Reading Mary Stuart's Casket Sonnets: Reception, Authorship, and Early Modern Women's Writing

Abstract

The reception history of the casket sonnets attributed to Mary Queen of Scots is a rich archive of material, revealing the complex ways in which histories of reading intersect with the early modern woman writer's relationship to the institutions of authorship. By tracing the reception of these sonnets over four centuries, I argue that competing religious, historical, and geopolitical formations work to privilege or occlude Mary Stuart's authorship at different historical moments. Understanding these formations and their relationships to authorship and gender allows a new perspective on the canonical biases still at work in the field of early modern women's writing.