Abstract
Recent work on early modern women’s marginalia has already revealed much about the ways in which early modern women read and wrote, using the materials of manuscript and print as markers of relationships and as tools for self-positioning.1 However, as Heidi Brayman Hackel has argued, such traces are thought to be relatively rare, and, to date, studies of substantial archives of marginalia have centred on books annotated by two authors: Margaret Hoby and Anne Clifford.2 In this chapter, 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 fifteenth-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 chapter examines all three of these types of marginalia in order to reconstruct what Jason Scott-Warren describes as ‘the anthropology of the book’: 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
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Notes
See Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010): 363–81.
Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Stephen Orgel, ‘Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s Mirror for Magistrates’, in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 245–65. Margaret Hoby’s marginalia has recently been discussed by Julie Crawford, ‘Reconsidering Early Modern Women’s Reading, or, How Margaret Hoby Read Her de Mornay’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010): 193–223 and Andrew Cambers, ‘Reader’s Marks and Religious Practice: Margaret Hoby’s Marginalia’, in Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning, ed. John N. King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 211–31.
See David Angus, ‘Mary’s Marginalia’, Review of Scottish Culture, 3 (1987): 9–12. As Angus notes, marginal dates indicate that the Book of Hours was in Mary’s possession as early as 1554, and the evidence of various signatures suggests that the book remained in England until at least 1615. Patricia Z. Thompson draws upon Alexandre Laborde’s work to date the manuscript at c. 1430; it was originally executed for the House of Luxembourg, and later passing to the House of Guise before it was acquired by Mary Stuart. She also offers a lively account of the wider acquisition practices of Peter Petrovich Dobrovskii, who was responsible for bringing the manuscript to Russia and its current place in the manuscript department of the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library, the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg.
See Patricia Z. Thompson, ‘Biography of a Library: The Western European Manuscript Collection of Peter P. Dubrovskii in Leningrad’, The Journal of Library History, Philosophy and Comparative Librarianship, 19 (1984): 477–503.
The fourteen poems and fragments were reproduced in the nineteenth century by Prince Alexandre Labanoff, Lettres, instructions et memoires de Marie Stuart, reine d’É’cosse, 7 vols (London, 1852), vol. 7, pp. 348–51.
Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010): 363–82.
Apart from David Angus’ article, the manuscript has been discussed in Natalia Elagina, ‘Manuscripts and Documents on Mary Queen of Scots, in the collection of the National Library of Russia’, Studies in Variation, Contact and Change in English, 9 (2011): 1–13. Lisa Hopkins discusses a quatrain written by Mary Stuart in the margins of a Mass book belonging to her aunt Anne of Lorraine in ‘Writing to Control: The Verse of Mary, Queen of Scots’, in Reading Monarchs Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James I, ed. Peter C. Herman (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), pp. 36–9, as does Peter Herman in Royal Poetrie: Monarchic Verse and the Political Imaginary of Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 54–5.
See Seth Lerer, ‘Literary Prayer and Personal Possession in a Newly Discovered Book of Hours’, Studies in Philology, 109 (2012): 409–27.
Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240–1570 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006).
Kathleen Ashley, ‘Creating Family Identity in Books of Hours’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32.1 (2002): 147–65.
See Charity Scott-Stokes, Women’s Books of Hours in Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 1–5.
Janet Backhouse, Books of Hours (London: The British Library Reference Division Publications, 1985), pp. 3–4.
Susan M. Felch, Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Morning and Evening Prayers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 21.
Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990): 31.
See also Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, ‘Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England,’ in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain, eds Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 102–24.
Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 15.
Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1993), pp. 1–6.
For selected historical accounts of Mary Queen of Scots’ life, see Retha M. Warnicke, Mary Queen of Scots (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (New York: Mariner Books, 2005) and My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London: HarperPerennial, 2004).
Susan Watkins, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001).
Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969; reprinted New York: Random House, 1993).
Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 1988).
For work on signature, see Scott-Warren, ‘Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book’, p. 367 and Jonathon Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 1990).
Megan Moore, ‘Illuminating the Four Evangelists: A Comparison of Depiction in the Flemish Book of Hours and French Book of Hours,’ p. 4. http://frenchbookofhours.weebly.com/illuminating-the-four-evangelists-a-comparison-of-depiction-in-the-flemish-book-of-hours-and-french-book-of-hours-by-megan-moore.html [accessed 20 October 2013].
James McDermott, ‘Howard, Charles, Second Baron Howard of Effingham and First Earl of Nottingham (1536–1624)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 http://www.oxforddnb.com.library.newcastle.edu.au/view/article/13885 [accessed 31 October 2013].
Anne Duffin, ‘Clinton, Edward Fiennes de, First Earl of Lincoln (1512–1585)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn Jan 2008 http://o-www.oxforddnb.com.library.newcastle.edu.au/view/article/5679 [accessed 10 July 2013].
Micheline White, ‘Dismantling Catholic Primers and Reforming Private Prayer: Anne Lock, Hezekiah’s Song and Psalm 50/51’, in Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, eds Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 98–9.
Elizabeth I, ‘The doubt of future foes’, in Collected Works, eds Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 133–4.
For an illuminating account of Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart’s textual rivalry, see Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 173–202.
For the female subject’s use of the volatility of example in popular and elite complaint, see Rosalind Smith, ‘“A goodly sample”: Exemplarity, rhetoric and true crime in female gallows confession’, in Women and the Poem, ed. Susan Wiseman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 72–93.
See Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 170–1.
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© 2014 Rosalind Smith
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Smith, R. (2014). ‘Le pouvoir de faire dire’: Marginalia in Mary Queen of Scots’ Book of Hours. In: Pender, P., Smith, R. (eds) Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342430_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342430_4
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