'A Companion To Marguerite de Navarre' by Mary B. McKinley (Ed.)

A Companion to Marguerite de Navarre
Brill’s Companions to the

Christian Tradition
A series of handbooks and reference works

on the intellectual and religious life of Europe,
500–1800
Editor-in-Chief
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VOLUME 42
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A Companion to
Marguerite de Navarre
Edited by
Gary Ferguson & Mary B. McKinley
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2013
The essays by Isabelle Garnier with Isabelle Pantin, Jean-Marie Le Gall, and Olivier Millet were
translated from French by Marian Rothstein and Gary Ferguson.
Cover illustration: Portrait of Marguerite de Navarre, Heures de la reine Catherine de Médicis,

MS NAL 82, fol. 151v (1544?), reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de
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CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors .................................................................................... vii
Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1
Gary Ferguson and Mary B. McKinley
Marguerite de Navarre and Evangelical Reform .................................... 29

Jonathan A. Reid
Marguerite de Navarre: The Reasons for Remaining Catholic .......... 59

Jean-Marie Le Gall
Neo-Platonic Themes of Ascent in Marguerite de Navarre ................ 89

Philip Ford
Opening and Closing Reflections: The Miroir de l’âme pécheresse

and the Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié .................................................. 109
Isabelle Garnier with Isabelle Pantin
Speaking with the Dead: Spirituality, Mourning, and Memory

in the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne and La Navire ........... 161
Reinier Leushuis
Les Prisons’ Poetics of Conversion .............................................................. 211

Cynthia Skenazi
Chansons Spirituelles—Songs for a “Delightful Transformation” ...... 237

Jan Miernowski
Staging the Spiritual: The Biblical and Non-Biblical Plays ................. 281

Olivier Millet
The Heptaméron: Word, Spirit, World ....................................................... 323

Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 373
Index .................................................................................................................... 387
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Gary Ferguson is the Elias Ahuja Professor of French at the University

of Delaware and has been a Visiting Professor at the Universités Paris
13-Paris Nord, Rennes 2-Haute Bretagne, and Jean Monnet-Saint-Étienne.
He has published extensively on Marguerite de Navarre, notably Mirror-
ing Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (Edinburgh UP, 1992)
and numerous articles on the Heptaméron, as well as on medieval and
early modern religious culture, women’s writing, and devotional poetry,
including an edition of Anne de Marquets’s Sonets spirituels (Droz, 1997).
In the areas of gender and queer studies, his most recent books include
Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Cul-
ture (Ashgate, 2008). He is currently completing a study entitled “Like Man
and Wife”? A (Hi)story of Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome.
Philip Ford, PhD (1977), University of Cambridge, is Professor of French

and Neo-Latin Literature at that University. He has published monographs
and articles on Renaissance literature and on the classical tradition, and is
an editor of The Encyclopaedia of Neo-Latin Studies (Brill, 2013). He is the
author of a study on the reception of Homer, De Troie à Ithaque: récep-
tion des épopées homériques à la Renaissance (Droz, 2007) and is publish-
ing with Brill in 2013 a monograph on literary bilingualism in the French
Renaissance: The Judgment of Palaemon: The Contest between Neo-Latin
and Vernacular Poetry in Renaissance France.
Isabelle Garnier is maître de conférences in Renaissance Literature

at the Université Jean Moulin–Lyon 3, where she directs the Groupe
d’Analyse de la Dynamique des Genres et des Styles (GADGES, XVI–XVIIIe
siècles). The author of L’Épithète et la connivence: Écriture concertée chez
les Évangéliques français (1523–1534) (Droz, 2005), she studies the linguistic
particularities of French 16th-century Evangelism and Protestantism and
the polemic use of religious texts (in particular the psalms and prières
farcies). She is the editor of the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, the
Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, and accompanying texts (Augereau, 1533) for
the Œuvres complètes of Marguerite de Navarre, published by Honoré
Champion under the general editorship of Nicole Cazauran.
viii notes on contributors
Jean-Marie Le Gall, Professor of History and currently Head of the

Department of History at the Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, is
a specialist of the religious and political culture of the 16th century. His
books include Les Moines au temps des Réformes, France (1480–1560) (Seys-
sel, 2001), Le Mythe de saint Denis: entre Renaissance et Révolution (Seys-
sel, 2007), Les humanistes en Europe: XV e–XVIe siècles (Paris, 2008), and
Un idéal masculin: Barbes et moustaches, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 2011).
Reinier Leushuis (PhD Princeton University, 2000) is Associate Professor

of French and Italian at Florida State University. He specializes in early
modern dialogue, the literary treatment of marriage and friendship in the
Renaissance, Franco-Italian literary connections, and the works of Eras-
mus. He is the author of a book entitled Le Mariage et l’“amitié courtoise”
dans le dialogue et le récit bref de la Renaissance (Olschki, 2003) and has
published articles on a wide variety of authors and texts in French and
Italian Renaissance literature. He is currently completing a book on the
Italian dialogo amoroso and its influence on French authors of the period
1550–80.
Mary B. McKinley is the Douglas Huntly Gordon Professor of French at

the University of Virginia. She has written two books on Montaigne and
edited and translated Marie Dentière’s Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre
and Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin for The Other Voice in Early Mod-
ern Europe (Chicago, 2004). She has written numerous articles on Mar-
guerite de Navarre and has co-edited and contributed to Critical Tales:
New Studies of the Heptameron and Early Modern Culture (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
Jan Miernowski is Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-

Madison and at the University of Warsaw. He is the author of over 40
articles on French Renaissance literature. Among his books are Signes dis-
similaires: La quête des noms divins dans la poésie française de la Renais-
sance (Droz, 1997); Le Dieu Néant: Théologies négatives à l’aube des temps
modernes (Brill, 1998); L’ontologie de la contradiction sceptique: Pour une
étude de la métaphysique des Essais (Champion, 1998); “Fine idiocies inter-
preted in the most perfect sense”: Allegory as Provocation in French Medieval
and Early Modern Literature [in Polish] (Czytelnik, 2000). Forthcoming
volumes include La Beauté de la haine: Essais de misologie littéraire and
a collective volume, Sublime & Grotesque.
notes on contributors ix
Olivier Millet is Professor of French Literature at the Université Paris–

Sorbonne. He is interested in particular in questions of rhetoric and
poetics in relation to religious culture and the history of ideas. He has
published Calvin et la dynamique de la parole: Étude de rhétorique réfor-
mée (Champion, 1992) and La première réception des Essais de Montaigne
(1580–1640) (Champion, 1995). He has also edited Marguerite de Navarre’s
Théâtre (with Geneviève Hasenohr) in the Œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole
Cazauran (Champion, 2002) and Jean Calvin’s, Institution de la religion
chrétienne (1541) (Droz, 2008) and is the general editor of Joachim Du Bel-
lay, Œuvres complètes (Champion, 2003).
Isabelle Pantin is Professor of Literature at the École Normale Supérieure

and a member of the Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (ENS-
CNRS). She works on the history of the book, on cosmological thought in
the Renaissance, and on the relationship between science, philosophy, and
literature (scientific poetry, philosophical fiction). With Nicole Cazauran,
she is editing the Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié in the Œuvres complètes of
Marguerite de Navarre, published by Honoré Champion.
Jonathan A. Reid is an Associate Professor of History at East Carolina

University and Assistant Editor of the journal Explorations in Renaissance
Culture. His first book, King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of
Navarre (1492–1549) and Her Evangelical Network (Brill, 2009) reconstructs
for the first time the collective career of a prominent group of Évangé-
liques, whose members, led by Marguerite, attempted to renew the French
Church from within. His next monograph, Reformation in the French Cities,
1520–1563, will attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the impact
of indigenous evangelical as well as foreign Protestant reformation move-
ments in France’s towns and burgs during the 40-year build up to the
outbreak of religious civil war in 1562.
Cynthia Skenazi is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at

the University of California, Santa Barbara. A specialist of Renaissance
literature and culture, she is the author of Maurice Scève et la pensée chré-
tienne (Geneva, 1992), Le Poète architecte en France: Constructions d’un
imaginaire monarchique (Paris, 2003), and of numerous articles on 16th-
century French poetry.
INTRODUCTION
The woman who would play such an important role in French religious
reform and literary life was born at the château of Cognac near Angoulême
on 11 April 1492, the first child of Louise de Savoie and Charles, Count of
Angoulême. A son, François, was born two years later, on 12 September
1494. Much of Marguerite’s later prominence and influence arose because
she was François’s sister; at the time of his birth, however, it was not at
all evident that he would one day become king of France. Their father was
a distant relative of Charles VIII, and Cognac was far from the center of
royal power. However, when the king’s only son died in December 1495,
Louis, Duke of Orléans, Charles d’Angoulême’s cousin, stood to inherit
the throne. In the absence of a male heir to Louis, Charles d’Angoulême
became the second in line to the throne, and when Charles died on 1 Janu-
ary 1496, his son François took that place. Louis obtained legal guardian-
ship of Marguerite and François, allowing Louise to retain custody of her
children. When Charles VIII died childless in 1498, Louis became King
Louis XII. He designated François heir presumptive to the throne and
brought François, Marguerite, and their mother to court. Louis appointed
as their guardian Pierre de Rohan, seigneur de Gié, and arranged for them
to live first at the château of Blois and then at Amboise.1
Louise fiercely guarded her right to remain with her children and to
oversee their education. Throughout her life, she showed a strong dis-
position toward spirituality and religious devotion, a commitment that
she endeavored to pass on to her children. She engaged François de
Moulins (or Desmoulins/Du Moulin) de Rochefort, a Franciscan humanist
1 The standard biography of Marguerite remains Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême,

Duchesse d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre (1492–1549): Étude biographique et littéraire, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1930; Geneva, 1978). Jonathan A. Reid’s King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent: Marguerite
of Navarre (1492–1549) and Her Evangelical Network, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston, 2009) fol-
lows Marguerite’s engagement in evangelical reform and her role as patron and protector
of individuals in that movement. Patricia F. Cholakian and Rouben C. Cholakian’s Mar-
guerite de Navarre, Mother of the Renaissance (New York, 2006) draws from Marguerite’s
own writings clues to events in her life. Robert J. Knecht’s Renaissance Warrior and Patron:
The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge, Eng., 1994) provides historical detail often relevant to
Marguerite.
2 gary ferguson and mary b. mckinley
cleric, disciple of Erasmus and Lefèvre d’Étaples, to be her son’s precep-

tor. Moulins remained a close advisor to the family. Jean d’Angoulême,
Marguerite’s paternal grandfather, had gathered a rich and varied collec-
tion of books for his library at Cognac, and those books were moved to
the library at Blois. Louise added to their number by hiring a scribe and
an artist, Robinet Testart, and ordering manuscripts. Marguerite appears
to have shared in much of her brother’s education.2
With Louis XII’s accession to the throne, Marguerite, as the sister of
the young heir presumptive, became a valuable pawn in the negotiation
of royal marriages. Nonetheless, her position, like that of her brother, was
tenuous, because the possibility remained that Louis and his wife, Anne
de Bretagne, would produce a male child and the Angoulême threesome
would return to the shadows. Louis endeavored to use Marguerite to
strengthen his relations with Tudor England, working first toward a mar-
riage with Arthur, Prince of Wales, son of King Henry VII. When Arthur
died in 1502, Louis turned his efforts toward Arthur’s younger brother, the
future Henry VIII, again with no success. In 1505, it was King Henry VII’s
turn to raise the question of marriage between his son and Marguerite,
but by then it had been decided that the sister of the heir to the French
throne should remain in France. On 2 December 1509, in a match calcu-
lated by Louis to strengthen the royal dynasty, Marguerite, at age 17, mar-
ried Charles d’Alençon.3
Louis XII died on 31 December 1514, and François became king of France
on 1 January 1515. Having appointed his mother as regent, he left in July,
accompanied by Charles d’Alençon, to lead the French invasion of Italy
in an effort to claim the duchy of Milan. The French victory at Marignano
in September established François’s reputation as a military leader and
marked a brilliant beginning to his reign. Louise, Marguerite, and Queen
Claude traveled south to welcome the returning hero. While staying in
Arles, Louise and Marguerite became aware of efforts to reform the abbey
2 Jourda lists many titles that were available in the library at Blois (Marguerite, 1:19–30).
On Louise’s purchases of manuscripts, see Mary Beth Winn, “Books for a Princess and her
Son: Louise de Savoie, François d’Angoulême, and the Parisian Libraire Antoine Vérard,”
Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 46 (1984), 603–17.
3 See Jourda, Marguerite, 1:12–17 and Laurent Ripart, “Les mariages de Marguerite,” in
Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1992: Actes du Colloque international de Pau, 1992, ed. Nicole
Cazauran and James Dauphiné (Mont-de-Marsan, 1995), pp. 59–83. Ripart rejects Jourda’s
explanation that the marriage was simply a solution that settled a territorial dispute
between the Alençons and the Angoulêmes. He argues that Louis wanted to strengthen
the monarchy by bringing the Alençon line into the royal orbit. Marguerite was the “hinge”
that effected that consolidation (pp. 64–65).
introduction 3
of Hyères, efforts that were meeting with strong resistance. In response

to appeals from the community’s superiors, Marguerite intervened on
behalf of the advocates of reform.4 In so doing, she continued a family
tradition of concern for men and women in religious life. She was one of
several women in the extended royal family, including her mother-in-law
Marguerite de Lorraine, to labor for the good of monastic communities
throughout their lives.5 Several stories in the Heptaméron dramatize the
need for such initiatives and portray Marguerite intervening on behalf of
victims of corruption in monasteries and convents.
Leaving Arles, Marguerite, Louise, and Claude traveled to Saint-
Maximin, the church east of Marseille said to house the relics of Mary
Magdalene. Devotion to that saint as a repentant sinner and disciple of
Christ was extremely popular in the later Middle Ages. In gratitude for
François’s victory, the royal women fulfilled a vow to make a pilgrimage to
la Sainte-Baume, the shrine in the hills near Saint-Maximin where, it was
believed, Mary Magdalene had lived in a cave at the end of her life. After
a reunion with François marked by triumphant ceremonies in Marseille,
the royal party returned to Saint-Maximin on 20 January 1516 and to la
Sainte-Baume the next day, making generous gifts to support the shrine.6
Doubts about the cult of Mary Magdalene had begun to arise in France.
The appearance of several women named Mary in the New Testament
had led to confusion about their identity, pious tradition having made
them into a single person. Following her visit to Saint-Maximin, Louise
commissioned François de Moulins to write a life of Mary Magdalene.
The king’s former tutor apparently consulted with Lefèvre d’Étaples, the
revered humanist and biblical scholar. Lefèvre responded in 1517 with his
De Maria Magdalena et triduo Christi disceptatio, challenging the tradi-
tional devotion and arguing that it had conflated three different women.7
4 Jourda, Marguerite, 1:48, 55–57.

5 Jean-Marie Le Gall, Les Moines au temps des Réformes, France (1480–1560) (Seyssel,
2001), pp. 56–60.
6 Sheila M. Porrer, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the Three Maries Debates (Geneva,
2009), pp. 36–48. See also François Rigolot, “The Heptameron and the ‘Magdalen Contro-
versy’: Dialogue and Humanist Hermeneutics,” in Critical Tales: New Studies of the Heptam-
eron and Early Modern Culture, ed. John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley (Philadelphia,
1993), pp. 218–31 and “Magdalen’s Skull: Allegory and Iconography in Heptameron 32,”
Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994), 57–73.
7 On Lefèvre’s life and career, see Porrer, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples; Guy Bedouelle,
Lefèvre d’Étaples et l’intelligence des Écritures (Geneva, 1976); and Philip Edgcumbe Hughes,
Lefèvre: Pioneer of Ecclesiastical Renewal in France (Grand Rapids, 1984). Cf. Jean-Pierre
Massaut, Critique et tradition à la veille de la réforme en France (Paris, 1974).
Sometime around 1520, Lefèvre became the unofficial leader of a group

of people working for religious reform. They never constituted a formal
body, nor did they promulgate a new doctrine. They argued that the gos-
pel, l’évangile, was and should be recognized as the founding and endur-
ing authority of the Church. They struggled to reform that body without
dividing it, seizing opportunities where they could to advance their cause.
Marguerite became the group’s intermediary to the royal court where,
over the next decade, she procured appointments for some of its mem-
bers, invited them to preach sermons, and, when necessary, called for
royal intervention to protect them. The group in Paris included some, like
Gérard Roussel, who would remain a member of the Catholic clergy, and
others, like Guillaume Farel, Lefèvre’s student, who would leave France,
reject the Roman hierarchy, and work to establish the Reformed Church
in Geneva. In 1517, Martin Luther had affixed to the door of Wittenburg
cathedral his 95 theses protesting ecclesiastical abuses, including the
sale of indulgences. In 1521, the Faculty of Theology in Paris, known as
the Sorbonne, condemned Luther’s ideas as heretical. In that same year,
Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, invited Lefèvre and his followers
to preach there. Thus was born the “Meaux group,” that would promote
evangelical renewal throughout the kingdom and draw accusations of
heresy from the conservative theologians of the Sorbonne and the Parle-
ment of Paris.8
In those early years of François’s reign, Marguerite was a regular mem-
ber of her brother’s inner circle. In 1517, François gave her the duchy of
Berry and appointed her to the ducal peerage, a status otherwise reserved
to men.9 In 1520, she accompanied François to the historic meeting with
England’s Henry VIII, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Letters
from Italian and English ambassadors refer to her as an influential fig-
ure whose favor they courted. The close relationship of trust and power
evident within the trio of François, Louise, and Marguerite is reflected in
their frequent representation as the Royal Trinity. Court poet Jean Marot
referred to them as “un seul cueur en troys corps.”10
8 Reid, King’s Sister, ch. 5, 1:151–80; Henry Heller, “Marguerite of Navarre and the
Reformers of Meaux,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 33 (1971), 271–310; and
James K. Farge, “Marguerite de Navarre, Her Circle, and the Censors of Paris,” in Interna-
tional Colloquium Celebrating the 500th Anniversary of the Birth of Marguerite de Navarre,
ed. Régine Reynolds-Cornell (Birmingham, Ala., 1995), pp. 15–28.
9 Barbara Stephenson, The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre (Aldershot,
Eng. and Burlington, Vt., 2004).
10 Reid, King’s Sister, 1:85–102; Richard Cooper, Litterae in tempore belli: Étude sur les
relations littéraires italo-françaises pendant les guerres d’Italie (Geneva, 1997), ch. 10, pp.
introduction 5
It is not clear exactly when Marguerite began to write the religious

poetry for which she would become famous, but very early in her brother’s
reign she was portrayed as a sympathetic patron of poets. In 1519, the
young Clément Marot, hoping to follow his father and enter Marguerite’s
service, addressed his “Epistre du despourveu” to her. In that poem, Marot
portrays the allegorical figure of Bon Espoir, who reassures him about
Marguerite:
c’est la Dame de cueur
Mieulx excusant les esperitz, et sens
Des Escrivans, tant soient ilz innocens,
Et qui plus tost leurs miseres desboute.11
Marot continued to refer to Marguerite with deep respect and affection,
and eventually many writers would dedicate works to her and benefit
from her patronage.12
In 1521, Marguerite began a correspondence with Guillaume Briçonnet.13
In those letters to Meaux, she presents herself as a humble, troubled soul
seeking spiritual direction. When, on 26 July 1524, Claude de France, wife
of François I, died, a grieving Marguerite wrote to Briçonnet (Correspon-
dance, 2:230). The bishop responded on 31 August with one of the longest
letters in the correspondence (2:231–61), a meditation on the mystical
marriage of the soul with Christ after the death of the body. Marguerite
thanked him for his consoling words but conveyed the further distressing
news that Claude’s and François’s eight-year-old daughter Charlotte was
gravely ill. The young princess died in mid-September. Briçonnet again
offered consolation (Correspondance, 2:262–70). In her response, Margue-
rite mentioned a project undertaken: “Et si Dieu veult que quelque chose
commencée soit finée” (2:292). Scholars disagree in attempting to relate
this reference to Marguerite’s first literary work. The general view has
been that she was alluding to her Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne,
a poem in which the soul of Charlotte instructs her spiritually troubled
207–32; Anne-Marie Lecoq, François Ier imaginaire: symbolique et politique à l’aube de la

Renaissance française (Paris, 1987), pp. 393–413.
11 Clément Marot, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990–
93), 1:72–77 (vv. 125–28) and 1:451–55.
12 Pierre Jourda, “Le mécénat de Marguerite de Navarre,” Revue du Seizième Siècle 18
(1931), 253–71; Reid, King’s Sister, ch. 10, 2:447–95. Reid provides a list of writers who were,
in various ways, connected to Marguerite and who supported efforts toward evangelical
reform, Table 4, 2:451–57.
13 Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite d’Angoulême, Correspondance (1521–1524), ed.
Christine Martineau and Michel Veissière, with Henry Heller, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1975–79).
aunt.14 Franco Giacone, however, has argued that she meant her Pater
noster, a verse dialogue between “Dieu” and “l’Ame,” commenting on each
line of the Lord’s Prayer.15 W. G. Moore first demonstrated that her model
for that work was Martin Luther’s commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, Kurtz
begreiff und ordenung aller vorgeschrieben.16 What is clear is that Margue-
rite had already begun the rich literary production that would mark the
rest of her life.
In 1525, François again led a military campaign into northern Italy.
This time the results were disastrous for both the king and his kingdom.
At Pavia, on 24 February, the French were routed by the Spanish impe-
rial army. François was captured and taken as a prisoner of Charles V
to Madrid. Charles d’Alençon was wounded in the battle but escaped
capture by fleeing. He returned in dishonor to Lyon where he died on
11 April, attended by his wife. Louise resumed the regency in her son’s
absence, and Marguerite’s attention was directed to the task of obtaining
François’s release. She traveled to Madrid in August 1525, where she found
him gravely ill, but she was unsuccessful in negotiating the ransom that
would liberate him. The Treaty of Madrid was not concluded until 14 Janu-
ary 1526 and François was finally able to return to France on 17 March,
leaving his two sons in Spain as hostages.17
In François’s absence, with Marguerite preoccupied and working for his
release, it had become more difficult to protect the members of the Meaux
group. The Parisian Parlement, encouraged by the Faculty of Theology,
moved to arrest and prosecute leaders of evangelical reform in the dio-
cese. In autumn 1525, Lefèvre, Roussel, and Michel d’Arande, Marguerite’s
personal chaplain, sought refuge in Strasbourg, where they were joined
14 Pierre Jourda, “Sur la date du Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne,” Revue du Seizième
Siècle 14 (1927), 150–61; Christine Martineau and Christian Grouselle, “La Source première
et directe du Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne: la lettre de Guillaume Briçonnet à Mar-
guerite de Navarre, du 15 septembre 1524,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 32
(1970), 559–77. The Dialogue was published by Simon Du Bois in Alençon in 1533; see Fran-
cis Higman, Piety and the People: Religious Printing in French, 1511–1551 (Aldershot, 1996),
M31, pp. 308–09.
15 Franco Giacone, “Le premier ouvrage de Marguerite de Navarre: Dialogue en forme de
vision nocturne ou Pater noster?,” in Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1992, pp. 261–89. Margue-
rite de Navarre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole Cazauran, vol. 1, Pater noster et Petit Œuvre
dévot, ed. Sabine Lardon (Paris, 2001).
16 W. G. Moore, La Réforme allemande et la littérature française (Strasbourg, 1930), pp.
187–88.
17 Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, pp. 225–48; Reid, King’s Sister, 1:345–50. On Margue-
rite’s mission to Madrid, see Jonathan A. Reid, “Marguerite de Navarre, la sœur fidèle,” in
Les Conseillers de François Ier, ed. Cédric Michon (Rennes, 2011), pp. 415–37.
introduction 7
by Farel. In letters to Farel in Strasbourg, written in 1526 after his return

to France, Roussel conveys Marguerite’s concern for the French Evangel-
icals abroad. He tells of presenting part of a work to her—presumably
a new translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into French
that Lefèvre and other exiles had undertaken—and records that she
accepted the offering cheerfully and conveyed her greetings to the group
in Strasbourg.18 When Lefèvre d’Étaples returned to France, Marguerite
procured for him the positions of tutor to the king’s children and royal
librarian. In the following years, he completed his translation of the Bible.
When, in 1531, he asked to retire, Marguerite invited him to her court in
Nérac, where he spent the remaining years until his death in 1536.19
When her brother returned from Madrid, Marguerite, a widow and
childless after 15 years with her first husband, was once again the subject
of marriage negotiations. She married Henri d’Albret, ruler of the disputed
kingdom of Navarre, on 24 January 1527. She gave birth to their daughter
Jeanne on 16 November 1528. A son, Jean, was born in July 1530 but died
the following December. Louise de Savoie died on 22 September 1531.
Marguerite’s Miroir de l’âme pécheresse—the first work by any woman
in France to appear in print during her own lifetime—was published
anonymously by Simon Du Bois in Alençon in 1531. It was issued under
Marguerite’s name in 1533 by the Parisian printer Antoine Augereau.20
The young Elizabeth Tudor, future Queen Elizabeth I of England, later
translated the Miroir into English, working from a copy obtained from
France by her mother Anne Boleyn.21 By 1533, Marguerite’s support for the
evangelical reformers was well known and had earned her the animosity
of conservatives. In a letter to a friend, the young Jean Calvin described a
play produced in October 1533 by students at the Collège de Navarre. One
of them portrayed
a Queen, who, in womanly fashion, was taken up with spinning, and wholly
occupied with the rock [distaff] and the needle; then the fury Maegera
appeared, bringing lighted torches near to her that she might throw away the
rock and the needle. For a little while she opposed and struggled; but when
18 Aimé-Louis Herminjard, ed., Correspondance des réformateurs dans les pays de langue
française, 9 vols. (Geneva, 1866–97), 1:439, no 178; 1:449, no 182; 1:457–61, no 184.
19 Reid, King’s Sister, 2:384.
20 Pierre Jourda, “Tableau chronologique des publications de Marguerite de Navarre,”
Revue du Seizième Siècle 12 (1925), 209–55 (pp. 211–18); Higman, Piety, M34–M38, pp. 309–11.
See also the essay by Isabelle Garnier and Isabelle Pantin in this volume.
21 Marc Shell, ed., Elizabeth’s Glass: with “The Glass of the Sinful Soul” (1544) by Elizabeth I,
and “Epistle Dedicatory” & “Conclusion” (1548) by John Bale (Lincoln, Nebr., 1993).
she had yielded, she received the Gospel into her hand, and straightway
forgets all she had formerly grown into the habit of, and almost even herself.
Last of all she becomes tyrannical, persecutes the innocent and unfortunate
by every method of cruelty. Many other devices were introduced in the same
style, most unworthily indeed against that excellent woman, whom, neither
indirectly nor obscurely, they tauntingly revile with their reproaches.
Everyone recognized Marguerite as the queen and saw behind “the fury
Maegera” Gérard Roussel, who had indeed raised a fury with the Lenten
sermons he preached that spring at the Louvre at Marguerite’s invitation.
Calvin continues:
Certain factious theologues have perpetrated another exploit, equally malig-
nant, and perhaps almost as audacious. When they searched the shops of
the booksellers, among the books which they brought away, they seized the
book which is called Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, the reading of which they
wished to prohibit. When the Queen was informed of it, she called on the
King her brother, and told him she had written the book.
Calvin goes on to describe François’s intervention and Nicolas Cop’s chas-
tisement of the Faculty of Theology:
he inveighed in a long and bitter oration against the doctors, because of their
rash and arrogant behaviour towards her majesty the Queen. He advised
them not to interfere in any way in a matter of so much danger, if they did
not wish to incur the displeasure of the King, nor to array themselves against
the Queen, that mother of all the virtues and of all good learning.22
Calvin offers one contemporary’s account of events in 1533 and Margue-
rite’s role in them. Within weeks of writing that letter, Calvin fled from
Paris, as did Nicolas Cop, following Cop’s evangelical inaugural address as
rector of the University on 1 November 1533.
October 1534 marks a turning point in the history of religious reform
in France. Before that date, François I had been fairly tolerant toward the
evangelical reformers and there were signs that certain measures might be
implemented without schism. However, François did not tolerate activity
that threatened public order in his kingdom. Rising tensions exploded on
18 October when placards attacking the Catholic Mass appeared widely
22 Letters of John Calvin, ed. Jules Bonnet, trans. David Constable, 4 vols. (New York,
1858; New York, 1972), 1:36–38, no 9. Cf. Herminjard, Correspondance, 3:106–11, no 438; Jean
Calvin, Epistolae, ed. Cornelis Augustijn and Frans Pieter van Stam, Ioannis Calvini Opera
Omnia, series VI, vol. 1 (Geneva, 2005), pp. 75–80.
introduction 9
in Paris and several provincial cities.23 Reports claimed that one of them
had even been affixed to the door of François’s private chambers. Official
reaction was swift. Harsh persecution pursued those deemed to be her-
etics as it never had before. By the end of November, several dissenters
and suspected heretics had been executed, including Antoine Augereau,
Marguerite’s printer. Shaken by the affront to his authority and the threat
of worse to come, François withdrew his support from the reformers.
Among those who fled France in the aftermath of the affaire des placards
were Calvin and Clément Marot. Marguerite gave refuge to both men at
her castle in Nérac before they proceeded to Italy. From exile in Venice in
1536, Marot appealed to her:
Par devers qui prendront mes vers leur course,
Synon vers toy, d’éloquence la source,
Qui les entens sans les falloir gloser,
Et qui en sçais de meilleurs composer?
À qui diray ma doulleur ordinaire,
Synon à toy, Princesse debonaire,
Qui m’a nourry, & souvent secouru,
Avant qu’avoir devers toy recouru?
À qui diray le regret qui entame
Mon cueur de fraiz, synon à toy, ma Dame,
Que j’ay trouvée en ma premiere oppresse
(Par dit & fait) plus mere que maistresse?24
The following years were marked by increasing repression. William
Monter has detailed the escalation in executions from the late-1530s through
the mid-1540s. 130 people were executed for heresy by French Parlements
between 1534 and 1545 inclusive, 40 in 1544–45 alone.25 These years also
23 On the affaire des placards, see Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, pp. 313–21; Gérard
Defaux, “1534, 17–18 October: The Posting of Violent Anti-Catholic Placards in France’s
Main Cities and on the Very Door of Francis I’s Room Launches a Period of Systematic
Repression,” in Denis Hollier, ed., A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Mass.,
1989), pp. 162–67; and Gabrielle Berthoud, Antoine Marcourt: réformateur et pamphlétaire,
du “Livre des marchans” aux placards de 1534 (Geneva, 1973). Francis Higman gives the
text of the placards in La Diffusion de la Réforme en France, 1520–1565 (Geneva, 1992), pp.
72–75.
24 Marot, Œuvres poétiques, 2:118–19. See also the late epistle “À ung sien amy,” 2:703–
05, vv. 71–76.
25 William Monter, Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century
Parlements (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), ch. 4, pp. 85–115, and Appendix, pp. 255–57. On that
ten-year period, see also Francis Higman, “De l’Affaire des Placards aux Nicodémites: le
mouvement évangélique français sous François Ier,” in Lire et Découvrir: La circulation des
idées au temps de la Réforme (Geneva, 1998), pp. 619–25.
saw the deaths of two writers in Marguerite’s circle who had been strong
voices for evangelical reform: Marot in Turin in 1544; Bonaventure des
Périers, apparently by suicide, in the same year. In April 1545, François
gave in to pressure and authorized the massacre of the Waldensians in the
Provençal villages of Cabrières and Mérindol; some 3000 people deemed
heretics were killed by the forces of the baron d’Oppède. That event is
accorded relatively little attention today, compared with the later Saint
Bartholomew’s Day massacre, but it moved the official suppression of
reform movements to a new level of violence. In a letter to Farel on 4
May Calvin describes his reaction to
the melancholy intelligence, that several villages have been consumed by
fire, that most of the old men had been burned to death, that some had been
put to the sword, others having been carried off to abide their doom; and
that such was the savage cruelty of these persecutors, that neither young
girls, nor pregnant women, nor infants, were spared. So great is the atrocious
cruelty of this proceeding, that I grow bewildered when I reflect upon it.26
Farel’s response to Calvin tells of the arrival of the news at the French
court, the whole grisly story reported triumphantly by the son-in-law of
baron d’Oppède. Upon hearing the details, Farel writes, François broke
into laughter and responded: “C’est une belle défaite!” His sister’s reaction,
however, is portrayed as being quite different:
Finally he went to the queen of Navarre. They say she wept many tears over
the terrible fate of those pious people, that she responded harshly to the
messenger and threatened his father-in-law, the baron d’Oppède, saying:
“Your father-in-law is responsible for all of this, but I will do everything in
my power to see that he suffers the greatest of misfortunes.” She let the mes-
senger kneel for over an hour, nor did she order him to rise.27
Intrigues and conflicts at court also weighed on Marguerite during this
period. Henri d’Albret’s efforts to regain the territories of Navarre lost
to Spain met with disappointment when they conflicted with François’s
own vacillating political objectives. The marriage in June 1541 of Jeanne
d’Albret, then 12 years old, to the German duke of Cleves promised to
26 Letters of John Calvin, 1:458; Jean Calvin, Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia,
ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss, 59 vols. (Braunschweig, 1863–1900), 12:75–76, no 639.
See Gabriel Audisio, Les Vaudois du Luberon: une minorité en Provence, 1460–1560 (Aix-en-
Provence, 1984) and D. Boccassini, “Il massacro del Valdesi di Provenza: per una rilettura,”
Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 154 (1984), 61–73. On the political background to the
massacre, see Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, pp. 508–16.
27 Calvin, Opera omnia, ed. Baum et al., 12:79–81, no 643, trans. Mary McKinley.
introduction 11
build François’s alliance with the German Protestant princes and advance
the cause of evangelical reform. It was strongly opposed by Henri d’Albret,
however, who hoped that his daughter would marry Charles V’s son,
thereby increasing the possibility of Henri’s regaining Spanish Navarre.
Marguerite’s desire to support reform was complicated by her young
daughter’s vigorous objections to the marriage. Jeanne’s departure to join
her husband was delayed because of her tender age. François failed to
support the duke of Cleves in a crucial battle against Charles V’s forces
and the marriage was eventually annulled.28
During these years Marguerite also came under attack from reformers
who had broken with the Church of Rome and established the Reformed
Church in Geneva. They criticized her for what they saw as her lukewarm
support of their cause and her accommodations toward the pope. As early
as 1539, Marie Dentière, a former Augustinian nun who had joined Farel
and participated in the Protestant takeover of Geneva, published a letter
addressed to Marguerite.29 She began by entreating the queen to inter-
vene more forcefully to protect those still in France who were sympa-
thetic to the Reformed religion. As the letter continues, its tone grows
increasingly critical and it indirectly attacks Marguerite and François for
accommodating Rome while recognizing the need for reform. Dentière’s
anger may have been provoked in part by François’s meetings with Pope
Paul III and Charles V in Provence the previous summer. Marguerite had
accompanied her brother on that journey and participated in the usual
ceremonial festivities marking such encounters.30 The caustic reference of
Dentière’s Epistle to the custom of kissing the pope’s slipper as a sign of
reverence no doubt alludes to those meetings as it excoriates those who
believe in reform but dissimulate their convictions by remaining in the
Catholic Church.31 The Epistle thus becomes an oblique indictment of the
woman it addresses and initially praises.
28 Reid, King’s Sister, 2:502–04; Jourda, Marguerite, 1:251–74. While Marguerite has been
accused of callous indifference to her daughter’s well-being in this affair, Patricia and Rou-
ben Cholakian offer a more sympathetic analysis of her strategies; see Mother of the Renais-
sance, pp. 212–25.
29 Marie Dentière, Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and Preface to a Sermon by John
Calvin, ed. and trans. Mary B. McKinley (Chicago, 2004).
30 Jourda, Marguerite, 1:231–34; Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, pp. 385–86; Laurent
Ripart, “Marguerite à Nice ( juin 1538),” in Études sur “L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de
Navarre, ed. Christine Martineau-Génieys (Nice, 1996), pp. 123–39.
31 Dentière, Epistle, p. 78.
In 1542, Clément Marot wrote a long, acerbic Coq à l’âne à Lyon that
advocated the very behavior that Dentière decried. Through the poem’s
enigmatic references, Marot urges evangelical believers to practice self-
protection by hiding their dissenting views: “Ne parlez point de l’Evangile, /
Si vous n’avez la langue agile / Pour Sorbonner, la bonne myne.”32 Marot
evokes harassments and persecutions that menace those suspected of her-
esy and advises his readers to dissimulate when necessary. Later in the
same poem he refers allusively to Marguerite:
Que fera l’âme pecheresse?
Je croy qu’el[le] est en grand distresse
Que son miroir est deffendu.
L’anthecrist n’est plus attendu:
Nous l’avons, gardons qu’il eschappe.
Baisez la pantouffle du pape
En disant votre patenostre. (vv. 91–97)
Marot refers to the attack on Marguerite’s poem and advises the same
strategy of compromise that Dentière had scorned. Marot did not publish
this coq-à-l’âne, nor could he depend on following his own advice for long.
He left France for his second and final exile soon after writing the poem.
Dentière’s Epistle echoes Calvin’s early attacks from Geneva on people
who practiced dissimulation of their dissenting religious views, people
whom he would later call “Nicodemites.” Already in 1537, he had written to
Roussel, castigating him for hypocritically remaining among the “papists”
in order to avoid persecution and to receive the benefice of the bishop-
ric he obtained through Marguerite’s influence.33 Calvin was to develop
his criticism in his 1544 treatise, Excuse de Jehan Calvin, à Messieurs
les Nicodémites, sur la complaincte qu’ilz font de sa trop grand’ rigueur,
turning the example of Nicodemus back on those who had claimed it as
their defense.34 In April 1545, Calvin wrote a letter to Marguerite justify-
ing his treatise Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins, qui se
32 Marot, Œuvres poétiques, 2:165–71, vv. 45–47. Cf. Reid, King’s Sister, 2:561–63.
33 Calvin, Epistolae duae, Opera omnia, ed. Baum et al., 5:233–312. Appointed bishop of
Oloron in 1536, Roussel assumed his office in 1539.
34 Jean Calvin, Excuse de Jehan Calvin à Messieurs les Nicodémites, in Three French Trea-
tises, ed. Francis Higman (London, 1970), Introduction, pp. 21–26, and pp. 131–53. For an
English translation of the principal documents in the Nicodemites polemic, see Come Out
From Among Them: “Anti-Nicodemite” Writings of John Calvin, trans. Seth Skolnitsky (Dal-
las, 2001). Cf. Reid, King’s Sister, 2:550–63, and Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The
Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), pp. 234–75.
introduction 13
nomment spirituelz, a work he understood had offended her because she

had invited Thierry Quintin and Antoine Pocque, two prominent mem-
bers of that group, to preach at Nérac in 1543. Most of what is known
today about the Spiritual Libertines—the name Calvin gave them—comes
from his and Théodore de Bèze’s polemical attacks against them. They
appear to have constituted a loose association of radical reformers who
preached a mystical devotion to the Holy Spirit that made them incapable
of sin. Their movement began in Flanders and has been associated with
the 14th-century heresy of the Free Spirit. Quintin had begun preaching in
Tournai in 1534, and Pocque joined him in France after spending time
in Strasbourg and in Geneva, where, in 1542, he had run afoul of Calvin.
In his letter, Calvin stops short of explicitly placing Marguerite among
the Nicodemites.35 In his 1544 Excuse, however, he had taken a disguised
swipe at her in the second of the four sections, where he designates dif-
ferent kinds of Nicodemites: “Je mettray en un mesme ranc les mignons
de court, et les Dames qui n’ont jamais apprins que d’estre mignardées, et
pourtant ne savent que c’est d’ouyr qu’on parle un peu rudement à leur
bonne grace.”36 “Mignonne” was, as many people knew, one of François I’s
names of endearment for Marguerite.
From another quarter came a different sort of appeal. In 1545, François
Rabelais dedicated his Tiers Livre to “the spirit of the queen of Navarre”:
Esprit abstraict, ravy, et ecstatic,
Qui frequentant les cieulx, ton origine,
As delaissé ton hoste et domestic,
Ton corps concords, qui tant se morigine
À tes edictz, en vie peregrine
Sans sentement, et comme en Apathie:
Vouldrois tu poinct faire quelque sortie
De ton manoir divin, perpetuel?
Et ça bas veoir une tierce partie
Des faictz joyeux du bon Pantagruel?
François Rabelais à l’esprit de la royne de Navarre.37
35 Calvin, Opera omnia, ed. Baum et al., 12:64–68, no 634; Letters of John Calvin, 1:453–
58, no 130. On the Spiritual Libertines and Marguerite, see Carol Thysell, The Pleasure of
Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian (Oxford, 2000), pp. 19–38, and V. L.
Saulnier, ed., Marguerite de Navarre, Théâtre profane (Geneva, 1963), pp. 241–73.
36 Calvin, Excuse, p. 138.
37 François Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris, 1994), p. 341.
Although the Tiers Livre was published in 1546, the privilège is dated 6 August 1545.
We have no record of Rabelais’s having met Marguerite.38 Like her, he had

