Abstract: Lost children and foundlings generated a metaphorical field in the form of the English Renaissance romance. The troubling popularization of texts (consequent to increasing literacy) and of bodies (consequent to wide-ranging social changes) is conflated in the person of the lost-and-found daughter. In both prose romances like the Urania of Mary Wroth and theatrical romances like the Pericles of Shakespeare and Wilkins, the foundling daughter figures both the possibilities of dynastic and generic inheritance and the origin of new work.
