In 1561, George Buchanan definitely left France to live in Scotland where he became court poet of the Catholic Queen Mary Stewart, even if he publicly became Protestant. At the beginning, the humanist composed a few epigrams in which the queen is depicted as a good sovereign who restores the Golden Age in Scotland. A few years later, Buchanan depicted Mary Queen of Scots as a tyrant in his Rerum Scoticarum Historia, published in 1582. This article will provide a comparison between Buchanan’s different works (poetical works, tragedies and political and historical works) and show that the aesthetic choices and the references and quo- tations of ancient writers are based on Buchanan’s political thought about the Good King and the Tyrant, as we can read in the De jure regni apud Scotos dialogus, published in 1579.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Catellani-Dufrêne, N., (2025), "L’icône et l’idole. Les représentations de Marie Stuart dans l’œuvre de George Buchanan", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Catellani-Dufrêne, Nathalie. "L’icône et l’idole. Les représentations de Marie Stuart dans l’œuvre de George Buchanan." Renaissance and Reformation 36 (4): 2014. 81-100. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v36i4.20983. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.