published in the early 1530s; also like her, he published no major work
in the ten years following the affaire des placards.39 The first six lines of
his dizain portray Marguerite as a mystic, a spirit “ravished” out of her
body in ecstasy. The idea of the queen’s abandoning her body (vv. 3–6)
refers primarily, of course, to her physical body, but might also suggest the
Church as Christ’s mystical body on earth, the corpus mysticum, an anal-
ogy developed frequently in Paul’s Epistles.40 The reform of the Church as
envisioned by Evangelicals had encountered persecution, and Rabelais’s
words may articulate the view that Marguerite had withdrawn into a state
of spiritual indifference toward things of the world, including the suffer-
ing body of the evangelical movement. Seen in this light, Rabelais’s lines
7–10 would express his plea that she come back down to earth and engage
again in efforts to defend that cause. Unlike Calvin’s serious tone, how-
ever, Rabelais’s is playful; he concludes by inviting the queen to read the
Tiers Livre with its “jovial deeds of good Pantagruel.”
If during these later years, Marguerite may have appeared to some to
be withdrawn and uninvolved, she continued to write prolifically. From
March 1544 to February 1546, she was at the French court. It was during
that sojourn that she read, perhaps in manuscript, a work she had commis-
sioned and which was dedicated to her: Antoine Le Maçon’s translation
of Boccaccio’s Decameron, which appeared in 1545 with a privilège dated
November 1544.41 Le Maçon’s translation apparently found an enthusi-
astic audience in the royal family, some of whom—including the future
King Henri II, his wife Catherine de Médicis, and “Madame Marguerite”—
decided to compose a French collection of cent nouvelles, in imitation of
but departing from the Boccaccian model. When they became distracted
from that project, Marguerite de Navarre made it her own, which would
38 “Connaissait-elle Rabelais?” Jourda asks and responds, “La chose est probable” (Mar-
guerite, 1:303). Jean Céard argues that the dedication, “qui n’a pas pu être écrite et publiée
sans son consentement, prouve que la reine soutient ouvertement Rabelais,” Le Tiers Livre,
ed. Jean Céard (Paris, 1995), p. 4.
39 Pantagruel in 1532 and Gargantua in 1535; Gargantua was completed in 1534. See
Huchon, ed. cit., pp. 1054–56.
40 1 Cor. 12:12–14; Rom. 12:4–8; Ephes. 4:11–16; Col. 1:18. See Mary B. McKinley, “Rabelais,
Marguerite de Navarre, et la dédicace du Tiers Livre: voyages mystiques et missions ter-
restres,” Romanic Review 94.1–2 (2003), 171–83.
41 Jean Balsamo, “Le Décaméron à la cour de François Ier,” Revue de littérature française
et comparée 7 (1996), 231–39.
introduction 15
lead to the book we now know as the Heptaméron.42 Prose fiction was a
new venture compared with the poetry she had composed up to this point
and that she continued to write, along with her stories, until she died.
In February 1546, Marguerite and Henri d’Albret left François’s court
and returned to their lands in Navarre. Perhaps Calvin’s letter and Rabe-
lais’s appeal were a factor in the queen’s decision to publish the first major
collection of her poetry, an enterprise that must have occupied her during
the ensuing months. The first edition of the Marguerites de la Marguerite
des princesses, an elegant octavo volume, was printed by Jean de Tournes
in Lyon, with a privilège dated 29 March 1547.43 The volume included the
Miroir de l’âme pécheresse; Discord estant en l’homme par la contrariete de
l’esperit et de la chair; Oraison de l’âme fidele à son Seigneur Dieu; Oraison
à Nostre Seigneur Jésus Christ; a cycle of four nativity plays; Le Triomphe de
l’Agneau; Complainte pour un detenu prisonnier; 32 Chansons spirituelles;
a series of verse epistles; Les quatre dames, et les quatre gentilzhommes;
two non-biblical plays on spiritual themes; La Coche, embellished with
woodcuts by Bernard Solomon; and several shorter works. A verse epistle
by Jean de La Haye and a sonnet signed with the initials of Maurice Scève
introduced Marguerite’s work.
The privilège for the Marguerites was accorded at Bordeaux just two
days before François I died at Rambouillet on 31 March 1547. Aware of his
declining health, Marguerite was apparently trying to reach her brother
when she received the news of his death at the priory of Tusson, where
she had stopped en route.44 Her own health fragile, she remained in seclu-
sion with the community of nuns for several months and found expres-
sion for her grief in writing “ce cycle du grand deuil, entamé à Tusson”:45
La Navire, a dialogue with the soul of François in which her dead brother
consoles her, a number of the Chansons spirituelles, the Comédie sur le
trespas du Roy, at least one part of Les Prisons, and various epistles. She
42 The Heptaméron’s prologue thus alludes to the book’s genesis. For a more detailed
discussion, see our essay in this volume. Scholars have disagreed about the identity of
“Madame Marguerite,” some seeing a reference to Marguerite de France, François’s daugh-
ter, others a reference to the author herself.
43 Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, tresillustre Royne de Navarre (Lyon: Jean
de Tournes, 1547). Cf. Jourda, “Tableau chronologique,” pp. 224–31, and Higman, Piety, M32,
p. 309. See The Renaissance in Print, <http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/digitalcuration/port
folio/gordon/literary/marguerite/marguerites.html>. Modern edition by Félix Frank, 4 vols.
(Paris, 1873; Geneva, 1970). The printed privilège date of 29 March 1546, “avant Pasques,”
reflects the old calendar when the year began at Easter.
44 Jourda, Marguerite, 1:311–17; Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, pp. 541–49.
45 The expression is Saulnier’s, ed. Théâtre profane, p. 207.
left Tusson for Béarn in the summer, stopping at Mont-de-Marsan, Nérac,

and Pau, before settling for a time in Mont-de-Marsan in January 1548.
Here she composed for Mardi Gras the Comédie jouée au Mont de Marsan,
that V. L. Saulnier sees as her response to Calvin’s attack on the Spiritual
Libertines.46
In the summer of 1548, she traveled with her daughter from Navarre
to Lyon to join the court of her nephew, the new king, Henri II, and
to accompany him and his queen, Catherine de Médicis, on their royal
entries into that city on 23 and 24 September. The royal couple had little
sympathy for religious reform, and Marguerite’s relations with them were
strained at best. On 20 October, on orders from Henri II, Jeanne d’Albret
married Antoine de Bourbon. It was a disappointing union from the point
of view of Marguerite, who had hoped to see her daughter marry a son of
the Spanish royal family, thereby strengthening the Albrets’ connection
to the lost territories of Navarre. Jeanne’s son from that marriage, Henri
de Navarre, who, like his mother would embrace the Reformed Church,
inherited the French throne in 1589, though was only crowned as Henri IV
after his second abjuration and reconversion to Catholicism in 1594.47
Marguerite returned to Pau in December 1548 and spent some time there
and at Cauterets in the spring with Jeanne. In September, she took up
residence in her castle at Odos. Jeanne had returned to her husband and
Henri d’Albret departed for Paris, leaving Marguerite in relative solitude.
Her health had been poor and in December an infection, perhaps pleurisy,
caused her final, rapid decline. She received the sacrament of extreme
unction from a Franciscan friar and died on 21 December 1549.
In those last years, marked by disappointment and grief, Marguerite was
amazingly productive, and she left a large and diverse corpus unpublished
when she died.48 In addition to the works mourning François’s death, she
completed Les Prisons49 and a revised though not final text of the Miroir
de Jésus-Christ crucifié, a long meditation by a woman contemplating the
46 Théâtre profane, pp. 246–66.

47 Jeanne d’Albret declared her conversion to Calvinism two months after her father’s
death in 1555. See Nancy Roelker, Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d’Albret (Cambridge, Mass.,
1968), pp. 120–54, and p. 127 for Jeanne’s letter to the Vicomte de Gourdon (22 August 1555),
in which she states that she can no longer follow “in the footsteps of the deceased Queen,
my most honored mother—whom God forgive—in the matter of hesitation between the
two religions.”
48 In his edition of her uncollected works, Richard Cooper shows the variety of her writ-
ing in the last period of her life, Œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole Cazauran, vol. 8, Chrétiens et
mondains, poèmes épars (Paris, 2007), pp. 84–97.
49 Les Prisons, ed. Simone Glasson (Geneva, 1978).
introduction 17
crucified Christ, mirroring herself in his image and finally losing herself
in mystical unio.50 Several verse epistles express her affection for her
daughter and her sadness during the separations that followed Jeanne’s
marriage.51 Another to Henri II shows her efforts to ease the tensions in
her relationship with the king.52 She also produced the major part of her
collection of cent nouvelles during those years. At her death, however, that
work remained incomplete.
* * *
The essays collected in the present volume offer a series of analyses of
Marguerite’s life and literary works. The literary discussions are organized
with an eye to chronology, though not in straightforward chronological
order. Since an exhaustive consideration of the queen’s extensive corpus
would have been impossible, we have privileged the representation of
her major works as well as the wide range of her production in different
genres. Thus chapters focus on a particular work—for example, the long
allegorical poem Les Prisons—or genre within which Marguerite wrote:
theater, chansons spirituelles, the short-story collection. Within the latter
group of essays, we also sought, in two cases, to stimulate fruitful cross-
temporal reflections by pairing a work from the very beginning of Margue-
rite’s career with one from the end of her life. An obvious juxtaposition to
make was that of the two long poetic dialogues of mourning, the Dialogue
en forme de vision nocturne and La Navire, written, respectively, after the
deaths of her niece (1524) and her brother (1547). If the Dialogue was the
first major poem Marguerite composed, the earliest diffused in print was
the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse in 1531. In the months preceding Marguerite’s
death in 1549, she worked on Le Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié, a very dif-
ferent kind of poem, but one set also in specular mode, that would be her
very last poetic composition.
The analyses of particular works or groups of works are preceded by a
discussion of the influence on Marguerite of the ideas of 15th- and 16th-
century neo-Platonism, with reference to the whole of her corpus, poetry
and prose. The two opening essays propose, on the basis of diverse evi-
dence, two historical examinations of the queen’s life that lead to con-
trasting insights and conclusions.
50 Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié, ed. Lucia Fontanella (Alessandria, 1984).

51 Chrétiens et mondains, poèmes épars, Épître 18, pp. 201–02; Épîtres 20–23, pp. 206–22.
52 Chrétiens et mondains, poèmes épars, Épître 16, pp. 191–97.
For Jonathan A. Reid, Marguerite was a key player in—even the leader
at the center of—a network of reform-minded individuals, committed to
promoting a number of fundamental tenets such as the biblical founda-
tion of all religious doctrine, the fallen nature of humanity and its utter
dependence on God’s mercy, and salvation through grace by faith to the
complete exclusion of works. Marguerite is presented as orchestrating a
concerted campaign for a profound reform of the Church, the advance-
ment of which led her to pursue the political strategy of encouraging her
brother to form an alliance with the schismatic Henry VIII of England and
the German Protestant princes. Reid considers the French Evangelicals as
unable, given the current persecution of heretics, to express publicly the
full force of their convictions and as dissembling when necessary their
beliefs. According to this view, they acted in fact as they were accused
of doing by Calvin, who called them Nicodemites and taxed them with
cowardice. The French Evangelicals, for Reid, were thus far from being
Catholics favorable to a limited number of non-schismatic reforms; they
were rather in fundamental agreement with schismatic, Protestant Evan-
gelicals in Germany and Switzerland. If Marguerite and various close asso-
ciates remained officially within the institution of the Catholic Church,
this is only because to break openly with Rome in France was not possible
before the 1560s, short of accepting exile or death.
Jean-Marie Le Gall, on the other hand, following a review of the histo-
riography from Théodore de Bèze in the 16th century to the most promi-
nent scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries, formulates the question of
Marguerite’s adherence to Catholicism in positive rather than negative
terms. Le Gall details the ample evidence of Marguerite’s attachment to
certain traditional Catholic practices of piety (for example, the cult of the
Virgin Mary) and institutions (such as religious orders) and takes these as
indicative of a real and positive desire. Le Gall stresses the familial and
patrimonial aspects of Marguerite’s activities in favor of monastic reform
within her personal territories. He also accords fundamental importance
to her royal rank, her position in a social and religious hierarchy, a politi-
cal and ecclesiastical order, that, for Marguerite, was an expression of the
divine will. In this providential order, she and her kingly and princely
relatives were called to play their proper role along with prelates and the
pope. Finally, Le Gall suggests a number of possible personal reasons for
Marguerite’s attachment to monastic life, especially that of women.
While the differences between the conclusions of Reid and Le Gall are
obvious, it is important to recognize a number of positions they share,
notably that of Marguerite’s particular status as a royal personage, imbued,
introduction 19
despite any personal pursuit of spiritual humility, with the privileges and
attitudes of aristocratic rank, one for whom Church and religion were
deeply intertwined with national and international politics, with family,
and with dynasty. Both historians also remind us that Marguerite’s literary
works may not tell the whole story regarding her personal religious beliefs,
Reid arguing for the necessity of authorial self-censorship even in compo-
sitions not intended primarily for public diffusion, Le Gall warning of the
dangers of the imposition of potentially anachronistic criteria by modern
commentators. These two essays also direct our attention to writings by
men close to the queen, men she protected and advanced, and to evidence
from diplomatic correspondence: in the case of Reid, to two unpublished
catechetical and expository texts (the anonymous L’Initiatoire instruction
and Gérard Roussel’s Familiere exposition) and to exchanges with the Eng-
lish ambassador; in the case of Le Gall, to a treatise on monastic life by
Antonio Caracciolo (Le Mirouer de vraye religion) and to relations with
the papal nuncios. At the same time, Le Gall signals the interested nature
of diplomatic exchanges that, far from representing objective accounts of
unfolding events, inevitably reflect mediated desires, hopes, and policies
and translate complex and shifting political negotiations, not always free
of one degree or another of dissimulation.
From the collected essays, a number of common threads emerge that
are worthy of note. Several contributors, for example, point out Margue-
rite’s apparent fidelity, throughout her life, to the ideas and ideals explored
in the early 1520s under the spiritual guidance of Guillaume Briçonnet,
bishop of Meaux. Key themes and concepts discussed in their correspon-
dence continue to find significant echoes in the queen’s later writings.
As we will see further below, some of these ideas were also adopted
by Gérard Roussel, a member of the Meaux group to whom Marguerite
remained close until her death, and whom she had named to the bishop-
ric of Oloron in her own territory of Navarre.
Collectively, the essays also highlight the centrality in Marguerite’s
works of a concern with death. This was fed in her own life by the loss
of people close to her. We have mentioned already her young niece and
her brother, whom she grieves in the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne
and La Navire. François’s death also gave rise to the play, Comédie sur
le trespas du roy, and a number of chansons spirituelles. Additionally, in
Les Prisons, Marguerite portrays the exemplary deaths of her mother,
Louise de Savoie, along with that of François, and, in a complementary
pairing, the deaths of her first husband, Charles d’Alençon, and his mother,
Marguerite de Lorraine. Beyond these immediate personal circumstances,
however, death functions as a fundamental metaphor within the Christian

tradition, especially the mystical tradition, expressing the desired moment
of the loss of self in order to live in union with God. Death which closes
every life, the Christian also believes, is the moment of birth into eternal
life. These thematics inform not only Marguerite’s poems of mourning,
they are omnipresent in her œuvre. Inseparable from the issue of death,
then, and no less central to the queen’s works, is a concern with life as
the Christian pilgrimage of faith, the journey of the individual soul toward
God. As the essays gathered here suggest, using slightly different terminol-
ogy, this implies spiritual “movement”: conversion, transformation, tran-
scendence, ascent.
For Philip Ford, the inspiration Marguerite draws from Platonic and
neo-Platonic sources operates primarily through the borrowing of gen-
eral images and themes, revealing the extent to which “[s]piritual ascent
appears to be at the heart of her thinking.” Thus, the body is a prison
from which the soul must escape; the moment of release in death is also
that in which the soul gains knowledge and returns to its divine origin.
Marguerite’s two mirror poems, the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse and the
Miroir de Jésus Christ crucifié, as Isabelle Garnier and Isabelle Pantin show,
are involved in “the promotion of a new understanding of death,” one
celebrating “the death of death” or “la mort vivifiante”—death bringing
life, transformation, and deification. Situated in the tradition of the ars
moriendi, the Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié, is also more immediately a
preparation for death—first and foremost that of the author herself, which
overtook her before the completion of the poem. The Dialogue en forme
de vision nocturne and La Navire, as examined by Reinier Leushuis, reveal
themselves to be vast meditations on the role of human agency and will
in the processes of mourning, remembrance, and spiritual transcendence.
In the face of mortality, these poems ask “what humans can do.” For Cyn-
thia Skenazi, it is conversion that is fundamental to the poetics of Les
Prisons, evidenced through the narrator, who recounts retrospectively his
escape from a series of forms of spiritual imprisonment. Ultimately, how-
ever, it is the reader who is the focus of a poem that “provokes our personal
meditation on key notions—freedom, love, faith, hope, grace—and asks
us to translate our moral values and religious principles into life choices.”
As with Marguerite’s other poems of mourning, it is not only the case, for
Jan Miernowski, that a number of the chansons spirituelles concern the
death of François I; rather, all the songs celebrate the profound “harmony
of death and love,” the “delightful transformation” embraced by the soul
that accepts annihilation of the carnal self in confident hope of union
introduction 21
with the divine. Songs of conversion, they themselves cannot convert the
reader, but they may “enchant.” Conversion, or lack of it, as Olivier Millet
points out, lies at the heart of much of Marguerite’s theater—both biblical
and non-biblical—that, also frequently using song, “foregrounds the way
the characters inwardly accept or reject the advent of salvation.” On the
one hand stand the positive examples of the Magi and shepherds who
adore the infant Christ and the sick man and the inquisitor in Le Mal-
lade and L’Inquisiteur, on the other, the negative examples of Herod or
Trop and Prou. Combining the two possibilities, Mont-de-Marsan stages
both “conversion and the impossibility of self-conversion.” In the short
story collection L’Heptaméron, finally, as our own essay shows, death is a
common element of the narratives, though not a banal one. In a tale of
suicide, it may serve to criticize the despair induced by a deathly theol-
ogy of works preached by a Franciscan; at other times, it represents the
ultimate moment of transcendence and union with God. Death also has
a structuring role in the collection, being associated with the flood, the
inaugural calamity gathering together the storytellers that both recalls
the Decameron’s Black Death and alludes to the motifs of baptism and
divine judgment. Like Marguerite’s theater, the Heptaméron depicts fallen
human beings responding to and moving toward or turning away from
God. Though incomplete, the challenge it describes for the storytellers
and for the intended reader is that of being counted among the former.
Equally significant is the fact that many of Marguerite’s works either
take the form of dialogues or are informed by dialogic principles.53 This
is most obviously true of the long poems Dialogue en forme de vision noc-
turne and La Navire (and it is central to the analysis of Leushuis). The
poetic dialogues allow for a pedagogical exchange, but one in which the
“disciple”/“Marguerite” is an active partner, not merely a passive recipi-
ent of wisdom, as she was also in the exchange of letters with Briçonnet.
Dialogism finds a natural expression in writing for the stage and is cen-
tral to Marguerite’s dramatic practice (as Millet notes); it also structures
the Heptaméron, where the discussions of the storytellers are of no less
53 A number of critics have noted the importance of dialogism for Marguerite. In the
words of Robert D. Cottrell, “a dialogic impulse animates all of Marguerite’s poetry,” The
Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry (Washington, D.C., 1986),
p. 131. See also, in particular, Colette Winn, “Toward a Dialectic of Reconciliation: The
Navire and the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre,” in The Dialogue in Early Modern
France, 1547–1630: Art and Argument, ed. Colette H. Winn (Washington, D.C., 1993), pp.
79–120. Winn points out that Marguerite’s Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne was one of
the first texts in France to designate itself a dialogue in its title.
importance than the tales they recount and none of the speakers has a
monopoly on truth. Some, like Oisille, are certainly characterized by a
greater degree of spirituality than others. The women, in general, are also
frequently more honest in their discussion of male-female relations, in
which men’s seduction is often synonymous with one degree or another
of deceit. This does not mean, however, that the women never dissemble
or that one of the most ribald men might not on occasion give voice to a
genuine religious or spiritual insight. Dialogue, for Marguerite, thus seems
to have represented a means of pursuing greater understanding, enlight-
enment, or spiritual progress, a means that is open, collaborative, respect-
ful, and profoundly human. Dialogue is also characteristic of prayer and,
as such, is present in almost all of her works, from the shortest of the
spiritual songs to the longest poetic meditations.
Marguerite was a duchess, a peer of France, a queen, a writer and
thinker profoundly engaged with and committed to religious and spiritual
life. She was not, however, a systematic theologian. Even had she aspired
to do so, it is doubtful that it would have been possible for a laywoman
to publish a theological treatise in 16th-century France. Nevertheless, like
many other French Evangelicals, Marguerite seems to have been genu-
inely more concerned with spiritual life and with the practical life of faith
than with the exposition of dogmatic thought. Her unwavering objective
seems to have been the pursuit and the promotion of fervent belief, true
prayer, and devout Christian living. This is not to say that Marguerite’s
literary and devotional works do not carry theological meaning.54 Many
scholars, including several contributors to this volume, have shown that
they do, relating leading ideas to those of contemporaries on both sides of
and in between the developing confessional divide. Yet what emerge most
clearly from Marguerite’s works are often not detailed dogmatic proposi-
tions but strong, broad ideas of immediate, practical relevance to Christian
life. Moreover, these are often expressed by means of biblical or more spe-
cifically Pauline phrases or expressions that were characteristic of those
in France advocating a moderate religious position. In his unpublished
Familiere exposition, Gérard Roussel argues in relation to the Eucharist for
the importance of simply accepting and not inquiring beyond the words
54 Considering Marguerite’s poetry as devotional writing—a genre understood as vari-

ously combining elements of the language and epistemological structures of both spiritual-
mystical and theological-dogmatic writing—is the fundamental approach adopted by Gary
Ferguson in Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (Edinburgh, 1992).
introduction 23
of Christ himself recorded in the gospels; to do otherwise, for Roussel,

leads inevitably to disagreement.55 Marguerite would likely have been in
sympathy with such sentiments, as well as preferring theological formu-
lations to be pragmatic, of practical use to the Christian in living the life
of faith. A notable example of such an approach to a major theological
question of contention is the presentation of the respective roles of faith
and works in the process of salvation.
Marguerite does not deny that the truly Christian life will be character-
ized by good works. In the 16th century, various linguistic formulae existed
to express the relation between faith and charity, such as foi formée de/
en charité, foi œuvrant/qui œuvre par charité, vraie et vive foi, and so on.56
As is the case with other Evangelicals, Marguerite’s term of predilection is
foi vive, an expression which may suggest faith accompanied by works of
charity as well as a lively confidence and trust in God and his promises.
Gary Ferguson has argued that in Marguerite’s later poetry the associa-
tion of the term vive foi with the performance of good works becomes less
evident.57 This does not necessarily mean, however, that she abandoned
this idea altogether. In two late works, Marguerite has recourse to the
formula foi qui œuvre par charité or foi œuvrant, that is, faith working
through charity. This linguistic tag, much favored by Evangelicals like
Lefèvre d’Étaples, had the dual advantage of being biblical, drawn from
Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians 5:6, and of not suggesting any primacy
of charity and its works over faith, positing rather charity as an expres-
sion or effect of faith. In the very last poem Marguerite composed, the
Miroir de Jésus Christ crucifié, the formula faith working through charity
is applied not to human actions but to those of Christ (figured by King
David);58 in a verse epistle addressed to her brother François I, however,
it is presented as the blessed fruit that will grow from peace between the
French king and the emperor Charles V, uniting Christians and converting
the pagans:
55 See Reid, King’s Sister, 2:527. Cf. Reid’s essay in this volume.
56 On this question and Marguerite’s position in relation to it, see Ferguson, Mirroring
Belief, pp. 147–78, and Isabelle Garnier-Mathez, L’Épithète et la connivence: Écriture concer-
tée chez les Évangéliques français (1523–1534) (Geneva, 2005), esp. pp. 157–97. See also the
essay by Garnier and Pantin in this volume.
57 See Mirroring Belief, pp. 168–77, a conclusion corroborated with regard to the chan-
sons spirituelles by Jan Miernowski and to La Navire by Reinier Leushuis in their essays in
this volume.
58 See Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, pp. 176–77, and the essay by Garnier and Pantin in
this volume.
C’est qu’unyssant la chrestienté toute

En seure paix, et que nulluy n’ayt doubte
D’avoir du mal, si ne l’a meritté,
Et que la foy ouvrant par charité
Regne si fort entre les Chrestiens,
Qu’à leur exemple accourent les payens
La recepvoir, chantantz par les provinces:
Voicy le fruict de la paix des deux princes.59
In adopting this particular term, then, Marguerite articulates a conviction
that works do not save, nor are they necessary to salvation, nor do they
give form or life to faith that without them would be formless or dead—
works that without faith would themselves be dead. It signals that true,
living faith of its nature overflows and is expressed in works of charity. A
similar position is delineated in the late works of Roussel, who instructs
his clergy to exhort the faithful to believe and to act (croire et faire).60
Drawing a metaphor from the human body, the bishop elaborates: “là où
la foy est vive, l’œuvre tantost la suyt et accompaigne non plus ne moings
que le respirer, sentir, mouvoir accompaignent l’homme vivant.”61
The significance for Marguerite of the concept of “the eye of faith,”
related to the metaphor of the eye as the lamp of the body found in
the Gospel of Saint Matthew 6:22–23, has been demonstrated by Jan
Miernowski.62 The “eye of faith” is the intention of the Christian, the heart
purified and focused on its ultimate goal of conformity to the divine will
and union with God. This idea had been discussed by Briçonnet in his
letters to Marguerite in the 1520s. We also find it in the 1540s in the writ-
ing of Roussel, who combines it with the notion of faith working through
charity. In discussing how God requires truth of the believer in words,
deeds, and doctrine, Roussel nonetheless adds that this should be directed
and regulated by “l’œil de foy ouvrante par charité, lequel est simple, ne
regardant pour vray but que la gloire de Dieu et le bien du prochain.”63
The striking combination of the two distinct formulae (œil de foy and
foy ouvrante) suggests not that the eye of faith is opened, as it were, by
59 Chrétiens et mondains, poèmes épars, p. 181; Épître 13, vv. 107–14, dated probably,
according to Cooper, January 1545.
60 See Reid, King’s Sister, 2:529.
61 Quoted in Reid, ibid., n. 75.
62 Jan Miernowski, “L’intentionnalité dans l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,”
Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 63 (2001), 201–25. See also Miernowski’s essay
in this volume.
63 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 419, Gérard Roussel, Familiere exposition,
fol. 78r. Cf. the essay by Reid in this volume.
introduction 25
charity; it designates the kind of faith that truly constitutes the eye through
which Christians must look in order to be fixed on their final goal. It is the
eye of faith-working-through-charity that will enable them always to speak
and to act to the glory of God and for the good of their fellows. This desire
to avoid suggesting that works might merit salvation and yet to maintain
the essential and necessary unity of faith and charity lies at the heart of
the practical theology of the French Evangelicals and of Marguerite.
There can be little doubt that Marguerite must have found the most
conservative and reactionary sections of the Catholic Church of her day
unedifying if not inimical, including the theologians of the Sorbonne who
persecuted those striving for an evangelical renewal of the Church, men
and women she protected and whose work she patronized, beginning
with Lefèvre d’Étaples and the other members of the Meaux group. None-
theless, like Lefèvre, Briçonnet, Roussel, and others—or like Erasmus—
Marguerite remained within the Catholic Church throughout her life,
maintaining good relationships with Rome and its representatives. She
also had direct or indirect contacts with schismatic reformers in Germany
and Switzerland as well as with French Evangelicals like Farel who took
the decision to join them. While she would later be in disagreement with
Calvin over the Spiritual Libertines, she had nonetheless protected the
future Reformer in his youth as he fled persecution in France. In between
the outer ends of the spectrum of religious beliefs and ideas in the early
16th century there were innumerable intermediate shades of opinion and
degrees of sympathy. One thing that emerges clearly from the essays of
Reid and Le Gall is that people of all stripes were eager to see and to pres-
ent Marguerite as sharing their own position. The essay of Garnier and
Pantin offers a vivid demonstration of how this dynamic of subtle appro-
priation was at work, immediately after the queen’s death, in the publica-
tion of her last poetic composition in two separate editions, one prepared
by a Dominican friar the other by a sympathizer with reform. As our own
essay notes, the stories of the Heptaméron were subjected to similar pro-
cesses of reworking and recontextualization for confessional ends.
The long-meditated project of holding an ecumenical council finally
began to be realized in Trent in 1545, four years before Marguerite’s
death; it would only come to conclusion almost twenty years later in 1563.
The Council launched the Counter- or Catholic Reformation, chang-
ing definitively the face of the Roman Church and setting it on a course
opposed in all points to ideas and practices of reform embraced by Prot-
estants and declared heretical. In the first half of the 16th century, when
confessional divisions were not yet firmly established, it was still possible
to be a Catholic and to share some of these ideas—to not consider

as anti-Catholic, for example, the translation of the Scriptures into the
vernacular (a position vindicated ultimately in the 20th century by the
Second Vatican Council). Marguerite was committed to religious renewal
and reform, reform founded not, however, on schism but on unity. She was
no less committed to the promotion of a personal piety grounded both in
individual study of the Bible and in the reception of the sacraments—
and not only the two sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist—mediated
through the Church’s sacerdotal ministry, a piety nourished also by the
mystical tradition, that might be sustained by contemplative retreat and
a sharing in the offering of the monastic liturgy of the hours. The sources
from which she drew inspiration were many and diverse, from neo-
Platonic writings, through the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite to the recent publications of Luther.
Marguerite’s position must no doubt be understood in part in light of
her privileged situation as a high-ranking noble, one who was a major
actor in both the political and religious spheres, a woman who governed
territories in various capacities in her own right, who was a close advisor
to rulers, who negotiated in delicate or fraught situations with foreign sov-
ereign powers and their envoys. Marguerite’s religious and ecclesiastical
vision was a profoundly royal and diplomatic one. With historical hind-
sight, it may seem to have been overly optimistic. It was nonetheless an
ideal that it was possible to pursue in France in the early decades, even
the first half, of the 16th century, in a particularly fluid concurrence of cir-
cumstances involving traditional and new forms of religious thought and
expression—overlapping and as yet not reified in terms of confession—
and dependent on a particular understanding of the status of the Gal-
lican Church and of the configuration and balance of temporal-political
and spiritual powers. And while circumstances would change consider-
ably during the reign of Marguerite’s nephew, Henri II, a similar—though
more forlorn—hope would briefly animate Henri’s widow and son in 1561.
With the Council of Trent as yet unconcluded and currently suspended
and with civil war about to break out in France, Catherine de Médicis
and Charles IX called together Catholic and Protestant theologians and
leading national figures in an attempt to find common ground at the Col-
loquy of Poissy.
If Marguerite de Navarre was not a systematic theologian, she was
undeniably a committed, creative, and supple religious thinker, who
lived and wrote at a particularly complex time in the history of Western
Christianity—a time full of challenge and danger but also of possibility
introduction 27
and potential, a good deal of which, however, would not be realized in the
way that she and many around her would likely have wished. Marguerite
championed a practical yet fervent religious message, destined to pro-
mote devout and faithful Christian living, involving action flowing from
Bible reading, prayer, and the reception of the sacraments, and stressing
a number of key ideas, such as the fallen nature of humanity and the
Christian’s utter dependence on God’s grace. Her vision was broad and
generous; characterized by conviction, it often found expression in the
decisive exercise of (personal) temporal authority, yet it also favored con-
ciliation: in drawing inspiration from numerous sources and traditions,
in maintaining dialogue with all sides, in seeking to go beyond partisan-
ship, in embracing practical worldly concerns and mystical élan. It is for
this reason that her life and work have given rise to such a diversity of
judgments and resist easy categorization or pigeon-holing. This volume
does not seek to pronounce the last word on Marguerite de Navarre as a
religious thinker. Its essays examine her life and review her major works
and their reception; they synthesize previous scholarship and extend our
understanding through new analyses. We hope they will provide the stim-
ulus and point the way for future studies of the complex and fascinating
Christian woman who is their subject.
Marguerite de Navarre and Evangelical Reform
Jonathan A. Reid
Car par eulx [François I and Charles V] [Dieu] veult

que la foy confirmée
Soit, et aussy l’eglise reformée,
Et d’une part oustées les heresies,
De l’aultre aussy les vaines fantaisies,
Et que la foy nous face en toutte guyse
En triumphant triumpher saincte Eglise.
(New Year’s Day Epistle, Marguerite to François I
[c. January 1545])1
I. Marguerite: Actor and Author in the Reformation
Throughout her career as a prominent member of court, Marguerite kept

urging major powers—her brother François I, his son Henri II, Henry
VIII of England, Pope Paul III, reforming bishops, and Protestant princes
and theologians—to effect “la reformation de l’Eglise,” to “reformer et
conserver la Christienté.”2 As an actor in the Reformation conflict, she
mounted a series of campaigns to advance religious renewal, the most
important of which concentrated on swaying her brother’s heart and
religious policy. As an author, one who wrote much but published little
until the end of her life, Marguerite expressed in her poems, plays, songs,
1 Marguerite de Navarre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole Cazauran, vol. 8, Chrétiens et

mondains, poèmes épars, ed. Richard Cooper (Paris, 2007) [hereafter OC 8], Épître 13, pp.
178–81, vv. 65–70.
2 As early as 1521, Marguerite believed her brother and mother were ready to promote “la
reformation de l’Eglise, où plus que jamais le Roy et Madame sont affectionnez, et le salut
de touttes pauvres ames,” Marguerite to Guillaume Briçonnet, [Compiègne, c.10 December
1521], in Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite d’Angoulême, Correspondance (1521–1524),
ed. Christine Martineau and Michel Veissière, with Henry Heller, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1975–79),
1:75–76, no 17 (Reid, “Additions,” no 38). She retained hope for a royal reformation even
after François I’s death (31 March 1547), writing to Pope Paul III: “je le [Dieu] suplye vous
[the pope and Henri II] lier sy bien ensamble et par vostre bon moyen l’empereur, ansy
[ainsi] que vous troys puisiés reformer et conserver la Christienté,” Charles Samaran and
Henry Patry, “Marguerite de Navarre et le pape Paul III: lettres inédites,” Bibliothèque de
l’École des Chartes 68 (1907), 320–38 (p. 336) ( Jourda, Répertoire, no 1037). For the conven-
tions used in citing Marguerite’s correspondence, see note 4.
30 jonathan a. reid
and prose Heptaméron the profound piety and zeal for instilling in others
“vivifying faith” (her term) which animated her persistent efforts to pro-
mote reform. Indeed, her literary imagination can be seen as an out-
growth of her self-appointed role as the evangelical cause’s chief advocate
at court. She peopled her verse and prose works with the figures of court-
iers: herself, her closest relations, and other favorites. In dialogue with one
another or a heavenly guide, these figures are converted from sinfulness
to thankful union with their Savior Christ.3 This common trajectory in her
major works reflects her desire to lead those nearest to her to a renewed
faith, and through their influence, others in the kingdom and countries
beyond.
The focus of this essay is twofold. First, it describes Marguerite’s sev-
eral campaigns—ones that largely failed—to promote, in concert with
a network of like-minded Evangelicals whom she championed, a hotly
contested reform agenda. Second, it relates how the literary works of the
queen and authors she championed contributed to this reformation proj-
ect. Evidence from those works will permit, in conclusion, a response to
the long-standing controversy, one inherited from the Reformation era
itself, about whether she and those around her were Catholic, Protestant,
or something other.4
This essay argues that Marguerite and her network shared with
“Protestants” belief in a number of core doctrines.5 Dissenting from the
3 Paula Sommers, Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiri-

tual Ascent (Geneva, 1989).
4 For a fuller presentation of the views developed below, see Jonathan A. Reid, King’s
Sister—Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) and Her Evangelical Network,
2 vols. (Leiden and Boston, 2009) [hereafter KS], in particular the “Introduction” (pp.
1–15) for a historiographical orientation and ch. 2, “Mapping the Navarrian Network” (pp.
35–84), for an overview of her reforming career and network as well as the source base.
That work disagrees with many interpretations of Marguerite’s major biographer, Pierre
Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, Duchesse d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre (1492–1549): Étude
biographique et littéraire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1930; Geneva, 1978). Parts of section II of this essay
follow Jonathan A. Reid, “Marguerite de Navarre, la sœur fidèle,” in Les Conseillers de Fran-
çois Ier, ed. Cédric Michon (Rennes, 2011), pp. 415–37.
Appendix A of KS contains additions and corrections to Jourda’s essential Répertoire
analytique et chronologique de la correspondance de Marguerite d’Angoulême, Duchesse
d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre, 1492–1549 (Paris, 1930). References to Marguerite’s correspon-
dence in this essay cite the published or manuscript source and the appropriate finding
aid ( Jourda, Répertoire) or (Reid, “Additions”).
5 “I have tried to use for Germany’s Protestants the name they used for themselves,
Evangelicals, and to reserve Protestant for the rulers and the urban regimes that adhered
to this cause, a practice that also follows their usage. All Protestants were Evangelicals,
but not all Evangelicals, were Protestants,” Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Protestant Politics:
Jacob Sturm (1489–1553) and the German Reformation (Boston, 1995), p. xv. For use of the
marguerite de navarre and evangelical reform 31
established Church, Evangelicals held that Scripture is the sole source of

