaborates on the Sidney-Chancellor connection (Old Worlds, 112-13); he further points out that “the great map of Russia and Tartary that [Anthony] Jenkinson produced in 1562” was “dedicated to Henry Sidney” (114). Richard Wilson, “Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan the Terrible,” ELH 62, no. 1 (1995):
On this May-December marriage, see Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s PhoenX Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38–40.
Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, from the first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Othoman Familie (London: Adam Islip, 1603), 179
Ibn Battuta, the famous Moroccan traveler and contemporary of Tamerlane, who visited the Haram al-Sharif, which includes al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, on which see Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 56–57.
Cf. the description in Knolles’s primary source, The Historie of the Great Emper-our Tamerlan… Drawen from the auncient Monuments of the Arabians, by Messire Jean du Bec, Abbot of Mortimer. Newly translated out of French into English, for their benefite which are ignorant in that language (London: William Pon-sonby,1597)
The Life of Tamerlane the Great, with His Wars against the great Duke of Moso [Muscovy], the King of China, Bajazet the great Turk, the Sultan of Egypt, the King of Persia, and some others, carried on with a continued Series of Success from the first to the last. Wherein are Rare Examples of Heathenish Piety, Prudence, Magnanimity, Mercy, Liberality, Humility, Justice, Temperance, and Valour (London: J. H. for Simon Miller, 1653). “Sa[muel] Clarke, late pastor in St. Bennet Fink, London” is identified as the author on the title page of the 1664 edition. In the dedication “To the High-Born Prince, His Grace, James Duke of Monmouth, &c” of the 1679 edition of The History of Tamerlan the Great (sig. A2), Tamerlane is described as “a Sovereign Prince, of a Heroick Spirit, of an undaunted Courage, and of an admirable Conduct in War” and as “a Prince so exact in the Execution of Justice, and of so singular a Piety and Goodness, that the Christian Profession, as well as his own Religion, flourished all over his Dominions under his Protection” (sigs. A2—A2v). The Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son and the hope of the Protestant cause during the succession crisis that sought to exclude the Catholic James II, brother and legitimate heir of Charles II, from the English throne, is explicitly praised by analogy with Tamerlane in the rest of the dedication. On Monmouth, from the first Exclusion Bill of 1679 to his failed revolt in 1685 (for which he was executed), see Christopher Hill, Century of Revolution, 1603–1714, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1980), 168–70
Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 180
Hendricks and Parker, Women, “Race,” and Writing, 2. Henry Sherley, the son of Robert and Teresa, who seems to have assimilated to English culture without a trace of his Persian lineage, on which see Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 314–16.
Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677 (Aldershot: Ash-gate, 2008)
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© 2009 Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim
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Andrea, B. (2009). Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia. In: Johanyak, D., Lim, W.S.H. (eds) The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106222_2
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