Eros and Poetry examines the erotics of literary desire at the Stewart court in Scotland during the reigns of Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI. Encompassing the period from the early 1560s to the late 1590s, this is the first study to link together Scottish Marian and Jacobean court literatures, presenting a relatively unknown body of writing, newly theorized and contextualized. It argues that in this period erotic poetry can only be considered in relation to the figure of the monarch, and that the formation of elite lyric culture takes place under the shaping influence of desire for, and against, the sovereign, and her or his 'passional' and symbolic powers.

Acknowledgements Introduction: Incarnations of Eros PART I: THE MARIAN PERIOD Feminine Eros: Mary Queen of Sots and the Emergence of Desire Demonic and Angelic Women: The Erotics of Renunciation and Marianology in the Bannatyne Manuscript PART II: THE JACOBEAN PERIOD Fables of Eros: James VI and the Revelation of Desire Devotional Artefacts: John Stewart and the Eroticization of the Courtly Love's Alter: Alexander Montgomerie and the Erotics of Representation Heretical Love Words: The Poetry of William Fowler Conclusion: Love's End Index

SARAH M. DUNNIGAN is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has published articles on early modern literature, women's writing, and on twentieth-century Scottish literature and theory.