ABOUT THIS BOOK

Key insights into women’s multi-dimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century.

Lady Mary Carey (c. 1609–c. 1680) was a noblewoman who examined her life and expressed her views in a handwritten manuscript that she intended for self-reflection and for sharing with restricted audiences of family and friends, rather than for print publication. Her poetry and prose, composed and revised between 1650 and 1658, were important enough to her inner circle, however, that her autograph manuscript was carefully copied by another hand in 1681. In addition to providing us with key insights into women’s multidimensional roles as wives, widows, and mothers during the seventeenth century in England, Carey’s work teaches us a great deal about a woman’s deepest emotional and spiritual states while confronting the hardships of life—from the fears of childbearing to the sorrows over child loss to the terrors of war.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Mary Carey (c. 1609–c. 1680) was the daughter of Sir John Jackson. She married Pelham Carey in 1630, and later was remarried, to George Payler, though she continued to be known as Lady Carey. Pamela S. Hammons is professor of English and Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami and coeditor of World-Making Renaissance Women: Rethinking Early Modern Women’s Place in Literature and Culture.

REVIEWS

"While Lady Mary Carey’s poetry has been available in small excerpts in anthologies, this is the first attempt to gather her known writings, prose and poetry, in a single authoritative edition—one that establishes that Carey was an active participant in probably more than one coterie network and was conversant with multiple genres of spiritual writing, from mothers’ legacies, elegies, and prayers to conversion narratives and autobiographical meditations. While Carey matches the description of a good/proper early modern woman in the period’s prescriptive writings, her volume also contains robust questioning of male superiority, as well as a poignant challenge to the God who took so many of her children at an early age. Her writings have much to show us about the ways in which literate seventeenth-century Englishwomen navigated patriarchal environments."

— Margaret Ezell, Distinguished Professor of English, Texas A&M University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

A MOTHER’S SPIRITUAL DIALOGUE, MEDITATIONS, AND ELEGIES
To My Most Loving and Dearly Beloved Husband, George Payler, Esquire
A Dialogue Betwixt the Soul and the Body
Note on the Deaths of Five Children
Written by My Dear Husband at the Death of Our Fourth (at That Time) Only Child, Robert Payler
Written by Me at the Same Time, on the Death of My Fourth and Only Child, Robert Payler
Written by Me at the Death of my Fourth Son and Fifth Child, Peregrine Payler
A Meditation or Commemoration of the Love of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
A Meditation or Commemoration of the Love of Christ
A Meditation or Commemoration of the Love of the Holy Ghost
Upon the Sight of My Abortive Birth the 31 of December 1657

APPENDIX 1: MARY CAREY’S LETTER TO THOMAS PELHAM

APPENDIX 2: POETIC EXCHANGE BETWEEN MARY CAREY AND THOMAS FAIRFAX

Bibliography
Index