No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Critics have often been drawn to metaphors of space and place to describe both families and the genre of romance, speaking of households, networks, and cycles. Recently Helen Cooper has persuasively adopted the idea of the meme, derived from genetics, to discuss the transformations of romance motifs in medieval and early modern England; as she observes: ‘The romance genre – any genre, indeed – is best thought of as a lineage or family of texts rather than a series of incarnations or clones of a single Platonic idea. A family changes over time as its individual members change, but equally, those individuals can be recognized through their “family resemblance”’. There are not enough surviving portraits to ascertain whether the Sidney family resembled one another physically, but the repetition of names across the generations certainly emphasised their relationships: Mary Wroth was named after her aunt, Mary Sidney Herbert, whose mother had also been a Mary; Philip’s brother Robert was named after his uncle, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; he named his own youngest son Robert, and one of his daughters was Philippa. These ties of kinship were paratextually re-created in the Sidneys’ own publications: Philip Sidney dedicated his romance to his sister, locating its composition within her household and describing her as his first reader in his preface; it was published, after his death, as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia . A generation later, Mary Wroth or her printer also located her romance firmly within kinship networks, using its title-page to announce it as 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 ye most exele[n]t Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late deceased .
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.