doctrine and that God justifies sinners by grace through faith alone. These
core principals led them to condemn major portions of the traditional
Church’s economy of grace and attempt a thorough-going reform of its
doctrines, sacraments, and rites. Marguerite and her network have rightly
been called “evangelical” by modern historians, for they consistently said
that the goal of their reform agenda was to promote the gospel. In private,
they even adopted the label, but could not do so in public;6 their Catho-
lic adversaries blamed them for claiming such an “evangelical” identity,
denying it to be true.7 German Protestants, in turn, recognized Margue-
rite and her network as their “brethren.”8 Following the Protestants in the
Empire, French Evangelicals came to reject, at least in private, the claims
of the traditional Catholic Church, centered on Rome, to be the only true
Church and sole guarantor of doctrine, the sacraments, and salvation. Yet,
they also recognized that the established Church hierarchy was a formi-
dable worldly power and continued to interact with it as such. They never
publicly denounced, as did Protestants, Rome as the Antichrist or rejected
the existing Church as irredeemably corrupt; nor did Marguerite and her
network accept Church authorities’ condemnation of Evangelicals as her-
etics. Ultimately, they aimed to establish right religion by transcending
the confessional war waged by Protestants and Catholics, which was lead-
ing Western Europe towards permanent schism.
This assessment of Marguerite’s and her network’s beliefs, reform initia-
tives, and goals depends on a close analysis of the strife-ridden, high-stakes
term evangelical by 16th-century actors and modern scholars, see Marie-Madeleine Frago-
nard, “Nommer et définir les groupes hérétiques,” in Les Frontières religieuses en Europe
du XVe au XVIIe siècle: Actes du XXXIe colloque international d’études humanistes, ed. Robert
Sauzet (Paris, 1992), pp. 37–49.
6 Very early on it became dangerous to champion the gospel (claim to be evangeli-
cal). In 1524, Pierre de Sébiville lamented that “Sathan a estainct le fruit de l’Évangille en
France . . . Pour confabuler ensemble secrètement de l’Évangille nul ne dict rien, mais de
en parler publicquement il n’y pend que le feu,” but rejoiced that the movement had pow-
erful patrons, “grands zélateurs de l’Évangille,” like Marguerite, the most evangelical of all:
“Il n’y a point aujourdui en France plus évangélicque que la Dame d’Alençon,” Aimé-Louis
Herminjard, ed., Correspondance des réformateurs dans les pays de langue française, 9 vols.
(Geneva, 1866–97), 1:314–15, no 132.
7 In 1542, a rival of Marguerite’s secretary, Charles de Sainte-Marthe, mocked his claims
to religious identity: “Tu te vantes d’être évangélique / Tu parles sans cesse du Christ / Tu
dis qu’il est doux de vivre à la manière des apôtres,” Hubert Sussanée, “In Samarthem,”
quoted in translation by J. J. Hémardinquer, “Les Prisons d’un poète: Charles de Sainte-
Marthe (1537–1543),” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 20 (1958), 177–183 (p. 178).
8 See Martin Bucer’s letter to Philipp Melanchthon in note 31.
32 jonathan a. reid
arena in which they operated. Marguerite and her network adjusted their
plans to the following facts. First, the Reformation was a political event. In
France, the king and power elites had the authority to enforce a religious
settlement and punish dissent. Marguerite pinned her principal hope for
reform on her brother; she regulated the tempo of her network’s activities
according to his changing favor. Second, France’s orthodox confessional
orientation was provisionally fixed as early as 1521 by the Paris Faculty of
Theology’s condemnation of Luther, the Parlement of Paris’s prohibition
of works containing his heresy, and the crown’s commitment to punish
dissenters. Thereafter, a coalition of conservatives from the Faculty of
Theology, the Parlement, and the royal court sought to shore up Catho-
lic orthodoxy by affirming traditional doctrines, persecuting heretics, and
censoring books.9 Their chief domestic targets included Marguerite and
the members of her network. From 1521 onward, Marguerite tried to con-
vince her brother that “la verité de Dieu” espoused by Evangelicals “n’est
point heresie.”10 Third, persecution forced Evangelicals to advance their
views with extreme caution. Marguerite and other Evangelicals habitu-
ally simulated orthodoxy and auto-censored their communications, espe-
cially what they published.11 Their deeds and words, consequently, must
be interpreted as representing far less than what they would have liked to
do or say, the full extent of which has to be reconstructed by contextual-
izing their every action and utterance.
II. Actor in the Reformation
Marguerite was born in 1492 and attained significant power after her
brother became king in 1515. She only emerges in the sources, however, as
a major Reformation figure around 1521. The limited evidence we possess
about Marguerite’s career to 1521 reveals that she was already supporting
the most advanced late-medieval programs of religious renewal. With her
mother, Louise de Savoie, and her brother, she seconded ongoing efforts
to return wayward Benedictine, Franciscan, and Dominican houses to
9 On the Parisian hub of this axis, see James K. Farge, Le Parti conservateur au XVIe
siècle: Université et Parlement de Paris à l’époque de la Renaissance et de la Réforme (Paris,
1992).
10 After having successfully convinced François I and Louise de Savoie to protect Lefèvre
d’Étaples, Marguerite assured Briçonnnet “que le Roy et Madame i ont bien deliberé de
donner à congnoistre que la verité de Dieu n’est point heresie,” [Compiègne, 21 or 22
November 1521], Correspondance, 1:71, no 15A (Reid, “Additions,” no 35).
11 See note 6 and section III below.
strict observance of their rules, a movement that had begun in the 1490s.12
Monastic reform was a family affair. Her mother-in-law, Marguerite de
Lorraine (whose exemplary death she recounts in Les Prisons),13 retired to
a nunnery in 1517, charging Marguerite with administering funds to sup-
port the convent. As she would throughout her life when caring for other
monastic foundations, Marguerite sought to ensure the material and spiri-
tual well-being of her mother-in-law’s Franciscan house.
During the period 1518 to 1521, Marguerite came under the sway of
Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, a leading Christian humanist. “Faber Stapulensis”
had had a distinguished career as a scholar and teacher of the Liberal
Arts and philosophy at the University of Paris. Starting in 1508, he had
shifted focus from commenting on and retranslating Aristotle’s works
and other core texts in the arts curriculum to publishing works suited
to improving clerical education. Most importantly, he had helped to lead
the first wave of northern humanists, including Erasmus and Johannes
Reuchlin, in revising the Latin Vulgate Bible and in elucidating the Scrip-
tures based on the study of the original Greek and Hebrew texts.
In 1516, Louise de Savoie asked her almoner, François de Moulins (or
Desmoulins/Du Moulin) de Rochefort, for a new account of the life of Mary
Magdalene, a popular saint closely associated with the power and author-
ity of French kingship, and of Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin and patron
saint of conception. Louise was seeking Saint Anne’s aid for Marguerite,
who remained childless after ten years of marriage to Charles d’Alençon.
Moulins turned to Lefèvre, who promptly produced several treatises in
which he rejected as biblically unfounded the traditional identification
of the Magdalene with Mary the sister of Martha and the sinful woman
mentioned in Luke 7, as well as the legend that Saint Anne had had three
daughters named Mary by three successive husbands, asserting that she
had given birth only to the Virgin. These tracts occasioned a minor inter-
national pamphlet war among scholars just at the moment when the far
more contentious “Luther affair” was beginning to shake Europe. Lefèvre’s
opponents, led by members of the Paris Faculty of Theology, accused him,
like Luther, of undermining popular piety and the authority of the Church.
12 Marguerite’s first datable letter, 23 August [1515], was in support of the reformed
Dominicans of Le Mans, Paris, Archives nationales, X1A 9322, fol. 75 (Reid, “Additions,” no
10003). On her religious interests to 1520, see KS, pp. 85–114; on her lifelong support for and
critique of monasticism, see Jean-Marie Le Gall, Les Moines au temps des Réformes, France
(1480–1560) (Seyssel, 2001), chs. 2 and 12.
13 Marguerite de Navarre, Les Prisons, ed. Simone Glasson (Geneva, 1978), pp. 207–09,
Bk. 3, vv. 2160–240.
34 jonathan a. reid
In 1521, Lefèvre and his disciples moved to the diocese of Meaux in

order to flee the hostility of the Paris theologians and to help their patron,
Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, with his foundering efforts to improve his
clergy and their ministrations. Immediately after the Fabrists’ arrival, Mar-
guerite initiated an intense collaboration with the Meaux group. While
she had previously worked with Briçonnet on monastic reform and corre-
sponded with him principally during the Fabrists’ stay at Meaux, her clos-
est connection remained with Lefèvre and his disciples. In her first letter
to Briçonnet she requested that one of the group, Michel d’Arande, return
to court in order to deliver a course of biblical instruction.14 After the
dissolution of the Meaux group in 1525, Marguerite championed Lefèvre,
d’Arande, Pierre Caroli, Gérard Roussel, and other ex-Meaux campaigners,
while dropping all relations with Briçonnet.
Marguerite’s intimate involvement with the Meaux group laid the foun-
dation for her career and activity as a reformer. During that time, she
acquired the basic structure of her mature faith, began her career as a
writer, and allied with them and a growing circle of sympathizers farther
afield to advance the evangelical movement. The letters, books, and deeds
of Marguerite and her collaborators reveal they were waging a coordinated
campaign to advance the renewal of the faith and the Church on several
fronts, attempting to: (1) convert François and others at court to the evan-
gelical cause, Christ and his gospel, le seul necessaire or negotium evangelii
as they termed it; (2) build a network of like-minded believers at court
and across France; (3) disseminate their gospel message widely to clergy
and laity through preaching and publishing books; (4) protect adherents
from persecution and censure; (5) promote Evangelicals to positions of
influence; and (6) collaborate with Evangelicals abroad to win a favorable
political settlement to the religious contest.
The Heart of the King

Of these six activities, Marguerite’s campaign to sway François I was the
most important for advancing the evangelical cause. Marguerite twinned
her attempts to convert François’s heart with specific policy propos-
als. The first phase of her campaign—from the beginning of the Meaux
reform through François’s captivity after the battle of Pavia (1525)—began
favorably. In November 1521, Marguerite boasted, as the self-appointed
14 [Before 12 June 1521], Correspondance, 1:25, no 1 (Reid, “Additions,” no 15).

“advocate” of the Meaux group and “sub-minister” of their teachings at

court, that François and Louise de Savoie were favorable to a reformation
of the Church.15 By the next spring, however, she was complaining that
“thorns”—an allusion to Chancellor Duprat and other conservatives—had
deflated the royals’ enthusiasm. Again in September 1522, she tried to con-
vince François and Louise to back a specific reform program formulated
by Briçonnet and Lefèvre.16 Although the text of that proposal is lost, her
correspondence with Briçonnet indicates that they had urged the court
to adopt the Meaux reform program as a model for the French Church.
Specifically, they were appealing for François to select only worthy men,
ones who would ensure the preaching of the gospel, for vacant ecclesi-
astical offices, in order to replace the many worldly prelates who were
extinguishing religion. As Briçonnet described them colorfully: “Je parle
de moy et mes semblables . . . plus froidz que viperes, que estraingons tout
feu de grace, vraies salamandres diabolicques.”17
François and Louise reacted favorably to this overture initially, but
cooled to it by November when the king’s confessor, Guillaume Petit,
denounced Marguerite’s court preacher, Michel d’Arande, for defending
Luther’s doctrines. Briçonnet advised Marguerite to temporize:
Le porteur m’a tenu propos de grande pauvreté, auquel monsieur Fabry
[Lefèvre d’Étaples] et moy avons dict nostre advis . . . Il vous plaira couvrir
le feu pour quelques temps: le bois [François and Louise] que voulez faire
brusler est sy verd qu’il estaindroit le feu et ne conseillons pour plusieurs
raisons . . . que passez oultre, sy ne voullez du tout estaindre le tizon et le
surplus qui desire se brusler et aultres enflamber.18
This setback came just as the Fabrists were leading the Meaux reform in
unprecedented directions. By 1523, they had refocused their efforts from
clerical renewal to direct evangelization of the laity, hoping to teach com-
moners the doctrine of God’s free salvation of sinners and enable them to
15 See note 2 and Marguerite’s reports to Briçonnet from June 1521 to February 1522,
Correspondance, vol. 1, nos 5, 14, 26, and 33 (Reid, “Additions,” nos 20, 33, 51, and 58); for a
full account, see KS, pp. 186–93.
16 Allusion in Marguerite’s letter to Briçonnet, [c.15 September 1522, Saint-Germain-en-
Laye], Correspondance, 1:216, no 41 (Reid, “Additions,” no 71).
17 Briçonnet to Marguerite, 22 December 1521, Correspondance, 1:107, no 20 (Reid,
“Additions,” no 41). For Briçonnet’s damning criticism of the clergy, see KS, pp. 200–11 and
Heather M. Vose, “A Sixteenth-Century Assessment of the French Church in the Years
1521–24 by Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet of Meaux,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39
(1988), 509–19.
18 Correspondance, 1:230, no 47 (Reid, “Additions,” no 85).
36 jonathan a. reid
teach this message to others. Emulating Luther’s translation of the New

Testament into German, Lefèvre published French versions of the New
Testament and Psalms in 1523. Having distributed free copies of these
texts to the laity, the Meaux group’s preachers read the Sunday lectionary
readings in French and gave exegetical sermons on them. In 1524, follow-
ing the example of the reformer Oecolampadius, Gérard Roussel and four
other preachers started giving daily lessons on Paul’s Letter to the Romans
and the Psalms to groups of lay people advanced in the faith. Pierre Caroli
initiated a similar effort in Paris. In addition to teaching their core mes-
sage of salvation by faith in Christ alone, some preachers like Roussel,
Caroli, and Masurier attacked as unscriptural major aspects of the Church’s
teaching about the cult of the saints, works, merits, and other “human
inventions.” All the while, Meaux group members were corresponding
with Evangelicals in the Empire, whom they credited with inspiring major
aspects of their reform program (KS, pp. 268–74).
Marguerite, however, had few opportunities after 1522 to advance the
Meaux group’s new program of lay evangelization at court. At best, she
was able to mount a rear-guard action to protect the Fabrists and other
Evangelicals from persecution. In the summer of 1523, Marguerite con-
vinced the royals to protect Louis de Berquin, a courtier who had been
caught with heretical books (including translations of works by Luther),
Lefèvre, and other Meaux group members from a sweeping heresy inves-
tigation mounted by the Faculty of Theology.
Thereafter, François and Louise de Savoie were preoccupied with the
war effort. Meanwhile, conservatives began publically accusing Margue-
rite and other notables at court of fostering heresy. Louise and Chancellor
Duprat capitulated to pressure in the autumn of 1523 and again in 1525,
authorizing anti-heresy measures. Bending to the political winds, Briçon-
net issued edicts against Luther’s teachings and cooperated with the Parle-
ment of Paris’s investigation of heretics at Meaux, especially after radicals
defaced prayers to the Virgin posted in the cathedral and mocked papal
indulgences. As the bishop drew back from further agitation, Marguerite
took the lead of what was now a growing evangelical network, whose
members at court and in Meaux, Paris, Poitiers, Lyon, and Grenoble cor-
responded and collaborated with increasing intensity from 1524 through
1526 with French exiles and sympathetic German reformers in Strasbourg,
Basle, Zürich, and Wittenberg (KS, pp. 64–84, 254–74).
Marguerite made her leadership of the network clear, and was given
full credit for it by its members, by sponsoring and protecting several
evangelical preachers across France from late 1523 through 1525, including
Michel d’Arande at Alençon, Bourges, and Macon, Aimé Meigret at Greno-

ble and Lyon, Pierre Caroli at Paris, and Pierre de Sébiville at Lyon.19 But
mounting pressure from conservatives, especially after Marguerite left
for Spain in the late summer of 1525 to negotiate François I’s release,
led to the arrest or flight of all these preachers, including the Fabrists at
Meaux. Lefèvre, Roussel, and d’Arande escaped to Strasbourg, where they
received protection from Marguerite’s distant German cousin, Sigismund
von Hohenlohe, a cathedral canon and leader of the reformation there.
In 1525, while conservatives were crushing the nascent evangelical
movement, Marguerite seized, improbably, on François’s own defeat as an
opportunity to revive the cause. She attempted to convince him that God
had imposed his “purgatory” (captivity) in order to transform him into
an instrument for the restoration of the Church. François I was, it seems,
potentially receptive to a spiritual interpretation of his plight. After his
capture, evidently dejected, he began a Lenten penitential fast. Sensing
his need, Marguerite asked François’s boon companion, Anne de Mont-
morency, to give him her copy of Lefèvre’s New Testament translation and
to relate to him this prophesy: a holy “recluse” had told her
que s’y plaist au Roy par manière d’oraison, tous les jours, quand il sera
retiré, lire les épistres de Sainct-Pol, il est asseuré qu’il [François] sera déli-
vré à la gloire de Dieu et l’honneur de luy; car il promet en son évangile que
qui aime la vérité, la vérité le délivrera. Et pour ce que je pense qu’il n’en a
point, vous envoye les miennes, vous priant le supplier de ma part qu’il les
veuille lire, et je croy fermement que le Sainct-Esperit, qui es demouré en
la lettre, fera par luy chouses ainsy grandes comme il a faict par ceulx qui
les ont escriptes.20
In May, Marguerite told François explicitly that his imprisonment was a
spiritual trial through which God sought to win his heart and turn him
into a champion of the faith:
Je vous supplie, Monseigneur, croire sans riens en douter que ce [captivity]
n’est que pour esprouver combien vous l’aimez, et pour vous donner le loisir
de penser et connoistre combien il vous aime; car il veult avoir votre cueur
entièrement, comme par amour vous a donné le sien, pour après vous avoir
uny à luy par tribulations, vous deslivrer à sa gloire et vostre consolacion
19 For examples of network members praising Marguerite’s leadership, see Sébiville’s

letter cited in note 6 and the letters cited in KS, pp. 45–46, 300–04.
20 Marguerite to Anne de Montmorency, 3 March 1525, F. Génin, ed., Lettres de Mar-
guerite d’Angoulême, sœur de François I, reine de Navarre (Paris, 1841), pp. 177–78, no 26
(Jourda, Répertoire, no 208).
38 jonathan a. reid
par le mérite de sa victorieuse résurrecsion, afin que par vous son nom soit
congnu et sanctifié, non seulement en vostre réaulme, mais par toute la
cristienté jusques à la conversion des infideles. O que bienheureuse sera
vostre brefve prison, par qui Dieu tant d’ames deslivrera de celle d’infidélité
et esternelle damnacion!21
When Marguerite arrived in Spain in August to negotiate his release,
she found her brother deathly ill and had the Eucharist celebrated in his
presence. Marguerite induced the half-conscious François to look at the
sacramental elements, and when he expressed the wish to communicate,
had a fraction of the host given to him while she received the rest. Fran-
çois’s rapid recovery over the following days was considered by observers
to be an evident “miracle.”22 Although she failed ultimately to secure Fran-
çois’s freedom, courtiers universally gave credit, after God, to Marguerite
for saving the king’s life.23 Within days of his recovery, she reminded Fran-
çois of her hope that he would restore God’s ruined Church:
Votre petite main [Marguerite] . . . va suplyer Celluy qui a coumandé à sainct
Francoys d’aler reparer son esglize destruiste vous donner grace d’estre cel-
luy par quy y parfera son euvre au bien de tous le[s] cristiens.24
It appears, however, that Marguerite failed to win François over to her
vision of him as the restorer of Christendom. François I wrote ten medita-
tive poems during his captivity.25 In these cathartic expressions of anguish,
he voices a number of deep regrets, but finds solace only in the fact that
his honor remains intact:
Cœur resolu d’autre chose n’a cure
Que de l’honneur.
Le corps vaincu, le cœur reste vainqueur,
. . . . . .
Doncq’ je concluds qu’eureuse est l’entreprise
Qui rend fortune indigne de surprise
Par fermeté, qui vault bien qu’on la prise,
Or en jugez.26
21 Marguerite to François I, [May 1525, Lyon], F. Génin, ed., Nouvelles lettres de la reine
de Navarre, adressées au roi François Ier, son frère (Paris, 1842), pp. 32–33, no 5 (Reid, “Addi-
tions,” no 219).
22 Jean de Selve to the Parlement of Paris, Toledo, 1 October 1525, in Aimé Champollion-
Figeac, ed., Captivité de François Ier (Paris, 1847), pp. 331–33, no 158.
23 Champollion-Figeac, Captivité, pp. 346–47, no 171 and pp. 356–57, no 179.
24 Raymond Ritter, ed., Lettres de Marguerite de Valois-Angoulême (Paris, 1927), p. 7, no 7
( Jourda, Répertoire, no 260).
25 François Ier, Œuvres poétiques, ed. J. E. Kane (Geneva, 1984), pp. 148–77.
26 François Ier, Œuvres poétiques, Prison 8, p. 173, vv. 23–25, 29–32.
Nowhere does he echo Marguerite’s religious exegesis of his experience.

His heart remained unconquered.
Nevertheless, Marguerite did convince him, in November 1525, to order
the Parlement to suspend heresy proceedings against the Meaux group.27
When François emerged from captivity in 1526, he quashed the “fâcheries”
which touched “her honor” so closely.28 Over the next four years, she
also persuaded François to grant ex-Meaux campaigners offices: Michel
d’Arande was named bishop of Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, Lefèvre became
tutor to the royal children, who were under Marguerite’s guardianship, and
Gérard Roussel, whom she took as almoner, received the abbey of Clairac.
Yet until 1530, while François’s two eldest sons remained in his place in
captivity, she could not convince him to allow evangelical preaching at
court or in the realm, since the resulting controversy would have under-
mined his relations with the pope, whose aid he needed to secure their
release (KS, pp. 345–50).
The Quest for Religious Concord in the 1530s and 1540s

Marguerite seized on new developments in the international political
arena during the 1530s and 1540s as opportunities to induce François I to
adopt foreign policies favorable to the evangelical cause. In 1531, German
Protestant princes and cities formed a powerful defensive alliance, the
Schmalkald League. In 1533, Henry VIII broke with Rome.
From 1533 to 1535, Marguerite and her partners at court, Jean and Guil-
laume Du Bellay, convinced François I to pursue a new, ambitious anti-
Hapsburg policy. They proposed to draw the schismatic English king, the
Schmalkald League, and, remarkably, even the pope into a military alli-
ance with France based on religious concord that would resolve outstand-
ing theological and ecclesiological divisions. As the means to promoting
this union, they sought to bring Philipp Melanchthon and other tractable
Protestant reformers to France for a religious colloquy.29
Marguerite was arguably the leading architect of this plan. She had laid
the groundwork for the venture by pursuing the lines of communication
to Evangelicals in the Empire that the Meaux group had established in the
27 Catalogue des actes de François Ier, 10 vols. (Paris, 1887–1908), 5:736, no 18505.
28 Marguerite to François I, [end of 1525] ( Jourda, Répertoire, no 319, p. 70, with text of
letter); Marguerite to François, [before 18 March 1526], Génin, Nouvelles lettres, p. 77, no 35
(Jourda, Répertoire, no 347); and Marguerite to Anne de Montmorency, [end of 1526],
Génin, Lettres, pp. 219–21, no 34 ( Jourda, Répertoire, no 362).
29 For the following as well as Marguerite’s sustained connection with the English court
from 1533 to 1535, which will not be treated below, see KS, pp. 436–46.
40 jonathan a. reid
early 1520s. After their seven-month sojourn in 1525–26 with her cousin
Sigismund von Hohenlohe at Strasbourg, Marguerite maintained ties
with him; he sent her French translations of works by Luther in the late
1520s and visited the French court.30 Meanwhile, the Du Bellay brothers
cultivated a group of German students at the University of Paris, includ-
ing Johann Sturm and Ulrich Chelius, who were in contact with German
reformers. They would serve as the Du Bellays’ operatives well into the
1550s.
When the German “Protestants”—those princes and city magistrates
who had protested Charles V’s anti-heresy policy at the 1529 Diet of
Speyer—headed to the pivotal Diet of Augsburg in August 1530 to pres-
ent their confessions of faith, Marguerite saw clearly that the fate of the
evangelical cause in France rested in part on its success in the Empire. At
her express order, members of her network sent letters to Martin Bucer,
a leading reformer from Strasbourg, urging him to encourage the Protes-
tants to present a united front lest their divisions undermine the cause in
France.31 At a time when France lacked diplomatic representation in the
Empire, Marguerite displayed remarkable knowledge of imperial politics
as well as perspicacious foresight. It was upon the basic premise she artic-
ulated in August 1530 that she and the Du Bellay brothers broached future
overtures to German Protestants in the 1530s and 1540s: by collaborating
they could help each other politically against the emperor and advance
their common religious cause.
In 1531, François sent observers to the founding of the Protestants’ mili-
tary alliance at Schmalkalden. In May 1532, ambassadors of two leading
members of the League, the elector of Saxony and the landgrave of Hesse,
who had come to secure financial aid for the conquest of Württemberg,
presented themselves at court first to Marguerite, indicating the Protes-
tants were responding to her calls for cooperation.32 While we cannot, for
30 See Nicolas Gerbel to Martin Luther, Strasbourg, [2] April 1527, in D. Martin Luthers
Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Briefwechsel, 18 vols. (Weimar, 1930–85), 4:187–90, no 1093
[hereafter WA, Br].
31 Martin Bucer to Philipp Melanchthon: “Accepimus nuper literas a fratribus ex Galliis,
qui scribunt admodum feliciter apud se Evangelium gliscere, sed ita cursui ejus obstare infe-
lix hoc nostrum dissidium, ut, nisi componatur, haud sperent unquam futurum ut Galliæ
Evangelium publicitus audiant. . . . Hac ergo de causa, fratres qui illic sunt . . . persancte nos
hortati sunt, idque jussu reginæ Navarræ, ut quam liceat diligentem operam demus, ut hoc
tandem dissidium sopiatur, in quo certe ultrò currentibus calcar addiderunt,” Herminjard,
Correspondance, 2:271–72, no 305.
32 [May 1532], Marguerite to Montmorency, “Mon neveu le duc de sacx [Saxe] et lan-
grave des [sic for ‘de Hesse’] ont ycy envoyé leurs ambassadeurs pour affaires de telle
importance que vous le scaurez bien considerer. Et pource qu’ilz se sont addressez à moy
lack of insider sources, fix Marguerite’s or the Du Bellays’ precise contribu-

tion over the next three years in orchestrating concord with the German
Protestants, it is clear that if Guillaume Du Bellay was the lead negotiator,
Marguerite was also a major force. The landgrave of Hesse wrote to Mar-
guerite three times in 1534, just as Guillaume Du Bellay was making the
first inquiries about the possibility of religious union.33 From the Saxon
side, Melanchthon wrote to her twice in 1533–34.34
Moreover, it was precisely Marguerite’s bold initiatives to legitimate
the evangelical movement on the domestic front from 1533 to 1535 at Paris
and beyond that convinced Melanchthon and German Evangelicals that
she and her allies at court had real influence over the king and hence of
the seriousness of French proposals. During Lent 1533, Marguerite had her
almoner, Gérard Roussel, preach with the king’s blessing at the Louvre.
His sermons attracted crowds of thousands. In July 1533, Melanchthon
heard an encouraging report that, despite having been accused of heresy,
Roussel and other ministers would be allowed to defend evangelical doc-
trine (doctrinam evangelicam) in a public debate with Paris theologians
before a board of sympathetic judges, including Jean Du Bellay.35 Simi-
larly, Marguerite’s and the Du Bellay brothers’ success in mitigating the
conservatives’ sweeping persecutions in Paris following Nicolas Cop’s All
Saint’s Day sermon of 1533 and the posting of anti-Mass placards in Octo-
ber 1534 convinced Melanchthon in 1535 that the king’s heart was still “in
the hands of the Lord” and that his visit to France might lead to full-scale
evangelical renewal.36 Even after French negotiations with the Schmal-
kald League finally broke down in December 1535 and conservatives, led
by Anne de Montmorency, became dominant at court, Protestants contin-
ued to ask Marguerite for help in convincing François to end the persecu-
tion of Evangelicals in France and to revive closer relations with them.37
et que je n’entens pas bien leur langaige ce porteur m’a servy de truchement lequel je vous
envoye pour vous describer leurs dicts,” Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 3036, fol. 13
(Jourda, Répertoire, no 560).
33 Reid, “Additions,” nos 584.4, 584.5, and 584.6.
34 Reid, “Additions,” no 1110 (redated to c.22 July 1533) and Jourda, Répertoire, no 597.
35 Urbanus Rhegius to Philipp Melanchthon, 8 July 1533, Melanchthons Briefwechsel:
Kritische und kommentierte Gesamtausgabe, Regesten (12 vols. to date) and Texte (11 vols. to
date), ed. Heinz Scheible (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1991–), Texte, 5:459, no 1344, ll. 10–22.
36 See Martin Bucer’s report to Ambrosius Blarer, in Briefwechsel der Brüder Ambro-
sius und Thomas Blaurer, 1509–1548, ed. Traugott Schieß, 2 vols. (Freiburg-im-Breisgau,
1908–10), 1:469, no 396; Johann Sturm from Paris to Philipp Melanchthon, 6 March 1535,
Herminjard, Correspondance, 3:266–71, no 498, and Sturm to Martin Bucer, 10 March 1535,
p. 272, no 499.
37 KS, p. 440 n. 166 and Reid, “Additions,” nos 605.1, 10053, and 10055.
42 jonathan a. reid
During a period of growing factional strife at court, 1540–47,38 Margue-

rite worked with allies to revive the same pro-evangelical diplomacy that
she had scripted in the 1520s and advanced again in the 1530s with the Du
Bellay brothers. During two favorable periods—1540–43 and 1545–47—
she, Philippe Chabot de Brion (until his death in 1543), Jean Du Bellay, and,
above all, Mme d’Étampes, the king’s increasingly influential mistress,39
struggled, often secretly in order to bypass conservatives who held sway
at court, to convince François to ally with the German Protestants and
England.40
During the 1540s, François’s quest to win Milan from the emperor fell
into three phases, which dictated the pace and the scope of Marguerite’s
and her allies’ efforts. In the first, 1540–43, following Montmorency’s
failure to induce Charles V to come to terms for Milan, Marguerite sup-
ported plans to marry her daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, to a major oppo-
nent of Charles’s power in the Empire: the duke of Cleves-Jülich. Cleves, a
wavering Catholic, was allied to his brother-in-law, the elector of Saxony,
and thereby closely connected to the princes of the Protestant Schmal-
kald League. The duke was also on good terms with Henry VIII, who was
married, briefly, to his sister Anne in 1540. Marguerite knew as early as
October 1538 that an alliance with the duke of Cleves offered France an
opportunity for union with German Protestants.41 Despite her husband’s
opposition, Marguerite made an Abrahamic sacrifice: although it was
detrimental to Navarre’s dynastic interests, from 1540 through 1542 she
helped to engineer the marriage and attempted to build from it an alli-
ance between France and the German Protestants as well as, potentially,
England. In pursuit of this goal, she exchanged over 30 letters with the
duke and his advisors. To the same end, she sent a further 20 letters to his
38 David L. Potter, “Politics and Faction at the Court of Francis I: The Duchesse
d’Étampes, Montmorency and the Dauphin Henri,” French History 21 (2007), 127–46 (pp.
130, 143, 146); Robert J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I
(Cambridge, Eng., 1994), pp. 483–86.
39 Marguerite told the English ambassador in February 1540 that she had to work
through her ally, Mme d’Étampes, in order to fix ideas in her brother’s hard head; see
John Sherren Brewer et al., eds., Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of
Henry VIII, 21 vols. (London, 1862–1910), 15:79–80, no 223.
40 For the following, see KS, pp. 497–516. Only supplemental data will be cited.
41 See the letters of [ Johann Sturm] and Johannes Sleidan to [Jean Du Bellay], 14 Octo-
ber [1538], and of Sleidan to Jean Du Bellay, 27 October 1538, Correspondance du cardinal
Jean Du Bellay, ed. Rémy Scheurer, 5 vols. (Paris, 1969–2012), 3:134–36 and 138–40, nos 551
and 553.
German Protestant allies, including the elector of Saxony and the duke of
Hesse.42 Evangelical courtiers aided her. In May 1540, Guillaume Du Bel-
lay wrote to the German Protestants telling them that the time was ripe
to ally with France against the emperor.43 Recognizing the importance of
the proposed Cleves-d’Albret marriage, Philipp Melanchthon responded
to Du Bellay and advertised to Protestant princes that Cleves’s betrothal
to the “daughter of the Queen of Navarre” boded well for a religious and
political accord with France.44 In turn, Luther (or Melanchthon) wrote to
Marguerite to urge her to continue to advance the cause of the gospel at
court.45 Responding to such hopes, soon after the marriage was celebrated
( June 1541), Marguerite wrote to Jean Calvin asking him to tell his Protes-
tant friends that she and her husband were very happy with the union and
believed that great good would come of it for the evangelical cause.46
In 1542, Marguerite, Philippe Chabot, and Mme d’Étampes attempted
to draw Henry VIII into a broad anti-imperial, anti-papal league with the
Protestants and France, an alliance they proposed to seal by the mar-
riage of Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, with François’s second son, Charles
d’Orléans. Calling the emperor “Hypocrisy” and the pope “the Devil,” Mar-
guerite and Philippe Chabot predicted to the English that great benefits
would come to Christendom from the three-way union.47
Henry VIII entertained but ultimately rejected these overtures and
allied with the emperor (February 1543), precipitating the second phase
of France’s foreign relations in the 1540s. During their combined cam-
paign in 1543, the emperor easily defeated the duke of Cleves because his
allies, François I and the German Protestant Princes, failed to support him
42 Marguerite and Jean Du Bellay regularly apprised German Protestants of their con-
fessionally colored power struggles at court. For instance, Marguerite informed Protes-
tants attending the 1542 imperial diet of her and Mme d’Étampes’s efforts to get rid of the
“reformationsfeindlichen französischen Kanzlers [Poyet]” and replace him with Margue-
rite’s “gelehrt und evangelisch gesinnt” chancellor of Alençon, François Olivier. See Franz
Burchard to Philipp Melanchthon, Speyer, 11 March, Melanchthons Briefwechsel, Texte,
11:99–100, no 2908.
43 V.-L. Bourrilly, “Lazare de Bayf et le Landgrave de Hesse,” Bulletin de la Société de
l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 50 (1901), 369–76 (pp. 373–75).
44 See Melanchthon’s letters from 1540 in Melanchthons Briefwechsel, Texte, vol. 9
(= Regesten, vol. 3), nos 2507, 2510, 2511, 2526; and further, nos 2341, 2575, 3194, and 3270.
45 WA, Br, 9:299–301, no 3565.
46 25 July [1525], Herminjard, Correspondance, 7:198–202, no 1017 (Jourda, Répertoire,
no 851).
47 Marguerite and Chabot made these declarations privately to the English ambassador,
William Paget, a man who was systematically skeptical of their covert offers of confes-
sional allegiance. See KS, pp. 497–98.
44 jonathan a. reid
sufficiently.48 Cleves’s capitulation to the emperor in September 1543 sev-

ered the link he had formed between France and the German Protestants
and Marguerite immediately sought the annulment of her daughter’s
marriage.49 During the hostilities, England took Boulogne from France.
The following year the emperor’s further battlefield victories forced Fran-
çois to accept humiliating terms. The Treaty of Crépy (September 1544)
required François I to give up the territories he had won, to aid the
emperor in crushing the Protestants, and to agree to support a Church
council (Trent) in exchange for the emperor’s offer to marry one of his
female relations to Charles d’Orléans with Milan as dowry. These out-
comes effectively checked the French evangelical faction’s campaign to
build a political and religious alliance with the Protestants.
Marguerite and Mme d’Étampes began almost immediately to resurrect
the alliance scheme. Starting in late 1544, they had the Du Bellay brothers’
operatives in Strasbourg make a secret overture to Henry VIII. They told
him that if he would accept a large but reasonable settlement from Fran-
çois for Boulogne, they could end the war and build toward a confes-
sional and military union between France, England, and the Schmalkald
League.50 In 1545, the situation became more favorable as François grew
impatient with the emperor for failing to invest Charles d’Orléans with
Milan and especially after the duke’s sudden death in late 1545 effectively
voided the Treaty of Crépy. With Mme d’Étampes taking the lead—she
promised to be able to induce François to break with Rome—and Mar-
guerite seconding her, the two women at last convinced Henry to come to
terms (The Peace of Ardres, June 1546), but they were unable, yet again,
to tempt him to join a broad anti-imperial and anti-papal alliance. When
Charles V began his campaign against the Schmalkald League in 1546, they
were, however, able to persuade François to contribute to the Protestants’
war coffers. In the meantime, François called Marguerite to court. The
meaning of his summons was clear to the English: “The Queen of Navarre
is sent for, and therefore the Protestants’ matter is likely to prosper.”51
48 Brady, Protestant Politics, pp. 148, 254–57.

