Mary, Queen of Scots--Appianus Alexandrinus

folio (280 x 192mm.), woodcut printer's device on title-page and final verso (otherwise blank), woodcut initials, late sixteenth-century English limp vellum with yapp edges, gold-stamped arabesque centrepiece with lettering MR (upper cover) SCOTORUM (lower cover), flat spine gilt and lettered horizontally in ink, title also lettered along foot of textblock, occasional slight foxing, a few small spots on B2, front flyleaf slightly torn, upper hinge somewhat soiled, lacking two pairs of green silk ties, binding slightly soiled

VD16 A3164

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, where appropriate
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A BINDING FOR MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS (1542-1587).

The inventories of Mary's books, dating from 1569 and 1578, and the catalogue of books belonging to James VI (compiled 1573-1578), are all listed in the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (volume 12, Scottish Libraries, S11, S16 and S17), and indicate that she possessed a collection of nearly 300 volumes of books, most of which were printed books published on the Continent. A few armorial bindings date from her brief period as queen of France (1559-1560). Yet "very few, if any, of the books listed in S16, S17 or S11 can now be identified with surviving books... The loss of bindings no doubt prevents the identification of other books formerly in royal ownership" (Corpus 12, p.103). This book does not appear in any of the inventories, nor does the Beza that also belonged to her (see below).

The binding is remarkably similar to that on a book belonging to Mary, and probably given to her by Sir James Melville (sale, Christie's London, 28 November 1990, lot 22, now in the National Library of Scotland), a copy of Beza's Confessione della fede christiana (Geneva, 1560). The bindings on this volume and on the Beza are typical late sixteenth-century English limp vellum bindings (produced from the 1560s into the seventeenth century) with a single gilt fillet border and gilt centrepiece (different on each book), with the sewing supports visible across the joints, a flat spine with small stamp in each compartment, yapp edges, and two pairs of ties (the Beza has "MARIA R SCOTORU[M]" at the head of the upper cover).

Pamela Robinson, in "John Leslie's Libri duo" (Order and Connexion: studies in bibliography and history, Cambridge, 1997, 63-75), discusses two manuscripts made by Leslie for Mary (Lambeth Palace Library MS 566, British Library Add. MS 48180), both of which were bound in English gold-tooled limp vellum bindings, a centrepiece (different on each binding) and the initials M R beneath a crown (again, different on each binding), and green silk ties (pp.70-71). Both these manuscripts are recorded in collections from the seventeenth century, belonging to people who had no interest in the romantic myth of Catholic Mary; the Lambeth manuscript was owned by an archbishop of Canterbury, and the BL manuscript came from the library of the man who carried her death warrant to Fotheringhay.