SOURCE: "Running On with Almost Public Voice: The Case of 'E.C.'," in Traditions and the Talents of Women, edited by Florence Howe, University of Illinois Press, 1991, pp. 37-67.

An American educator and critic, Ferguson has written and co-written a number of studies of Renaissance literature, including Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (1983) and Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986). In the following essay, Ferguson assesses "the feminist political significance" of The Tragedie of Mariam and explores the work's "extremely ambivalent ideological statement about women as male 'property.'"

An excerpt from Cary's introduction to her translation of The Reply (1630)

Reader Thou shalt heere receive a Translation wel intended…. I desire to have noe more guest at of me, but that I am a Catholique, and a Woman: the first serves for mine honor, and the second, for my excuse...