49 In October 1543, she asked François for help. Recognizing the necessity of obtaining
the pope’s agreement, she reserved to God the true right to grant an annulment and the
surety of knowing that He had granted it to herself: “je vous supplie très humblement nous
ayder à la mettre en liberté davant l’église et les houmes, comme je say qu’elle l’est davant
Dieu,” Génin, Nouvelles lettres, p. 237, no 133 ( Jourda, Répertoire, no 951).
50 Jean Du Bellay exchanged dozens of letters from 1545 to 1547 with his German opera-
tives Johann Sturm, Ulrich Geiger, and Johannes Sleidan in support of this plan. See Cor-
respondance du cardinal Jean Du Bellay, vol. 3.
51 Wotton to Paget, 30 December 1530, Letters and Papers, 21–2:324, no 648.
Yet Henry VIII refused to help and Marguerite failed to reach court before
François died on 31 March 1547.52 French financial support was too little
and came too late to enable the Protestants to escape defeat at Mühlberg
in 1547.
While pursuing these political gambits in the 1540s, Marguerite intensi-
fied her campaign to convert her brother to an evangelical foy vive and to
convince him to reform the realm accordingly. We see her efforts most
clearly in a series of intimate religious poems she exchanged with him—
ten from her, three from him—during the period 1540 to 1547.53 In one
remarkable poem, written between 1541 and 1543, we find Marguerite
responding to François’s account, which is not extant, of his own recent
spiritual awakening. She rejoices that he has finally experienced, as she
had long hoped, a heart-wrenching conversion which led him to deny his
own merits and trust solely in the grace of Christ for salvation:
Puis que voz yeulx [sont] remplis d’aultre lumiere,
. . . . . .
Que maintenant le [Christ] voyez en son estre
Tel qu’il estoit, voire devant son naistre:
Puis que du tout l’ignorance est rompue,
Dont trop long temps vostre ame fust repeue,
. . . . . .
Puis que le cœur monde, pur et nouveau
Donné vous est, et creé trop plus beau,
. . . . . .
Pouvez gecter un cry à mon advis,
Disant “C’est Christ et non plus moy qui veis”:
. . . . . .
Moy qui ay tant desiré ceste chose,
Qui un tel bien vous ay tant desiré,
Et devant Dieu en priant souspiré
Vouloir voz yeulx trop endormis ouvrir,
Et sa beaulté secrecte descouvrir.
. . . . . .
Mais vous, plourez sentant la joye extreme,
Qui vient d’aymer son dieu plus que soy mesme.54
52 Mme d’Étampes and Jean Du Bellay awaited her arrival impatiently. For unknown
reasons, she halted her journey. See Jean Du Bellay to [Anne de Pisseleu], 13 January [1547],
Correspondance du cardinal Jean Du Bellay, 3:407–08, no 735.
53 Richard Cooper reconstructed this poetic dialogue for the first time by redating and
publishing Marguerite’s occasional poems and her brother’s responses in OC 8.
54 OC 8, Épître 8, pp. 143–51, vv. 1, 5–8, 13–14, 17–18, 22–26, 117–18.
46 jonathan a. reid
She predicts not only that he will be freed from his worldly affections, but
also that he will go on to do great things because of his new-found faith:
Puis envers tous, amys ou ennemys,
Vous employrés ainsi qu’il [Dieu] le demande,
. . . . . .
Ainsi vivant en luy par son esprit,
Soit en pensant, ouvrant, ou par escript,
. . . . . .
Vous luy plairés en touts voz sacrifices,
Communicquant à tous ces beneffices:
Et, si par foy en luy puis esperer,
Ainsi que vous de luy ne separer. (ibid., vv. 211–12, 220–21, 223–26)
Marguerite also notes that God would demand action of François, but she
explicitly draws back from specifying what reform measures he should
take:
J’auray plaisir, soit en dict ou en faict,
Qui ne tiendra plus rien de l’imparfaict.
Quel y sera vous le pouvez penser.
D’en dire tant vous me debvez tencer,
Mais le propos par dessus moy me maine. (ibid., vv. 227–31)
In a subsequent series of New Year’s Day poems from 1543 through 1545,
in which she likens François in turn to David, Christ, Abraham, and Solo-
mon, Marguerite proclaims that God will make him victorious because
of his faith and enable him to root out heresy and superstition, and thus
reform and reunite the Church.55 Just as she had done during his cap-
tivity in 1525, Marguerite told François in these poems that his personal
transformation would earn him God’s favor in his dynastic struggles and
turn him into God’s instrument for a national, and even international,
reformation of the faith and the Church. Unlike in 1525, however, François
evidently accepted Marguerite’s spiritual guidance in some measure. In
response, he protests that he is not, as she had described him, a David, but
rather, echoing her more fundamental teaching, an abject sinner:
55 See the epigraph to this essay and OC 8, Épître 10, [January 1543], pp. 156–61, esp. vv.
85–95; Épître 11, [November 1543], pp. 165–71, esp. vv. 61–68; Épître 12, [January 1544], pp.
172–77; Oraison 8, [February 1544], pp. 326–28.
Point je ne suis au bon David semblable,

De qui le cœur à Dieu fust aggreable,
Je suis pecheur, et cela je confesse,
Dont le congnoistre est ma seure radresse.
. . . . . .
Je prie à Dieu qui a en son pouvoir
Tout nostre bien, qu’il y vueille pourveoir,
Estant beaucoup envers nous plus propice
Que ne dessert nostre grande malice.56
He also accepted Marguerite’s notion that God would bless him materially
because he had confessed to being a sinner and wholly dependent upon
God for salvation:
Louenge à toy, O infiny donneur,
Mon seul salut et mon certain sçavoir.
Tu m’as donné, dont je te rendz l’honneur:
Conqueste, enffans, et defense et pouvoir.57
If François I had experienced a spiritual awakening in the early 1540s under
Marguerite’s guidance, as these poems seem to indicate, the fact remains
that he did not go on to implement domestic policies in favor of religious
renewal like those Marguerite and her allies at court were advocating. If
anything, royal religious policy became harsher and the number of heresy
executions increased during the final years of his reign.58 One reason for
these trends is that most of the highly competent men whom François I
chose as his chief advisors, including Duprat, Montmorency, Bayard,
Poyet, Tournon, and d’Annebault, were quite orthodox. They secured the
upper hand in shaping the crown’s religious policy at the expense of Mar-
guerite and the evangelically inclined at court, whose ranks were thinned
by death (Guillaume Du Bellay, †1543; Philippe Chabot, †1543; and Charles
d’Orléans, †1545) or disgrace (Jean Du Bellay, 1545).59
56 So he confesses in his 1543 New Year’s Day response to Marguerite, OC 8, Épître 10,
pp. 156–61 and pp. 162–64, vv. 11–14 and 73–76 for verses quoted.
57 OC 8, Oraison 8, pp. 326–28 (p. 327, vv. 25–28).
58 Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, pp. 508–16; N. M. Sutherland, The Huguenot Struggle
for Recognition (New Haven, 1980), pp. 27–39, 335–40; and William E. Monter, Judging
the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements (Cambridge, Mass.,
1999).
59 For these figures and the balance of power at court, see Cédric Michon, ed., Les
Conseillers de François Ier (Rennes, 2011), esp. pp. 457ff.
48 jonathan a. reid
The Evangelical Network and Domestic Reform

As hard as she worked for a court-directed reform of the Church, Mar-
guerite arguably worked even harder, and certainly had greater effect, in
promoting renewal at the local level. She used her seigniorial powers and
above all her influence over her brother to build the movement by placing
scores of protégés in positions of influence and by protecting dozens of its
proponents from persecution as heretics. Through these efforts Margue-
rite helped to build a network of evangelical communities first at Meaux
and at court, then in locales where she had influence—her seigniorial ter-
ritories of Alençon, Bourges, Berry, and Béarn, as well as Paris, Toulouse,
Orléans, and Nîmes. Her successes in championing at court Jean and Guil-
laume Du Bellay as well as her chancellor of Alençon, François Olivier (who
became chancellor of France in place of the conservative Poyet), head a
long list of notable and lesser preferments including Jacques Groslot as
bailli d’Orléans, Arnaud de Badet and Louis de Rochette successively as
inquisitors at Toulouse, Claude Baduel as rector of the University of Nîmes,
a series of masters and clerics in the university and churches of Bourges,
Antonio Caracciolo as abbot of Saint-Victor in Paris, and Gérard Roussel
as bishop of Oloron. Notably, all of the cities where Marguerite installed
such figures developed strong evangelical communities from which would
emerge, in the decade after her death, Reformed Churches.60
Marguerite also sought to protect such individuals and communities
whenever they were persecuted. The most prominent figures after the
Meaux group for whom she intervened include, in chronological order:
the preachers Aimé Meigret and Pierre de Sébiville, the hermit of Livry
Jean Guibert, the courtier Louis de Berquin, the court poet Clément Marot,
Jean Du Bellay, the rector of the University of Paris Nicolas Cop, Jean Cal-
vin, the neo-Latin poet Nicolas Bourbon, the preacher Pierre de Nuptiis,
the jurist scholar Jean Boysonné, the preacher Jean Michel, Antonio Car-
acciolo, and the school master André Melanchthon, the reputed nephew
of Philipp Melanchthon. As she had on behalf of the Meaux group, she
attempted to save evangelical cells persecuted for heresy and, when she
failed, succored the victims and their relatives by taking them into her
household or providing for them financially. These groups included: sur-
viving members of a university-based fellowship crushed at Toulouse in
60 For details about Marguerite’s connections to these persons, events, and locales, see
KS passim via the index and an overview, pp. 69–84.
1532, the Waldensian communities abused by the inquisitor Jean de Roma

at Aix in 1533, 40 persons indicted for heresy in her ducal seat of Alençon
from 1533 to 1534, the scores of auditors and followers of Gérard Roussel
and Nicolas Cop incarcerated at Paris in 1533 and 1534 in the wake of their
sermons and again after the affaire des placards, members of Rénée de
France’s household in Ferrara oppressed by the duke in the mid-1530s, as
well as the members of her own household scrutinized by the Parlement
of Bordeaux in 1542. When shielding this last group, Marguerite repeated
to François her usual defense in such cases: conservatives, the “forgers
of heretics,” were laying false evidence and persecuting the truly faithful
unjustly:
Dieu merci, Monseigneur, nul des nostres n’ont esté trouvés sacramentai-
res . . . et ne me puis garder de vous dire qu’il vous souviengne de l’opinion
que j’avois que les vilains placars estoient faits par ceux qui les cherchent
aux aultres.61
Interestingly, unlike Clément Marot and other evangelical authors who
described their suffering for the sake of religion and praised Marguerite
for her protection, she only hints at her career-long efforts to foster such
evangelical communities and to foil ‘counter-Reformation’ persecution of
them in two of her minor poetic works—“Prince eternel, qui congnoys nos
miseres”62 and Complainte pour un detenu prisonnier—and in her unpub-
lished play, L’Inquisiteur. This curious silence leads us to our final consid-
erations: How, or in what ways, was she an engagée reformation writer?
What can Marguerite’s writings tell us about her reformation agenda?
III. Author among Evangelical Authors
Marguerite was a prolific writer yet she published little during most of her
long career. This noteworthy fact complicates our understanding of her as
a Reformation-era author. From the early 1520s to the end of her life, she
composed scores of works, most of them religious meditations, but she
made public only four thin volumes of her poems until 1547 when, shortly
61 Génin, Nouvelles lettres, p. 196, no 114 ( Jourda, Répertoire, no 903). When trying to
save Louis de Berquin in 1529, she argued similarly to François: “j’espère que la vérité qu’il
[Berquin] fera apparoistre rendra les forgeurs d’hérétiques plus maldisans et désobéissans
à vous que zeálateurs de la foy,” ibid., p. 97, no 51 ( Jourda, Répertoire, no 434).
62 OC 8, Oraison 6, p. 324. Cf. the rondeau closing this essay.
50 jonathan a. reid
after the death of her brother, she re-edited these titles with a selection
of her unpublished writings in the Marguerites de la Marguerite des
princesses.63 Her first published work, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, was
threatened with censure by the Paris Faculty of Theology in 1533. Only
after she had lost influence at court and, seemingly, had little else to lose,
did she decide to publish again in a major way. Even so, she did not have
printed her longest and potentially most controversial religious works,
which she completed shortly after her brother’s death, Les Prisons and La
Navire. The most compelling conclusion we can draw from the chronol-
ogy of her publishing career is that the threat of persecution and scan-
dal, which shaped the lives of her many protégés as well as her actions
at court, also constrained decisions about which of her works to publish
and when to do so. Thus, while from our modern perspective, with all
of her works in hand, she appears to have been a major Reformation-
era author, in her own day until 1547, she was publicly only a minor one.
She did circulate at court, however, many compositions in manuscript,
including the exchange of religious verse epistles with her brother, as part
of her efforts to secure influence and promote her religious and politi-
cal agenda. In 1541, she had a presentation manuscript of La Coche made
for Mme d’Étampes and in 1542 ladies at court staged her Comédie des
quatres femmes. She may also have circulated early versions of some of
her Heptaméron stories since, as she claims in its prologue, Henri II and
other courtiers had given her the idea for the work. Given the prominent
mentions of Henri II in the Prisons, Navire, and Comédie sur le tréspas du
roi, Marguerite seemingly intended to curry the new king’s favor via these
reflections on his father’s life and faith, which she depicted as decidedly
evangelical. If so, no evidence has come to light that she ever presented
them to her nephew.
More importantly, the content of her literary works, including other
unpublished works such as her versification of Luther’s exposition of the
Pater Noster, offers intriguing but problematic evidence for speculating
about what sort of reformed Church she aspired to and was, as illustrated
above, desperately fighting for in the face of conservatives’ increasingly
severe repression of heresy. As she declared in the preface she wrote for
the 1533 reprints (Paris, Antoine Augereau) of the Miroir and reused to
63 Marguerite’s secretary obtained a privilege for the Marguerites from the Parlement
of Bordeaux on 29 March 1547, that is, two days before François I’s death, indicating that
she had planned to publish before his demise, though perhaps in expectation of it since
she knew he was gravely ill; see Jourda, Marguerite, 1:313–14.
head the Marguerites, she aimed simply in her writings at inculcating piety
and an undogmatic living faith. She was not writing programmatic trea-
tises about doctrine and reform agendas, let alone polemics. Indeed, she
could not have published such works even if she had wanted to. Despite
her elevated station, the Parisian theologians, who rightly suspected that
she deviated from their faith, would not have allowed her to do so as a
woman and a layperson. Therefore, her compositions offer material ill-
suited to speculating about her confessional stripes, that is, for surmising
to which of the then competing Churches or confessions she would have
openly professed her allegiance were she able to do so.
In face of the interpretive difficulties presented by her works, it is
essential to realize that while Marguerite did not publish much, she
patronized several dozen evangelical authors and printers who did. This
support was arguably her greatest literary contribution to Reformation
discourse. Collectively, her protégés published over 500 Latin and French
works and penned scores of other texts that remained in manuscript, all
of which more or less directly engaged in the religious debate.64 Notably,
in lockstep with her own publishing career, this body of literature exhibits
a great caesura—a fundamental shift in character—around 1534 as the
conservatives’ campaign of persecution made it increasingly risky to pub-
lish dissenting ideas. Before 1534, Lefèvre d’Étaples, Louis de Berquin, and
other members of Marguerite’s network published a sizeable corpus of
biblical, catechetical, devotional, and exegetical works, including Lefèvre’s
complete French translation of the Bible (Antwerp, 1530) and dozens of
translations of catechetical works by German reformers. Most of these
titles were printed anonymously or with false attributions of author or
printer. This semi-clandestine enterprise was hazardous. The Paris Faculty
of Theology censured most of these works and authors. After the crack-
down following the affaire des placards, the publication of prescriptive
evangelical texts ceased in France and moved to foreign printing centers.
The four printers who had produced almost all of these books and tracts
were silenced: Simon Du Bois (Paris and Alençon, vanished 1534), Antoine
Augereau (Paris, executed as a heretic December 1534), Martin de Keyser
(Antwerp, died 1535), and Pierre de Vingle (Lyon, emigrated 1533).
Starting in the early 1530s, Marguerite presided over a literary turn
in evangelical publication. A closely knit community of over 20 authors
64 See KS, Appendix B, and pp. 274–93 for the launching of this publishing campaign
in 1525.
52 jonathan a. reid
patronized by Marguerite and the Du Bellay brothers, including Clément

Marot, François Rabelais, Charles de Sainte-Marthe, Nicolas Bourbon,
and Étienne Dolet, commenced their publishing careers, some quite late
in life, and changed the register of evangelical discourse. These “enfants
d’Apollo,” as Marot dubbed his brother poets in his first work, L’Adolescence
clémentine (1532), a publication which self-consciously launched this liter-
ary movement, collaborated intensely in and out of print. Daringly, they
produced hundreds of verse and prose works—mostly, but not always,
under their own names—which though not as often overtly religious, nor
in the usual genres of religious writing, nevertheless expressed evangeli-
cal sentiments, doctrines, and, occasionally, polemics in an admixture of
worldly themes.65 Most of these authors eventually suffered censure or
worse punishment, despite suppressing their most stridently controversial
works and auto-censoring their published texts.
Scholars have not yet adequately assessed how the ever-present threat
of persecution affected these authors—Marot and Rabelais are better
studied—when they were writing on controversial religious topics. More
importantly, although modern scholars like contemporary admirers and
critics have recognized that these authors were part of a coordinated
movement, we lack any synthetic study of their religious views and aspi-
rations, let alone of the impact of their works on religious discourse in the
university halls and the streets.
To conclude this survey and illustrate the value of such a collective
study, the following will show how Marguerite’s doctrines and reform
goals, which she expressed guardedly in her letters and writings, can be
amplified and clarified by reading the texts of writers she patronized.66 I
will focus on two detailed expositions of faith that come from her immedi-
ate circle and most likely reflect her views. Hitherto, both have been little
studied.67 The first is a custom-made catechism and guide to auricular
confession, made for Marguerite c.1530, entitled L’Initiatoire instruction.68
65 See KS, ch. 10 for a survey of this group and their works, their evangelical piety, and
their polemics in favor of religious renewal.
66 The fullest attempt to date to profile Marguerite’s thought on justification, faith,
the Church, the saints, and the sacraments from her writings is Gary Ferguson, Mirroring
Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (Edinburgh, 1992).
67 For the literature on and discussion of both texts, see KS, pp. 251–53 and 520ff.
68 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5096. Emblazoned with Marguerite’s arms, this
luxurious manuscript contains: (1) an augmented translation of two short catechisms by
the Lutheran Johannes Brenz; (2) an anonymous treatise on confession, a slightly altered
version of which Marguerite’s printer, Simon Du Bois, published in her city of Alençon
c.1530; (3) a programmatic cycle of illustrations with penitential and Eucharistic themes;
The second is the sole surviving exposition of faith by her closest spiritual
advisor from 1526 until her death, Gérard Roussel, the Familiere exposition.69
Scholars agree that leading French Evangelicals like Lefèvre d’Étaples,
Marguerite, and Roussel shared with the Protestant reformers an over-
arching belief that sinners are justified by faith alone. In Les Prisons, Mar-
guerite identifies this doctrine and sola scriptura as the key criteria for
discriminating between good theologians and books and bad ones. The
good “doctor” focuses solely on God’s gift of faith as revealed in Scripture;70
the bad one introduces damning doctrines not found in Holy Writ:
L’autre [docteur] duquel la doctrine est doubtable,
C’est cestuy là qui l’homme enorguillit
Et qui l’excuse, encores qu’il faillist,
En luy donnant povoir, sçavoir, bonté,
Et que par luy peult bien estre dumpté
Le peché joinct à nostre chair humaine,
Voire effacé par son labeur et peyne;
Ainsy le fait confier en son œuvre,
. . . . . .
En ces deux poinctz gist la damnation:
D’attribuer nostre salvation,
Redemption, aux hommes en partie,
Et de luy seul, dont la vie est partie,
Ne croyre pas que du tout dependons
Affin que honneur à luy seul nous rendons. (vv. 1260–67, 1277–82)
Like Luther and many others, Marguerite particularly condemns the psy-
chological trap set by bad doctors. However well meaning they may be,
they lead sinners to damnation by puffing them up with self-confidence
that they can contribute in any way (“en partie”) to their salvation though
their works (vv. 1283–91).
and (4) a concluding rondeau, which encourages a fraternal alliance of the elect suffering
persecution to stand firm (quoted at the end of this essay). For Simon Du Bois’s edition
of the treatise on confession, see Eugénie Droz, Chemins de l’hérésie, 4 vols. (repr. Geneva,
1970–76), 1:59–77.
69 Paris, BnF, fr. 419. This multipart manuscript contains: (1) Roussel’s Familière exposi-
tion—a catechetical explanation of the Ten Commandments, Lord’s Prayer, and Creed—a
copy of which the Faculty of Theology condemned in 1550; (2) his treatise on the two
sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist; (3) his principles for diocesan reform. The last
is edited in Charles Schmidt, Gérard Roussel: Prédicateur de la reine Marguerite de Navarre
(Strasbourg, 1845), pp. 226–39.
70 “Mais pour juger des mauvais et des bons [docteurs] / Ce qui en est, fault que nous
regardons / Qui le plus près de l’Escripture touche / Car l’Evangile est la pierre de touche,”
Les Prisons, Bk. 3, vv. 1229–32. Cf. story 44 in the Heptaméron.
54 jonathan a. reid
Beyond voicing such blanket warnings, Marguerite rarely identified

specific false doctors, books, or doctrines. The unpublished catechism
compiled for her, however, asserts what neither she nor any other Evan-
gelical in France could proclaim openly: the Roman pope and doctors of
Paris were in the wrong. Concerning the remission of sins, the catechist
explains:
Je ne croy point, et ne me confie aucunement aux fainctes et plaines de
fraulde indulgences ou pardons du pape Romain, ne de ses scavoirs, mais
je croy la remission des peches que Jesuschrist nous a par sa tressuffisante
mort et passion impectrée.71
In a long excursus on the “traditions humaines” reigning “aujourdhuy,” the
author condemns auricular confession to a priest as a diabolical invention
designed to damn souls:
Qui n’aura creu en Jesuschrist mais aura mis sa confience et esperance en
aultre chose, soit au ciel, soit en la terre, il sera damné. Vous voyes que
l’escripture ne dict point, Celuy qui se sera confessé ainsi que l’eglise
Romaine, ou la faculte de Paris, ou les hommes quelz qu’ils soient, l’auront
commandé, sera saulvé, et qui ne l’aura faict sera damné. Ceste doctrine
n’est point venue de Dieu, mais est doctrine de Diable, qui ne cerche synon
que laissons la vraye et vifve parolle de Dieu et suyvons la vaine parolle des
hommes, affin que soions perdus.72
How then should one confess? The catechist tells the confessant to admit
his or her sinfulness first to God, then to any trusted fellow Christian.73
Recognizing that, although it is a damnable invention, the confessant will
be obliged to confess to a priest, the catechist gives a formula of what to
say, which amounts to a general confession of faith rather than a model
for confessing specific sins. The catechist admonishes the confessant to
take the priest’s words of absolution only as an advertisement of God’s
freely given forgiveness, not as a sacramental means by which forgive-
ness is conveyed. Furthermore, he advises the confessant do the penance
imposed by the priest in order to avoid scandalizing others (“pour evicter
scandale”), but warns:
71 Ars., 5096, fol. 25r. This attack on the pope’s indulgences, pardons, and “scavoirs” is
a strident amplification by the translator of Brenz’s original, “Auch glaub ich nit in den
Ablass des Bapsts sonder Iesu Christi.”
72 Ibid., fol. 39r–v; for another attack on Rome and Paris, see fol. 37r–v.
73 Cf. Heptaméron, story 72, and Mary B. McKinley, “Telling Secrets: Sacramental
Confession and Narrative Authority in the Heptameron,” in John D. Lyons and Mary B.
McKinley, eds., Critical Tales: New Studies of the Heptameron and Early Modern Culture
(Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 146–71.
gardes vous comme d’ung chien enragé, et sur le peril de votre ame, de
penser que par ceste votre oeuvre ou aultre vous pourries satisfaire à la
justice de Dieu pour voz peches. . . . Mieulx vous seroit de n’avoir oncq veu
prebstre.74
Signaling that there are false practices surrounding confession without
denouncing them, Roussel similarly instructed his flock that God alone
forgives sins and that it is from him only they should seek pardon. Never-
theless, he says, one would contravene God’s will not to “use the means”
he has ordained; the penitent should
se retirer au prebstre, [et] devant luy se recongoistre pécheur, s’accuser et
confesser pour obtenir par son organe et ministère la parolle par laquelle est
offerte et dispensée la rémission des péchez, de laquelle Dieu en est l’autheur,
et le prebstre seul dispensateur.75
Roussel makes clear, however, that the penitent is confessing directly to
God and that the priest, when pronouncing the words of absolution, is
simply announcing, not granting, God’s forgiveness, which the sinner can
only receive through faith. Roussel omits any discussion of sacramental
absolution, the debt of sin, merits (other than Christ’s), imposed penance,
purgatory, or the treasury of merits in his presentation of the essentials of
sin, confession, and forgiveness.
No sacramental dispute divided Reformation-era Christians more deeply
than that over the Eucharist. Marguerite’s poems, correspondence, and
deeds exhibit a strong devotion to the sacrament, corresponding to the
Christocentric orientation of her piety. She evidently believed in Christ’s
real sacramental presence in the Eucharist, as is revealed in Pierre Doré’s
claim in 1539 that she boasted of burning a book by Zwingli on the Mass
for denying it76 and in the relief she expressed to François I in 1542 that no
one in her household was Sacramentarian.77 Like Roussel, however, she
never specifies in any of her writings the mode of the real presence, nor
adheres clearly to a specifically Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist formula-
tion of it. Notably, Roussel, who largely followed Calvin’s real-spiritualist
interpretation as well as his liturgy for administering the Eucharist in
both kinds, claimed that all “les abominations, abus, irrévérences, . . . les
74 Ars. 5096, fol. 54r–55v; 55r. See further KS, pp. 367–68.
75 BnF, fr. 419, fol. 179v, emphasis added; cf. KS, pp. 533–34.
76 Noted by Marie-Madeleine Fragonard, “Pierre Doré: une stratégie de la reconquête,”
in Olivier Millet, ed., Calvin et ses contemporains: Actes du colloque de Paris 1995 (Geneva,
1998), p. 185.
77 See note 61.
56 jonathan a. reid
discordes et débatz” surrounding the sacrament would fall away and the
faithful be united if everyone would simply follow Jesus’s words and form
of institution of the sacrament, without inquiring further into how he is
present.78
Roussel’s appeal for unity and the ending of abuses of the sacrament
echoes Marguerite’s calls to her brother and other powers to reform and
unify the Church or Christendom. Those calls for unity are what makes
them so hard to “type” confessionally. Scholars’ attempts to do so ever
since the 16th century by measuring their doctrinal statements against
the benchmarks of the different confessions, however understandable the
temptation may be, have often been anachronistic and, more importantly,
have ignored their plight and expressed intentions. What Church were
they seeking to uphold? Both Marguerite’s catechism and Roussel’s Fami-
liere exposition define the Church as the body of Christ, nothing more,
nothing less. Mystically, it is comprised of all the living elect in commu-
nion through Christ, including the saints of paradise. The visible Church,
they maintained, is spread throughout the world and can be found wher-
ever the gospel (doctrines of salvation) is rightly preached and the two
sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, are celebrated in conformity with
Scripture.79 As Marguerite’s catechism explains:
Eglise, signiffie congregation. Quant doncques nous disons, Je croy la congre-
gation, non pas ce monceau de boys et de pierres, ou la multitude des anti-
christians, ministres, qui ne sont rien moins que union ou congregation, veu
que chacun d’eulx veult estre differend de l’autre, tant en sentence, ou opi-
nion, que en supersticieuses et hipocriticques ceremonies. Et quoy doncques?
La compaignie totale du peuple de Dieu. C’est à dire des chrestiens qui sont
le vray temple de Dieu, et qui tous jouxte le commandement de leur maistre,
sentent une mesme chose, et demeurent en une mesme reigle, saichans que
quiconcques se retire d’unite, il se retire de Dieu.80
78 BnF, fr. 419, fol. 168v; cf. KS, pp. 526–27 and 536–48.
79 After defining the Church as the mystical body of Christ, Roussel specified, “Bien y
a il une aultre Eglise de Dieu, visible, laquelle il nous descript avecques certains signes et
nottes pour la nous faire congnoistre: comme sont la Parolle de Dieu et les sacrementz pure-
ment administrez; laquelle Parolle il veult par nous estre ouye, observée et suyvie . . . mais
en cest article péculièrement et bien proprement est parlé de la congrégation des esleuz,
de ceulx lesquelz Dieu, par son occult élection, a adoptez pour enffans et héritiers de salut,
laquelle ne se voit de l’œil corporel, ny se congoist par signes, mais est seulement cong-
neûe et appréhendée par foy,” BnF, fr. 419, fol. 23r. Roussel only elaborates on baptism and
the Eucharist as sacraments instituted by Jesus in this work, fols. 145v–74r.
80 Ars. 5096, fols. 23v–24r. The translator elaborates (in italics above) significantly on
Brenz’s original text: “Quid dicitur ecclesia lingua nobis vernacula? Responsio. Congregatio,
non illa quidem lignorum et lapidum, sed populi Dei,” Martin Luther, Catechismus . . . Huic
adiecti sunt alij quoque gemini Catechismi, Iohannis Brentij (Haguenau, 1529), fol. R3r.
Marguerite, Lefèvre d’Étaples, and Roussel defined the true Church and
its true ministers81 performatively not confessionally. Further, in identify-
ing the true Church with true believers who could be found everywhere,
they developed the principle that they should not reject any of the vis-
ible Churches or their members, lest they break the unity of the mystical
Church and fail in their duty to enlighten the misguided within it, espe-
cially those persecuting them. In his explanation of the petition in the
Lord’s Prayer, “deliver us from evil,” Roussel advises the elect to pity and
pray for those who torment them:
recongnoistre seul pour ennemy [le Diable], et prendre les hommes des-
quelz il s’ayde pour nous faire mal, non pour ennemys mais comme pouvres
captifz et prisonniers, voire détenuz en trèsmisérable et dangereuse capti-
vité, est le vray moyen pour bien user de la présente formule et dire d’ung
ardent désir, tant pour nous que pour noz prochains: “O Père, délivre nous
du maling.”82
Moreover, this petition will help the elect to persevere even though
[Le Diable] ne cesse de leur [les esleuz] insidier . . . pour les destourner
de la Parolle de Dieu, de la voye de vérité: à la sénestre, combien excite-il
de persécutions, y a-il tourment qu’il n’excogite? À la dextre, combien de
sectes, d’hérésies, de scandalles? En quelque part que se tourne le fidèle,
tandis qu’est en ce monde, hault, bas, à dextre, à sénestre, devant et der-
rière, dedans et dehors, que recongoist-il de l’oeil de foy que par tout son
venin espandu et tel que, s’il n’y est pourveu, ameine la mort spirituelle et
éternelle.
What are the faithful to do when faced with persecutions on the left and
heresies on the right in a world bent on confessional strife? In his exposi-
tion of the commandment against bearing false witness, Roussel advised
the faithful to dissimulate in need, advocating a comportment in face of
persecution which Calvin stigmatized as (Pseudo-)Nicodemism. Citing as
precedent a long list of biblical figures, including Abraham, the Egyptian
midwives, Rahab, David, and Judith, but notably not Nicodemus, all of
whom prevaricated or lied in times of need with God’s blessing, Roussel
argued that one can and should dissimulate the truth whenever speak-
ing it would fail to edify one’s neighbor and instead give “Sathan en ses
organes et ministres” an opportunity to oppress the faithful and mislead
those weak in the faith. Only with “l’oeil de foy ouvrante par charité” can
81 On Lefèvre’s performative definition of true ministers, see KS, pp. 172–73, cf. 203.
82 For this and the next quotation, see BnF, fr. 419, fol. 141r.
58 jonathan a. reid
one discern when exhibiting the truth “soit en doctrine, soit en dictz ou en
faictz” will result in the glory of God and the good of others.83
The advice of her almoner and that found in her catechism clarify for us
that in their clearly evangelical but confessionally evasive doctrinal state-
ments, their fervent but guarded piety, and bold but circumspect deeds,
Marguerite and her network were agitating for a profound reformation of
the universal Church from a particular vantage-point—persecution-ridden
Catholic France—within a confessionally fractured Europe. Evangelicals
from Lefèvre to Roussel took deep, though not exclusive, inspiration from
the doctrinal works of a series of Protestant thinkers: Luther, Bucer, Brenz,
Melanchthon, and Calvin. Correspondingly, in the political sphere we
see that Marguerite and other Evangelicals at court worked most closely,
though by no means exclusively, with Protestants abroad in an attempt to
convince François I to restore the French Church, in doctrine and prac-
tice, to conformity with their understanding of the gospel.
In this they failed. Yet, they were prepared for the worst. In his inscru-
table wisdom, God might pass over France and allow their reform efforts
to come to naught.84 The only option in their view—as expressed in the
poem that concludes Marguerite’s catechism like a benediction—was to
soldier on as a small band, suffer persecution, and try to gather the elect,
while awaiting final victory in the hereafter:
En aymant Dieu de cueur entierement,
Consolons nous ensemble uniquement,
Quelque tourment qu’on nous face ou grevance,
Ne delaissons fraternelle alliance,
Comme plusieurs font infidelement.
Les saincts escriptz universellement,

Mandent à tous d’avoir parfaictement,
Dilection l’ung à l’autre et fiance,
En aymant Dieu de cueur entierement.
Quant il viendra au jour du jugement,

Il pugnira les tyrans durement,
Et les esleux seront hors de souffrance.
Vivons donc tous en certaine esperance,
Prenans en gré le temps presentement,
En aymant Dieu de cueur entierement. (Ars., 5096, fol. 57v)
83 BnF, fr. 419, fol. 78r–v.

84 See Gérard Roussel to Guillaume Farel, 24 August 1524, Herminjard, Correspondance,
1: 272–73, no 117.
Marguerite de Navarre:
The Reasons for Remaining Catholic
Jean-Marie Le Gall
Historians’ well-known obsession with labeling religious tendencies in the

course of a life lived in the early Renaissance, before there was a choice
of Churches in France, provoked a memorably sarcastic response from
Lucien Febvre. To the possible categories Catholic Marguerite, evangelical
Marguerite, Protestant Marguerite, Lutheran Marguerite, Calvinist Mar-
guerite, mystical Marguerite, spiritual Marguerite, skeptical or perhaps
even free-thinking Marguerite, we might add Marguerite the Platonist,
the Fabrist, or the Erasmian. “Toutes ces étiquettes dénuées d’intérêt pour
l’homme qui sait la vie ou bien engendrent d’abominables anachronismes
de pensée ou bien prétendent enfermer en deux mots toute la vie et toute
l’œuvre, infiniment variées, d’une femme qui vécut cinquante ans.”1
It is not difficult to understand the famous historian’s irritation at a
frequently Protestant historiography that had allied François I’s sister to
its cause despite her disagreement with Calvin over the Spiritual Liber-
tines. Théodore de Bèze was less categorical since he expressed regret that
while Marguerite had initially supported the true gospel, she had relapsed
into superstition and idolatry.2 In the opinion of the Haag brothers in the
19th century, Marguerite was “ni catholique, ni protestante, dans le sens
strict du mot . . . Mais elle cherchait la vérité, et c’est en cela qu’elle se rap-
prochait davantage du protestantisme.”3 So innovative a female humanist
could not be a Catholic since that religion was by definition identified
with a conservative traditionalism, typical only—in the contemptuous
(and contemptible) words of Febvre—of “femmes qui végètent obscuré-
ment dans la prison sordide d’une petite vie ménagère sans horizon ni
courant d’air pur” (Amour sacré, p. 206). Such a view depends on a preju-
dice commonly held in France, even today, which associates Renaissance
Protestantism with modernity and relegates Catholicism to the ignorance
1 Lucien Febvre, Amour sacré, amour profane: Autour de “l’Heptaméron” (Paris, 1996
[1944]), p. 205.
2 Théodore de Bèze, Histoire ecclésiastique, ed. G. Baum and E. Cunitz, 3 vols. (Paris,
1883–89), 1:36–37.
3 E. Haag and E. Haag, La France protestante, 10 vols. (Paris, 1846–59), 7:228.
60 jean-marie le gall
of the Middle or Dark Ages.4 The battles between the Republic and the
Catholic Church that began in 1791 in France weigh heavily on the inter-
pretation of the national past.
The imposing of labels results not only from a confessional and politi-
cal reading of the past, however. It also owes something to the positivist
spirit of the late 19th century, committed to establishing categories and
implicitly passing judgment. Abel Lefranc, who uncovered and published
a number of Marguerite’s works, believed these offered proof that the
“mysticisme nébuleux, creux et platonicien” taught by Briçonnet formed
only one stage in the development of a Reformed doctrine that was
“déterminée, ferme sur les points essentiels.” For Lefranc, the Miroir de
l’âme pécheresse—published repeatedly and even translated by England’s
future Queen Elizabeth I during Marguerite’s lifetime—was an “œuvre
protestante,” a “manifeste de la religion nouvelle” (Les Idées, pp. 8, 15).
Lefranc’s conclusion is terse yet still not without a certain ambiguity: “La
sœur de François Ier a été sûrement protestante mais à sa manière” (p. 23).
The historian goes so far as to state that he cannot imagine anyone want-
ing to “disserter pour faire valoir l’opinion contraire.” Marguerite did not
belong to a Catholic third party like Rabelais or Sadoleto, named cardinal
by the Erasmian Pope Paul III. She rejected monasticism, the cult of saints
and of the Virgin, insisted on salvation by grace, and attached no value to
purgatory or the sacraments.
It is in the light of such partisanship, stemming from an outlook no
less positivist than confessionally motivated, that we can appreciate Luc-
ien Febvre’s irritation. Positivism reifies life rather than giving an account
of it; confessionalism is anachronistic when applied to the fluid time of
reforms during which Marguerite lived. Pierre Jourda’s rich biography,
a work that remains essential to an understanding of Marguerite, had
served to inform Febvre about Marguerite’s adherence to Catholicism.5
Nonetheless, reviewing Jourda’s book in September 1931 for the Jesuit
journal Études, Father Dudon felt that its author had not gone far enough
in rehabilitating Marguerite’s Catholicism.
And indeed, even though he refuses to apply labels, even though he
insists that Marguerite was first and foremost a student of the Bible, even
though he shows that she was above all a disciple of Saint Paul, in a sense
4 Abel Lefranc, Les Idées religieuses de Marguerite de Navarre d’après son œuvre poétique
(Paris, 1898; Geneva, 1969), p. 33.
5 Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, Duchesse d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre (1492–
1549): Étude biographique et littéraire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1930; Geneva, 1978).
the reasons for remaining catholic 61
which is not the monopoly of any Church, Febvre still chose to frame his
discussion not in terms of Marguerite’s Catholicism but of her possible
Lutheranism, entitling his chapter “Marguerite luthérienne?” Lefranc had
already claimed that she was more Lutheran than Calvinist, and the pub-
lication of W. G. Moore’s La Réforme allemande et la littérature française
offered support for this thesis.6 Febvre rejected this label, making Margue-
rite rather into a follower of Saint Paul, who remained within the Roman
Church by default and because no other choice existed at the time. In
other words, it was conformity that caused her to remain Catholic—and
that was the end of a question summed up in an affirmation as peremp-
tory as those of his opponents: “Marguerite a été Marguerite, c’est tout et
c’est assez” (Amour sacré, p. 194). Such a judgment, that holds the course
of a life to be fundamentally indescribable, is an invitation to historians to
close up shop. Often right, often polemical, Febvre is an influential figure,
who should nonetheless not be invoked as an infallible authority. Many
of the questions he considered “mal posées” are in fact worthy of being
looked at again.
To say, as does Febvre, that Marguerite lived at a time of “religions per-
sonnelles avant le temps des confessions,” to say that she had a “religion
à elle, qu’elle s’est faite elle même” (Amour sacré, p. 206) seems rather
like seeing what one wants to see by taking her as the embodiment of an
emergent religious autonomy distinct from the ambient conformity. Here
Febvre was following the view of Jourda, who saw his subject as being “à
côté de toute église,” having forged “une doctrine personnelle” (Margue-
rite, 1:303). Before the age of confessionalism, then, one could apparently
belong to the Church without believing. But is this not seeing the world
through the spectacles of Calvin, who applied the term Nicodemite to
those timid souls who, accepting neither exile nor martyrdom, preferred,
in the name of material comfort, to continue to pollute themselves with
heresy? Historians studying Marguerite have continued and will continue
to write at length about the affinities of her work with a given Protes-
tant text, to seek links and convergences, and, since there was as yet no
Protestant Church, to examine the queen’s Protestant networks, instead
of putting positively rather than negatively the question of her continued
adherence to Catholicism.
6 Will Grayburn Moore, La Réforme allemande et la littérature française (Strasbourg,

1930).
Lefranc, following Marius Cabantous or Henri Strolh, saw Marguerite’s

remaining Catholic as nothing more than a political obligation for the
sister of the French king. In this view, Marguerite’s heart was Reformed
while she was politically Catholic, motivated by loyalty to her brother
and by political interests involving her affairs in Navarre and the abil-
ity to grant ecclesiastical benefices to her clients. Henry Heller is willing
to admit that she was Catholic, but at the same time seeks to show that
her religion was an “unorthodoxy.”7 The late Thierry Wanegffelen—whose
personal journey led him to Catholic baptism as an adult before joining the
Reformed Church—was the first to try to understand dispassionately the
religious motivations that led men and women in the first half of the 16th
century to remain within the fold of the traditional Church. Wanegffelen
devotes no more than a few pages to Marguerite however, echoing Émile
Léonard’s argument concerning her fidelity to the mother Church and
adding her commitment to ecclesiastical unity and her devotion to the
Eucharist.8 As evidence of this last claim, we can note that, in July 1536,
Marguerite participated in a procession from the church of the Celestines
to that of the Dominicans in Lyon in order to expiate a sacrilege commit-
ted against a consecrated host (Jourda, Marguerite, 1:201). In December
1542, she repeated her opposition to the Sacramentarian arguments of the
placards against the Mass.9 Finally, the Franciscan Gilles Caillau, whose
preaching she had much appreciated, administered the last rites to her
on her deathbed.10
To evoke the label “Catholic Marguerite,” then, does not proceed from
a confessional motivation but from a genuine historical question—which
in fact presupposes a rejection of a strain of Catholic apologetics that
claims the Roman Church’s doctrine is invariable and that this is proof
of its truth, in contrast with the variations existing in and between Prot-
estant Churches. Clearly Marguerite was not a Catholic according to a
post-Tridentine understanding—any more than she was according to an
early 20th-century understanding associated with the Thomist revival in
reaction to modernism. But Catholic she surely was in the way many of
her most illustrious contemporaries were. This essay will detail the many
7 Henry Heller, “Marguerite of Navarre and the Reformers of Meaux,” Bibliothèque

d’Humanisme et Renaissance 33 (1971), 271–310.
8 Thierry Wanegffelen, Ni Rome, ni Genève: Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au
XVIe siècle (Paris, 1997), pp. 80–85.
9 François Génin, Nouvelles lettres de la reine de Navarre (Paris, 1842), p. 196.
10 Pierre Tucco-Chala, “Pau au temps de Marguerite de Navarre,” in Marguerite de
Navarre, 1492–1992: Actes du Colloque international de Pau, 1992, ed. Nicole Cazauran and
James Dauphiné (Mont-de-Marsan, 1995), pp. 25–43 (p. 40).
indications of Marguerite’s adherence to Catholicism and seek to under-

stand their meaning.
Presumed Heretic?
One approach to Marguerite’s religious sensibility—the most commonly

practiced—is to analyze her works. This demands sensitivity to the dif-
ferences in objective and status between, on the one hand, what she pub-
lished during her lifetime—principally the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, the
Discord estant en l’homme par la contrariete de l’esperit et de la chair, and
the Oraison à Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ in 1531; the Dialogue en forme
de vision nocturne in 1533; La Fable du faux cuyder in 1543; and the major
collection of texts contained in the Marguerites de la Marguerite des prin-
cesses in 1547—or what was published posthumously but still in the 16th
century—the Heptaméron, the Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié—and, on the
other hand, the texts uncovered by scholars since the end of the 19th cen-
tury. The meaning and function of a text published by the queen are not
the same as those of a text she kept private. It is also important to distin-
guish her own work from those presented or dedicated to her. The status
of the latter is not the same with respect to the queen’s involvement in
the religious disputes of her day. To be given a translation of a Lutheran
text did not mean one was a Lutheran. Censors, after all, were often the
most familiar with the material they condemned.
Be that as it may, comparing Marguerite’s work to Lutheran, Calvin-
ist, or Platonizing intertexts is the preferred method of those who search
the queen’s soul in hope of finding a Lutheran or a Calvinist within. I do
not seek to disparage this approach or to discourage scholars from seek-
ing the queen’s sources of inspiration. At a time when taking inspiration
from the works of others was the general rule, borrowings, quotations,
and the circulation of ideas are not clues to be despised. But how are
they to be understood? Quoting Luther without naming him, as Margue-
rite does, does not have the same impact as invoking his name, perhaps
even without quoting him. Furthermore, not every statement by (let’s say
again) Luther was necessarily heretical, which is all the more important if
the reader was unaware of its source. Finally, attributing a proposition to
one confessional camp or another can be a tricky business. It was possible
to be a good Catholic and criticize monks, pilgrimages, or the supersti-
tious excesses of the cult of saints, and even to believe in the weakness
of humanity and in salvation by faith. For Wanegffelen, the true line of
demarcation between Catholics and Protestants in Marguerite’s time was
the Eucharist; this is where everything is said to have played out. The risk
in this approach is that it charges the historian-theologian with defining
identities, with all the attendant perils of retrospectively reconfiguring
their contours and borders. To set up the Eucharist today as the central
issue in the confessional divisions of the past seems to partake of an irenic
religious strategy desirous, in order to establish a minimal shared creed,
to make the list of things indifferent to salvation (adiaphora) as long as
possible. The danger is to forget that for 16th-century Christians, monks,
the cult of the Virgin, and holy images were not in the least indifferent to
their religious choices. So even if intertextuality is a useful means of trac-
ing the reception, circulation, or construction of texts, in the final analy-
sis, describing a person or a work as more or less orthodox or heterodox
depends on criteria established by the reader. The person who points out
connections and rereads old texts to reveal their affinities is at risk of pro-
ceeding anachronistically. In consequence, the question seems to me not
to be whether Marguerite’s works look Catholic to us, but whether they
were perceived as Catholic or not by her contemporaries.
Lefranc is clear. In his opinion, the censoring of the Miroir de l’âme
pécheresse by the Faculty of Theology, the Sorbonne, gave the signal for
the “attaques furieuses et grossières” of fanatical Catholics (Les Idées, p. 9).
In fact, at no point was the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse ever censored by
the Faculty of Theology. The book, confiscated by the lieutenant-criminel,
would certainly have been presented to that body, since it had been printed
without its authorization. But the Faculties of Arts and of Medicine dis-
tanced themselves immediately from the proceedings, which had aroused
the ire of the king.11 On 27 October, the theologians met and affirmed
under oath that they had never condemned the work nor had it been
condemned by their deputies. 54 doctors signed this affidavit, including
the future inquisitor Matthieu Ory. On 3 November, the Dominican Guil-
laume Petit—royal confessor and bishop of Senlis, a friend of Margue-
rite but not sympathetic towards heterodoxy (he had denounced Michel
d’Arande to the Faculty in 152212)—presented the book to the Faculty,
which repeated its declaration that it had not censured it, and each doc-
tor was asked to ratify the decision with his signature. Five days later,
the Faculty affirmed solemnly that neither it nor its deputies had either
11 Francis Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne: A Bibliographical Study of Books in

