Sacred afterlives: Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth Melville and the politics of sanctity

Abstract

This article adopts the motif of the “afterlife” to explore the sacred writing of two early modern Scottish women writers, Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth Melville. It suggests that the representation of sanctity and devotion in the major religious poetry of Mary and Melville is invested with political meaning which has been previously unrecognised. Accordingly, the devotional selfhood, or religious “self-incarnations”, of both women polemically mirror their doctrinal loyalties: respectively Roman Catholicism and radical Presbyterianism. Their poetic articulation of faith can, therefore, be interpreted as passionate political “defences” of that faith. The article analyses the intersection of their religious poetry with contemporary and posthumous representations of their piety, seeking to exemplify how this reveals the possibility that the poetry of both women is the attempt, conscious and unconscious, to invent a symbolic “afterlife”. The conclusion suggests that Scottish early modern women's writing as a whole has suffered from a critically uncertain “afterlife”; brief investigation of the possible reasons for the complex “invisibility” of this body of writing therefore brings the article full circle as it ultimately suggests that the fusion of the aesthetic, the spiritual, and the political in the religious writing of Mary and Melville may help to bring their work greater recognition.