explores the origins and implications of the political marriage metaphor deployed by King James to buttress his growing prerogative and by godly ministers to articulate their principled resistance. Because women served as ideal surrogates for political subjects who merited “reasonable liberty” while accepting monarchical rule, domestic conduct guides such as William Whately’s offered coded discussions of political rights and duties, including a woman’s obligation to obey her conscience. In addition, oppositional uses of the passionate and militant female voice in the Song of Songs championed Christ’s independent jurisdiction over the faithful to the exclusion of earthly kings. Echoing the voice of the wife as political subject in marriage sermons, the desiring voice of the spouse as Church united male and female subjects seeking to be joined with an attentive Head committed to mutuality and recognition of her needs.

establishes Speght’s position within a Calvinist community of writers, preachers, and printers that included her father and husband. Like Whately’s sermons, Speght’s A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617) deploys domestic and biblical rhetoric to give “good councell” in the political realm. If, for Speght, the doctrine of male superiority becomes a manifesto of the obligations of the ruler, the wife is authorized to enforce those obligations as a significant influence on her husband’s ability to exercise good government. In her later work Mortalities Memorandum (1621), Speght offers a prefatory Dreame in which a distinctively female voice provides a Calvinist framework for the pursuit of godly knowledge that draws on the Song of Songs. Mortalities Memorandum, the lengthy poem that follows, capitalizes on this voice to deliver a significant religious and political message to English men and women at a crisis point in their history.

establishes Southwell’s Puritan allegiances and situates her within a wider godly community that included Walter Raleigh, Francis Quarles, and Roger Cocks, male authors equally committed to trenchant political critique of early Stuart kings and court. Writing exclusively in manuscript, Southwell challenges the politics of both King James and King Charles in the contentious decades of the early seventeenth century. Much like Whately, Speght, and Lanyer, Southwell deploys a politically-charged domestic rhetoric not only to represent the wife as counselor to her husband but also to rhapsodize a prospective union with the ideal bridegroom and husband, Christ.

offers canonical and non-canonical examples of early seventeenth-century female voices that call for freedom of speech and resistance to tyranny. Drawn from drama and print culture, authored by men and women, such voices figure the connection between women and political dissent. If Othello’s Emilia and Desdemona use free speech to express their virtue and contest male authority, Paulina in The Winter’s Tale plays the shrew to call out domestic and political tyranny, while Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Vittoria speak truth to power and Elizabeth Caldwell’s Letter denounces her husband in a display of Protestant religious zeal. Rooting these voices in sixteenth-century female-voiced political and religious dissent, the chapter suggests that representations of the woman as resistant subject could take on a particularly acute political inflection during the early Stuart period.

situates Lady Mary Wroth’s romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) in the political crisis of 1618-21 to argue that its domestic discourse of legitimate rule grounded in consensual contract and liberty of conscience has political meaning. Carefully policing the boundaries between anarchic libertinism and “lawfull and Juditiall libertie,” Wroth echoes contemporary parliamentary debates about the freedom of the subject. Figuring the danger of false counsel and the threat of tyranny within both marriage and kingdom, Wroth repeatedly stages princesses liberated from threatened or real captivity to become powerful political forces in their own right. Their struggles for outward liberty are matched by struggles for freedom from inner captivity evident in female-voiced poetic complaints that move from lamenting the abandoned and betrayed Calvinist subject to seeking redress against tyranny.

Building on the turn to religious and political networks in the field of early modern women’s writing, the Introduction draws on the theory of intersectionality and the historiography of Puritan culture to argue that uses of the female voice in early Stuart England cut across lines of gender to build coalitions and undermine the essentialism on which the field is based. Challenging critics who suggest that early modern male ventriloquism leads to repression of the female voice, the Introduction offers the counter-example of Thomas Scott, who uses Esther’s words to articulate his own radical politics. Situating the present study as a necessary intervention in a field that is increasingly marginalized even as its archive has ballooned and its dispersal celebrated, this book answers the call for a larger narrative that puts the female subject and her voice at the heart of the early Stuart political imaginary.

challenges the still-influential view of Cary as a Catholic writer, arguing instead for her association with reform-minded men such as Spenserian John Davies and parliamentarians such as her father Lawrence Tanfield, who were defending the liberties of the subject when Cary was producing her drama. Opening up questions about the right to free speech and debate guaranteed by English common law, Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam (1613) allows quasi-legal arguments to multiply on either side until reaching a resolution by juxtaposing characters who scorn the common law with those who articulate its fundamental principles. For Members of Parliament, as for Mariam, freedom to speak one’s conscience was an inalienable right equivalent to owning property (or, in Mariam’s case, owning her body and independent lineage); in Mariam, as in Parliament, those rights are asserted in defiance of the royal prerogative to silence them.

The Epilogue considers anonymous pamphlets printed in the later part of King James’s reign that deploy the female voice as a form of political critique: Ester Hath Hang’d Haman, Hic Mulier, Haec Vir, and Muld Sacke. Of the cross-dressing pamphlets, Haec Vir in particular recruits the female voice for its association with militant Elizabethan values and the freedom of the subject, while the pseudonymous author Esther Sowernam ventriloquizes Esther, the biblical heroine who confronts the king. The female voice occupied a unique position in the seventeenth-century political landscape, allowing women writers to critique abuses of male power without compromising their position as dutiful subjects. Unlike the freedoms achieved by male citizens at the expense of women later in the seventeenth century, the “reasonable libertie” sought by men and women in early Stuart England authorized the voice of the wife/subject as a powerful political tool.

argues that Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611) participates in an oppositional brand of religious politics associated with the poem’s female dedicatees. Building on the system of correspondences in which wife was to husband as subject was to ruler, Lanyer issues a call for “libertie” not as protofeminist appeal but as defense of the rights of the Church and the nation at a time when both were threatened by James’s growing use of his royal prerogative. Reviving the woman-centered discourse of the Protestant Reformation, Lanyer champions an ultra-Protestant corrective to masculine tyranny, the true Church of the persecuted elect represented by the oppressed collective of women. In “Cooke-ham,” Lanyer pays tribute to her primary patron and zealous Puritan Margaret Clifford by representing her as a virtuous monarch whose intimate relation to Christ in her rural retreat recalls the Song of Songs and offers pointed anticourt critique.