French Censured by the Faculty of Theology of Paris (Geneva, 1979), p. 31; César Egasse Du
Boulay, Historia universitatis Parisiensis, 6 vols. (Paris, 1665–73), 6:238.
12 James K. Farge, Biographical Register of Paris Doctors of Theology, 1500–1536 (Toronto,
1980), p. 369.
reproved or approved the work, having never examined it. In all, more
than 70 doctors declared that they had nothing to say concerning the
work of the king’s sister.13
This abortive attempt to condemn the Miroir has been explained by
historians: Marguerite was indeed tainted with heresy but she was also
the king’s closest relative and the protection she enjoyed should not blind
us to the Reformed tenor of her work. The price she paid for this political
protection was never breaking openly with the religion of her brother. If
we were to accept this political reading and follow it to its logical con-
clusion, this would mean that the indexes produced by faculties and
institutions located in lands under the control of Charles V—François’s
bitterest enemy—could well have censored Marguerite’s work in order
to promote the idea that the king, who was already making alliances
with infidels and negotiating with heretics, also had a sister of question-
able orthodoxy. Rome could equally have entered the fray. Finally, the
death of François I followed by that of Marguerite could have allowed
the censors to speak out. As it is, not only the Parisian indexes of 1544,
1545, 1547, and 1549 make no mention of Marguerite’s works, neither do
those of 1551 and 1556, and the same is true of the indexes of Louvain
and Antwerp and of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman Inquisitions.14
During the whole of the 16th century, no Catholic censor in France or
anywhere else in Europe ever expressed publicly the slightest doubt about
the orthodoxy of Marguerite’s work. Her mysticism was not assimilated
to that of the alumbrados, who were condemned in Spain; her thought
was not conflated with Lutheran or Calvinist doctrine. Soledad Arredondo
did discover that, in 1573, the Spanish Inquisition seized a “discorso de
la reina de Navarra.”15 But this might refer either to Marguerite or to her
daughter Jeanne d’Albret. In 1583, Heredia’s report for the tribunal reveals
that the Inquisition examined a copy of the 1547 Marguerites de la Mar-
guerite des princesses but that, in the end, it did not place the work on
the index of Quiroga. Arredondo has also argued that the Chansons spiri-
tuelles were put on the index in Spain in 1583 and a publication with the
same title had earlier been condemned by the Paris index of 1544 and
the Antwerp index of 1570. Yet nothing proves these poems were those of
13 James K. Farge, Registre des conclusions de la Faculté de théologie de l’Université de

Paris (Paris, 1990–), vol. 2 (1994), pp. 302, 303, 305.
14 J. M. de Bujanda et al., Index des livres interdits, 11 vols. (Sherbrooke and Geneva,
1984–2002).
15 Soledad Arredondo, “La Réception de l’Heptaméron en Espagne: Raisons d’une
absence,” in Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1992, pp. 189–204 (p. 195).
Marguerite; Jésus Martinez de Bujanda identifies the censored title as a

work by Matthieu Malingre, published in Paris in 1533.
In the eyes of 16th-century censors, then, Marguerite was orthodox,
even if present-day historians raise questions concerning her beliefs and
her Protestant friends. From this point of view, Marguerite’s historio-
graphical fortunes have been the exact opposite of those of Erasmus. For
the last 50 years or so, since the Second Vatican Council, the work of the
Dutch humanist has undergone a rehabilitation in terms of its Catholi-
cism, so much so that a historian like Silvana Seidel Menchi has felt the
need to remind us that Erasmus was considered a heretic by many of his
contemporaries in Italy and Spain. His works were placed on indexes, his
readers arrested and interrogated by the Inquisition.16 This does not seem
to have been the case for Marguerite’s readers, although further research
remains to be done. In short, Marguerite does not seem to have worried
Church authorities, with the exception of Érard de Grossoles, bishop of
Condom. On the contrary, a number of prelates, like Paul Sadolet, bishop
of Carpentras, or Pier Vergerio, sang her praises. And in addition to Guil-
laume Briçonnet, Georges d’Armagnac, Gérard Roussel, and the Cardinal
de Tournon, whose sister was in the queen’s household, she also expressed
her affection for Artus Fillon17 and Pierre Du Chastel.18 Pope Paul III, who
met with her in the company of Cardinals Jacopo Sadoleto and Contarini
in Nice in 1538, discussed theology with her at length. The Pope’s wine-
steward Lancerio commented after this meeting that is it unusual to see
“such a learned (dotta) and holy woman.”19 Let us look more closely then
at Marguerite’s relationship with the Catholic hierarchy.
Remaining Faithful to Rome
“[E]lle vouloit croire en ce que son Dieu et son Eglise commandoient, sans
entrer plus avant en autre curiosité,” Brantôme affirmed of Marguerite.20
Her attachment to the Church, for which we will detail the evidence here,
16 Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasme hérétique: Réforme et inquisition dans l’Italie du XVIe
siècle (Paris, 1996).
17 François Génin, Lettres de Marguerite d’Angoulême (Paris, 1841), pp. 158 and 375. Fil-
lon was bishop of Senlis 1522–26.
18 Bishop of Tulle, 1539; Mâcon, 1544; Orléans, 1551.
19 Laurent Ripart, “Marguerite à Nice ( juin 1538),” in Études sur “L’Heptaméron” de Mar-
guerite de Navarre, ed. Christine Martineau-Génieys (Nice, 1996), pp. 123–39 (p. 136).
20 Pierre de Brantôme, Recueil des dames, ed. Étienne Vaucheret (Paris, 1991), p. 183.
rested on the role of apostolic continuity as a guarantor of doctrine. Thus,

Febvre is overly precipitous in stating that she did not have a “sens de
la hiérarchie catholique” (Amour sacré, p. 201). According to the histo-
rian, Marguerite’s mystical and feminine sensibilities were at odds with
hierarchical communication. This overlooks the fact, however, that the
works of Pseudo-Dionysius—greatly admired at the time as the Apostle
of the Gauls—were at one and the same time the foundation of a mysti-
cal theology and of a hierocracy. Luther’s accusations against the Pseudo-
Dionysian writings, that he considered more Platonizing than Christian,
were rejected by the Faculty of Theology of Paris; they were also rejected
by Guillaume Briçonnet, who discussed Dionysius’s thought with Margue-
rite at such length that she asked the bishop to devote a letter to him
in 1524.21 According to a Dionysian vision, the transmission of the light
of divine grace is effected by means of a hierarchical mediation, through
which come the sacraments. Paul Sadolet, who in 1548 praised the Cathol-
icism of the queen of Navarre and her zeal for the reform of the Church,
stressed that she spoke of the latter with moderation, “en réservant tou-
jours l’autorité de qui cela relève.”22 This ecclesiology was all the more
likely to appeal to Marguerite in that it established a theologico-political
order suited to her situation—that of a sister of a king who was not a
“daughter of France” since her own father had never ruled. In a letter from
December 1521, Briçonnet recalled that the monarch is God’s viceroy and
lieutenant on earth, adding that God “luy a données les grâces insignes
et grandes pour les faire ardre en son administration et royaume” (Cor-
respondance, 1:113). This Dionysian view of the world seems to be con-
firmed by Brantôme, according to whom, when Montmorency cast doubt
on Marguerite’s religion, the sovereign replied: “Elle ne croyra jamais que
ce que je croyray, et ne prendra jamais de relligion qui prejudicie à mon
Estat” (Recueil, p. 178). It would be reductive to read such an affirmation
only in terms of family ties or a sister’s love of her brother. The queen
of Navarre cared about the unity of the kingdom as she cared about the
unity of the Church—which depended on the king and the pope. How,
then, could she have joined the schismatic heretics who saw Rome as
21 Letter 103: Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite d’Angoulême, Correspondance (1521–

1524), ed. Christine Martineau and Michel Veissière, with Henry Heller, 2 vols. (Geneva,
1975–79), 2:162. On Dionysius in France and Europe in the 16th century, see Jean-Marie Le
Gall, Le Mythe de saint Denis: entre Renaissance et Révolution (Seyssel, 2007).
22 Marc Venard, Réforme protestante, réforme catholique dans la province d’Avignon au
XVIe siècle (Paris, 1993), p. 416.
the new Babylon and the pope as the Antichrist, and whom François I
increasingly viewed as fomenters of sedition? Marguerite was certainly a
papist, attached to hierarchies. Toward the end of her life, she confided in
Paul III that she had always loved, respected, and obeyed the pope, espe-
cially since the meeting in Nice when he had received her with such marks
of distinction (“dopo che io ne recevei tanti honori a Niza”).23
There is no doubt that Marguerite needed the pope and recognized
his power with respect to canonical dispensations and investitures of
ecclesiastical offices. But neither did she deny the power of the keys of
the successor of Saint Peter since, in November 1524, she took part in
Lyon in the jubilee declared by Clement VII on his accession to the papal
throne (Génin, Lettres, p. 172). In November 1533, while the Miroir de l’âme
pécheresse was the subject of debate and Advent was approaching, Clem-
ent VII accorded her a dispensation for medical reasons (she believed she
was pregnant) from the obligation to abstain from meat, eggs, butter, and
dairy products. The dispensation was also intended to calm the queen’s
scruples of conscience.24 In 1545, she wrote to Cardinal Farnese asking him
to annul the marriage of her daughter to the duke of Cleves.25 Marguerite
did not seek in any way to free herself from the pope’s spiritual power
over Christendom and in relation to its temporal princes, nor, according
to the nuncio, did she approve of the schismatic course taken by the king
of England.26
Marguerite also intervened frequently to obtain ecclesiastical benefices
for her clients—from the king (as a result of the Concordat) but also from
the pope. In 1536, the nuncio was strongly solicited to secure the bish-
opric of Oloron for Gérard Roussel.27 From 1540 on, she was extremely
active in ensuring that Georges d’Armagnac, whom she called her son,
should receive a cardinal’s hat.28 In 1542, she denied that he was illegiti-
mate and the nuncio expressed his fear that if her request was denied, she
23 Charles Samaran and Henry Patry, “Marguerite de Navarre et le pape Paul III: lettres
inédites,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 68 (1907), 320–38 (p. 338).
24 Bartolommeo Fontana, Renata di Francia, duchessa di Ferrara, sui documenti
dell’archivio Estense, del Mediceo, del Gonzaga e dell’archivio secreto Vaticano, 3 vols.
(Rome, 1889–99), 1:489.
25 Samaran and Patry, “Marguerite,” p. 334.
26 Correspondance des nonces en France: Carpi et Ferrerio, ed. Jean Lestocquoy, Acta
nuntiaturae gallicae (Rome-Paris, 1961), p. 535.
27 Correspondance des nonces en France: Carpi et Ferrerio, pp. 99 and 220.
28 Ibid., p. 619.
might turn against the pope.29 There was no real danger of this: in 1544
d’Armagnac was still not a cardinal and Marguerite continued to plead
his cause. As she declared in December 1544, in a letter to Cardinal Far-
nese, Georges d’Armagnac was worthy of a cardinal’s hat not only because
of his personal merits, but also in consideration of “l’onneur que par ce
moien le roy de Navarre et moy en pouvons recevoir.” Having always been
“loyale et fidèle au pape,” it would be strange and a source of shame “que
nostre seulle maison demour[ât] en tout ce reaulme sans sentir le tesmoi-
gnaige d’estre en sa bonne grâce.”30 In the European political order, the
pope was a dispenser of high offices and honors which conferred rank and
distinguished families. To break with Rome was to break with the socio-
political hierarchy guaranteed by the Church. Marguerite was socially and
politically conservative; she also had strong ambitions for her husband,
his reduced domains, and their less-than-secure lineage.
If Marguerite needed the pope however, he also needed her. Some
would again stress here the worldly aspects of this exchange, for exam-
ple regarding the help she afforded the Farnese family. Thus, in 1540, she
gave her support to the marriage of Vittoria Farnese with Monsieur
d’Aumale, who was a Guise.31 The following year, she undertook to wel-
come to the French court the young Horace Farnese, the natural son of
Pier Luigi, duke of Parma.32 And in 1542, she intervened to promote his
marriage to a princess of the house of Este from Ferrara.33 At the same
time, it would be an oversimplification to reduce papal policy involving
Marguerite to these family strategies.
As the sister of a king, to whom she was also an influential advisor,
the pope was careful to show Marguerite all due regard. As early as 1522,
Adrian VI asked her to use her influence with François I to promote
peace.34 In October 1524, Clement VII wrote asking her to encourage the
king to receive the papal datary Ghiberti, who hoped to appease the dis-
pute which was to lead to Pavia (Jourda, Répertoire, p. 44). After the death
of Louise de Savoie, between 1531 and 1549, no fewer than 14 papal briefs
29 Correspondance des nonces en France: Capodiferro, Dandino et Guidiccione, ed. Jean

Lestocquoy, Acta nuntiaturae gallicae (Rome-Paris, 1963), pp. 109 and 140.
31 Correspondance des nonces en France: Carpi et Ferrerio, p. 595.
33 Correspondance des nonces en France: Capodiferro, Dandino et Guidiccione, pp. 114
and 128.
34 Pierre Jourda, Répertoire analytique et chronologique de la correspondance de Mar-
guerite d’Angoulême (Paris, 1930), p. 17.
recommended to the queen’s good graces various envoys sent to France:

a nuncio, a legate, or even a chamberlain.35 All these documents solicit-
ing Marguerite’s personal intervention offer so many testimonials to her
faith, prudence, and fidelity to the Holy See. Nuncios furthermore some-
times advised the pope to write to her given the importance of her role
in the royal council, as in December 1535 when Rome sought to avoid a
return to war. Following a conversation with her at that time, the nuncio
reported: “she always speaks with me in the best way one could possibly
wish for.”36
The pope, in his role as father of all Christian princes, tried to use Mar-
guerite’s diplomatic influence to maintain peace between Europe’s two
most powerful Catholic sovereigns at the same time that confessional
divisions and growing Ottoman power were weakening the Holy See. As
a humanist, Marguerite was receptive to a project aimed at preserving and
renewing Christendom since, on 17 March 1536, the nuncio reported that
she spoke favorably concerning the pope’s mediation between François I
and Charles V in the hope of avoiding war.37 The following year, the nun-
cio stated that Marguerite was making great efforts to promote peace.38
Equally, during his mission in 1542 to prevent conflict from reigniting,
Jacopo Sadoleto expressed regret at the queen’s absence from court since
this deprived him of a precious ally.39 A year later, the nuncio judged her
the strongest supporter of Rome vis-à-vis the king (“il meglio appogio”).40
In February 1544, in a letter to Cardinal Farnese, the Cardinal Nephew, she
encouraged him, as a “mère à son fils,” to persevere in his efforts to find
common ground between Charles V and François I.41 In April or May 1547,
she wrote to Paul III that she hoped he would strengthen the friendship
between Charles V and the new king of France in order to “reformer et
conserver la chrétienté.”42
The issue of peace was in fact closely connected to an important eccle-
siastical question: the meeting of the Council that Paul III had convoked
35 Fontana, Renata di Francia, 1:492, 479; 2:482, 486; 3:366, 372, 373, 375, 377, 378, 380,
381–84.
36 “[C]erto sempre con meco parla di sorte che meglio non si sapia desiderare,” Cor-
respondance des nonces en France: Carpi et Ferrerio, p. 99.
38 Ibid., pp. 247, 254, 305.
39 Richard M. Douglas, Jacopo Sadoleto 1477–1547, Humanist and Reformer (Cambridge,
Mass., 1959), p. 171.
40 Correspondance des nonces en France: Capodiferro, Dandino et Guidiccione, p. 294.
in 1535. As early as the following year, the pope asked for Marguerite’s
support.43 In 1540, in a conversation with the nuncio, the queen declared
herself in favor of such a Council.44 The pope and the king of France were
both concerned at this time by Charles V’s attempts to settle religious dif-
ferences in the Empire by means of colloquies. Clearly agreements reached
in this way were politically detrimental to François I, whose interests were
served by divisions within the Empire, but settlements reached under the
aegis of imperial power also undermined the authority of the pope and
Church councils. The bishop Pier Paulo Vergerio, sent by the pope to
Worms, made his way there via France, where the king engaged him as
his own agent. But the bishop was also affected by Marguerite’s spiritual
and intellectual influence. In a letter he wrote to her, he revealed his pes-
simism concerning these regional colloquies marked by divisive theologi-
cal quibbling, but he recognized at the same time that their failure would
well serve the interests of the pope and the king of France.45 In 1541, Mar-
guerite told the nuncio Dandino that this policy of colloquies showed that
the emperor, like the king of England, sought to “make himself pope in
his own domains.”46 When the Council of Trent finally opened in 1545,
François I sent a small delegation of prelates, including several bishops
close to his sister, such as Nicolas Dangu, bishop of Séez, Guillaume Pel-
licier, Pierre Du Chastel, Gérard Roussel, and Jean Joly de Choin. One of
the royal ambassadors envisaged by François I, Jacques de Mesme, was
especially close to Marguerite.47
The queen of Navarre’s support for a Council arose from her Gallican
vision of Christendom, whereas the king of France was somewhat more
hesitant, given the risk that it might offer a platform to that part of the
French Church opposed to the Concordat. Marguerite’s intent was at once
to assure the respect due to the Holy See, against the emperor, but also
to limit pontifical interference in the exercise of temporal power and to
promote the unity of Christendom. While respectful of the sovereign pon-
tiff, she nonetheless resisted any papal pretense to indirect control over

44 “Si bene Lauda che si faria un concilio,” Correspondance des nonces en France: Capo
diferro, Dandino et Guidiccione, p. 550.
45 Ann Jacobson Schutte, Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer (Geneva,
1977), pp. 144 and 149.
46 “[E]gli non pensava meno a farsi papa nelli suoi domini ch’avesse mai fatto il Re
d’Inghilterra,” Correspondance des nonces en France: Capodiferro, Dandino et Guidiccione,
p. 24.
47 Alain Tallon, La France et le Concile de Trente (Rome, 1997), pp. 168, 166, 644.
temporal powers. In keeping with this view, in March 1540, she made
known to the nuncio her opposition to any idea of depriving the king of
England of his throne by means of a papal deposition supported by mili-
tary action from François I and Charles V. She even reminded him point-
edly that the papacy had behaved in just this way when it had deprived
the kings of Navarre of their title following the Spanish conquest of the
southern part of their territory in 1512.48 The king of England would be
more likely to return to the fold of the Catholic Church if the emperor and
the king of France established a commercial blockade. Moreover, in the
light of imperial propaganda denouncing France’s alliance with the Turks
and the passivity of the Most Christian King in combating heresy, Margue-
rite repeated the position elaborated by the French monarchy justifying
these policies. In January 1536, in the wake of the affaire des placards, she
told the nuncio Carpi that François I had served Christianity well, having
punished the Lutherans more severely than the emperor, who “fait le saint
et le catholique” but did less against the heretics in his domains.49 As for
the sultan, he respected the king of France because he considered him
to be, like himself, a descendent of Hector of Troy.50 Two years later, the
Soliloque François, a defense of the Turkish alliance destined to remain
in manuscript, was dedicated to Marguerite by its author, Jean Lucas de
La Fons. According to this text, those who spoke out against royal poli-
cies violated the king’s secret counsel and sought to “usurper l’office de
chief, contre tout ordre hiérarchique.” Moreover, in seeking to discredit
the Most Christian King, Charles V was weakening Christendom and the
pope, while François had always defended “la foy catholique et pureté de
l’église chrétienne et militante.” The emperor besides had done nothing
to help the island of Rhodes in 1522; he also had infidel allies, like the king
of Tunis, and in Worms and Regensburg (Ratisbon) had negotiated with
heretics. Finally, the Bible did not forbid Israel from making alliances with
the gentiles.51
Marguerite’s attachment to the Roman Church reflects her theologico-
political beliefs that bring together, in one mystical body, social
order, ecclesiastical hierarchy, the unity of Christendom, respect for the

49 Ibid., p. 114.
51 V. L. Saulnier, “Le Soliloque français, œuvre inédite de Jean Lucas de La Fons: Une
apologie de l’alliance turque inspirée par Marguerite de Navarre,” in Mélanges d’histoire
littéraire de la Renaissance offerts à Henri Chamard (Paris, 1951), pp. 210–24.
sovereign pontiff, and a commitment to Gallicanism and the reform of

the Church.
Remaining Faithful to Royal Monastic Reform
Pierre Jourda stressed the importance Marguerite attached to a “réforme

de l’Église dans l’Église” (Marguerite, 1:303). The period saw many reform-
ist experiments of different kinds, at times little appreciated by certain
parts of the Catholic establishment, such as, for example, the experiments
of Lefèvre d’Étaples at Meaux, deemed heterodox by the Paris Faculty of
Theology. Marguerite was without question sympathetic to such initia-
tives in France as well as in Italy.52 It is understandable, then, that history,
the student of change, should have focused on this interest in new ways
of reform. Nevertheless, Marguerite did not repugn more traditional forms
of action like monastic reform, which, contrary to the belief of Jourda,
was far from representing “les premiers et timides essais d’une réforme
catholique” (Marguerite, 1:48). Augustin Renaudet and I have both empha-
sized the movement’s vitality, especially before 1520.53 Marguerite came
in contact with it very early, as she acknowledges in nouvelle 22 of the
Heptaméron. Here we meet a sinister character, the prior of Saint-Martin-
des-Champs, whose name the author withholds due to their former friend-
ship. In fact, Étienne Gentil was one of the major reformers of male and
female monastic houses in the Paris region between 1510 and 1535; he was
also the Visitor of Fontevrault and part of an attempt to reform Lérins.54
We do not know when Marguerite became acquainted with Gentil, but
the break between them came perhaps in 1521 for juridical rather than
religious reasons. In 1513, Marguerite also heard Bonifazio da Ceva preach
at Blois. He was the Franciscan Minister General who tried to reform his
order in unity under the established hierarchy (sub ministris), following
the model of Saint Colette, rather than through division, as was the prac-
tice of the Observant Franciscans (Jourda, Marguerite, 1:38). Marguerite’s
52 Richard Cooper, “Marguerite de Navarre et la réforme italienne,” in Marguerite de

Navarre, 1492–1992, pp. 159–88 (pp. 160–76).
53 Augustin Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres
d’Italie (1494–1517), 2nd ed. (Paris, 1953 [1916]); Jean-Marie Le Gall, Les Moines au temps des
Réformes, France (1480–1560) (Seyssel, 2001).
54 On Étienne Gentil, see Le Gall, Les Moines, esp. pp. 517–18, 546, 548–49. See also
Jean-Marie Le Gall, “Le temps des réformes bénédictines, XVe–XVIIIe siècle,” in Histoire de
l’abbaye de Lérins, ed. Mireille Labrousse, Eliana Magnani, Yann Codou, et al. (Bégrolles-
en-Mauges, 2005), pp. 321–448 (p. 370).
entourage also included reformers of major abbeys like Guillaume Briçon-

net, Commendatory Abbot of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and Artus Fillon,
who, as bishop of Senlis, reformed the abbeys of Saint-Maurice and La
Victoire in that city.55
Despite the view of Lucien Febvre (Amour sacré, p. 20), an inventory of
Marguerite’s interventions in this area seems to be called for:
1515, a letter to the Parlement of Paris in favor of the reformed Dominicans
of Le Mans against the non-reformed.56
1516, a letter to the Parlement of Paris in favor of the reform of Yerre.57
1518, a letter to Leo X in favor of Almenèches.
1521, a letter to the king in favor of the reform of Saint-Andoche and Saint-
Jean d’Autun.58
1524, the reform of the abbey of Issoudun.59
1526, Luigi Canossa asks her to intervene at La Trinité in Caen.
1531, a letter to Rome asking the pope to support the reform of the Francis-
cans of Amiens and in which she regrets “la désobéissance des religieux
à l’égard de leurs supérieurs.”60
1532, Gregorio Cortese requests that Marguerite dissuade the king from end-
ing the incorporation of Lérins in the Italian reformed Congregation of
Santa Giustina of Padua.61
1540, she requests the reform of the Dominicans at Tarbes and the Poor
Clares at Mont-de-Marsan.62
As this chronology makes clear, Marguerite’s involvement in monas-
tic reform slowed somewhat after 1530, a development in line with the
general tendency following the intense activity of the years from 1480 to
1520. Other reforms made their appearance and the regular orders were
increasingly discredited by numerous internal disputes. It is nonetheless
apparent that Marguerite was an important force in this movement and
replied positively to those who sought her help.
55 Gallia christiana in provincias ecclesiasticas distributa, ed. Denis de Sainte-Marthe et

al., 16 vols. (Farnborough, 1970 [1715–1865]), 10:1440.
56 Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549)
and Her Evangelical Network, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston, 2009), 2:577.
57 Jourda, Répertoire, p. 3.
58 Jourda, Répertoire, p. 9; Gallia christiana, 4:481.
59 Gaspard Thaumas de La Thaumassière, Histoire de Berry, 2 vols. (Bourges, 1865
[1689]), 1:111.
60 Jourda, Marguerite, 1:123.
61 Histoire de Lérins, p. 374. V. L. Saulnier, “Troubles au couvent de Tarascon: Marguerite
de Navarre, Guillaume du Maine, Claude de Bectoz et Denys Faucher,” French Renaissance
Studies in Honor of Isidore Silver, Kentucky Romance Quarterly 21 suppl. 2 (1974), 309–17.
62 Jourda, Marguerite, 1:312.
The importance Marguerite attached to monastic and conventual

reform was based in part on a familial and patrimonial heritage. Margue-
rite’s domains—which even recent historiography, adopting an expres-
sion of Martin Bucer, describes as “petites Germanies”—had been affected
before her time by monastic reform. As a result of her marriage to the
duke of Alençon, Marguerite became the daughter-in-law of Marguerite
de Lorraine, a person much involved in monastic reform in Normandy.
Marguerite de Lorraine received the habit of the Third Order of the Fran-
ciscans in 1516 from the hands of Gabriel Maria, before whom she took
vows four years later.63 Marguerite de Lorraine was not only a princess
devoted to works of charity, she also wrote a series of Pensées pieuses in
the form of a dialogue between Christ and the Virgin Mary.64 Obsessed by
the question of salvation, the duchess become nun repeats the leitmotif
“n’espère pas mais aussi ne désespère.” The world is vanity but in Christ
there is hope. The Virgin, the first to believe in the resurrection of her
son, is the image of this confidence. Filled with sorrow, the Virgin is also
the image of love for Christ, whom, the text tells us, Marguerite de Lor-
raine had the good fortune to see face to face (BnF, n.a. fr. 1857, fol. 34).
This spirituality focused on Christ and the Virgin as the model of devotion
was well suited to a hierarchical vision of the world inspired by Pseudo-
Dionysius. Indeed, the aristocratic nun drew a clear parallel between the
angelic and earthly hierarchies: lords are equivalent to Dominions; priests
to Principalities, married men to Archangels, and monks to Thrones (ibid.,
fol. 54).
The queen of Navarre took on part of this spiritual and reforming heri-
tage. She supported the reformed Dominicans in Caen in 1515, as Mar-
guerite de Lorraine had done seven years earlier in Argentan. At the
latter’s death, Marguerite de Navarre continued to pay a pension of 40
livres tournois (l.t.) to Marie Gaveran, a nun at Mortagne.65 In September
1543, she created two pensions of 20 l.t. for two other nuns in the same
house, to which she made a gift of wood in 1548.66 When the Confraternity
of the Présentation de Notre-Dame of Alençon was subjected to fines in
63 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 1047, fols. 49 and 54v.

64 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, n.a. fr. 1857, Marguerite de Lorraine, Pensées
pieuses.
65 Abel Lefranc and Jacques Boulenger, Comptes de Louise de Savoie et de Marguerite
d’Angoulême (Paris, 1905), pp. 79 and 95.
66 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, MS 1831, Jean de Frotté, Registre de la mai-
son de Marguerite de Navarre. Livres de dépenses. Deuxième registre des finances, 1548–1549,
fols. 14 and 60.
1546, Marguerite decided to remit half the sum and directed that the other
half be used to renovate the chapel of the confraternity, founded by her
mother-in-law in the church of Notre-Dame (Bib. Inst., 1831, fol. 49). Piety,
for Marguerite, included fidelity to the religion of her ancestors and to a
mother-in-law soon wreathed in an aura of sanctity.
In 1517, Marguerite’s brother granted her the duchy of Berry. This had
been a particularly important locus of monastic renewal, with the Bene-
dictine reform of Chezal-Benoît and the foundation by Jeanne de France
of the Order of the Annonciades, which this daughter, sister, and repu-
diated wife of kings of France subsequently entered herself. Marguerite
continued this activity in Berry, which must have been familiar to her
through Gabriel Maria, an Observant Franciscan who had been close to
both Marguerite de Lorraine and Jeanne de France. In December 1523, in
response to his sister’s urging, François I confirmed the pension of 340
l.t. that Jeanne de France had granted her beloved Annonciades. A little
earlier, Marguerite herself had given them tithes, both because of their
material need and in recognition of the prayers they offered on her behalf
as duchess.67 In September 1542, she remitted the taxes they owed her for
80 acres of newly acquired land.68
If Marguerite’s involvement in monastic reform lessened from around
1530, she continued to find monastic life attractive, and not only because
of her filial piety and her obligations as duchess of Alençon and Berry.
She was also drawn to it as a matter of personal choice, frequenting reli-
gious houses throughout her life. In 1522, she visited Saint-Victor in Paris;69
she stayed with the Celestines in Lyon in 1525 and, in October of that
year, spent much time in the monasteries of Toledo (Jourda, Marguerite,
1:124). In 1531, for “la consolation spirituelle de son âme,” Pope Clement
VII granted her the right, with 12 noblewomen of her choice, to enter the
enclosure of any convent of Poor Clares, to speak and eat with the sis-
ters, and even, accompanied by four ladies, to spend the night (Fontana,
Renata di Francia, 3:370). We know that Marguerite paid frequent visits
to the Poor Clares in Nérac. In 1547, as François I lay dying and following
his death, she spent several months in the Fontevrist priory of Tusson.
67 Ferdinand Delorme, “Documents pour l’histoire du Bienheureux Gabriel Maria,” La

France Franciscaine 10 (1929), 212–16.
68 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, MS 1830, Jean de Frotté, Registre de la mai-
son de Marguerite de Navarre. Livres de dépenses. Premier registre des finances, 1540–1548,
fol. 96.
69 Pierre Driart, “Chronique parisienne,” Mémoires de la société de l’histoire de Paris et
de l’Ile de France 22 (1895), 67–178 (p. 74).
“Souvant on l’a veu . . . chanter aveq’ les Religieuses en leur Messes et leur

vespres,” Brantôme tells us (Recueil, p. 182). In this light, it is not surprising
that she chose as the setting for the company of noble storytellers in the
Heptaméron the abbeys of Saint-Savin, where they were “humainement
receuz,” and Serrance.70
Aside from the Poor Clares, the Second Order of Saint Francis, Mar-
guerite had a particular affection for the Order of Fontevrault, a mixed
congregation under the rule of an abbess. She went there in 1516 and in
the winter of 1545, and dedicated a poem to the abbess (Jourda, Mar-
guerite, 1:50). In the interval, she supported the continued reform of the
order. With the help of the legate, Philippe de Luxembourg, of Jean de
Bans, the abbot of Saint-Martin-de-Séez, and of Artus Fillon, Almenèches
was reformed by the transfer of 15 nuns from the Fontevrist priory of Bel-
homer, which had itself been reformed in 1498. Marguerite was instru-
mental in having the buildings restored and Marie de La Jaille installed as
abbess in place of Jacqueline Heudé, who had nonetheless been elected
(Gallia christiana, 11:737–38). Luigi Canossa, bishop of Bayeux, wrote to
Marguerite in 1526 on behalf of the nuns of La Trinité in Caen, whose
reform was undertaken by the abbess Renée de Bourbon, who was also
abbess of Fontevrault (Gallia christiana, 11:435–36). There were, moreover,
family ties to that order as is seen in the fact that the Fontevrist priory of
Haute-Bruyère was chosen for the interment of the heart and entrails of
François I.71 Who can say whether Marguerite, who often presented her-
self as a “mère spirituelle,” did not have a particular interest in the power
exercised by women in their capacity as abbess, and if her attachment
to Catholicism was not also due in part to the degree of freedom that
monastic structures offered women?72 Brantôme reports that at Tusson,
Marguerite would frequently “faire l’office de l’abesse” (Recueil, p. 182).
A certain element of feminism may thus explain her attachment to monas-
ticism and therefore to Catholicism.
Marguerite was also a lifelong distributor of alms to monks and nuns:
17 livres to the Poor Clares of Argentan in December 1540 and again in
February 1541, when she gave the same sum to the nuns of Essay (Bib.
70 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani (Paris, 1999), pp.

