The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 (review)

This collection, edited by one of the foremost textual scholars of Cary's oeuvre, expands our understanding of "the first English woman to have an original play printed, the first woman to author an English history, and the first woman to publish a translation of a religious polemical work." Cary was also a high-profile Catholic convert, married to the Protestant Lord Deputy of Ireland.

The opening section, on The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry, includes essays addressing the play's embedded lyric poetry, its dramatization of martyrdom, and its revision of its sources. Illona Bell reads a series of "truncated," "composite," and otherwise reconstructed sonnets in the play's rhymed verse. Thus bringing the "female voices" structuring Renaissance lyric from the margins to the center, Cary remakes the genre to critique gendered hierarchies. Erin E. Kelly complicates the assumption that the central character of the play ends a Christian martyr. Tracing exegesis of the Old Testament source, Kelly shows how Mariam's defiance enables the teleologies of Christian historiography even as it challenges Reformation and Counter-Reformation muting of women's agency. Alison Shell similarly interrogates the "source material" for Cary's play, focusing on Thomas Lodge's translation of the underlying Jewish history. By engaging Cary's dramatic response to Lodge's autodidactism, Shell argues for a reintegration of Cary's life and works.

In the next section, Curtis Perry situates Cary's History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II within "the furor surrounding George Villiers, duke of Buckingham." Perry highlights Cary's dual critique of the corruption of favoritism and the anarchy of "unruly popularity or unbridled speech." Mihoko Suzuki focuses on "locating a gendered, female author in the text" via the medieval paradigm of the "body politic," Machiavelli's stress on male sexual mastery, and Christine de Pizan's revision of headship as signifying interdependence rather than domination. Cary adds to this genealogy by dramatizing the link between tyranny by the head of the household and tyranny in the state. The essays by Jesse G. Swan and Margaret Reeves establish Cary's authorship of the history in its multiple renditions. Swan shows how editors elided Cary's determinative role in the productive of the history; for those "who do not necessarily care about Cary," this analysis confirms the importance of textual scholarship for assessing early modernity.

In the section on Cary's other writings, Karen L. Nelson turns to Cary's translation of the French Cardinal du Perron's defense of Catholicism against English Protestant aspersions. Nelson's comprehensive reading of the translation in its cultural milieu counters critical views that see Cary as a lone Catholic voice in the wilderness of the English Reformation. R. W. Serjeantson pursues the methodological problem of how to analyze lost works as part of a fuller profile of early modern English women's writing. Serjeantson concludes by locating the celebrated Great Tew circle, which centered on Cary's Protestant eldest son, within the broader intellectual domain of her translation of du Perron and her lost response to her son's polemics. Nadine N. W. Akkerman combines bibliographical analysis and formal close reading to argue for the addition of an anonymous elegy on Buckingham into Cary's oeuvre.

The concluding section reconceptualizes literary agency by considering patronage and influence. Deana Rankin presents Cary, whose formative years were spent attached to the English colonial administration in Ireland, as an author crossing borders between religions and regions. Her patronage in Ireland involved a series of schools ("sweatshops") for poor Irish children. She also sponsored the continuation of the militant Protestant Philip Sidney's Arcadia by the Irish Catholic Richard Bellings. Marion Wynne-Davies assesses the writing of Cary's children, Catholic and Protestant. This essay, based on the archives of English Catholics on the Continent, opens new vistas for the study of early modern...