Elizabeth Cary and Intersections of Catholicism and Gender in Early Modern England

Historians have analyzed the life of Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, primarily in the context of her highly publicized conversion to Catholicism and her equally public separation from her Protestant husband, Henry Cary. Through this scrutiny, she has become one among many English Catholic recusant heroines. Literary critics, in contrast, have celebrated Cary\u27s literary corpus both for its challenge to traditional ideals of early modern women as chaste, silent, and obedient and for its reevaluation of women\u27s roles within marriage.1 To circumscribe our understandings of Cary in such ways obscures one of her greatest contributions. Elizabeth Cary, albeit unintentionally, provided an alternative model of Catholic woman hood that sought to negotiate a new balance between religion and gender, thus challenging assumptions about women\u27s roles in English Catholic communities and about the rigid character of Catholicism in the Reformation era

Dispensing quails, mincemeat, leaven: Katherine Parr's patronage of the paraphrases of Erasmus

As a prominent patron of humanist scholarship and Reformed religion, and the author of several devotional works in her own right, Katherine Parr exerted a significant influence on the English Reformation – as several scholars have begun to explore. Yet to date, it is the texts that most legibly bear her authorial signature that have attracted critical attention. Parr’s patronage, by contrast, has long been widely celebrated as historical fact and at the same time surprisingly ignored as a social, literary and mechanical process. In the Acts and Monuments (1563), for instance, John Foxe paints a triumphal Protestant portrait of the queen as the period’s ‘only patroness of the professors of the truth’. And Parr’s recent biographer Susan James goes so far as to say that Katherine was ‘by conviction, by influence and by actions the first true queen of the English Reformation’. According to James Kelsey McConica’s 1965 portrayal of the period, Parr’s generation: "found appropriate patronage, not in a Machiavellian Secretary of State, but in a noble lady of irenic temperament and sincere attachment to humanist learning. ... It is in her circle, which revives the traditions of her royal predecessors Margaret Beaufort and Catherine of Aragon, that the Erasmian spirit finds new shelter and influential support.