Material texts: women’s paperwork in early modern England and Mary Wroth’s Urania

The last two decades have seen a turn towards material histories of texts and embodied acts of reading. Cultural representations of women’s encounters with books and the traces left behind by female readers have been central to our understanding of the material history of reading, as well as the recent turn away from texts contained within books to early modern textual culture more broadly. This chapter begins with an act of critical imagining, overviewing textual encounters elite, middling, and lower status women may have experienced. It attends to paper’s centrality to the literary negotiations of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania. Absent from the historical record because of their ephemerality and apparent triviality, Urania reveals connections between household sheets and the pages of Wroth’s romance. The ways in which paper might be handled, preserved, and destroyed, proves to be vital in how Wroth positions herself in relation to existing literary forms and traditions.