![]() Luther's 95 Theses begin and end with the concept of suffering, and the question of why a benevolent God allows his creations to suffer remains one of the central issues of religious thought. We graft, then, to illuminate the rich poetic contents of the tree-book in Wroth’s romance and to demonstrate how the conditions of its production both articulate and complicate scholarly approaches to early modern ecofeminism. ![]() ![]() Not only were early modern gardeners instructed to regard bark as a surface fit to receive the alphabetic “letters” made with sharp-edged tools but this integument also comprised and encased the early modern codex, whose etymological roots we trace back to the tree’s trunk. In conjoining these areas of expertise, we aim to show their fruitful convergence at the bark. We approach the same moment in the same literary text-the inscription of two poems into a tree in Lady Mary Wroth’s romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621)-from diverse perspectives: the material practices of arboriculture and the history of the book. In its more positive valence, grafting “impl the indissoluble marriage of what had been separate or alien.”1 Yet early modern gardening manuals also insisted that grafting worked best if there was a measure of similarity between the plants selected for the procedure.2 Such conditions for good grafting capture the dynamics of our collaboration. As Rebecca Bushnell observes, grafting was a “common metaphor” used to explain “conjunctions of disparate things” in early modern England. Grafting is both the subject and the method of our chapter. Queen Pamphilia, Urania’s most avid poet, is the “most distressed, secret, and constant Lover,” who “never in all her extremest sufferings” tells her story outright, but withdraws for self-communion to a bower as “delicate without, as shee was faire, and darke within as her sorrowes” (90–91). The book met with anger and mockery, forcing the author to apologize and withdraw it from circulation.2 Wroth’s foray into print contrasts sharply with her heroines’ view of public exposure: they hide the contents of their hearts and the products of their pens. And to the most exelent Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late deceased.” Urania was not only unique as an English work of fiction by a woman, it also trumpeted its author’s extraordinary social position and family connections.1 Although Wroth claimed not to have intended its publication, Urania’s exposure of its author could hardly have been more daring, given the time’s biases against print publication, against women reading - much less writing - romances, and against women as extramarital lovers. More startlingly, the title page announced the author as “the right honorable the Lady Mary Wroath, Daughter to the right Noble Robert Earle of Leicester, and Neece to the ever famous, and renowned Sir Phillips Sidney knight. In 1621, the bookstalls of London featured an unusual offering: The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, a romance that only thinly veiled its autobiographical tales of illicit love. At the same time that my project examines early modern articulations of nature, then, it offers a way to investigate how ideologies of kind informed the diverse identities accessible to early moderns, what the period’s identity categories had in common, and the dynamics that developed among them. Throughout the project, I focus on how literary experiments with various senses of “kind” concern a particular nexus of identity categories-rank, race, sex, gender, and species-as I move among early modern dictionaries, treatises, William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, and John Milton’s Comus, “Epitaphium Damonis,” Tetrachordon, and Paradise Lost. Consequently, these works allowed early moderns not only to imagine alternative “orders of nature” but also to evaluate the basis of their culture’s often-naturalized identity categories, which the period registered as kinds. Analyzing texts and performances from the late 16th century up until 1674, when John Milton published his second edition of Paradise Lost, I argue that certain works portray such processes as simultaneously natural, artificial, and social. ![]() But I propose that the polyvalence and polysemy of “kind” as well as the culture’s impulse to classify its kinds prompted some to think critically about the processes by which kinds came into existence. Because nature was frequently portrayed as a system that ranked its kinds according to their presumed virtue, ideologies of kind could be invoked both to reinforce customs believed to correspond to natural order and to justify the marginalization of “lesser” kinds. Engaging kind as one of the period’s organizing concepts, this dissertation explores the role it played within hierarchical schematics of nature.
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