Politics and sainthood : literary representations of St Margaret of Scotland in England and Scotland from the eleventh to the fifteenth century

This thesis is a study of the literary representation of St Margaret of Scotland in England and Scotland from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. Drawing both on existing developments made towards the understanding of the historical Margaret - and other medieval queens - and on advances in the wider theoretical field of queenship studies and feminist scholarship, it demonstrates the usefulness of reading the textual representation of Margaret as a reflection of contemporary ideas about queens and queenship in England and Scotland across the five centuries it covers. It identifies two key strands in the literary representation of Margaret - Margaret as dynastic mother and Margaret as ideal queen - and reveals how these were used both individually and together on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border. This thesis demonstrates both that Margaret is something of a lightning-rod for ideas of good queenship and Scottish independent sovereignty, and that these ideas exist in symbiosis with her sanctity. This thesis ends with a consideration of how my literary analysis of the textual representation of Margaret might be used as a case-study to further understanding of the literary representations of other medieval queens.