HEI: University of Glasgow
Project Title: The ‘Quenis awne hand’: Self-presentation in the poetry and correspondence of Mary Queen of Scots, 1567-1587
What was your research about?
This thesis examines the self-presentation of Mary Queen of Scots in the writing she produced between 1567 and 1587. It acts as a feminist intervention in Mary’s textual history, revealing for the first time the extent of her authorial agency in shaping her public image during her imprisonment. As the introduction demonstrates, Mary was acutely aware of the role written propaganda played in influencing her reputation and fate, and in her own writing she consciously crafted her textual persona in response. Each chapter thus compares the external representations of Mary during this period with how Mary depicted herself in poetry, prose treatises, letters, and visual culture.
The first two chapters focus on the gendered nature of the recurring propagandistic depictions of Mary. Chapter One explores the representation of Mary as “evil” women of classical myth such as Clytemnestra, Medea, or Circe, arguing that in her letters and her ‘Traité sur l’adversité’ (1580) she rejects such narratives of feminine monstrosity in favour of the civic virtues of classical figures like Hecuba, Portia, and Dido. Chapter Two considers the use of biblical women – Jezebel, Delilah, and Susanna – in both negative and positive polemical portrayals of Mary, demonstrating that she countered these associations by invoking the virtues of biblical kings such as Solomon and David in her poetic and epistolary works.
Building on these contextual foundations, the final two chapters offer crucial new readings of Mary’s textual negotiation of her feminine and mortal body. Chapter Three examines the external textual responses to her rape by Bothwell in 1567, noting the link these draw between her supposed complicity and her alleged authorship of the casket sonnets. It then contrasts these portrayals against Mary’s own later epistolary and visual assertions of her status as a rape survivor. Chapter Four challenges the critical assumption that Mary’s self-conception of religious martyrdom emerged only in the immediate lead-up to her execution, arguing instead that her correspondence throughout her English imprisonment reveals a sustained narrative of Catholic suffering stretching from her arrival in 1568 all the way to the scaffold in 1587.
Together, these chapters demonstrate that Mary’s writings were not merely personal, emotional reactions to her circumstances, but deliberate, rhetorically sophisticated acts of self-fashioning. Her writing must therefore be understood as an expression of enduring queenly agency – literary, political, and performative – even long after her loss of tangible sovereign power.
Contact Emily Hay via LinkedIn
Contact Emily Hay via BlueSky
