Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation

This article considers how relative anonymity could be used in sixteenth-century literary culture as an aesthetic strategy for women authors in a male (or) coterie context. I elucidate this supposition by examining the sixteenth-century Scottish verse miscellany, the Maitland Quarto Manuscript (ca. 1586), which is affiliated with the Scottish courtier and writer, Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (1496-1586), and his daughter, Marie Maitland (died 1596). I explore how a Renaissance female "maker" such as Marie Maitland could appropriate male discourse and auctoritas to provide herself with a "metaphysics of presence" (DERRIDA 1997, 22). The article builds on the provocative new work on the Maitland Quarto by Sarah Dunnigan (1997; 2003b; 2005) and Evelyn Newlyn (2004) and re-contextualizes Marie Maitland's "voice" by examining the writings of Michel de Montaigne, Olympia Morata, Sappho, and Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots.

This article considers how relative anonymity could be used in sixteenth-century literary culture as an aesthetic strategy for women authors in a male (or) coterie context. I elucidate this supposition by examining the sixteenth-century Scottish verse miscellany, the Maitland Quarto Manuscript (ca. 1586), which is affiliated with the Scottish courtier and writer, Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (1496-1586), and his daughter, Marie Maitland (died 1596). I explore how a Renaissance female "maker" such as Marie Maitland could appropriate male discourse and auctoritas to provide herself with a "metaphysics of presence" (DERRIDA 1997, 22). The article builds on the provocative new work on the Maitland Quarto by Sarah Dunnigan (1997; 2003b; 2005) and Evelyn Newlyn (2004) and re-contextualizes Marie Maitland's "voice" by examining the writings of Michel de Montaigne, Olympia Morata, Sappho, and Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots.