'Le pouvoir de faire dire': marginalia in Mary Queen of Scots' Book of Hours

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.