‘Le pouvoir de faire dire’: Marginalia in Mary Queen of Scots’ Book of Hours

Abstract

In this essay, I would like to begin to examine a third significant archive: Mary Queen of Scots' diverse collection of marginalia in her Book of Hours. 3 This illuminated 15 th century manuscript was given to Mary during her time in the French court and was added to over her lifetime and beyond. 4 It contains three different types of marginalia: the queen's independent marks of ownership, ten other signatures, and fourteen quatrains, or fragments of quatrains, some signed and all written in French in Mary Stuart's very clear italic hand. This article examines all three of these types of marginalia in order to reconstruct what Jason Scott-Warren describes as 'the anthropology of the book': as evidence not only for reading but also for understanding the place of this Book of Hours in the individual, social and material fabric of the lives of its owners and readers over half a century. 5 Although this is a relatively large collection of marginalia within a single text, Mary Stuarts' Book of Hours has received little critical attention, despite the last decade's increased critical focus on the material traces of book use. 6 Its absence within English literary histories derives at least in part because its poems are in French, but written by a sovereign who moved between the French, Scottish and English courts, and as such they occupy an uncertain status in nationally focused genealogies of women's writing. The marginalia also occurs in a devotional text, one of the hundreds of surviving private prayer books owned and routinely annotated by women, which themselves form a rich and intriguing archive only now beginning to be considered as part of early modern women's use of the spaces of the book.

Katherine Parr's Giftbooks, Henry VIII's Marginalia, and the Display of Royal Power and Piety

“…71 Smith, 2017, 180. See also Smith, 2014, for a discussion of social inscriptions. 72 For Henry's and the woman's inscriptions see British Library (hereafter BL), Kings MS 9, fols.…”