Cary, Anne

Anne Cary (c. 1614–1671) was a Benedictine nun who authored a wide variety of spiritual texts. Cary frequently explored the challenges that accompanied her conversion to Catholicism in her writing, including psalm translations where she claimed the voice and the struggles of the psalmist as her own by gendering the speaker as female. She drew on her own experiences even more explicitly in brief religious treatises and devotions directed to other Catholic women. Collaboration with her sisters also shaped Cary’s work: the siblings regularly worked together on shared manuscripts and often served as scribe or editor for one another. Cary’s body of work thus demonstrates a range of authorial roles, from critic and collaborator to poet and translator.