| Summary: | In her prose romance The Countesse of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), Lady Mary Wroth inserted many more ekphraseis compared to the number found in her uncle Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593). Wroth’s ekphraseis are more numerous, yet they are often incomplete and repetitive, as if the author was more interested in the reflexive potential of the ekphrasis, foregrounding the « mise en abyme » of the act of writing, rather than in the detailed description of a « living picture » inherited from Antiquity. Both the multiplication and the incompleteness of ekphraseis in Urania testify to Mary Wroth’s use and transformation of this rhetorical device recurrent in the pastoral tradition in order to emphasize the act of writing which was essential for her as an author trying to assert her legitimacy.
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