The Sound of Silence: Elizabeth Cary and the Christian Hero

Abstract

The thematic links between Elizabeth Cary's Life, a spiritual biography written in the 1650s by Cary's cloistered, royalist daughter, and Cary's own Tragedy of Mariam, written a generation earlier, demand closer attention than has been given previously. Reading both texts alongside Protestant and Catholic martyrologies and spiritual biographies, the essay connects their shared concern with the interpretability of public language to a shared engagement with both Protestant and Catholic discourses of religious heroism. By glorifying silent suffering over eloquent dissidence, both Mariam and the Life assert the interpretative instability of language outside the confines of a charitable community of faith. In these texts, to speak well is to speak charitably, which in the religiously divisive climate of early modern England, means to speak privately or not at all. In response to the Protestant ideal of a bold-speaking (and dissident) public witness, they construct an alternative model of Christian eloquence centered on the suffering body and the charitable coterie/cloister.