La rappresentazione del corpo di Maria Stuarda nelle lettere francesi (1548-1647)

[Machine translation] The story of the Queen of Scots Mary Stuart has given rise to one of the most dynamic literary and artistic myths of modern Europe: in fact, there are countless literary, theatrical, iconographic and cinematographic transpositions of the life of Elizabeth I's rival produced from the 16th century to today. , The present study aims to reconstruct the dynamics of emergence and crystallization of one of the elements that regularly occur in such transpositions, namely the exaltation of Mary Stuart's beauty and, more generally, her attention to the representation of her body. This element finds its origin not so much in historical documentation as in literary documentation: it is in fact the compositions that French poets dedicated to Mary Stuart during her stay at the court of France (1548-1561) that have established some foundational traits of her literary person, including beauty. The systematic analysis of the Neo-Latin and vernacular French literary production of the years 1548-1587 (from arrival in France to her death) allows, on the one hand, to detect the imposition of beauty not as a generic commendation but as a real constitutive trait of the queen's identity; on the other, to examine the different values — erotic, moral, spiritual — of which this trait is loaded into the analyzed texts. The examination of the accounts of the beheading (1587-1588) then shows how, in the aftermath of Mary Stuart's death, the poetic celebration of beauty was received by both Catholics and reformers in documentary, apologetic or polemical texts, thus establishing the foundations of a tradition that, in the French sphere, finds its first expressions in the Baroque literary and theatrical performances of Montchrestien, Caussin, Regnault and Le Moyne (1601-1647).