81ff.
71 Jean Jacquart, François Ier (Paris, 1980), p. 393.
72 On the “mère spirituelle,” see Viviane Mellinghoff-Bourgerie, “L’Échange épistolaire
entre Marguerite d’Angoulême et Guillaume Briçonnet: discours mystiques ou direction
spirituelle?,” in Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1992, pp. 135–57 (pp. 140–42).
Inst., 1830, fols. 10, 15, 18). At Easter 1543, after Communion, her secretary
recorded that she gave 52 écus to 13 convents (ibid., fol. 123). In May 1543,
she forgave a penalty of 106 l.t. owed to her by the nuns of Almenèches
(Bib. Inst., 1831, fol. 7). In 1545, she paid 50 l.t. that various debtors owed
to the Dominicans of Bourges, which is an indication both of her concern
for those in debt and of her desire to protect the convent (ibid., fol. 30).
All these gifts were not merely a demonstration of her well-known gener-
osity; they show that she did not reject the intercessory role of men and
women living a cloistered life consecrated to God. In this spirit, she made
a gift to the Franciscans of Alençon in 1526 in order to be included in their
prayers (Jourda, Marguerite, 1:142). In June 1541, she distributed 35 l.t. to
mendicant friaries in Tours, asking for prayers for her sick daughter (Bib.
Inst., 1830, fol. 32). At the end of 1542, believing herself to be pregnant,
she had 50 l.t. given to the nuns of Nérac (Jourda, Marguerite, 1:277–78).
In 1545, in addition to the money given to the mendicants of Bourges, the
abbey of Essay received a donation of wood (ibid., 1:304). This continued
recourse to the intercession of religious orders offers eloquent testimony
to her attachment both to the communion of saints and to the institu-
tional Church.
All this leads us to the question of her understanding of reform and of
monastic life. Marguerite had no great respect for the principle of elec-
tion, and a good number of abbeys reformed with her help saw their
elected superior deposed. In 1530, she wrote to Montmorency to notify
him that the abbey of Issoudun, whose income was between 6000–7000
l.t., would soon likely need a new abbot and she recommended Chris-
tophe Garrault as someone who would lead it to “mieux vivre en bon état
régulier.” Concerning procedure, she continued: “Ne scay encores si les
moynes ont privilège d’eslire toutefois quant je scauray par votre réponse
le bon playsir du roy je y ferai donner tel ordre que y sera requis afin que
ledict personnage puisse être pourveu selon mon désir pour le bien de
l’abbaye” (Génin, Lettres, p. 262). Acting in this way, Marguerite expressed
her authority as duchess. In the end, however, it was not her candidate
who was appointed and who would oversee the reform of Issoudun but
Jacques Colin, abbot of Saint-Ambroise in Bourges. Neither was Margue-
rite particularly concerned with the canonical principle that reserved
regular benefices to the regular clergy. In 1535, she intervened to ensure
that Georges d’Armagnac receive Saint-Martin-de-Séez and Jean Du Bel-
lay Saint-Vincent-du-Mans, two abbeys reformed by Chezal-Benoît and in
principle requiring the election of an abbot from within the order (Jourda,
Répertoire, p. 134). Neither religious habit nor procedure mattered much
to Marguerite as long as she believed a candidate possessed the required

qualities. In 1538, she visited in person the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris
in order to accelerate the profession of Antonio Caracciolo, one of her
protégés, a young man attracted to the eremitic life of the Carthusians
or of la Sainte-Baume, and whom she wanted to see succeed the elected
abbot Jean Bordier. Bordier was uncooperative, however, and in 1542, hav-
ing tried in vain to resign in favor of a monk, he resolved to cede his
abbey to the Cardinal de Bourbon. At that point, Marguerite intervened
to obtain the Cardinal’s withdrawal in favor of Caracciolo, who finally
became abbot of Saint-Victor in 1543.73 It is true that the new superior was
a regular but his nomination was as a commendatory abbot who claimed
the full power of collation and income from the office. In no time at all,
Caracciolo found himself in conflict with his monks, who accused him of
violating the abbey’s constitutions and appealed the abuses to the Par-
lement. At this point, Marguerite intervened again in order to have the
matter referred to the king’s private council.74 Believing himself a worthy
pastor, Caracciolo considered the monks’ contestation itself an indication
of a disordered life and wrote the Mirouer de vraye religion, in which he
enjoined them to holy obedience: “Vous devez rendre grâce à Dieu qui
vous a pourvu d’un père qui vous aime et désire votre salut. Vous devez
vous employer à luy faire chose agréable et lui porter en toute chose, hon-
neur et obéissance et sans trop curieusement vous enquérir pourquoi il
commande une chose ou une autre, estimer tous ses commandements
être raisonnables.”75 Caracciolo subscribed to a view of reform as coming
from above, per capite. To obey one’s superior was to obey God. We see,
then, that Marguerite remained faithful to the principle of royal reform, in
which election was not the primary means of reestablishing regularity of
life but rather a cause of disorder. The guarantee of the good state of the
Church of France was the appointment of worthy people at the head of
communities. Such a view is in line with the logic of the Concordat, even
if in reality this was implemented quite differently. Marguerite espoused
the ideas of royal Gallicanism rather than those of capitular Gallicanism.
Caracciolo’s text, written for the canons regular of Saint-Victor, allows
us to discern Marguerite’s ideal of the monastic life, knowing that she
73 Fourier Bonnard, Histoire de l’Abbaye royale et de l’Ordre des chanoines réguliers de

St-Victor de Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 1904–08), 2:36.
74 Joseph Roserot de Melin, Antonio Caracciolo, évêque de Troyes (1515?–1570) (Paris,
1923), pp. 24, 28, 32, 37.
75 Antoine Caracciolo, Le Mirouer de vraye religion (Paris, 1544), p. 25.
was familiar with Luther’s De votis monasticis, apparently translated into

French for her by Antoine Papillon in 1524. At first, Luther seems to have
envisaged a renewal of monastic life, inviting those in religious orders not
to view their vows as a work leading to salvation but as a consequence of
their love of God. In 1521, however, he launched an attack on monastic
vows on the grounds they had no foundation in Scripture and were often
made impiously since, through the application of a human law, monks
hoped for salvation, having more confidence in their vows, their merit,
and their rule, than in faith in Jesus Christ. If the cloister were to become
a kind of school, which individuals might enter and leave freely, where
the Bible was read and the gospel preached, Luther was ready to concede
a place to monasticism: it might be a vocation like any other, neither bet-
ter nor worse. But why submit to vows and to a rule if one believes in
Scripture and in salvation by faith and the sacrifice of Christ? Moreover,
many religious orders, like Cluny in 1524, had forbidden Lutheran books in
their houses. One of Luther’s disciples, the Franciscan François Lambert,
admitted that if he had been allowed to keep them, he would not have
left the order. Finally, then, Luther embraced the idea that monasticism
must be eliminated since it led to wrong belief and formed an obstacle to
the spread of the true gospel. Confronted by a wave of apostasies, Luther,
himself a monk, vacillated between urging that vows be abandoned and
remaining within an order. In 1521, he wrote to his father in the dedica-
tory epistle of his De votis monasticis: “I am still a monk and yet not a
monk. I am a new creature, not of the pope but of Christ.”76 But subse-
quently, he abandoned the idea of a renewal of monastic life and of vows
and advocated secularization, himself leaving his order and marrying in
1524.77 From that point on, abandoning the religious habit was seen as a
moment of conversion, a reversal of the taking of vows. For Luther, those
called apostates were the true Christians, and monks were apostates to
the gospel.
This was not Marguerite’s view. The queen did not support the secular-
ization of monasteries; on the contrary, in 1519, the pope allowed her to
found the monastery of Essay with a contingent of penitent women from
76 Martin Luther, Works. American Edition, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Leh-
mann, 55 vols. (Saint Louis and Philadelphia, 1955–86), 48:335.
77 See Le Gall, Les Moines, ch. 12. See also Martin Luther, Jugement sur les vœux monas-
tiques, Œuvres, ed. Marc Lienhard and Matthieu Arnold (Paris, 1999) and Arnold’s infor-
mative note, pp. 1488–1503. For the letters addressed to monks and nuns, see Matthieu
Arnold, ed., La Correspondance de Luther (Mainz, 1996), pp. 408–24.
the Madeleine in Paris (Gallia christiana, 11:742). Nor did she favor grant-
ing regular clergy the freedom to nullify their vows. It is true that, in 1550,
the vicar of the archbishop of Avignon, Facchinettis, accused Marguerite,
when she passed through the city, of having wrecked his efforts to enforce
strict enclosure, increasingly seen as a fourth vow for women religious
(Venard, Réforme, p. 413). The accusation was made posthumously how-
ever, and is contradicted by a variety of actions. In 1526, Marguerite acted
to place in other convents a number of nuns who had left La Trinité in
Caen (Jourda, Répertoire, p. 78). In 1532, she had Robert Cavey, an apos-
tate Premonstratensian whose life was causing scandal, imprisoned in his
abbey of Silly. Marguerite did not like scandal or think that Christian lib-
erty authorized social disorder. Her position was rather like that of Eras-
mus when he discouraged those in religious orders from apostasy for fear
of scandal, the worst of all evils (Le Gall, Les Moines, p. 580). The gospel
might be lived in the cloister.
At the same time, Marguerite did not consider the taking of vows to be
incompatible with a belief in salvation by faith. In his Mirouer de vraye
religion, which was not without raising some suspicion on the part of the
Paris Faculty of Theology,78 her protégé Caracciolo reminded his readers
that “les œuvres et les mérites des hommes ne sont point de si grande
soufisance qu’ils puissent mériter la vie éternelle. Mais les mérites de
Jésus Christ la nous ont acquise qui tout seul a mérité pour nous et avec
son sang payé la dette et le tribut à Dieu” (p. 5). Thus, a religious habit
is no guarantee of salvation and the monastic life is not a state of per-
fection. Faithful to the spirit of Erasmus and of many monastic reform-
ers, Caracciolo argues for a religious life of the spirit, not merely of rites
and dress: “L’estat d’un vrai religieux ne consiste point aux cérémonies
extérieures . . . mais plutôt en pureté de cœur en laquelle seulement est
promise la vision de Dieu” (p. 6). He denounces those who “dégoisent leur
ramaige” during the office: “Dieu aime mieux un cœur humble qu’une voix
résonnante ou un art exquis de chanter” (p. 27). He encourages private
prayer while not denying the need for regular services or any of the vows;
in particular he emphasizes obedience and humility as well as poverty,
78 The faculty authorized its printing following an examination by Claude Bertot before
a number of doctors, led by the Franciscan Jacques Hugues, found in it two heretical prop-
ositions and one erroneous. Bertot intervened, however, to prevent the work from being
put on the list of censored books until Caracciolo had time to make corrections and elimi-
nate the errors. See Farge, Registre, 2:245, 269, 273.
which should be accompanied by a strong commitment to almsgiving,

fasting, and abstinence.
Drawn as strongly as she was to contemplation and union with God,
Marguerite could hardly fail to find the cloister appealing, a place ded-
icated to silence rather than to scholastic disputation and the pride of
learning. Caracciolo praised the monastic obligation of silence on the
grounds that speech is often lascivious, mean-spirited, and a source of
sin; the wisdom of the world is often empty chatter and folly (Mirouer, pp.
10–11). Being himself deeply attracted to the eremitic life, Caracciolo recalls
that the Desert Fathers broke their silence only to intone the psalms,
whereas the monks of his day are “cacqueteurs” and “mauvaises langues”
(p. 19). Marguerite de Navarre appreciated in the retreat of contempla-
tive life the possibility of flight from an active life that was frequently
tragic. On the other hand, the invitation to silence was not an invitation to
ignorance. Although she was skeptical of the vanity of scholastic theology,
Marguerite nevertheless loved learning and believed, like Erasmus, that
the cloister could be a place to cultivate a pious otium litteratum. Carac-
ciolo considered monastic and mystical life to be one of labor not of idle-
ness. Scripture and the Fathers of the Church were to be read; legends and
apocryphal fables were to be avoided (Mirouer, pp. 4v, 20–21). He encour-
aged monks to copy texts, because even if printed books were available
inexpensively, copying is an act of manual labor that also involves a form
of reading conducive to the rumination and memorization of the com-
mandments. At the same time, he also urged monks to correct printed
books (p. 22).
The harmony of the cloistered life with its meditation on sacred let-
ters characterizes another monastic network to which Marguerite had
ties: Lérins and Saint-Honorat-de-Tarascon. The queen had connections
with two Benedictine monks, Denis Faucher and Gregorio Cortese (the
future cardinal whose acquaintance she made around 1526).79 The con-
templative nuns of Tarascon belonged to the cura monialium of Lérins.
At the initiative of Cardinal Du Bellay, the abbot of Lérins, Denis Fau-
cher undertook the reform of Tarascon with the help of several nuns,
one of whom was Scolastique (or Claude) de Bectoz.80 The intention was
to cultivate the nuns’ mastery of Latin and Greek and encourage their
79 On Lérins, see Le Gall, “Le temps des réformes bénédictines.”

80 Faucher’s Opera omnia are included in Vincent Barral, Chronologia sanctorum et
aliorum virorum illustrium ac abbatum sacrae insulae Lerinensis (Lyon, 1613), part 2, pp.
222–446. On the initiation of the reform by Du Bellay, see pp. 222 and 285–86.
taste for letters.81 Some of them, like Sister Scolastique, who was praised
by Bonaventure des Periers and Visagier, acquired a reputation among
humanists82—a situation that might recall Erasmus’s colloquy The Abbot
and the Learned Woman. In this way, Faucher hoped that his nuns would
be able to read and meditate on Scripture with their hearts, not merely
with their lips like parrots.83 Beyond that, he may also have sought to
promote the education of women since Saint-Honorat took in young girls
and offered them schooling.84 This veritable sacred Parnassus was also a
place of asceticism and penitence however, intended to foster the refor-
matio mentis, the return of the soul to God. Marguerite was acquainted
with the literary merits of Sister Scolastique, whom she met during her
stay in Avignon in 1538.85 In July of that year, Denis Faucher addressed
a poem in hendecasyllables to Marguerite, in which he sang the queen’s
praises (Barral, Chronologia, pp. 297, 420). The role played by female reli-
gious houses in the education of women is no doubt another element
explaining Marguerite’s commitment to monastic life. In November 1541,
she donated the sum of 175 l.t. to pay the pensions of the daughters of her
late maître d’hôtel, Monsieur de La Mothe, placed in the monasteries and
priories of Fontevrault, Beaumont, Gaisne, Rives, and Desloges (Bib. Inst.,
1830, fol. 48). In 1546, she paid three years of expenses for a woman to a
convent in Blois (Bib. Inst., 1831, fol. 50).
Marguerite was thus much more committed to monastic life than was
Luther and she did not hold, as he did, that monastic vocation and evan-
gelical aspirations were incompatible. Indeed, the two kinds of reform,
monastic and evangelical, shared a number of characteristics (Le Gall,
Les Moines, ch. 12). The anti-Franciscanism that Marguerite portrayed in
the Heptaméron criticizes a form of religious instruction, often aimed at
unsuspectingly credulous women, that accorded too much importance to
works.86 Like Erasmus or Rabelais, Marguerite also denounced the igno-
rance of monks, the mechanical celebration of the liturgy, and, above all,
81 Marc Venard, “Humanisme monastique et réforme: Denis Faucher entre l’Italie et

la Provence,” in Humanisme et Église en Italie et en France méridionale, ed. P. Gilli (Rome,
2004), pp. 269–80.
82 Saulnier, “Troubles au couvent de Tarascon.”
83 Jan N. Pendergrass, Correspondance d’Antoine Arlier, humaniste languedocien: 1527–
1545 (Geneva, 1990), p. 240.
84 Pendergrass, Correspondance d’Antoine Arlier, p. 244. Arlier’s niece studied there.
85 Pendergrass, Correspondance d’Antoine Arlier, p. 174. Faucher’s correspondence indi-
cates that Scolastique de Bectoz wrote to the queen around 1537; Barral, Chronologia, p. 280.
86 See Gary Ferguson, “Mal vivre, mal croire: l’anticléricalisme de l’Heptaméron de Mar-
guerite de Navarre,” Seizième Siècle 6 (2010), 151–63.
the claims of some in the consecrated life to live in a state of perfection.

It is even possible that the later waning of her interest in the reform of
regular orders reflected a realization that this might proceed from and
encourage the idea that religious, by virtue of their vows, are better Chris-
tians than their lay brothers and sisters. For all that, the reduction of her
efforts in favor of monastic reform does not imply a condemnation of
monasticism per se. Like Erasmus in the colloquy of The Soldier and the
Carthusian, she considered the cloister, removed from the turmoil of the
world, a place suited to prayer and study, for both women and men. In
addition, given Marguerite’s neo-Platonist interests, she saw that these
places of solitude might favor contemplation, the return of the soul to
its creator, union, and deification.87 The cloister might be a locus amoe-
nus conducive to the Platonic sublimation of earthly love, as seen in nou-
velle 19 of the Heptaméron. Precisely at Lérins—as in the Congregation of
Santa Giustina of Padua as a whole, which was deeply influenced by the
Greek Fathers—the question of the soul’s union with God was considered
more important than that of salvation, which is a matter of confidence in
Christ’s promises. Monastic vows were less a way to salvation than a way
to divine contemplation.88
Marguerite’s attachment to monasticism, at precisely the time when the
Reformation was in the process of eliminating it, is also an element in her
continued fidelity to Catholicism. Other factors also call for examination.
Moving from place to place throughout her life, Marguerite frequently
took the opportunity to make a pilgrimage. In 1515, she went to Notre-
Dame-des-Fontaines, to la Sainte-Baume, and Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde
(Jourda, Marguerite, 1:47). In March 1529, she journeyed to Notre-Dame-
de-Cléry in order to fulfill a vow made during the illness of her daughter
(ibid., 1:154); she would return to Cléry with Queen Éléonore in 1534 and
with the king in 1544 (ibid., 1:304 and Jourda, Répertoire, p. 133). In a letter
written sometime between 1527 and 1531, she also asked Montmorency
to pray for her, should he go to Notre-Dame-de-Liesse (Génin, Lettres,
p. 151). Marguerite’s devotion to the Virgin Mary is clear. Nor did she
reject relics. In 1537, during a visit to Limoges, the city offered her some
as a gift (Jourda, Marguerite, 1:227). On 16 January 1538, the papal nuncio
encountered Marguerite in Montpellier cathedral, where she had attended
87 Abel Lefranc, Marguerite de Navarre et le platonisme de la Renaissance (Paris, 1897).

See especially his reading of the poem addressed to the abbess of Fontevrault.
88 See Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and the Reformation: The Congregation
of Santa Giustina of Padua (Oxford, 1985).
vespers and gone to see the relics.89 The way she distributed alms, more-
over, shows her respect for the liturgical calendar of saints’ days and feast
days. Thus her secrétaire des finances recorded that she donated 37 écus
d’or in October 1541, a month that had 31 days, four Fridays, and two fast
days for the vigils of Saints Simon and Jude and All Saints (Bib. Inst., 1830,
fol. 53). In December 1542, she purchased a large enamel image of an
apostle (ibid., fol. 111).
Monks, pilgrimages to Marian shrines, relics: so many signs that Mar-
guerite did not break with the communion of saints; so many signs, it
seems to me, that add up to much more than Abel Lefranc’s “indices fort
rares et bien peu symptomatiques de catholicisme” (Idées, p. 23). Others
could also be alleged. Around 1543, Marguerite had a Dominican confessor
(Jourda, Marguerite, 1:300); indeed, over time, her personal staff of reli-
gious grew: in addition to her two aumôniers, she had two, then three,
chaplains, one cleric assigned to her chapel, then two.90 In short, Margue-
rite would seem a strange Lutheran—or else, a genuine Catholic.
And yet a recent study, the most informative since Jourda’s biography,
puts back in circulation the idea of an evangelical Marguerite, where
evangelical means covert Lutheran. Jonathan Reid believes that, given her
position, Marguerite was obliged to remain silent and that it is therefore
not in her literary works that her sensibilities and her convictions may be
discerned, but through those with whom she corresponded, her protégés,
her entourage. And these, for the most part, were Evangelicals (King’s Sis-
ter, 1:63–64). According to this view, Marguerite militated for a reform
led by the king that might have led to a break with Rome (2:474, 501,
514). A staunch supporter of English interests in France, oriented more
toward Germany than Italy, she is seen as having advocated alliances
with Lutheran princes in order to promote the triumph of the gospel in
France—affinities that slanted her Evangelism toward Lutheranism (1:83,
42–43). Marguerite is thus said to have mobilized a network of writers and
infiltrated the system of benefices and even the inquisitorial structures by
placing men, committed as she was, to the cause of the true gospel (2:385–
87). Either before or after Marguerite’s death, many of these writers and
bishops were suspected of heresy. As exemplified by her daughter Jeanne
d’Albret, the legacy of this “Navarrian network” is said to be the Protestant
Reformation in France (1:13). The argument is forceful and detailed.

90 Lefranc and Boulenger, Comptes de Louise de Savoie, p. 73.
In the light of the evidence presented in this chapter however, it meets

certain objections. First of all, to speak of a “Navarrian network” supposes
that Marguerite was at the heart of a structured web which was not merely
a collection of diverse individuals, that she was the “captain” of the group,
in Briçonnet’s expression (King’s Sister, 1:186). In using this term however,
the bishop of Meaux was encouraging the then duchess to take on that
role, rather than describing an established fact. As the sister of the king,
Marguerite received requests of all kinds from many people; sometimes
she replied favorably, at other times not. Yet she was always a focus for
people’s hopes. A request or a dedication reflects not the reality of a situ-
ation, but what is hoped for. François I did not become a partisan of the
Reformation as a result of Calvin’s dedication to him of the Institutes of
Christian Religion. If Martin Bucer took Marguerite’s domains for “petites
Germanies,” we are not required to subscribe to the same view (2:393).
The danger is to take Marguerite for what many people wanted her to be
and particularly to fall into this trap when reading ambassadorial reports.
Diplomatic envoys told their sovereign what he or she wanted to hear.
The English ambassador reports a conversation with the queen of Navarre
in which she views the pope as the Antichrist (ibid., 1:63, 2:497). His desire
to confessionalize diplomatic relations is palpable. At the same time, the
nuncio describes Marguerite as the pope’s strongest ally. To whom should
we give credence? Each man sees, to some extent, what he wants to see.
In order to reach a conclusion, we must leave aside the interested state-
ments of those with whom Marguerite had dealings and judge her by her
actions. We must take into consideration her interventions to protect
partisans of the gospel from persecution, but also her fidelity to Rome,
her respect for Church hierarchy, her attachment to the Eucharist and
to monastic life, and her Marian piety. In all these respects, she is close
neither to the schismatic king of England nor to the Lutheran princes of
Germany.
Marguerite’s network is described by Reid form the point of view of
those who were Evangelicals or who would become heretics long after the
death of their protector, like the bishop of Troyes, Caracciolo, or Vergerio.
But her most important protégé, Cardinal Georges d’Armagnac, remained
a faithful Catholic, as did the Cardinal de Tournon.91 Marguerite certainly
had connections with inquisitors whose orthodoxy was called into ques-
tion, like Arnaud de Badet or Louis de Rochette. She also had ties to other
91 In relation to Armagnac, see Nicole Lemaitre and Charles Samaran, eds., Correspon-
dance du cardinal Georges d’Armagnac, vol. 1 (Paris, 2007).
inquisitors, however—like Daniel Moron, to whom she gave a pension in

January 1547 and again in 1548—who, because they were never suspect,
are less visible to the historian (Bib. Inst., 1831, fols. 49 and 54). In the same
way, not all of the writers connected to Marguerite were suspected of her-
esy, nor did they all become Reformed. In 1542, she paid an annual pen-
sion of 200 l.t. to the University of Bourges for Jacques Amyot, who came
to Berry with Abbot Jacques Colin, lecteur royal, who opened a school in
Saint-Ambroise (ibid., fol. 15). The future grand aumônier to Charles IX
and bishop of Auxerre, known for his translation of Plutarch, was never
subject to any investigation. But even certain suspect writers, like Rabe-
lais, remained within the Catholic fold. Having been suspect, having had
to flee the country, having been imprisoned, or having connections to
men or women who did break with Rome, does not necessarily mean that
one has left the Catholic Church. Take the case of Denis Faucher. Here is
a man connected to Marguerite, but also to Salmon Macrin, Jean-Baptiste
Folengo, Charles de Sainte-Marthe, Jean Visagier, as well as with Cardi-
nal Du Bellay and later the Cardinal de Lorraine and Cardinal Bertrand.92
Nuns opposed to the reform of Tarascon tried to make him out to be sus-
pect of heresy. These various connections would qualify him for inclu-
sion in the “Navarrian network” and even under the evangelical banner.
Yet this same man congratulated Meynier d’Oppède on the repression of
the Waldensians and wrote to Sainte-Marthe in July 1540, urging him to
beware of heresy.93
Was Marguerite then an Evangelical or a Catholic? In the final analysis,
labels matter little as long as we are clear about their meaning. Certainly
she was a Catholic, as long as we recognize also her commitment to salva-
tion by faith, to the reform of the body of the faithful, to reading Scripture
in the vernacular, and to the non-confessionalization of diplomatic alli-
ances. She was also an Evangelical, as long as the term signifies a desire
for the reform of the Gallican Church within the Roman Church, under
the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and encompasses her attachment to monastic
life, to the Eucharist, and to Marian piety.
92 Barral, Chronologia, pp. 308, 309, 327, 431.

93 “Dolui Sammarthane carissime ubi te in tam grave discrimen adductum accepi quo
vita tua periclitaretur sed dolore poenae contabui quod de religione male sentire te aie-
bant et haereticorum opiniones erroneas obfirmatio animo sustinere. . . . Mi Sammarthane
te hortor et pro mutua nostras benevolentia rogo ut talem te praestes quem nulla opinio
mala unquam a firmite sinceritaque fidei catholicae nec ulla tribulatio a mentis statu et
viti sapientis dignitatis possit dimovere,” Barral, Chronologia, p. 429.
NEO-Platonic Themes of Ascent in Marguerite de Navarre
Philip Ford
Là, sous tes piedz, les saisons

Recueillent leurs pas qui glissent,
Là, tu connois les raisons
Des longs jours qui s’apetissent,
Tu scais pourquoy le Soleil,
Ores palle, ores vermeil
Predit le vent & la pluye,
Et le serain qui l’essuye,
Tu scais les deux trains de l’eau,
Ou si c’est l’air qui sejourne,
Ou si la Terre qui tourne
Nous porte comme un bateau.1
Ronsard’s “Hymne triumphal,” from the Tombeau on the death of Margue-
rite de Navarre published by Nicolas Denisot in 1551, includes, amongst
many other themes, a section on the knowledge which the queen will
have gained as a result of the liberation of her soul from the body (vv.
397–432). This important (neo-)Platonic notion, linked to the theory of
knowledge as reminiscence expounded in Plato’s Phaedo, points to the
association of her philosophical and religious ideas, at least in the minds
of her contemporaries, with certain aspects of neo-Platonism, and there
are certainly elements of neo-Platonic love present in the Heptaméron as
well as other apparently neo-Platonic themes in her religious poetry. This
essay will explore the possible origins of these ideas in her intellectual and
spiritual development, and their presence in her writing.
Nevertheless, the precise role of neo-Platonism in Marguerite’s thinking
has been hotly debated, as Stephen Murphy points out in the introduc-
tion to his edition of J. de La Haye’s French translation of Marsilio Ficino’s
De amore.2 An important article by Christine Martineau, which took
1 Pierre de Ronsard, “Hymne triumphal sur le trepas de Marguerite de Navarre,” vv.

409–20, Œuvres complètes, ed. Paul Laumonier, 20 vols. (Paris, 1924–75), 3:74.
2 Symon Silvius [J. de La Haye], Le Commentaire de Marsile Ficin, Florentin: sur le Ban-
quet d’Amour de Platon, ed. Stephen Murphy (Paris, 2004), pp. 15–16. Murphy states, some-
what menacingly for this chapter, that “le cas [in favor of Marguerite’s neo-Platonism] a
été longuement débattu sans qu’on puisse conclure.” He also points out that, contrary to
90 philip ford
issue with the way in which she saw Abel Lefranc blurring the distinc-
tions between Platonism, religious neo-Platonism, and neo-Platonic love
theories, has to a certain extent defined the terms of the debate.3 While
Martineau sees no problem in accepting the idea of a strong neo-Platonic
influence on Marguerite de Navarre’s religious thinking, as a result of the
teaching of Guillaume Briçonnet, she perceives no presence of Ficinian
notions of love in the French queen’s writing. In what follows, we shall
attempt to reconsider these important issues by examining how her ideas
may have developed and entered into her writing. However, in doing so, it
will be important to remember that Marguerite was neither a philosopher
nor a theologian, and that consequently she was receiving many of the
ideas that she embraced second or third hand. In many cases, it will be
the images with which these ideas are associated rather than necessarily
the underlying theory that will have the most impact on her writing.
Influences on Marguerite’s Thinking
Like her brother, the future François I, Marguerite d’Angoulême would

have received a reasonably full education thanks to the encouragement
of her mother Louise de Savoie. After the death of her husband, Charles
d’Angoulême, in 1496, Louise moved in 1499 with her children to the château
d’Amboise, one of the residences of the king, Louis XII, where Marguerite
and François were taught by François de Moulins (de Rochefort) and Rob-
ert Hurault, reputedly men who were open to new ideas. She would have
been schooled in Latin as well as the vernacular.4 The accession of Fran-
çois to the throne in 1515 not only provided Marguerite with a prominent
role in court life, it also gave her access to important humanist thinkers
such as Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, who became her directeur de conscience
and introduced her in 1521 to his friend Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of
Meaux. It is largely through her correspondence with the latter, which
what is frequently stated, “il n’est dit nulle part que Marguerite de Navarre ait demandé à
son valet de chambre [J. de La Haye] de faire cette traduction,” though the first element
in the book, after the privilège, is a poem dedicated to the queen (p. 21).
3 Christine Martineau, “Le Platonisme de Marguerite de Navarre?,” Réforme, Human-
isme, Renaissance 4 (1976), 12–35. The work she takes issue with is Abel Lefranc, Les Idées
religieuses de Marguerite de Navarre d’après son œuvre poétique (Paris, 1898; Geneva,
1969).
4 On Marguerite’s education, see, for example, Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême,
Duchesse d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre (1492–1549): Étude biographique et littéraire, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1930; Geneva, 1978), 1:20–25.
neo-platonic themes of ascent 91
began in June 1521 and continued until the end of 1524, that Marguerite’s
religious ideas were able to develop.5
Early on, Marguerite had shown an interest in the ideas of Erasmus
and Luther, and was clearly attracted to a form of spirituality that was
not being provided by traditional Catholicism. In particular, she appears
to have been convinced by the Scripture-based theology that Briçonnet
practiced, influenced by certain neo-Platonic ideas deriving from Pseudo-
Dionysius the Areopagite and later writers such as Nicholas of Cusa. Some
of the central ideas from these Platonizing Christian sources include the
relationship between the soul and the body, the nature of the divine, and
the possibility of knowledge of and union with God. In the exchange of
letters between Marguerite and the bishop, we see him expounding his
ideas in a highly metaphorical language, based predominantly on biblical
sources.
The influence of Briçonnet on Marguerite’s thinking has, of course,
been the subject of some scholarly exposition, notably in recent years by
Jacob Vance.6 As he points out, the precise relationship between the soul
and God is at the heart of Briçonnet’s, essentially Augustinian, theology.7
Citing in particular letter 64 (Correspondance, 2:53–59), Vance explains
Briçonnet’s notion of the lantern of the soul, which can bring spiritual
enlightenment. After the Fall, man’s soul, which previously had access to
divine knowledge, is cut off from any direct apprehension of God, and his
reason too is incapable of achieving this. However, the “lanterne raison-
nable estaincte a esté illuminée par l’esperit de vie” (that is by the coming
of Jesus into the world) and, depending on the “disposicion et pureté de
l’ame,” God, the source of true light, conceals himself there “par grace à ce
que l’ame illumine le corps” (Correspondance, 2:55). God’s grace, in other
words, acts on the soul to illuminate man with divine truth thanks to the
coming of Jesus into the world.
The parallels with Ficino’s explanations of the workings of love in his
commentary on the Symposium are not hard to find and, like Briçonnet,
5 See Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite d’Angoulême, Correspondance (1521–1524), ed.

6 See Jacob Vance, “Humanist Polemics, Christian Morals: A Hypothesis on Marguerite
de Navarre’s Heptaméron and the Problem of Self-Love,” MLN: Modern Language Notes 120
Supplement (2005), S181–95, and “Préréforme et mysticisme: l’articulation du secret dans
la correspondance de Guillaume Briçonnet et Marguerite de Navarre,” in D’un principe
philosophique à un genre littéraire: les “Secrets,” ed. Dominique de Courcelles (Paris, 2005),
pp. 241–62.
7 See Vance, “Préréforme et mysticisme,” p. 254.
92 philip ford
Ficino is drawing on the same theological sources. In the words of La Haye’s

translation of the De amore with which Marguerite was associated:8
Non sans cause Denys compare dieu au soleil: pource que tout ainsi que le
soleil donne clarté au corps, et l’eschauffe, semblablement dieu baille clarté
aux esprits de verité, et ardeur de charité. (La Haye, Commentaire, p. 54)
Thus, if she read Ficino, Marguerite would have discovered the use of a
similar set of images to those expounded by Briçonnet through which the
nature of the soul’s relationship with God is explained.
It is indeed the importance of imagery, as a means of adumbrating
divine and philosophical truths, that Marguerite would have learnt from
her correspondence with Briçonnet. Often in the correspondence, it is
she who provides the initial image, and he who develops it, in a style of
exegesis which would no doubt have been inspired by his clerical duties
as preacher. The opening of Briçonnet’s letter 60 in the edition of the
Correspondance illustrates his method of presenting an idea in biblically
inspired imagery, followed by an exegetical section aimed at clarifying his
thought. Marguerite, in her letter to the bishop dating from before 24 June
1523, had referred to Luke 5:1–11, the miraculous draught of fishes which
led to Jesus’s recruitment of Simon Peter as disciple:
Estant le labeur de nuict infructueulx, pour neant, Madame, qui en cecité
travaille se lyeve avant le jour, lequel luisant en noz tenebres commande
mener le navire de foy en hault et gecter en sa parolle le rez de noz opera-
cions et solicitudes en la dexterité de la providence et bonté divine. Laquelle,
comme ne destitue les humbles, qui de soy rien et de Dieu tout presument
et actendent, aussy qui en leur force et vertus se gloriffient, humillie. Par
l’amplitude et grandeur de foy, est mené le navire en la haulte mer de
l’infinitude divine, en la profundité de laquelle Esperance gecte le retz que
Charité remplist en latitude sy très-exuberante qu’elle est contraincte com-
municquer à ses compaignons qui sont en l’aultre navire. En celuy de Pierre
(qui est l’ame congnoissante) est assiz Jesus l’instruisant (et par luy aultres)
sortir de terre et par contemplacion aller en hault où est sa naissance. Là,
enyvrée et plaine d’ymportable plenitude, se descharge et en communicque
à son corps, qui est le grand navire, par telle equalité et division que les
deux sont egallement remplies en telle plenitude que sy plus en avoient
seroient en danger de submersion; mais charité tousjours se distribue selon
la mesure et capacité de la foy.
8 Although La Haye’s translation was not printed until 1546, it is a relatively faithful ver-
sion of Ficino’s text and offers a good indication of the kind of philosophical language that
Marguerite would have been familiar with in the vernacular. For these reasons, we will use
La Haye’s translation of Ficino in this chapter rather than the original Latin.
Les deux navires sont l’ame et le corps, uniz par grandeur et charité; les
compaignons sont les sens de l’esperit et du corps, par lesquelz excersent
respectativement leurs operacions, predominant l’ame, et seulle gectant le
retz et, après la prinse, appellant le navire corporel et ses compaignons, non
pour dominer, mais pour le vivifier, remplir et communicquer la pasture
vitalle par foy, en esperance de charité receue. (Correspondance, 2:45)
The images which Briçonnet develops here are inspired by the passage
from Luke. The future disciple has been fishing all night without catch-
ing anything, but when Jesus instructs him to cast his net in the middle
of Lake Gennesaret, he pulls in so many fish that his net breaks and he
needs to share the catch with a second ship on the lake. Briçonnet uses
the incident here to develop the neo-Platonic theme of the ascent of the
soul. The first paragraph picks up on the details of the New Testament
story, while already suggesting the allegorical status that they have: the
“haulte mer” in the lake, where Jesus instructs Peter to cast his net, is the
“infinitude divine” of heavenly love, Peter’s ship represents the soul, while
the other ship is the body. The soul is told by Jesus to “leave the earth
and through contemplation to ascend to where it was born,” an impor-
tant neo-Platonic theme which we already find in a Christian context in
Boethius.9 However, this first level of allegorical exegesis is still operating
on a poetic level, and it is followed in the second paragraph by a far more
straightforward description of the workings of the soul, through faith, on
the body.
The manner of composition that we find here clearly influenced the
way in which Marguerite thought about and described her own religious
feelings. All the details of the New Testament story are commented on
and explained, so that nothing is seen as lacking in significance. For
example, when Jesus arrives at the lakeside, he “saw two ships standing
by the lake: but the fishermen were gone out of them, and were washing
9 The idea of the pre-existence and heavenly origin of the human soul, expounded by
Plato in the Phaedo, is not part of traditional Christian thinking, but may be found in some
Platonizing writers such as Boethius, who writes in the Consolatio Philosophiae, 3.11: “Non
omne namque mente depulit lumen / Obliuiosam corpus inuehens molem. / Haeret pro-
fecto semen introrsum ueri / Quod excitatur uentilante doctrina. / Nam cur rogati sponte
recta censetis, / Ni mersus alto uiueret fomes corde? / Quod si Platonis Musa personat
uerum, / Quod quisque discit immemor recordatur.” (“For the body, which brings its mass
of forgetfulness, has not deprived our minds of all light. A seed of truth remains within us,
which is roused by the winds of learning. For why do you think when questioned we give
the right answer spontaneously, unless the sparks lie buried deep in our hearts? If Plato’s
Muse proclaims the truth, whatever we learn, we remember having once forgotten it.” My
translation.)
94 philip ford
their nets.”10 The net-washing is seen not as an incidental detail, but as a

highly symbolic act which indicates their desire to be reborn in Christ:
Par les pecheurs estantz en terre, lavans leurs retz, nous est declaré leur
esperance estant terrestre et, par ce, corrompue, qu’ilz ne pourroient nes-
toier, combien qu’ilz eussent innumerables lavemens, jusques à ce qu’ilz ont
esté visitéz par le second Adam celeste, qui leur a commandé laisser la terre
et monter audict estang de Genesareth pour estre regeneréz en nouvelle
nativité celeste. (Correspondance, 2:46)
This attention to detail will find its way into Marguerite’s poetry.
Neo-Platonic Religious Imagery in Marguerite’s Poetical Works
One of the central points of some ancient forms of neo-Platonism and

certainly of Ficinian neo-Platonism was to bring Platonic thinking into
line with Christian doctrine.11 This was aided in many ways by Platonizing
tendencies to be found in Saint Paul as well as in that most important
of the western Church fathers, Saint Augustine. Renaissance humanists
were quick to seize upon the resemblances between the two systems,
often focusing on the similar imagery to be found in each of them, while
dismissing the incompatible elements through the deft use of allegory.
For this reason, it should come as no surprise that there can be a blur-
ring between neo-Platonic and Christian imagery in Marguerite’s religious
poetry. However, there are certain themes which it is worth highlight-
ing as being informed by neo-Platonic ideas, whether or not Marguerite
had read the source texts at first hand: just as many writers today may
invoke Darwinian theories of evolution without having read On the Origin
of Species, the pervading mentality in Renaissance France meant that neo-
Platonic ideas were simply in the air.
One frequently used image is that of the body as the prison of the soul.
This central Platonic idea was expounded in the Phaedo, a dialogue itself
set in the prison where Socrates had been condemned to die by hemlock.
The body is presented as a hindrance to contemplation, in part because
our sense perceptions are at best deceptive and at worst distracting, pre-
venting the true work of the soul: “The lovers of knowledge are conscious
10 Luke 5:2, Authorized King James Version.

