Ladies of the Oddest Passion: Early Modern Women and the Arts of Discretion

I take the first part of the title of my essay from a character in Mary Wroth’s Urania , dubbed the Lady of the Oddest Passion, who makes a fleeting appearance in book 3. 1 This lady, described as “most loving, most discreet” (452), is loved by, and in return loves equally, two men. All three were content with this situation for a time, but ultimately the Lady is pressed to choose between the suitors. She is unable to do this, so all three accost the traveling Ollorandus, asking him to make the choice: “to whom you give her she shall be contented with him, and leave the other” (449). By the end of the scene, however, the two male lovers have made their own decision to abandon their mistress, which the bemused Ollorandus thinks is the appropriate end for such a lady. Among the many odd things about this scene, the conjunction of “most loving” and “most discreet” in the description of the lady is perhaps one of the oddest. Discretion in love would not seem to apply to a lady who openly loves two men and is unable to exercise her judgment in choosing one over the other. The suitor describing the lady appears to justify his use of the term by following it with the presumably clarifying and laudatory information that she “judicially carried her hand evenly, when he kissed one, I had the other, she sate betweene us still, and ever gave us even and indifferent graces,” locating her discretion in her judiciously evenhanded distribution of the signs of her affection, providing no evidence of a preference. But this