ABSTRACT
Mary Stuart’s education in France was “meticulously planned,” according to biographer John Guy, with instruction in languages, philosophy, grammar, and the classics equivalent to the training the Dauphin, her betrothed, received-as well as lessons in dancing and needlework (p. 67). Yet there still was time for the young girl to play dress up and keep house with her Scottish companions, and Guy contrasts this harmless fun with some of Mary’s later extravagances, especially her love of “sumptuous and expensive embroideries” that, even as a teenager, she purchased “indiscriminately.” Against these baleful pleasures should be reckoned Mary’s childhood pastimes, Guy maintains:
That Mary’s adult life as sovereign would be almost completely circumscribed by the “mundane” comforts and confinements of the household seems a strange irony, even a rude one, yet the parallel characterized the lives of many aristocratic women, seemingly schooled for intellectual pursuits and political conquest, yet moored to their families and the care of cloth, food, animals, and each other.2
