While much has been made critically of the ways in which writers such as Katherine Philips in the second half of the seventeenth century were held up to succeeding generations of women as potential role models for female engagement with print culture, the processes of cultural remembering surrounding Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, are equally instructive in their insights into early modern society’s relations with its (textual) pasts. The extract above concludes a vigorous letter of complaint to Pembroke’s niece, Lady Mary Wroth, from Sir Edward Denny, who believed that he had been satirised (as appears to have been the case) in Wroth’s prose romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621). On its title page, Urania proclaims itself to be written by the ‘neece to the ever famous, and renowned Sr. Phillips Sidney knight. And to the most exele[n]t Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late deceased’, and indeed many critics have speculated that Pembroke herself is figured forth in the prose romance as the Queen of Naples. Nonetheless, the ranting Denny insists that if Wroth must violate cultural proprieties by taking up the pen in the first place, then she should acknowledge the full weight of her Sidneian past and be controlled (rather than empowered) by the ‘pious example’ of her aunt. However, there remain intriguing questions surrounding Pembroke’s own participation in the ongoing Tudor commitment to the textual projects of imitatio, memorialisation and heroic narrative.