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Elizabeth Cary's literary career was bracketed by translations. Her first known work, The Mirror of the Worlde (1598), was written in early adolescence and is a translation from the French of regional descriptions by Abraham Ortelius that he wrote to accompany maps in a world atlas. Cary's last published text, which reportedly she thought of as her finest endeavour, is The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron (1630), a translation that Cary used to gain entry into political and religious debates that were of particular importance to her as a convert to Catholicism. At present her most famous work, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), a Senecan drama that adapts the writings of Josephus, is, I suggest, rooted within and indebted to early modern translation practices, practices that contributed significantly to the material conditions of women's writing during this period.¹ Over the last two decades, critical attention has turned to translations produced by early modern women, quickly shifting from an initial view that the practice limited women to subservient literary roles to analyses of the complex set of authorial choices and negotiations that go into producing even the most "faithful' translations.² In my own work on the subject, I have argued that translation, which even now is often viewed as an uninspired or menial activity, gave women entry into the rich literary culture of the Renaissance.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137342430_5

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