Dolimandro’s ‘Turkish Knife’: Geopolitics and Narrative Style in Mary Wroth’s Urania

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines Lady Mary Wroth’s engagement with early seventeenth-century Anglo-Ottoman relations in The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. The Urania follows a group of rulers who create an international Christian coalition in what was historically part of the Ottoman Empire. Besides Bernadette Andrea, no other critic has seriously considered the Urania’s allusions to Ottoman peoples, places, and objects. I propose that Wroth’s prose, filled with interpretive cruxes resulting from syntactical and pronominal ambiguities, resonates with England’s ambiguously identificatory relationship with the Ottoman Empire to create a geopolitically inflected narrative style. Following critical work on early modern race as a measure of ‘proximity’, I identify English desires both to identify with and differentiate themselves from the Ottoman Empire within literary and diplomatic discourses. I demonstrate how members of the Sidney-Herbert circle negotiated overlaps in English and Ottoman political, legal, religious, and racial identity markers. I then argue that these overlaps synergize with Wroth’s use of what I term syntactical and pronominal ‘severalty’ of character voices, particularly those of her narrator and characters identified with Ottoman regions. I conclude by demonstrating how Wroth experiments with her narrative style to imagine a Christian empire that surpasses Ottoman authority. In identifying a dialectic between contemporary Anglo-Ottoman relations and Wroth’s narrative style, this essay expands critical approaches to the politics of the Urania beyond more global narratological analysis.