ABSTRACT
The critique of gender and property relations in The History of Edward II is incomprehensible unless it is understood in the historical and cultural context of Elizabeth Cary’s specific and changing experience of property relations. Early Modern women occupied a complex, often inconsistent position within their culture’s material and ideological construction of property relations. Feminist historians have debated about the degree to which the gradual shift from the feudal hierarchy of the middle age to the more centralized Protestant government of Elizabethan and Jacobean England affected women’s lives. The History’s account of Edward’s reign focuses on social and legal institutions and theories that govern men’s and women’s differential control over their property. Cary’s treatment of the mother-child bond in The History of Edward II reflects on the property a mother might be said to possess in her offspring in ways that signal a change in Cary’s thinking since her early days of writing The Tragedy of Mariam.
