Arguing with Catholic Women: Devotion, Polemic, and Female Agency in the Theological Crisis of the 1620s

Abstract Some studies of the lived experience of religion in early Stuart England have argued for a historiographical overemphasis on doctrinal controversy, suggesting that attention to contemporary works of private devotion can dissolve categories of division in post-Reformation English Protestantism. However, in considering two such devotional texts—Daniel Featley's Ancilla Pietatis (1626) and John Cosin's Hours of Prayer (1627)—this article demonstrates the difficulty in separating devotion from polemic. Indeed, these prayer manuals cannot be understood outside of an extended interconfessional and intra-Protestant polemical exchange—a confessional conflict with powerful women, including Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham, and Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, at the center. Here, attention to practical devotion does not elide categories of division within English Protestantism but rather highlights how such divisions were sharpened through competing devotional efforts aimed at court women in response to the theological uncertainty wrought by the Catholic dynastic matches of the 1620s. Finally, an extended examination of the activities and interests of Elizabeth Cary suggests that our understanding of the lived experience of religion for lay women must be expanded to include participation in theological controversy, offering a version of female religious agency that extends beyond private spaces of devotional practice.