11 See D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fif-
teenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972), esp. ch. 3, “The Ancient Theology in
Sixteenth-Century France.”
that their souls, when philosophy receives them, are simply fastened and
glued to their bodies: the soul is only able to view existence through the
bars of a prison, and not in her own nature; she is wallowing in the mire
of all ignorance” (Phaedo, 82d–e).12 This image was further elaborated by
Plato in the myth of the cavern, in Book 7 of the Republic, 514ff., where
man is presented as a prisoner, chained up with his back to the light, only
able to see shadows on a wall. Ficino picks up these ideas in his Platonica
theologia de immortalitate animorum, using them to suggest the need for
a progressive ascent of the soul from the realm of nature to the realm of
ideas by means of the effective use of light imagery:
But if, by chance, one of the prisoners is released and is forced to turn round
and gaze at the flame and the objects in front of the flame, he will immedi-
ately be dazzled and in pain, and because of the brightness he will be unable
to discern the objects whose shadows he saw a moment before. He will suf-
fer even more if he is suddenly dragged from the cave to the constant light
of day. And so it is not suddenly, but gradually, in suitable degrees, that he
should be led from the shadows of things to the things themselves, from the
reflection of light to the actual light, such that the things which are before
the prisoners in the cave should be seen first of all reflected in water before
being seen in themselves. (Ficino, Platonica theologia, 6.2.233)13
“Souls of mortal men,” he exclaims, “leave, I beg you, the bodies in which
you are now buried, and you will immediately find your true nature
beyond the confines of your bodies.”14
These themes, which are often associated, as they were in the Phaedo,
with consolation on the death of a loved one, recur in Marguerite’s poetry.
For example, among the poems written after the death of her niece Char-
lotte, aged eight, in 1524, Marguerite has the little girl address her soul as
follows:
12 The translation is by Benjamin Jowett, available, for example, on The Internet Clas-
sics Archive, <http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html>, accessed 7 June 2011.
13 My translation of the Latin text in Marsile Ficin, Théologie platonicienne de
l’immortalité des âmes, ed. and trans. Raymond Marcel, 3 vols. (Paris, 1964–70): “Si quis
autem horum qui vincti sunt forte solvatur subitoque lampadem et alia sub illa quae
sequuntur a tergo, retro versus intueri cogatur, caligabit protinus et dolebit, ac propter
splendorem intueri non poterit illa quorum umbras paulo ante cernebat. Multoque magis
id illi malum continget, si a spelunca sursum ad caeleste diuturnumque lumen repente
trahatur. Quare non subito, sed paulatim convenientibus gradibus ab umbris rerum ad res
ipsas, item a luminis imagine ad lumen ipsum est perducendus, ita ut quae in spelunca
sunt apud illos, prius illic in aqua videat quam ibidem in seipsis inspiciat.”
14 Théologie platonicienne, 6.2.234: “Emergite, obsecro, mortalium animae nunc immer-
sae corporibus, naturam vestram supra corporis fines statim reperietis.”
96 philip ford
Saillez dehors, mon ame, je vous prie,

Du triste corps tout plein de fascherie
Où vous estes en obscure prison,
Pour parvenir à la belle maison
Avec les sainctz et de leur confrairie.15
The Christian ending of the stanza follows on quite naturally from the
neo-Platonic opening. Picking up and developing the imagery of the cav-
ern myth in Plato’s Republic, Marguerite also returns to this theme in Le
Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, first published in 1531:
Voila comment en peine, criz, et pleurs
En terre gist sans clarte ne lumiere
Ma paouvre ame, esclave et prisonniere,
Les piedz liez par sa concupiscence
Et les deux bras par son acoustumance.16
The soul here is in exactly the position of Plato’s prisoners as described
by Ficino, for while Plato speaks of them as having “their legs and necks
chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being
prevented by the chains from turning round their heads,” it is Ficino
who adds the detail of the arms, describing the prisoners as “attached by
the neck, with their hands tied behind their backs and their feet to vari-
ous columns.”17 Perhaps it is inspired by Briçonnet’s exegetical approach
that Marguerite allegorizes the bound feet and hands as representing the
forces of “concupiscence” (lust, desire) and “acoustumance” (custom),
introducing yet again a Christian note into the image.
Later in the same poem, Marguerite takes up a theme that had been
developed by Briçonnet in one of his early letters to her on the antithesis
between All and Nothing (Correspondance, 1:32). The soul’s realization
of its nothingness allows its gradual ascension toward the All of God.18
15 Marguerite de Navarre, Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, ed. Renja Salminen

(Helsinki, 1985), Rondeaux, 1.1–5. Text based on MS 3525 of the Österreichische National-
bibliothek.
16 The text is taken from the edition published by Simon Du Bois (Alençon, 1533), con-
taining the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne . . . Le miroir de l’ame pecheresse . . . Discord
estant en l’homme . . . Une oraison à nostre seigneur Jesus Christ, fol. A2r–v, vv. 24–30.
17 “ita cervicem et manus a tergo pedesque columnis quibusdam alligatos” (Platonica
theologia, 6.2.232).
18 “Mais quant à luy par amour est unie, / Sy remply est son riens d’ung peu de tout /
Que à declarer ne poeut trouver le bout: / Plus ha de bien qu’il n’en poeut soustenir: /
Parquoy il croit tout le monde tenir” (Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, vv. 1326–30).
In the Miroir, Marguerite links this with light imagery which, as in Ficino’s
commentary on the prisoners’ introduction to light in Republic 7, empha-
sizes its initial blinding effect on the viewer and, despite his desire to see
more, the impossibility of achieving this all at once:
Quant le soleil d’une seule estincelle
Aveugle l’oeil, sa grand lumiere cele:
Mais demandez à l’oeil qu’il a senty,
Il dira, tout: mais il aura menty.
Car aveugle de petite lumiere
Il ne poeut veoir la grand clarte entiere:
Et demeure toutesvoyes sy content
Qu’il luy semble s’il en avait autant
N’estre puissant pour pouvoir endurer
Ceste clarte, qu’il ne poeut mesurer.
Aussy le cueur qui par façon subtile
Sent de l’amour de dieu une scintille
Treuve ce feu sy grand et sy terrible,
Si doulx, si bon, qu’il ne luy est possible
Dire que c’est d’amour. (Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, vv. 1331–45)
Marguerite may be thinking here of Ficino’s description, in De amore,
2.7, of the transmission of the spark of beauty from the heavenly Venus,
through the common Venus, down to the human world:
La premiere [Venus] premierement comprend en soy la resplendisseur
de la divinité, puis apres attire icelle à Venus seconde. La seconde, verse
d’ung lieu en aultres les estincelles de ceste resplendisseur, en la matiere du
monde. Par la presence de ces estincelles, tous les corps du monde, selon la
capacité de nature, semblent estre beaulx. L’esprit humain voit par les yeulx
la beauté des corps. (La Haye, Commentaire, pp. 62–63)
Just as this spark passes through various stages in its descent, the soul
must also pass back through them in its ascent, an elaboration of the idea
which Ficino had expounded in the Platonica theologia.
The loss of her brother, François I, in 1547 led Marguerite to write
La Navire, a dialogue between the dead king and his sister in which he
exhorts her to abandon her grieving for him. Interestingly, from the point
of view of the Briçonnet letter we explored earlier, the poem begins with
the image of the ship as soul, with François enjoining his sister to leave
behind earthly things:
Navire loing du vray port assablée,
Feuille agitée de l’impetueux vent,
Ame qui est de douleur accablée,
98 philip ford
Tire toy hors de ton corps non sçavant,

Monte à l’espoir, laisse ta vielle masse,
Sans regarder derriere viens avant.
Quant seras tu de ton fol pleurer lasse?
Quant auras tu mis fin à ton souspir?
Quant lairras tu ta triste et pasle face?
Quant donra Foy tresve à ton vain desir
Et quant fera ton œil torner en hault
La Charité, où est le vray plaisir?19
The body from which the soul must leave is characterized as being “non
sçavant,” and the (neo-)Platonic notion of knowledge, gained from the
release of the soul, is a central one in this poem. Important, too, is the
idea of the ascent to heaven, through Love, in the last stanza quoted. This
seems to echo Ficino’s De amore, 2.2, where divine beauty is the starting
point of a converting triad, consisting of Beauty, Love, and Pleasure, lead-
ing back to heaven:20
Veritablement ceste Beaulté divine a en tous engendré Amour, c’est à dire,
ung soubhayt de soymesme: car si Dieu attire à soy le monde, et le monde
est attiré, c’est ung attirement s’entresuyvant, qui tousjours dure, comman-
cement à Dieu, passant par le monde, et à la parfin finissant en Dieu: lequel
presques par ung cercle de rechef retourne à ce mesme dont est coulé. Par
ainsi donques ung et mesme cercle, de Dieu au monde, et du monde à
Dieu, est appellé par troys noms. Selon qu’en Dieu il commence et attraict,
Beaulté, selon que passant par le monde, le ravist Amour, selon que retour-
nant à son autheur, luy conjoinct son œuvre, volupté. Ce a baillé à entendre
ceste belle chanson de Hierotheus et Denys Areopagite, en laquelle ainsi ont
chanté Theologiens: Amour est ung cercle bon, veu que du bon estant né,
retourne au bon. (La Haye, Commentaire, pp. 53–54)
François hopes that, through the agency of Charité, divine love, Margue-
rite’s soul will be brought to the volupté, the pure joy, of heaven. Ficino’s
text makes this neo-Platonic cycle clear, but it is important to note that
he validates it by reference to Dionysius the Areopagite (De divinis nomini-
bus, 14.712d). Later in La Navire, the dead king reveals to his sister some of
the pleasures he enjoys and which she too can obtain:
19 Marguerite de Navarre, La Navire ou Consolation du roi François Ier à sa sœur Margue-

rite, ed. Robert Marichal (Paris, 1956), vv. 1–12.
20 For an important discussion of this triad in the visual arts, relating to the three
Graces in Botticelli’s Primavera, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev.
ed. (Oxford, 1980), pp. 36–52.
Tourne ton plainct en chantz et en louanges,

Crois fermement le plaisir que je sens,
Et ton ennuy à mon grand plaisir changes.
. . . . . .
Je gouste icy la haulte sapience,
Je voys icy la puissance infinie
Et la bonté me monstre sa science.
Mon ame icy de lumiere est garnie,
Qui en tenebre estoit vivante en terre,
Estant de veoir son vray soleil bannie.
Je voys icy l’esclair dont le tonnerre
Faict là-bas paour à un cueur escarté,
Qui sans la foy en chacun chemin erre.
Icy d’amour est la vraye clarté,
Icy se faict de charité le feu,
Et gaigne icy qui mieulx a escarté. (La Navire, vv. 403–05, 412–23)
As in the opening quotation of this essay by Ronsard, the release of the
soul brings “la haulte sapience,” knowledge that cannot be gained when
we are living in darkness on earth, but which divine love reveals to us
through its “vraye clarté.”
The texts cited in this section are illustrative of the neo-Platonic themes
to be found in Marguerite’s spiritual poetry, and certainly do not exhaust
the range of possible material. Christine Martineau cites others in her arti-
cle, as does Yon Oria.21 The images we have discussed—the imprisoned
soul, the light imagery, the ascent of the soul—are part of syncretist think-
ing in Renaissance Europe as a result of Ficino’s reading of Plato, and it is
significant that he, like Guillaume Briçonnet, drew on Pseudo-Dionysius
to act as guarantor for the ideas that he was expounding. This common
ground between Briçonnet and Ficino would no doubt have encouraged
Marguerite to take the writings of the Florentine neo-Platonist seriously.
How widely she would have read his works is debatable, though it would
be surprising if she had not read his commentary on the Symposium, and
we have seen possible echoes of this work in her poetry.22 At the same
21 See Martineau, “Le Platonisme,” pp. 17–24, and Yon Oria, “Platonic Symbolism of
Marguerite d’Angouléme [sic] in the Royal Courts of France and Navarre (1492–1549),”
Príncipe de Viana 177 (1986), 319–29.
22 Nevertheless, the Latin text would only have been available in printed form to
Marguerite in Ficino’s edition of the Platonis Opera (Florence, 1484). Ficino’s own Italian
translation of the De Amore, the Sopra lo amore o ver’ Convito di Platone was printed by
100 philip ford
time, as has already been pointed out, it seems unnecessary to require a

first-hand knowledge of Ficino or of other neo-Platonic texts in order to
see Marguerite’s thought and poetic imagery as being influenced by neo-
Platonism. It is enough that she should have understood and assimilated
the ideas in question, and used them in her own writing.
Neo-Platonic Love in the Heptaméron
We come now to the issue of neo-Platonic thinking in the Heptaméron,

whose presence is questioned to some extent by Christine Martineau,
though not entirely dismissed (“Le Platonisme,” pp. 27–35). The world that
Marguerite portrays in the collection is a mostly grim one, in which bestial
appetites have the upper hand over more spiritual values. Moreover, the
value systems of men and women are entirely incompatible: male honor
resides in notching up as many sexual conquests as possible, female honor
in avoiding even the slightest hint of scandal through their conduct. Thus,
the two sexes are constantly being characterized by the devisants as polar
opposites. As Parlamente says to her husband Hircan in the discussion
following nouvelle 26, alluding to the differences between the sexes:
Je sçay bien . . . que nous avons tous besoing de la grace de Dieu, pour ce
que nous sommes tous encloz en peché; si est-ce que nos tentations ne sont
pareilles aux vostres, et si nous pechons par orgueil, nul tiers n’en a dom-
mage, ny nostre corps et noz mains n’en demeurent souillées. Mais vostre
plaisir gist à deshonorer les femmes, et vostre honneur à tuer les hommes en
guerre: qui sont deux poinctz formellement contraires à la loy de Dieu.23
Most of the tales illustrate the selfishness of love or lust, and the impossi-
bility of the two sexes living together in harmony. Marguerite is depicting
for us man in a state of sin, deprived of grace.
Filippo Giunti in Florence in 1544, and, as we have seen, J. de La Haye’s French version
came out in 1546. There were various MS versions in circulation; see Marsile Ficin, Com-
mentaire sur Le Banquet de Platon, De l’amour, Commentarium in Convivium Platonis, De
amore, ed. and trans. Pierre Laurens (Paris, 2002), pp. CXVII–CXXII. Other works, including
Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore (Rome, 1535) and Symphorien Champier’s Le Livre de vraye
amour (Lyon, 1503), would have conveyed aspects of Ficino’s thinking. James Wadsworth
limits the material taken by Champier from Ficino to three sections: De amore, 1.4 (“De
utilitate amoris”), 2.3 (“Pulchritudo est splendor divine bonitatis”), and 2.8 (“Exhortatio
ad amorem, De amore simplici ac mutuo”); see Symphorien Champier, Le Livre de vraye
amour, ed. James B. Wadsworth (The Hague, 1962), p. 31. For a modern translation of the
Dialoghi d’amore, see Leone Ebreo, Dialogues of Love, trans. Cosmos Damian Bacich and
Rosella Pescatori (Toronto, Buffalo, London, 2009). Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples would, how-
ever, have read Ficino and could well have discussed his works with Marguerite.
23 Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron, ed. Michel François (Paris, 1967), p. 221.
However, very occasionally, a higher form of love can be discerned,

based on neo-Platonic ideals. We have already noted possible echoes of
Ficino’s De amore in Marguerite’s spiritual poetry, and although J. de La
Haye’s French translation was not published until 1546, the author’s dedi-
cation to the queen at the very least indicates an interest on her part.
Speaking of the return of heavenly love to earth, the liminary poem refers,
while punning on the translator’s name, to the welcome offered by Mar-
guerite to the winged god:
Lors fort joyeux brandist son æsle gaye
Et doulcement se mist sur une Haye,
Où quelque temps son repos il a pris,
Et puis apres d’ung desir feut espris
D’aller vers vous, ayant bien cognoissance
Qu’il seroit là en plus grande asseurance
Et mieulx traicté, d’une vraye Princesse,
Que Cupido d’une feincte Deesse. (La Haye, Commentaire, p. 42)
But what aspects of Ficino’s commentary find their way into the
Heptaméron?
The relationship between Ficino’s commentary and Plato’s Symposium
is an odd one. In Plato, a number of guests at the banquet speak in various
ways, both serious and comic, in praise of love, but it is Socrates at the
end who provides his own (by implication correct) philosophy of love; in
Ficino, each of the speeches is taken as offering some truth about love,
even Aristophanes’ comic interlude on the androgyne myth, so that the
whole of the Symposium, and not just Socrates’ speech, is taken seriously.
At the same time, as we have noted, some of Ficino’s explanations are
tinged with a Christian neo-Platonism inspired by Pseudo-Dionysius and
others. The result is a work that, far from presenting a coherent view of
love, offers a number of different approaches to the subject, while main-
taining the Platonic ideal of a spiritual love between a man and a boy as
the highest form of love.
Nevertheless, certain key notions emerged from the De amore and
became distilled into a theory of love that informed Renaissance love
poetry as well as more philosophical works.24 To understand these ideas,
it is useful to have in mind a notion of the neo-Platonic macrocosm, with
its four principal divisions: the cosmic mind (mens mundana), the cosmic
soul (spiritus mundanus), the realm of nature (natura), and the realm of
24 J. Festugière’s La Philosophie de l’amour de Marsile Ficin et son influence sur la littéra-
ture française au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1980) remains an excellent general introduction to the
many different themes used in French poetry derived from Ficino.
102 philip ford
matter (materia). Each part is conceived as one of a series of concentric

circles, with the realm of matter at the center and the cosmic mind at the
outer extreme. Natura corresponds to the earth, all of whose elements
are made up of inert matter. The spiritus mundanus corresponds to the
heavens, from the sphere of the moon to the fixed stars. The mens mun-
dana, beyond the heavens, contains the pure essences of all things, the
Platonic ideas.
We have already seen in Marguerite’s poetry the image of spiritual
ascent, and much of Ficinian philosophy concerning love presents it sim-
ply as a special case. Like Plato, Ficino distinguishes between two kinds
of love, one heavenly, one earthly:
La premiere Venus, qui est en l’entendement [i.e. the mens mundana], est
dicte estre née du Ciel, sans mere: pource que mere selon les Physiciens est
matiere. Mais cest entendement n’a point de compaignée avec la matiere
corporelle. La seconde Venus, laquelle est mise en l’ame du monde [the
spiritus mundanus], est engendrée de Juppiter et Dione. De Juppiter, c’est
à dire, de ceste vertu de l’âme, laquelle meut les choses celestes. Car icelle
a créé ceste puissance, laquelle engendre ces inferieures. (La Haye, Com-
mentaire, p. 62)
As in the Symposium, each type of love has two different goals: “l’une est
ceste intelligence qu’avons mis en l’entendement angelique. L’aultre est
la puissance d’engendrer, baillée à l’ame du monde,” in other words the
power of comprehension and the power of procreation.
The immediate goal of lovers is the pursuit of Beauty, which can only
be appreciated by the eyes, in the case of physical beauty, or the mind,
in the case of spiritual beauty.25 Hence, ideal love does not involve any
sexual pleasure. Since perfect Beauty resides in the cosmic mind, the ulti-
mate desire of the lover is union with the Sovereign One (God) through
the agency of Heavenly Love. Common love, on the other hand, causes
lovers to be tortured by cholere and melancholie so that “comme aveu-
gles ne sçavent où ils vont, ne qu’ils deviennent. . . . Pour ce est ce que
l’homme par ceste fureur se tourne en la nature de la beste” (La Haye,
Commentaire, p. 175). The majority of the lovers in the Heptaméron are
25 “Amour est ung desir d’avoir jouissance de Beaulté. Et Beaulté est quelque resplendis-
seur attirant à soy l’esprit humain. Veritablement la beaulté du corps autre chose n’est, que
ceste resplendisseur en la bonne grace des couleurs et lignes. Et la Beaulté de l’esprit est
une respendisseur par le parement de doctrine et de meurs. . . . L’œil seul doncques ha
la fruition de la beaulté du corps. . . . Davantage nous comprenons ceste resplendisseur
et beaulté de l’esprit par le seul entendement. À ceste cause, cil qui desire la beaulté de
l’esprit, se contente du seul regard de l’entendement” (La Haye, Commentaire, pp. 67–68).
subject to this form of love. With Heavenly Love, it is through the agency
of the fureurs divines that the lover’s soul can ultimately be united with
the One:
L’homme par fureur divine est eslevé par dessus la nature de l’homme, et
vient à estre Dieu. Or est fureur divine l’esclarcissement de l’ame naturelle,
par laquelle Dieu retire l’ame cheute des choses haultes aux basses: et des
choses basses la releve aux haultes. (La Haye, Commentaire, p. 176)
This assumes that our soul has descended into our bodies at our birth,
passing from the One, through the four steps of understanding, reason,
opinion, and nature, down to the body. For it to be able to return, it must
pass back through these same steps by means of the divine frenzies:
Il est donques quatre especes de fureur divine. La premiere est fureur poeti-
que: la seconde, fureur concernant les choses divines: la tierce, divination: la
quarte est affection contraignant à amours. Veritablement poësie vient des
Muses: Mystere, de Denis [Bacchus]: la Divination d’Appollo: et Amour, de
Venus. Car l’ame ne peut retourner en ung, si elle n’est faicte ung. (La Haye,
Commentaire, p. 177)
This summary is based on the Phaedrus, 244–45, and Ficino, like Plato,
sees the frenzy of love as the greatest of the four. The beloved, however,
while being the initiator of the frenzy of love, is inevitably left behind by
the soul in its spiritual ascent.
How far can these notions be seen at work in the Heptaméron? Nouvelle
19 offers by far the most explicitly positive depiction of neo-Platonic love,
in which Poline and her anonymous lover are led to spiritual enlighten-
ment through their mutual affection. Prevented from marrying Poline by
the duke and duchess of Mantua because of his lack of wealth, the young
man goes off to war, is captured and released, and determines, if he can-
not marry Poline, to enter a religious order. On deciding on this step, it is
very explicitly not the religious life that he sees as a means of salvation in
itself, as he explains to Poline:
non que je [ne] sçaiche très bien qu’en tous estatz l’homme se peut saul-
ver, mais pour avoir plus de loisir de contempler la Bonté divine, laquelle,
j’espere, aura pitié des faultes de ma jeunesse, et changera mon cueur, pour
aymer autant les choses spirituelles qu’il a faict les temporelles. Et si Dieu
me faict la grace de pouvoir gaingner la sienne, mon labeur sera incessam-
ment employé à prier Dieu pour vous. Vous supliant, par ceste amour tant
ferme et loyalle qui a esté entre nous deux, avoir memoire de moy en voz
oraisons et prier Nostre Seigneur, qu’il me donne autant de constance en
ne vous voyant poinct, qu’il m’a donné de contentement en vous regardant.
(Heptaméron, p. 145)
104 philip ford
At this point, the young man is seen at the start of his spiritual ascent, in
search of the “Bonté divine” which must be the goal of all Platonic lovers.
It is significant, too, that it is the sense of sight that he highlights at the
end of this quotation as having inspired him in the first place. The con-
clusion of the song that he writes shortly after entering the monastery,
and which is seen five or six months later by Poline, spells out the neo-
Platonic implications of their love:
Ainsy qu’au monde
Fut pure et monde
Nostre parfaicte amityé;
Dedans le cloistre
Pourra paroistre
Plus grande de la moictié;
Car amour loyal et ferme,
Qui n’a jamais fin ne terme,
Droict au ciel nous conduira. (Heptaméron, p. 148)
Perfect love, “qui n’a jamais fin ne terme,” will lead the two to union with
the One. When they see each other again during Mass at his monastery,
the effect is dramatic:
Quand Poline le veid en tel habillement où sa beaulté et grace estoient plus-
tost augmentées que diminuées, fut si esmue et troublée, que, pour couvrir
la cause de la couleur qui luy venoit au visaige, se print à toussyr. Et son
pauvre serviteur, qui entendoit mieulx ce son-là que celluy des cloches de
son monastere, n’osa tourner sa teste, mais, en passant devant elle, ne peut
garder ses œilz qu’ilz ne prinssent le chemin que si longtemps ilz avoient
tenu. Et, en regardant piteusement Poline, fut si saisy du feu qu’il pensoit
quasi estainct, qu’en le voulant plus couvrir qu’il ne vouloit, tomba tout de
son hault à terre devant elle. (Heptaméron, p. 149)
Again, we see the effects of beauty, this time on Poline, resulting in a
physical reaction on her part, while the sight of Poline rekindles the fire
of love in the young man, causing him to faint, an indication, perhaps, of
the temporary departure of his soul from his body.26
26 Poline and her lover had also fainted at their last meeting before he entered the
monastery: “La pauvre Poline . . . sans luy respondre aultre chose, luy vat gecter les bras au
col, pleurant avecq une si grande vehemence, que la parolle, la voix et la force luy defail-
lirent, et se laissa tumber entre ses bras esvanouye: dont la pitié qu’il en eut, avecq l’amour
et la tristesse, luy en feirent faire autant, tant que une de ses compaignes, les voyant tum-
ber l’un d’un costé et l’autre de l’autre, appella du secours, qui à force de remedes les feyt
revenir” (Heptaméron, p. 145). Indeed, a few lines further on, she is decribed as being like
“ung corps sans esperit” (ibid.).
While the two lovers are aware of the workings on them of God, “Celluy
qui est le vray, parfaict et digne d’estre nommé Amour,” it is Parlamente
in the ensuing discussion who spells out the more overtly neo-Platonic
implications of the story:
J’appelle parfaictz amans . . . ceulx qui cerchent, en ce qu’ilz aiment, quelque
parfection, soit beaulté, bonté ou bonne grace; tousjours tendans à la vertu,
et qui ont le cueur si hault et si honneste, qu’ilz ne veullent, pour mourir,
mectre leur fin aux choses basses que l’honneur et la conscience repreuvent;
car l’ame, qui n’est creée que pour retourner à son souverain bien, ne faict,
tant qu’elle est dedans ce corps, que desirer d’y parvenir. Mais, à cause que
les sens, par lesquelz elle en peut avoir nouvelles, sont obscurs et charnelz
par le peché du premier pere, ne luy peuvent monstrer que les choses visibles
plus approchantes de la parfection, après quoy l’ame court, cuydans trouver,
en une beaulté exterieure, en une grace visible et aux vertuz moralles, la
souveraine beaulté, grace et vertu. Mais, quant elle les a cerchez et experi-
mentez, et elle n’y treuve poinct Celluy qu’elle ayme, elle passe oultre, ainsy
que l’enfant, selon sa petitesse, ayme les poupines et autres petites choses,
les plus belles que son œil peult veoir, et estime richesses d’assembler des
petites pierres; mais, en croissant, ayme les popines vives et amasse les biens
necessaires pour la vie humaine. Mais, quant il congnoist, par plus grande
experience, que ès choses territoires n’y a perfection ne felicité, desire cher-
cher le facteur et la source d’icelles. Toutesfois, si Dieu ne luy ouvre l’œil de
foy, seroit en danger de devenir, d’un ignorant, ung infidele philosophe; car
foy seullement peult monstrer et faire recevoir le bien que l’homme charnel
et animal ne peult entendre. (Heptaméron, pp. 151–52)
The terms used to describe this spiritual ascent are deliberately syncretic
in nature: the lovers’ souls seek the “souverain bien,” but are hindered
by the imprisonment of their souls in their bodies; however, their senses
are corrupt as a result of original sin, “le peché du premier pere.” They
are led by physical beauty towards “la souveraine beaulté,” but this is
ultimately achieved by faith alone, sola fides, “car foy seullement peult
monstrer et faire recevoir le bien que l’homme charnel et animal ne peult
entendre.” The Platonic frenzy of love, then, acts in the same way as
Christian grace.
Not all stories involving “parfaicte amour” end on such a positive note,
however. Nouvelle 9 presents the account of another virtuous but impe-
cunious young man in love with a woman of higher wealth and station.
Although his honorable conduct makes him welcome with the family,
gossip drives him away for a time, and he languishes to such an extent
when he hears that his beloved’s family has chosen a husband for her that
he is on the point of death. Daughter and mother visit him, and his final
request is to kiss his beloved:
106 philip ford
Le pauvre languissant, le plus fortement qu’il peut, estendit ses bras tous
desnuez de chair et de sang, et avecq toute la force de ses os embrassa la
cause de sa mort; et, en la baisant de sa froide et pasle bouche, la tint le plus
longuement qu’il luy fut possible; et puis luy dist: “L’amour que je vous ay
portée a esté si grande et honneste, que jamais, hors mariage, ne soubzhaic-
tay de vous que le bien que j’en ay maintenant; par faulte duquel et avecq
lequel je rendray joyeusement mon esperit à Dieu, qui est parfaicte amour et
charité, qui congnoist la grandeur de mon amour et honnesteté de mon
desir; le suppliant, ayant mon desir entre mes bras, recepvoir entre les siens
mon esperit.” (Heptaméron, p. 52, my emphasis)
The kiss exchanged here may well evoke the neo-Platonic topos of the
exchange of souls, while the ascent of the soul to God is again a central
theme in the text. The lover dies as a result of the “vehemence” of his kiss,
finally releasing his soul, and the couple remain locked in their embrace.
Despite the somewhat gruesome nature of the scene, the narrator focuses
on the effects of this perfect love on the young woman: “l’amour que la
demoiselle avoit tousjours celée se declaira à l’heure si fort, que la mere
et les serviteurs du mort eurent bien affaire à separer ceste union; mais
à force osterent la vive, pire que morte, d’entre les bras du mort, lequel
ils feirent honnorablement enterrer” (p. 52). Once again, love is seen as a
powerful, if uncomfortable, force.
In these two cases, it has been the male lover that the story has focused
on. Nouvelle 21 concerns Rolandine, who happily defies her negligent
father and spiteful mistress out of love for a “bastard d’une grande et
bonne maison,” who in turn shows himself to be unworthy of her, being
more inspired by ambition than love. Platonic considerations are played
down in this story: beauty is not a factor, since Rolandine “ne fust des plus
belles ny des laydes aussy” (p. 158) and her lover “avoit si peu de beaulté,
que une dame, quelle elle fust, ne l’eust pour son plaisir choisy” (p. 159).27
This lack of beauty is significant. Despite Rolandine’s fidelity, despite her
courage in facing the queen, her mistress, after it becomes apparent that
she has been consistently defying her, there is no suggestion in this story
that love truly leads to spiritual enlightenment. God’s intervention in
the end is far more practical and earthly, when Rolandine discovers her
husband’s infidelity:28 “Parquoy, la Bonté divine, qui est parfaicte charité
27 While the physical appearance of the lovers in nouvelle 19 is not commented upon,
we learn in nouvelle 9 that the young man was “beaucoup plus riche de vertu, beaulté et
honnesteté que d’autres biens” (Heptaméron, p. 49).
28 In the course of their relationship, they had contracted a clandestine marriage
(p. 162).
et vraye amour eut pitié de sa douleur et regarda sa patience, en sorte que,

après peu de jours, le bastard mourut à la poursuicte d’une autre femme”
(p. 173). Thus, it is not every apparently perfect love that can lead to union
with God, and the importance of reciprocal love, even if it comes only at
the last moment, as in nouvelle 9, would appear to be crucial.
Conclusion
Between the spiritual poetry and the Heptaméron, there is a surprising

degree of overlap in terms of the neo-Platonic themes that Marguerite
draws on. Spiritual ascent appears to be at the heart of her thinking, so
that many of the ancillary images that would later find their way into neo-
Platonic love poetry—such as the beloved’s gaze acting as a poison on the
lover or ensnaring him as in a net—are absent from her writing. Whatever
the neo-Platonic texts she may or may not have read, it seems likely that
she had at least some acquaintance with Ficino’s De amore, either direct
or indirect, and that this found its way into her writing. In the end, it
seems that her evangelical religious views fitted in well with the spiritual
side of Platonism, an elitist view of the world in which, to quote Socrates,
“the thyrsus-bearers are many, but the mystics few” (Phaedo, 69c). Just as,
in the Heptaméron, the ten men and women who survive the floods in the
Pyrenees from among the many who perish are a chosen social elite, those
who are capable of true transcendent love, through Grace or divine furor,
are equally exceptional. The rest are attached to earthly things through
their bestial, postlapsarian nature, and will never achieve the “haulte
sapience” that she had alluded to in La Navire, and which Ronsard sees
her as enjoying in his “Hymne triumphal.”
Opening and Closing Reflections:
the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse
and the Miroir de JÉsus-Christ crucifié
Isabelle Garnier in collaboration with Isabelle Pantin
The theologian and poet Charles de Sainte-Marthe, a direct observer of

the last two years of the life of Marguerite de Navarre (into whose service
he came at that time), was the first to honor her following her death on
21 December 1549 with his Oraison funebre de l’incomparable Marguerite,
royne de Navarre, published in Paris in 1550. This prose eulogy of over
100 pages, subtitled “Icy est le mirouer des Princesses,” was dedicated to
the late queen’s daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, and to her niece, Marguerite
de France, the sister of Henri II. A liminary poem addressed to the latter
urges her to consider the example of her aunt, also using the metaphor
of the mirror:
Mirés vous donc (Niepce vertueuse)
Au mirouer de vostre Tante heureuse.1
The mirror metaphor reappears in a marginal note to the text of the
Oraison itself: “La Royn. de Navar. est un mirouer d’obeissance à toutes
femmes” (fol. Kv). The recurrence of this image in a work celebrating
Marguerite de Navarre, immediately following her demise, attests to the
particular resonance of the mirror motif in relation to the queen’s literary
renown and its aptness for underscoring a major quality in an author who
sought to make her life a mirror of divine love.
In the same year, 1550, another memorial volume in praise of Margue-
rite recalled the Miroir in one of the 104 Latin distichs composed in Eng-
land by the three Seymour sisters, Anne, Margaret, and Jane, whose tutor
was Nicolas Denisot:
Quis speculum illius non admirabitur, in quo
Vera dei effigies illa refracta datur?2
1 Oraison funebre de l’incomparable Marguerite, royne de Navarre, Duchesse d’Alençon.

Composé en latin par Charles de Saincte-Marthe: Et traduicte par luy, en langue françoise.
Plus, Epitaphes de ladicte Dame: par aulcuns Poetes François. Icy est le mirouer des Prin-
cesses (Paris, 1550), fol. Avr.
2 Annae, Margaritae, Janae, Sororum virginum, heroidum Anglarum, In mortem Divae
Margaritae Valesiae, Navarrorum Reginae, Hecatodistichon (Paris, 1550), distich Marg. 86.
110 isabelle garnier with isabelle pantin
A year later, Denisot and the young poets of the Pléiade, in their French
translation of the couplets, repeated the compliment, further drawing
attention to Marguerite’s work with the same small capitals as used for
the name of God, of whom it was said to offer “la vraie image”:
Qui n’admire son miroir
Qui rend toute ame asseurée,
De son dieu luy faisant voir
L’image reverberée? (Du Bellay)
Qui est cellui qui n’admire
Son miroir, où en tout lieu
La vraie image de dieu
Imprimée se remire? (Denisot)3
For the contemporary reader no doubt was possible: the reference was
to the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (henceforth MAP), the only mirror poem
published at this point in time.4 The Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié (MJCC),
also known as the Mirouer de la croix,5 was among the queen’s manu-
scripts and would be published posthumously for the first time in 1552. The
MAP is the only text of Marguerite’s monumental œuvre to be explicitly
named in this funeral tribute, confirming its emblematic status, from the
16th century on, as the capstone of her poetic output.6 The MAP can be
said to stand as a major work in European literary history for three rea-
sons. First, it is one of the earliest religious works written in the vernacular,
independent of the conservative theological thought in Latin, dominant at
the beginning of the 16th century, and intended to offer spiritual nourish-
ment to the community of French Evangelicals. Second, as a long poetic
meditation, it prepares the way for later Christian lyric poetry and the
important place this accords to first-person expression ( je). Third, it was
the first of Marguerite’s works to be printed, making the king’s sister, in
1531, the first woman in France to be published during her lifetime and the
MAP the first major text written by a woman to be frequently reedited,
and thus available to a broad public beyond the court circles in which
3 Le Tombeau de Marguerite de Valois Royne de Navarre. Faict premièrement en Distiques

Latins par les trois Sœurs Princesses en Angleterre. Depuis traduictz en Grec, Italien, et Fran-
çois par plusieurs des excellentz Poètes de la France (Paris, 1551), fol. Giiv.
4 An English translation of the MAP had also been prepared by the future Queen Eliza-
beth I, see below.
5 The variant title suggests that the poem’s genre was privileged over a precise descrip-
tion of its content. This was probably due equally to the fame of the first Miroir as to the
specular nature of the second one.
6 While there is a reference to the “Agneau divin,” no specific allusion is made to
Marguerite’s Triomphe de l’Agneau.
opening and closing reflections 111
works circulated in manuscript.7 The fact that Marguerite’s last major

poetic composition also bears the generic title Miroir invites us to con-
sider the two works together. How should we interpret the fact that at the
beginning and at the end of the prolific literary output of the protector of
the evangelical movement in France there stands a “mirror” poem?
In critical studies of these works, the miroir of the titles has been a cen-
tral consideration; some analyses even seem to give it greater weight than
the poems’ content, as they search for traces of the specular metaphor.
According to Saint Augustine, who also described the soul as a mirror,
the Christian function of the mirror is twofold: on the one hand, it reflects
back to man the image of himself as a sinful creature; on the other hand,
it reveals to him the image of man as the divine plan intended, that is, the
image of Christ.8 A comparison of the titles of Marguerite’s poems from
this Augustinian perspective might suggest that the MAP addresses the
first function whereas the MJCC fulfills the second. As an examination of
the texts will show, however, things are not so simple and the two func-
tions apply equally in both poems. If we follow Robert Cottrell in seeing
the capital letter O decorating the first line of the MAP as “a particularly
powerful figura, for it reinforces graphically the organizing metaphor of
the text” (Grammar of Silence, p. 101), the mirror theme is nonetheless
exploited very discretely, and the word itself and its derivatives are not
found in the poem—unlike the MJCC. The key verb in the MAP is voir,
generally employed in negative phrases to signal man’s powerlessness.
From the first lines of the poem, this verb expresses the blindness caused
by sin:
Où est l’enfer remply entierement
De tout malheur, travail, peine, et tourment?
Où est le puitz de malediction,
D’où sans fin sort desesperation?
Est il de mal nul si profond abisme
Qui suffisant fust pour punir la disme
De mes pechéz? qui sont en si grand nombre,
Qu’infinité rend si obscure l’umbre
Que les compter, ne bien veoir, je ne puis.9
7 The Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, for example, is known to have circulated
widely in manuscript before its publication in the second edition of the Miroir in 1533.
8 See Robert D. Cottrell, The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s
Poetry (Washington, D.C., 1986) and Einar Mar Jonsson, Le miroir: Naissance d’un genre
littéraire (Paris, 1999), pp. 146–49.
9 Marguerite de Navarre, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, ed. Renja Salminen (Helsinki,
1979), vv. 1–9. All subsequent quotations, indicating line numbers, will be taken from this
edition. Here and throughout, all italics have been added.
The same expression is repeated symmetrically to underscore the incom-

mensurable nature of God’s gift:10
Quand je pense, qui est l’occasion
Dont vous m’ayméz, riens que dilection
Je n’y puis veoir . . . (vv. 157–59)
The verb voir also alludes to another use of the specular metaphor, recall-
ing Saint Paul’s reference to indirect vision, vision by means of enigmatic
images to be deciphered (1 Cor. 13:12). Mirroring the apostle’s teaching, the
MAP calls for a direct contemplation, face to face, of the divine mystery,
a contemplation made possible only by the grace of God:
Parquoy venéz o bienheureux sainct Pol,
. . . . . .
Tirant noz cueurs, nostre amour et espoir
À desyrer, ce qui ne se poeut veoir. (vv. 1382 and 1409–10)
On the other hand, the MJCC makes the metaphor of the mirror con-
substantial with the text in which we find five instances of the word mir-
ouer: “De toy l’exemple en ce miroer voy.”11 The call to contemplation in
God’s mirror is repeated as in a litany and Marguerite exploits the incan-
tatory potential of anaphora:
qu’est ce de moy si bien en toy me mire,
l’homme perdu, le dampné, l’enfant d’ire (vv. 119–20)
[O mon] orgueil, mire toy dans ce chief,
[et] t’y remire encores de rechief! (vv. 123–24)
mire toy bien et voy ta gormandise,
ta superflue et doulce friandise,
mire toy bien en ceste bouche nette (vv. 327–29)
Mire toy bien, corps plain de pouriture (v. 853)
Mire toy bien en ce cueur amoureulx,
et plus le tien ne sera rigoreux (vv. 1168–69).12
Despite their titles, which refer to the same genre, much appreciated in
medieval and Renaissance literature (and to which we shall return below),
10 Cf. also vv. 853–56.

11 They are found notably at the start and the conclusion of the poem, vv. 2, 309 (quoted
here), 1025, 1147, and 1240.
12 Marguerite de Navarre, Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié, ed. Lucia Fontanella (Ales-
sandria, 1984). All subsequent quotations, indicating line numbers, are taken from this
edition. Occasional alterations of spelling are made to facilitate comprehension.
Marguerite’s two mirror texts are clearly different, both in their content
and in their publishing history. For this reason we will consider each indi-
vidually in terms of its genesis and structure before engaging in a com-
parative analysis. Drawing on recent scholarship, we will investigate the
particular status of both works, seek to evaluate their sources, and exam-
ine the ways in which they combine personal metaphysical meditation
and militant evangelical propaganda. We shall see that the first Miroir,
after a long period of disdain despite being reedited 13 times in the 16th
century, has benefited from the renewal of scholarly interest in Margue-
rite; we shall also see why the second, posthumous poem has had less suc-
cess both with its Renaissance contemporaries and with modern critics.
The Mirror as a Medieval and Renaissance Genre
The place of Marguerite’s two Miroirs in a long medieval tradition is sig-

naled not only by their titles but also by their choice of devotional pos-
ture: the soul steeped in penitence in the first case, the contemplation
of the cross in the second.13 Miroir is a common title for medieval and
Renaissance works of piety, both in Latin and in French.14 The noun
miroir is derived from the verb mirer, which in turn comes from the Latin
mirari, to be astonished or surprised or to contemplate with surprise or
wonder. Beginning in the early 12th century, miroir was used to designate
the object in which one can look at oneself, and quickly took on the figu-
rative sense of model or ideal representation.15 In this way, like the Latin
speculum, it appears in the titles of didactic works forming a tripartite
literary tradition: the mirror of Princes,16 the encyclopedic mirror,17 and
the mirror of devotion. Works of the third kind, whose aim was moral and
13 On the influence of the theme of the crucified Christ on Marguerite, via Venetian
editions of late Christian poems, see Charles Béné, “Tradition et nouveauté dans la poésie
de Marguerite de Navarre,” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis (Folia Literaria) 38 (1997), 53–65.
14 See Jonsson, Le miroir, esp. pp. 60ff.; cf. MAP, ed. Salminen, p. 215, and Cottrell,
Grammar.
15 See Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. Alain Rey, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris,
1995), 2:1251.
16 See Jean-Pierre Bordier, “Speculum, genre littéraire,” Dictionnaire du Moyen Age.
Littérature et philosophie, Encyclopedia Universalis (Paris, 1999). The oldest Western exam-
ples of the genre, without as yet the word mirror in their titles, are the Mirrors of Princes
with which the Carolingian Church sought to educate nobles.
17 The mirror genre includes texts whose aim is to summarize all human knowledge,
like Vincent of Beauvais’s 13th-century Speculum Majus, written in three parts for the sons
of Saint Louis and printed around 1460.
theological edification, owed their success, from the 12th century onward,
to a passage in which Saint Augustine, expounding on the first chapter
of the Epistle of Saint James, explains that Holy Scripture offers each
person a reflection of his or her image.18 The metaphor spread following
the imposition by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) of the obligation of
annual confession, leading each believer to a regular examination of his
or her conscience. Marguerite’s MAP, at one and the same time a mirror
of Scripture and a mirror of sin, inherits doubly the dynamics underlying
the development of this literary genre. While it would be impossible to do
justice in a short summary to the range and variety of mirrors of devotion,
the Mirouer des Pécheurs, a high point of the genre, is of particular note.
This work, based on the pseudo-Augustinian Speculum peccatoris, was fre-
quently translated into French in the 15th century and printed in the 16th.
A meditation on death and the misery of the human condition, an ars
moriendi more by virtue of its content than its form, the work’s charac-
teristics foreshadow the evolution of medieval piety. To a certain extent,
one can say that it prefigures the works of the following century discussed
here: the MAP, with its frequent biblical quotations and exempla taken
from the Old Testament or the hagiographical tradition; the MJCC with
its focus on the preparation for death. The latter poem, however, is closer
to meditations on the life of Christ, on the nature of human sin, and on
mystical life, like the late 13th-century Miroir des vierges (Speculum virgi-
num) by Marguerite d’Oingt or the Miroir des simples âmes anéanties &
qui seulement demeurent en vouloir & désir d’amour by Marguerite Porete,
a work the queen of Navarre admired.19 Between 1531 and 1552, the dates
of publication of Marguerite’s two “mirrors,” the genre also took hold
among Reformed writers: Les quatorze miroirs pour consoler la créature en
Dieu, published without indication of date or place, came from the Gene-
van printing house of Jean Girard in 1543. As mirror texts multiplied, the
term came to designate any didactic work in general, taking it away
from the particular aim of the cultivation of the soul implicit in the genre’s
origins.
18 Bordier, “Speculum,” p. 766.

