Introduction

Abstract

Once relegated to the status of a nearly forgotten playwright and eccen­tric Roman Catholic convert, Elizabeth Cary (1585?–1639) is now increasingly appreciated as a Renaissance woman historian, playwright, translator, and poet. The recent proliferation of editions and facsimiles of Cary’s writings has given students and scholars the ability to place the writer in broader and comparative contexts with implications that take her far beyond the domestic sphere.¹ Essays, articles, and chapters devoted to the topical nature of her writings, and a recognition of the ease with which she moved between literary genres, has repositioned her in the milieu of many of her more illustrious male contemporaries. While her small surviving oeuvre prevents her from being considered a major Renaissance writer, she is an intriguing and remarkable writer whose richly complex work actively ques­tions the meaning of political tyranny. As a female author she can be credited with a number of fi rsts: she is the fi rst English woman to have an original play printed, the fi rst woman to author an English history, and the fi rst woman to publish a translation of a religious polemical work. Cary’s resurrection is part of a much larger and rapidly evolving recovery process of women writers in general, spurred on by crosscurrents in literary theory, gender studies, new historicism, textual bibliography, and manuscript studies.