Hackett, Helen; (2025) 'When I last saw thee, I did nott thee see': Mary Wroth’s imagination. Sidney Journal , 43 (1-2) pp. 19-41.

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Abstract

Mary Wroth praises her heroine and alter ego Pamphilia for her ability to “discourse with her imagination” even when “in greatest assemblies.” Yet Wroth wrote in a period when the imagination was widely distrusted, and the female imagination was especially disdained for its supposed unreliability and folly. Drawing particularly on works listed in a seventeenth-century catalogue of the library at Penshurst Place, this article sets the Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in the context of animated contemporary debates about the imagination. It discusses Wroth’s assertion of the imagination and the passions as powerful sources for female poetry, relating this to her appropriation of Ficinian “genial melancholy,” associated with an elevated creative imagination, for both her heroine and herself. It also explores her association of the imagination with truthful prophetic dreams, and with the imprinting of a true image of the beloved in the lover’s heart. It concludes that contextualizing Wroth’s romance and sonnet sequence against contemporary authorities on the imagination highlights the radicalism of her writing: she creates a fictional world where the female imagination is empowering rather than disabling, and things don’t have to be real to be true.

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