“To Informe Thee Aright”: Translating Du Perron for English Religious Debates

Abstract

Elizabeth Cary’s translation of Jacques Davy du Perron’s The Reply of the most illustrious Cardinall of Perron to the Ansvveare of the most Excellent King of Great Britaine, the First Tome was published in Douai in 1630, its impressive red-and-black title paage graced with a printer’s mark depicting the seal of the Society of Jesus.¹ This 500-page, folio-sized volume was designed to bring the light of Catholic doctrine to an English population living in semidarkness. While the translation was an enormous exercise in erudition, it is an often-overlooked element of Cary’s canon. The translation’s protofeminist elements are excerpted for inclusion in antholo­gies or cited to assist in constructing Cary’s biography,² but the bulk of the volume goes unread, decidedly neither “literature” nor historical evidence. The attention it garners stems largely from its genesis as the product of a woman’s pen. Frances Dolan, who frames the text for the most recent facsimile edition, portrays Cary’s project as a lone female Catholic cry in the male Protestant wilderness, one that “attempted to reactivate a polemi­cal war which had peaked in 1616.”³ These characterizations undervalue the scope of Cary’s project and its place in religious controversies of the late 1620s and early 1630s. Cary forcefully joined her voice with those of many Catholic polemicists of the period. Because she translated Reply and had it published, she was able to extend her contemporaries’ critiques of the English Protestant Church to include a specifi c request that the king recognize the spiritual authority of the pope.