This paper focuses on the conference theme of "Gender Roles, Sexual Identity and Family Dynamics" by examining the travels of Lady Teresa Sampsonia Sherley, a Circassian subject of Shah 'Abbas I who married the first "Persian" ambassador to England, the interloper Robert Sherley, accompanying him on his several journeys from Safavid Iran to England during the early seventeenth century. Robert, during his residence in Iran from 1599 to 1608, had advised the Shah on military matters and gained a mastery of the Persian language. While he changed religions, it was from English Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. Teresa hailed from a Circassian background, with possible connections through an aunt to the household of Shah 'Abbas. The Circassians, situated around the Black Sea region, were traditionally Muslim, although Teresa may have been from an Orthodox Christian background. Representing the confessional complexities of the Safavid empire, upon marrying Robert around 1607 she aligned herself with the Roman Catholicism of the Carmelite missionaries, thus immersing herself in the opposing struggles of post-Reformation Western Europe. She accompanied Robert on his several embassies to Europe from 1608 to 1627, being incorporated into English culture through a spate of treatises, stage plays, and possibly even the first prose romance by an English woman. Teresa and Robert were also portrayed in a pair of culturally hybrid portraits painted in 1622 by Anthony Van Dyck while they sojourned in Rome. Robert famously sported a turban, on which he was reputed to wear a cross on occasion; Teresa wore a loose gown and headdress that blended her Persian background with her new Western European setting. Upon their return to the Savafid empire, Robert died suddenly in 1628, with the Carmelite chronicles recording Teresa's resistance to Persian men's pressure for her to "reconvert" after her English husband's death. She bravely guarded his remains, and ultimately sought the means to convey them to Rome, where she lived for fifty years before being buried beside him. Her epitaph describes her as an "Amazon," which references her Circassian background and her courageous character, but which also suggests her challenges to patriarchal norms of gender and sexuality. In examining Teresa's negotiations of multiple subject positions in cultural contexts that cut across traditional designations of "east" and "west," this paper thus seeks to theorize female agency across competing religious affiliations that nevertheless shared common codes for gendered behavior.