SOURCE: "Elizabeth Cary and Tyranny, Domestic and Religious," in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, edited by Margaret Patterson Hannay, The Kent State University Press, 1985, pp. 225-37.

In the following excerpt, Fischer argues that Cary's writings, in particular The Tragedie of Mariam, confront the political and domestic hardships that she suffered as a repercussion of her conversion to Catholicism.

Lady Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Viscountess Falkland (1585-1639), was the chiefly self-educated daughter and heiress of a genteel Renaissance family. She has been remembered primarily for her Catholic polemics, manifested most boldly in a translation, published in Douay in 1630, of Cardinal Perron's answer to criticism of his works by James I; for her temerity and conviction Lady Cary found her book confiscated and publicly burned. This was not, moreover, her first receipt of closed-minded and tyrannical oppression: if the Renaissance changed...