Parergon 29.2 (2012) Reading Mary Stuart’s Casket Sonnets: Reception, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s Writing Rosalind Smith The reception history of the casket sonnets attributed to Mary Queen of Scots is a rich archive of material, revealing the complex ways in which histories of reading intersect with the early modern woman writer’s relationship to the institutions of authorship. By tracing the reception of these sonnets over four centuries, I argue that competing religious, historical, and geopolitical formations work to privilege or occlude Mary Stuart’s authorship at different historical moments. Understanding these formations and their relationships to authorship and gender allows a new perspective on the canonical biases still at work in the feld of early modern women’s writing. The Chicago edition of Elizabeth I’s CollectedWorks, published in 2000, marks a moment in canon formation in early modern women’s writing. 1 Just as George Puttenham characterized Elizabeth’s poem ‘The doubt of future foes’ as exemplary of the figure of the gorgeous – that rhetorical figure of speech‘the most bewtifull and gorgious of all others’ – so the size, comprehensiveness, and prestige of the Chicago edition positions Elizabeth as literary exemplar within the twenty-first-century field of early modern women’s writing. Yet as Puttenham argues in The Arte of English Poesie, Elizabeth’s ‘ditty most sweet and sententious’ was written in response to the politically threatening ‘secret practizes’ of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. 2 Elizabeth’s textual pre-eminence is grounded upon the discredited and volatile presence of her sovereign cousin. The writing of Mary Queen of Scots, as generically varied and rhetorically complex as that of her cousin, has no place in Puttenham’s panegyric to Elizabeth’s rhetorical skill; as a consequence, she exists solely as a historical character associated with disorder and danger. This binary – positing Elizabeth as writer par excellence and Mary Stuart as silent foil – is sustained within current accounts of female sovereign authorship in the field of early modern women’s writing. There is no scholarly edition of Mary 1 Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds, Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 2 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), p. 207. Place of publication of all early works is London, unless otherwise stated.