“Love is a subject so delightful”: concepto y casuística de amor en el mundo pastoril de la Urania de Mary Wroth

Resumen

In spite of the general idea that the pastoral mode is superficial and escapist in the negative sense, it is actually a type of writing which authors from antiquity to the present day have used for social, political and moral purposes. Due to its classical origin, the mode was highly regarded during the Renaissance, when it was cultivated by most of the best writers. Apart from being used with ideological aims, pastoral was a common mode to deal with the concept and casuistry of love. The first Englishwoman who wrote prose fiction was Mary Wroth, whose Urania (1621) is a pastoral-chivalric romance mainly modelled on Sidney’s Arcadia but with more emphasis on love matters and female characters, in the fashion of Montemayor’s Diana. The concepts and cases of love presented by Wroth and Montemayor are to some extent similar, but there are also meaningful differences which this article attempts to analyse.