The Politics of Election in Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

This essay suggests that the inward style of Wroth's sonnet sequence can be attributed to her reliance on a Protestant discourse of election that shares symbols commonly associated with Petrarchism, such as the tortured heart, the occluding dark, and the illuminating light. As I will further argue, the language of predestination had become an oppositional discourse by 1621, enabling Wroth's public self-identification with other militant Protestants such as William Herbert, who opposed the political and religious policies of James I.