19 See Jean Dagens, “Le Miroir des simples âmes et Marguerite de Navarre,” in La Mys-
tique rhénane, Travaux du Centre des études supérieures spécialisé d’histoire des religions
de Strasbourg (Paris, 1963), pp. 281–89.
I. Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse
16th-Century Editions of the Text

The precise date at which the first Miroir was composed remains unknown.
If there is nothing in the text itself on which to base a hypothesis, careful
attention to its versification nonetheless reveals that it must have been
written before June 1530.20 Le miroir de l’ame pecheresse, ouquel elle recon-
gnoist ses faultes et pechez, aussi les graces et benefices à elle faictz par Jesu-
christ son espoux21 appeared anonymously from the presses of Simon Du
Bois in Alençon in 1531.22 It was accompanied by two shorter poems by
Marguerite, the Discord estant en l’homme par la contrariete de l’esperit et
de la chair and the Oraison à Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, as well as by two
prose prayers translated from the work of the German pedagogue and
musician Sebald Heyden. A single sentence on the title page alludes to the
parable of the pearl in the Gospel of Matthew (13:45–46): “La Marguerite
tresnoble et precieuse, s’est preposée à ceulx qui de bon cueur la cerchoyent.”
It does not, however, offer an exact quotation from the Scriptures, as is
often the case on the title page of evangelical works. The “marguerite
précieuse” is also a veiled reference to the anonymous author, whom her
spiritual director, Guillaume Briçonnet, called to be a “vraie perle et mar-
guerite, par charité et amour vraiement unie avec la . . . vraie marguerite,
le doulx Jesus.”23 Du Bois issued a second edition of the Miroir in 1533,
now preceded by a previously unpublished work, the Dialogue en forme
de vision nocturne, entre tresnoble et excellente princesse madame Margue-
rite . . . Et L’ame saincte de defuncte madame Charlotte de France, . . . niepce
de ladite dame Royne. This long evangelical poem, written after the death
20 The extensive use of lyrical cesurae suggests a terminus ad quem for the poem’s com-
position since Marguerite avoided them after June 1530. See Jean Vignes, review of Mar-
guerite de Navarre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole Cazauran, vol. 8, Chrétiens et mondains,
poèmes épars, ed. Richard Cooper (Paris, 2007), L’Information littéraire no 4 (2008), 51–52.
21 The two occurrences of the pronoun elle in the title refer not to the female author
but to the âme pécheresse. The text was published anonymously.
22 Between 9 April 1531 and 31 March 1532 to be precise. See William Kemp, “Marguerite
de Navarre, Clément Marot, and the Augereau Editions of the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse
(Paris, 1533),” Journal of the Early Book Society 2 (1999), 113–56. After having left Paris to
avoid censure, the printer took refuge in territory controlled by Marguerite.
Christine Martineau and Michel Veissière, with Henry Heller, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1975–79),
1:60. Marguerite was often referred to at court by the metaphor of the marguerite, mean-
ing pearl or daisy.
of François I’s daughter, on 8 September 1524, identifies clearly the author

of the work that appeared in a troubled year of uprisings in Paris, the
desecration of statues in Alençon, and the appearance of a play satiriz-
ing Marguerite herself.24 This edition of the Miroir also contains several
other texts, including Clément Marot’s translation of psalm 6, recently
published in pamphlet form in Lyon. In this unsettled context, the MAP
was issued for a second time in 1533, with the same content and title but
omitting the liminary sentence “La Marguerite . . .,” again without indica-
tion of date or place of publication.25 Lacking the legally required printer’s
name, the Miroir was condemned by the Sorbonne. The following table,
in which each edition is indicated by the letters A, B, C, now in common
use among scholars, allows their comparison.
A Miroir de l’ame Marginal scriptural

1531 pecherresse . . . references with biblical
Alençon, Simon Du Bois Discord estant en quotations (Miroir,
“La Marguerite l’homme . . . Discord).
tresnoble . . .” Two prose Oraisons The Miroir is missing
(Heyden) seven lines.
Oraison à nostre seigneur
JC
B Dialogue en forme de vision Marginal scriptural
1533 nocturne references without
Alençon, Simon Du Bois Miroir biblical quotations.
“La Marguerite Discord Lines 402–04 have been
tresnoble . . .” Oraison à NSJC added.
Two prose Oraisons
C Miroir Marginal scriptural
No date or place of Discord references with biblical
publication. Oraison à NSJC quotations
[1533, Paris, Augereau] Two prose Oraisons First complete corrected
edition of the MAP.
24 See Bernard Roussel, “Marguerite de Navarre, les débuts de la Réforme et les trou-
bles à Alençon, 1530–1534,” Bulletin de la Société Historique et Archéologique de l’Orne 105.4
(1986), 30–34.
25 For details and the dating of this edition, see Pierre Jourda, “Tableau chronologique
des publications de Marguerite de Navarre,” Revue du Seizième Siècle 12 (1925), 209–55 (pp.
213–14).
The king had the censorship of his sister’s work lifted; it had been
printed, as was known by members of his entourage, in the workshop of
Antoine Augereau. A majority of theologians, including the king’s own
confessor, stated that they found nothing heretical in the work.26 Fol-
lowing the legal proceedings against the MAP between 24 October and
8 November 1533, Augereau published two more editions in the same
year, attributed to Marguerite and with a title giving the mirror meta-
phor a new resonance: Le Miroir de treschrestienne Princesse Marguerite
de France, Royne de Navarre, Duchesse D’alençon & de Berry auquel elle voit
son neant et son tout. This title was adopted by all subsequent separate
editions of the Miroir:
D Miroir
1533 Discord
Paris, Augereau Oraison à NSJC
Two prose Oraisons
Le VI pseaulme de David (Marot)
E 1st part: Printer’s
1533 “Marguerite . . . au Lecteur” introduction. Text
Marguerite de Navarre Miroir revised in line
Paris, Augereau Discord with the queen’s
Oraison à NSJC (vers) manuscript.
Two prose Oraisons reworked
Le VI pseaulme de David (Marot)
2nd part:
Epistre familiere de prier Dieu
Aultre epistre familiere d’aimer
Chrestiennement
Briefve doctrine pour deuement
escripre selon la proprieté du
langaige Françoys
L’Instruction et Foy d’ung Chrestien,
mises en Françoys par Clément
Marot
F Reprint of the first part of E.
Marguerite de Navarre
[1533, Paris ?]
26 See Salminen, ed. MAP, pp. 21–30, and Kemp, “Marguerite.”

Two other printers reissued Augereau’s last edition: Le Prince (Lyon, 1538)
and Jean Girard (Geneva, 1539), bringing to eight the number of editions
before the poem’s 1547 publication, under its original title, in the complete
works of the queen by Jean de Tournes, Les Marguerites de la Marguerite
des princesses.
Marguerite’s First Miroir: A Key Text of the “Navarrian Network”

The first publication of the Miroir in 1531 was a militant act. It placed the
poem in a line of literary works marking a break with established religious
ideology, less in terms of its title, as we have seen, than by the circum-
stances surrounding its publication. Since the early 1520s, more and more
Christians had affirmed the need to put the gospel at the center of the life
of faith. The Faculty of Theology considered all those who sought to grant
each believer free and personal access to the Word in his or her native
language to be heretics. Historians have given them the name Evangeli-
cals. Such people, representing a range of theological tendencies, were to
be found all over Europe. French Evangelism (a word that was not in use
in the 16th century) was at once careful, active, and coherent. It emerged
under Marguerite’s protection, as the king’s sister headed a group of inno-
vators forming, to use the term proposed by Jonathan Reid, the “Navarrian
network.”27 The mission of this network was to make available catecheti-
cal and didactic texts that would supplement the translation of the Bible
by Lefèvre d’Étaples (the New Testament in 1523; the whole Bible in 1530)
and thus to promote an internalized practice of the faith. The movement
was particularly active between the king’s return from imprisonment in
Spain (1526), then that of his sons left behind as hostages (1530), and the
affaire des placards (17 October 1534). The publications emerging from
the network, often inspired by or in some cases direct translations of
Luther, did not avoid censure. Several imprints from the presses of Du
Bois, the printer of the first edition of the Miroir, were condemned in 1531:
L’Oraison de Jesus Christ, L’Epistre chrestienne tresutile, and Le Brief Recueil
de la substance et principal fondement de la doctrine evangelique. Accord-
ing to Jonathan Reid, “by the early 1530s, the faculty and many others were
now convinced that it was Marguerite who was fostering the plague of
27 Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549)

and Her Evangelical Network, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston, 2009), 1:35. Marguerite “shows
signs of having been an active leader in a broad network of evangelicals working for the
religious renewal of France” (1:3).
Lutheran heresy afflicting the land” (King’s Sister, 1:39). As she decided to
publish her first poem, the queen, who until then had favored the circula-
tion of her works in manuscript form, might have chosen its unremark-
able title on the advice of the printer. As Gabrielle Berthoud has shown,
the Evangelicals commonly had recourse to titles that appeared orthodox
in an attempt to avoid censure.28 The Miroir might be seen as part of this
trend in its appeal to a common genre of religious literature, despite the
absence of any specific use of the mirror figure in the text. In addition, a
work with a similarly unremarkable title, Le Mirouer d’or de l’ame pecher-
esse tresutile et profitable, translated from the 15th-century Latin of Denis
the Carthusian, enjoyed several editions beginning in 1484, and the doc-
tors of the Faculty of Theology, keen on the speculum as a genre,29 them-
selves oversaw an edition of the Mirouer d’or de l’ame pecheresse in Paris
in 1532.30 The appearance of this edition between the first two editions
of Marguerite’s Miroir might even suggest it was intended to counter the
Evangelicals’ attack.
The MAP was thus launched onto the book market alongside other
evangelical works as the battle against the conservatives was in full swing.
As Reid notes, beginning in the 1530s and continuing on into the 1540s,
“Marguerite and a host of fellow writers became a vibrant, public voice of
evangelical doctrine and renewal” (King’s Sister, 1:15). The Miroir contains,
more or less explicitly, the entire range of doctrinal ideas promoted by the
Evangelicals, arising from a reconsideration of Saint Paul, especially the
Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, which stress the opposition of
faith and law, the superiority of faith over works, justification by faith, and
salvation by the grace of God and by union with the Risen Christ. If these
ideas have much in common with Reformed theology, the Evangelicals
differentiated themselves from Luther and later from Calvin by being less
radical in their rejection of the fundamental practices of the Roman lit-
urgy and much more prudent in their statement of innovative elements.31
28 Gabrielle Berthoud, “Livres pseudo-catholiques de contenu protestant,” in Aspects de

la propagande religieuse, ed. Gabrielle Berthoud et al. (Geneva, 1957), pp. 143–54.
29 La Farce des Théologastres, attributed to Louis de Berquin, makes fun of the “grand
Miroer / Des Theologastres”; see ed. Claude Longeon (Geneva, 1989), ll. 541–42.
30 See Francis Higman, Piety and the People: Religious Printing in French, 1511–1551 (Alder-
shot and Burlington, Vt., 1996), p. 322.
31 See Isabelle Garnier-Mathez, “Influence et connivence luthériennes chez les Évan-
géliques sous François Ier: une innutrition communautaire,” in La Littérature française au
croisement des cultures, ADIREL, Actes du colloque de mars 2008 (Travaux de Littérature)
22 (Paris, 2009), pp. 127–38.
The MAP, like other texts produced by the network, remains silent on such
highly contested issues as the role and conduct of the pope, the clergy and
monks, the intercession of the saints, purgatory, or the doctrine of the
Eucharist.32 This was not its design. On the other hand, the poem does
adopt a clear position on the doctrine of justification by faith, “le thème
central, sinon le thème unique” of the poem (ed. Salminen, p. 76), and one
which “links the theology of the Miroir with that of the Dialogue.”33 The
Miroir forcefully and effectively deploys evangelical theology in a com-
pletely original way not found in other texts of the network. The long
first-person verse meditation, which calls for a personal commitment on
the part of the sinner, stands in marked contrast to the prose catechetical
treatises that frequently proffer vigorous admonition.
The Rediscovery of the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse and Recent Scholarship

After three and half centuries of neglect, Félix Frank’s 1873 edition of Les
Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses,34 followed by the studies of
Pierre Jourda, once again drew attention to Marguerite’s poetic works.
The MAP has received several critical editions: the editio princeps (A) was
presented by Joseph L. Allaire;35 the text in its most polished form (E),
edited by Renja Salminen in Finland, has attracted less interest than it
deserves, despite an extensive critical apparatus.36 After considering the
poem’s historical and religious context, Salminen studies its versification
and use of language. In addition to a glossary, an appendix gives the text
of The Glasse of the Synnefull Soule (1544), the English translation of the
Miroir by the future Elizabeth I and a testimony to the poem’s reception
at the English court.37
32 Only two lines of the Miroir make a discrete reference to “la reception / De vostre
corps tresdigne et sacré sang” (vv. 126–27); cf. the second Miroir: “noz ames repais / de
ta doctrine et de ton pain tresblanc / par qui mangeons et ta chair et ton sang” (vv.
802–04).
tual Ascent (Geneva, 1989), p. 51.
34 4 vols. (Paris, 1873); repr. 1 vol. (Geneva, 1970).
35 (Munich, 1972).
36 Most Anglophone scholars have used Frank’s edition, that is, the late text originally
printed in 1547. An edition of the Miroir and the texts that accompanied it in edition E is
in preparation by Isabelle Garnier, Marguerite de Navarre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole
Cazauran, vol. 2.
37 Of the 19 publications produced by the presses of Du Bois in Alençon, 12, including
Le Dialogue and Le Miroir, were included in the library of Henry VIII, providing further
evidence of the spirit of propaganda shared by Du Bois and the queen’s work. See James P.
If Salminen terms the MAP a “prière jaillie directement du cœur” (p. 82),
the editor also identifies its four principal sources: (1) the Bible, the poem
consisting essentially of “une suite de citations bibliques versifiées” (p. 31);
(2) the correspondence between Marguerite and Guillaume Briçonnet, to
which can be traced the idea of the union of the freed and purified spirit
with God, the exploitation of the metaphysical significance of vision, and
the use of terms found in the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius; (3) the
propagandist works published by Du Bois, such as the Traicté du Souverain
Bien, dedicated to Marguerite; (4) Luther, and in particular his De Libertate
christiana.38 There is a general consensus among scholars with respect to
these sources, which are above all evidence of Marguerite’s biblical and
evangelical inspiration, even if some have rejected a number of Salminen’s
overly hasty conclusions.39 The MAP was printed with marginal notes giv-
ing references to the Scripture passages commented on by the queen or
cited from memory, though their precise content and number vary from
edition to edition. This characteristic, which distinguishes the MAP from
medieval devotional works as well as from contemporary ones, is found
only one other time in Marguerite’s corpus: the Discord, published with
the Miroir from 1533 on. In her article “Les Annotations en marge du Miroir
de l’ame pecheresse,” Cynthia Skenazi stresses the central role of the Bible
among the poem’s sources: “l’Écriture est simultanément la source de
l’œuvre de Marguerite, son référent ultime et son point d’aboutissement,”40
a sign of the poem’s fundamentally didactic intention. We shall see later
that the MJCC also contains marginal biblical references but in this case,
since they are not found in the manuscripts, they appear to have been
added by the editors and, in consequence, vary in accordance with their
particular theological leanings.
The considerable work performed by the editors of the second, post-
humous mirror, has been exploited by modern scholars to enrich our
understanding of the first. Gary Ferguson, for example, draws on a treatise
Carley, “French Evangelical Books at the Court of Henry VIII,” in The French Evangelical
Book before Calvin, ed. J.-F. Gilmont and W. Kemp (Nugae Humanisticae) 4 (Turnhout,
2004), pp. 131–45.
38 Salminen speaks of Luther’s work without seeming to be aware of the anonymous
French translation that was circulating within the “Navarrian network”: Le Livre tresutile
de la vraye et parfaicte subjection des chrestiens, et ensemble de la sacree franchise et liberté,
qu’ilz ont en Sainct Esperit ([Strasbourg], [Johann Schott], [Wolfgang Köpfel], 1525?).
39 Marguerite “ne comprit jamais pleinement l’envergure du Protestantisme naissant,”
ed. MAP, p. 70.
40 Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 55 (1993), 255–70 (p. 257).
written by the Dominican Pierre Olivier, Le Mirouer du Chrestien et moyen

de cognoistre Dieu et soimesme, destined to be printed alongside the MJCC,
to show that the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse was clearly intended to have
“a certain exemplary and paradigmatic status.”41 Ferguson argues that the
traditional understanding of the MAP as purely personal had led to an
underestimation of its complexity and artistic merit, focusing attention
on the presence of a first-person speaker, je, uncritically assimilated to
the author-Marguerite. According to Ferguson, Olivier’s introduction to
Marguerite’s work, in addition to being a historical reflection, contains
an appreciation of the poem as a mirror, showing “a sensitivity to the
generic characteristics of Marguerite’s poem, which remains illuminating
for the modern reader, who does not necessarily share the same theologi-
cal concerns” (p. 404). Ferguson applies Olivier’s guidelines to the first 168
lines of the MAP, demonstrating that “three distinct spiritual states are
described and come to coalesce in a single predicated subject je” (p. 408).
A first je arises from the coalescence of “imaginary associations between
the poem’s individual âme pecheresse and natural man in his fallen state,”
making the subject of the poem “both personal and universal.” The fact
that man appears here “more radically fallen” than in traditional theology
is taken by Ferguson as a reflection of the influence on the queen of “the
rhetoric of mystical writing, as well as of Protestant writers such as Luther”
(pp. 405–06). Assuming the reader must understand that this je speaks of
his or her fallen state with a hindsight “guaranteed only outside the text
by the authorial soul of Marguerite, looking at herself in the mirror,” Fer-
guson points to the existence of a second je, “coexistent with the first in
the poem, yet logically posterior to it.” In a last step, “as it contemplates
Christ, by whose grace it is restored, the soul is eventually transformed
into a third je, who recovers in Christ, all that of which up until now it
had been deprived”—a transformation corresponding to Olivier’s mirror
of grace (pp. 405–07). Thus Ferguson accords the pronoun je “the possibil-
ity of a privileged relationship with its author,” but a relationship that is
“both poetically and theologically, self-conscious” (pp. 408–11).
If the particular relationship uniting the speaking je to Marguerite gives
shape to the meditation of the MAP, the sinful soul nonetheless remains
a common motif of medieval piety, whose precise sources Brenda Dunn-
Lardeau has worked to identify. Of particular importance is the model of
41 Gary Ferguson, “Now in a glass darkly: the textual status of the je parlant in the
Miroirs of Marguerite de Navarre,” Renaissance Studies 5.4 (1991), 398–411 (p. 399).
the great sinner repentant, taken from the Bible, as well as the historical
lives of female sinners and penitents (Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt)
and the apocryphal lives of Pelagia, Margaret, and Thaïs found in Jaco-
bus de Voragine’s 13th-century Golden Legend, a copy of which was in the
library of the château at Cognac where Marguerite spent her childhood.
As Dunn-Lardeau notes, “la figure hagiographique de la pécheresse et de la
pénitente . . . est l’étymon spirituel du Miroir pour reprendre une expres-
sion spitzérienne.”42 The work of biblical exegesis integrated into the
prayer-meditation of the sinful soul also has medieval sources, as Barbara
Marczuk-Szwed has shown.43 Marguerite, committed to the interpreta-
tion of Scripture, was familiar with the three traditional levels of spiritual
meaning: the allegorical, the moral (or tropological), and the anagogical
(or mystical), which supplemented the literal sense conveying historical
facts.44 Evangelical theologians like Lefèvre d’Étaples and Briçonnet had
taught her to seek out the true sense of the Scriptures, communicated
to those enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, Marguerite’s posi-
tion is not that of a theologian. The sinful soul identifies with a number
of biblical figures, who “racontent eux-mêmes leur propre biographie. Ils
expliquent le sens moral de leurs histoires et finissent cette exégèse ori-
ginale par une prière affectueuse et personnelle” (Marczuk-Szwed, p. 41).
Moral exegesis, as practiced by the queen, leads to an understanding of
the profound meaning of the lives of the saints at the same time that it
allows the Christian to understand his or her own situation and to see
“sa biographie tourmentée inscrite dans l’histoire du salut et dans le plan
divin.” Demonstrating a degree of “indépendance à l’égard de la tradition
et de l’enseignement de Briçonnet,” Marguerite “étend la signification
42 Brenda Dunn-Lardeau, “Archaïsme et modernité de la figure de la pécheresse et de la

pénitente dans le Miroir de l’ame pecheresse de Marguerite de Navarre,” Acta Universitatis
Lodziensis (Folia Literaria) 38 (1997), 21–33 (pp. 32–33). Dunn-Lardeau points out resem-
blances between Marguerite and her models: like Pelagia, “appelée Marguerite (perle) à
cause de la pompe de ses vêtements . . ., Marguerite aurait trop aimé son corps, mais cet
aveu ne survient que dans le second Miroir puisque le premier est tout à clamer l’aversion
de la chair” (pp. 30–31).
43 Barbara Marczuk-Szwed, “Marguerite de Navarre à la recherche du sens spirituel de
la Bible,” Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance 33 (1991), 31–42.
44 According to a couplet quoted by and sometimes attributed to Nicholas of Lyra:
“Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria / Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.” The
object of the allegorical sense is Christ and the Church, the history of Israel prefiguring
the earthly life of the Messiah. The moral or tropological sense reveals what the Christian
should or should not do. The anagogical or eschatological sense reveals his or her final
goal. See Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’Écriture, 4 vols. (Paris,
1959–64).
tropologique des histoires bibliques aux tourments spirituels” suffered by

her characters (pp. 35–37). With respect to the mystical meaning of Scrip-
ture, Marguerite is influenced by two theological traditions: the Fathers
lead her to seek in biblical narratives symbols of the mysteries of salva-
tion; Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite encourages her to see in them a
description of the mystical union of the soul with God. The originality of
Marguerite’s biblical commentaries is a result of her use of the Scriptures
“à titre d’argument à l’appui du raisonnement, ou comme illustration d’un
thème qui parfois ne s’apparente que de loin à l’Écriture.” This “exégèse
poétique” (pp. 41–42), which fits itself to the requirements of verse com-
position, testifies to the queen’s theological knowledge but also, as we
shall see, to the aim of her work.
Alongside the religious sources there are also specific literary influ-
ences. Marie Holban compares the MAP to a collection of epistles in both
prose and verse by the rhétoriqueur Jean Bouchet, Les Triumphes de la
Noble Dame et l’art de honnestement aymer (Poitiers, 1530/1531).45 This vol-
ume, dedicated to the new queen Éléonore, would meet with considera-
ble success, being reprinted, according to Holban, some 18 times. Like the
Miroir, it uses the enunciative fiction of giving voice to a soul confessing
its guilt. Among the many similarities highlighted between the two texts,
some are so specific as to give weight to the thesis that one must have
influenced the other. At the same time, it is uncertain that the Triumphes
were composed earlier and Bouchet might well have read the Miroir in
manuscript. As a result, Holban overstates her case when she claims that
the work of Bouchet contains “l’idée et la raison d’être” of the MAP. If
Bouchet’s influence on Marguerite were in fact established, this would
require holding the date of the Miroir’s composition back to the very end
of the period 1527–30, where current scholarship situates it, and accept-
ing that the poem “fut écrit rapidement, d’un seul jet.” Such a hypothesis
seems unlikely in light of the poem’s elaborate composition, to which we
now turn.
The Structure of the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse: A Challenge to Scholarship

Competing analyses
Most of the 20th-century commentators on the MAP, seeing the poem as
representing a lyrical outpouring of the author’s soul, her hopes, her fears,
45 Marie Holban, “Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse et les Epistres de la noble et amoureuse
dame,” in Mélanges Abel Lefranc (Paris, 1936; Geneva, 1972), pp. 142–54.
and her prayers, felt compelled to criticize its form. The poem’s subject
seemed to be treated in a disorganized way, leading to disorder and con-
fusion. Its style struck them as heavy, weighed down by repetition and
worn-out images, its versification undisciplined, far removed from clas-
sical norms:
C’est moins un poème qu’une longue effusion, une confession, où de beaux
traits épars ne suffisent pas à compenser des longueurs et un bavardage par-
fois pénible à suivre.46
La première chose qui frappe le lecteur du Miroir est l’abandon d’un plan
logique. Le poème est confus; Marguerite se laisse aller, elle écrit page après
page et pourtant la pensée n’avance pas.47
The poem’s lack of immediately apparent structure, long identified as
the cause of its relative neglect by scholars, no longer seems to deter read-
ers today. In recent decades, several studies, most of them in English, have
addressed the seeming “confusion” of the Miroir, drawing out its internal
logic and highlighting its structural dynamics. Robert Cottrell’s Grammar
of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry (1986) was the first
to open a new approach to the poetic work of the queen. Often marked
by the influence of psychoanalysis, whose conceptual framework was not
developed with such an object of study in mind, this analysis of the Miroir
turned out to be extremely stimulating and represents one of the most
successful attempts at explaining the work’s spiritual and poetic coher-
ence. The Miroir’s epigraph is taken from psalm 51[/50]: “Seigneur DIEU
crée en moy cœur net,” a prayer of repentance known as the Miserere.
Cottrell takes this to indicate that the poem “retraces the pattern of spiri-
tual progress outlined in the Miserere, which thus serves as a paradigmatic
text” (p. 99). The Miroir appears as a long meditation of 1434 lines, based
on Scripture: “Looking into the speculum Scripturae, which is immanent
in her own text, Marguerite sees in the image of herself that is reflected
back a sinner” (p. 106). Based on a close examination of Marguerite’s
correspondence with Briçonnet, Cottrell elucidates the main lines of a
mystical spirituality based on Pseudo-Dionysius’s negative theology, the
wellspring of the queen’s poetic search for a language capable of signify-
ing divine Silence. Seeking to define the “grammar” of this language of the
ineffable, Cottrell suggests that in the MAP, “as in all her major poems, the
46 Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, Duchesse d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre

(1492–1549): Étude biographique et littéraire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1930; Geneva, 1978), 1:380.
47 Salminen, ed. MAP, p. 87.
linguistic problem Marguerite confronts is how to devise strategies

whereby the Verbe of which the text is composed can efface itself and, by
so doing, signify the Tout-Verbe . . . source of all speech” (pp. 98–99). He
supports his analysis with notions drawn from linguistics, rhetoric, and the
categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis (the Real, the Imaginary, and
the Symbolic). Thus, after an introductory section of some 260 lines, in
the first part of the MAP,
[t]he convergence of specular, baptismal, and conjugal metaphors in Mar-
guerite’s account of the mortificatio points to a self that is constituted within
what Lacan calls the Imaginary. Originating in “the mirror stage” of infancy,
the Imaginary is a category of being in which the “I,” seeing in the Other
“a salutary imago” and “an ideal unity” it feels it lacks, tries to master its
world by identifying with the Other. (p. 109)
Cottrell suggests that Marguerite’s text quickly moves beyond the Imagi-
nary stage to the Symbolic—a “category of being into which the human
being emerges when he begins to acquire language” (p. 110)—by means
of a meditation on Matthew 12:50, in which the je of the poem takes sym-
bolic possession of the names of mother, daughter, sister, and spouse of
Christ, that is, of various Christ-like qualities. Je no longer defines itself
“in terms of the anthropomorphically limiting concept” of spouse or of
mother, daughter, or sister, that belong to the Imaginary (ibid.). Cottrell
identifies the four allegorical accounts staging the relations between the
speaker and Christ as the second part of the poem. Having undergone
an experience of mortification, the first-person narrator is reborn in God.
Marguerite makes “a perceptual shift away from the concept of the self as
reality, seeing its own (imperfect) image in God’s Word, to that of self as
a reflection of Christ” (p. 116). But since the aim of the Miroir is to bring
the Christian to see the whole that is the divine, the text goes beyond the
Imaginary and the Symbolic toward what Cottrell calls the Iconic in order
to express Marguerite’s message:
What the world calls real is in fact unreal. Within the context of Christian
revelation, what Lacan calls imaginaire turns out to be not imaginary but
real, for the Christian is an other. The text that represents this perception
is an iconic text. . . . As in an icon, the relationship between Marguerite, the
signifier, the Verbe, and Christ, the signified, the Tout-Verbe, is that of resem-
blance or likeness. (pp. 119–20)
In this way, the poem seeks to “impose itself on the reader’s conscious-
ness as a mirror that reflects the iconic figure of Christ, inseparable, the
text would have us believe, from our own image” (p. 120). The affirma-
tion of the unity of Christ and the speaker leads to the realization of the
inadequacy of language to transmit this experience. Cottrell continues:

“the text enacts the experience of mortificatio on the level of discourse. It
humbles itself and, confessing its grossness and baseness, declares itself to
be ‘moins que rien’” (p. 121). In actuality, this declaration is made by the
speaking je, the sinful soul itself:
Moy donques ver de terre, moins que riens,
Chienne morte, pourriture de fiens. (vv. 1373–74)
Nonetheless, these words help us see the paradox which informs the
entire last part of the MAP: “With proper authorial manipulation, . . . a text,
although it cannot contain the Tout-Verbe, can be polished and cleaned
until it is so smooth . . . that it becomes a mirror capable of reflecting not
only the sinful soul of the self but also the glory of the Johannine logos”
(p. 122).
The richness of Cottrell’s interpretation should be clear. Through the
deployment of Lacanian categories, he activates the metaphor of the mir-
ror which informs the whole of the poem, even if it is not inscribed in ref-
erential terms in the text itself. This controlled use of anachronism renews
the interpretive schemes generally employed in analysing 16th-century
texts; it underscores both the depth and originality of Marguerite’s verse
as well as her understanding of her own poetics.
In Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of
Spiritual Ascent (1989), Paula Sommers discerns a double structure in the
organization of the Miroir, based on two complementary patterns: “The
Miroir combines tertiary patterns based upon the exploitation of Scrip-
tural material with the steps of the triple way” (p. 52). The first pattern is
the “frame” technique, which results in the poem’s symmetrical composi-
tion in sections of “paraphrase-parable-paraphrase”:
The poem begins with short paraphrases culled from the Old and New Testa-
ments (vv. 1–378), includes a central passage in which the narrator develops
a series of parables based on concepts introduced in the preceding section
(vv. 379–840), and concludes with another sequence of short Biblical pas-
sages (vv. 841–1434). (p. 52)
As a careful reader of Scripture, Marguerite folds a close paraphrase of
the Bible into her prayer, which flowers into a personal meditation. Read-
ing, prayer, and meditation are the spiritual techniques Saint Bonaventure
prescribed in his De Triplici Via for each stage of the threefold mystical
way—purgatio, illuminatio, perfectio. The second pattern that governs
the poem, according to Sommers, thus derives from the Bonaventuran
scheme:
Purgatio forms a relatively short introductory sequence (vv. 1–94). Illumi-

natio, which occupies the center of the Miroir, merits over seven hundred
verses (vv. 95–852). . . . The narrator recalls that Christ’s death has brought
forgiveness (vv. 83–137) and created a new relationship between man and
God. The idea of Christ-as-brother encourages her to reflect upon His kind-
ness towards her, and her Biblical reading reveals that she is spiritually
daughter, mother, wife, and sister of her Saviour. . . . The Miroir concludes
with a perfective sequence (vv. 853–1034 [sic for 1434]). (pp. 52–53)
For Sommers, the use of both tertiary patterns shows the “strong af[f ]ini-
ties” the Miroir has with “the ladder-poems of the 1520’s” (p. 52), among
which was the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne. However whereas those
“ladder-poems” were characterized by a movement of spiritual ascent,
the Miroir is the first “to depict spiritual progress in terms of descent as
well as ascent. . . . The soul hesitates and falters, progresses and regresses”
(pp. 65–66).48
The Numerological Structure of the Miroir: A New Reading

Despite their differences, and even if they establish divisions in different
places, recent analyses concur in discerning a ternary structure in the MAP.
None of them, however, considers the whole range of numerical structures
to which Marguerite, along with many of her contemporaries, attached
such importance. We will argue here that taking account of a combina-
tion of diverse numerological structures can restore the text’s readability.
Unlike earlier interpretations, we take as constituting the Miroir properly
speaking only the poem’s first 1000 lines. These form a coherent whole
and are followed by an Oraison à Dieu of 434 verses placed at the end. This
precise designation is printed, among the biblical references, in the mar-
gin of the text next to verse 1001 from the 1533 Augereau editions onward.49
The heart of the Miroir, strictly speaking then, is made up of three parts.
The first is an introduction (vv. 1–172), whose last line presents the
48 Cf. p. 53: “purity is so far beyond her in the opening lines [of the Miroir] that she
seeks descent rather than ascent.” Barbara Marczuk-Szwed also proposes a ternary struc-
ture for the Miroir, different from that of other scholars, without however offering any
decisive justification for the divisions suggested. According to Marczuk-Szwed, a short first
section (vv. 1–260) is followed by a second (vv. 261–880) and third sections (vv. 881–1434),
the last of which is said to represent an “élan spontané de la prière.” See “Le mysticisme
biblique de Marguerite de Navarre,” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis (Folia Literaria) 38 (1997),
9–19.
49 Despite the presence of this marginal note in the 1547 edition of the Marguerites
used by Cottrell, the critic writes of “the long second half of the poem” that “goes nowhere
from a narrative point of view” (Grammar, p. 116). This observation tends to confirm the
necessity of considering the oraison apart from the rest of the poem.
principal topic—the soul treated by God “Comme mere, fille, sœur, et

espouse.” A development follows (vv. 173–926), comprised of three sec-
tions, each of which has four parts of increasing length, presenting the
four elements of comparison in a variety of situations. A structuring role is
thus played by the number 12, whose sacred associations are well known.
The conclusion (vv. 927–1000) repeats several times the tetrad “mere, fille,
sœur, espouse” that constitutes the fourfold allegory of the sinful soul.
These relationships, which cannot apply together to a single person, draw
the relationship of the soul to God into the orbit of negative theology.
1–1000. The “mirror” in the Miroir

The poem’s long introduction begins with a series of rhetorical questions
interspersed in the meditation of the sinful soul (vv. 1–7, 65–66, 93–94,
121). In three passages, the je confesses its humility, its weakness, sin, and
nothingness (vv. 1–30, 43–64, 100–38), to which respond three passages
where it celebrates the grace that brings salvation (vv. 31–42, 65–100,
139–72). The first of the four uses of the word grace appears in line 33, a
number with clear Christological symbolism. The introduction ends with
an apostrophe to God’s “Charité ardente” (vv. 150–72), based notably on
a series of seven uses (4 + 3) of the verbs aimer (vv. 149, 151, 152, 158) and
donner (vv. 154, 160, 169).
The start of the middle section of the poem sets forth the four terms
“mere, fille, sœur, espouse” in two different orders:
• 173–88: Mère
• 189–214: Sœur
• 215–18: Fille
• 219–46: Épouse
• 247–60: Fille
• 261–318: Mère
• 319–34: Sœur
• 335–64: Épouse
A prayer of thanksgiving (vv. 365–78), containing an apostrophe to God

echoing the female tetrad (“O mon Frere, Pere, Enfant, et Espoux,” v. 367),
is followed by a series of the sinful soul’s confessions, connected by a dou-
ble parallelism: each confession retells an episode found in the Bible in
which the soul takes on, in turn, one of the roles of the previous tetrad,
perverted by sin:
• 379–414: Wicked daughter, based on the parable of the prodigal son

(v. 383).
• 415–96: Wicked mother, based on the episode of the judgment of Solo-
mon (v. 445).
• 497–580: Wicked sister, taken from an episode in Numbers (12:1–14); the
sinful soul sees itself as Miriam, afflicted with leprosy after having spo-
ken against Moses along with Aaron, her “frere en trahison” (v. 505).
• 581–926: Wicked wife, based on Jeremiah.
The twelfth and last section of the central development section, almost
twice as long as the three preceding ones (345 lines), has several phases.
Unlike the reaction of parents to their wayward children or the brother to
his guilty sister, which might lead to forgiveness, the reaction of a husband
to his unfaithful wife is inevitably characterized by severity (vv. 581–602).
Marguerite marvels at God’s clemency, of love the “seul et parfaict exemple”
(vv. 603–06), before going on to the next stages: a fine marriage between
social unequals (vv. 609–16); the seriousness of the “piteux cas” of the sin-
ful wife (vv. 617–58), whose shame at abandoning Christ is underscored
by the anaphora “Laissé vous ay,” repeated ten times (vv. 642–58);50 the
attitude of the unfaithful wife who immediately identifies her lover: “C’est
l’Ennemy, et le Monde, et la Chair” (vv. 659–84); the mercy shown by the
Lord, “vray espoux,” that fails to produce any effect on the “brebiz errante”
(vv. 685–741); the decisive reading of the third chapter of Jeremiah, along
with a long quotation from the “sainct prophete,” in which the wife sees
her own misdeeds as if in a mirror (vv. 741–80); the repentance of the sin-
ner and divine forgiveness (vv. 781–830). It is in this final stage of the last
of the twelve sections of the Miroir’s central section that we find its most
strongly stated and most evangelical profession of faith:
Avéz usé de vostre grand’ clemence:
Mettant en moy une si vive Foy:
Que vous sçachant Maistre, Seigneur, et Roy,
(De qui debvois par raison avoir crainte)
Par vraye amour senty ma paour estaincte:
En vous croyant mary si gratieux,
Bon, doulx, piteux, misericordieux. (vv. 796–802)
50 Marie Holban compares this anaphora to Bouchet’s “j’ay delaissé” (“Le Miroir,” p. 145).
This is the only use in the body of the poem of the expression “vive foy,”
so characteristic of evangelical theology. It is intensified by the adverb
“si,” which highlights the gift of saving and life-giving faith—in a way
exceptional compared with the discourse of other members of the “Navar-
rian network”—experienced as a form of paroxysm. Quite naturally,
this twelfth section closes with an apostrophe to “Charité ardente” (vv.
831–80). This echoes the apostrophe of verses 150–72, opening with the
same hemistich “O Charité.”51 Marguerite stresses the regeneration of the
sinner, who becomes, in God, a “creature nouvelle” (v. 833). In this way,
in the words of Cottrell, quoted earlier, she allows for “a perceptual shift
away from the concept of the self as reality, seeing its own (imperfect)
image in God’s Word, to that of self as a reflection of Christ” (Grammar,
p. 116). The spouse has returned to the “Gratieux lict” (v. 844), locus of
divine grace, but she is blinded by “Le bien de [Dieu], qui est tant admi-
rable” (v. 865):
Las, qu’est cecy: jettant en hault ma veüe,
Je voy en vous bonté si incongnue,
Grace et amour si incomprehensible,
Que la veüe m’en demeure invisible. (vv. 853–56)
The rhetoric of the oxymoron reactivates the metaphor of the mirror here
and prepares the way for the Pauline inversion of death and life, a recur-
rent motif in evangelical writing, taken up in the Oraison at the very end
of the poem:
Vie sans fin a faict nostre mort vive.
Mort a donné à vie mort neïfve.
Par ceste mort, moy morte reçoy vie:
Et au vivant par la mort suis ravie. (vv. 885–88)
The third section that forms the conclusion of the Miroir (vv. 927–1000)
repeats six times the masculine tetrad “Filz, Pere, Espoux et Frere”; indeed,
this is found four times in the space of ten lines (vv. 932–42), with the
elements inverted two by two or the reversal of those in the middle.
The repetition of the “lieu, nom, et office / De Fille, Sœur, Mere, Espouse”
(vv. 946–47) completes the trajectory that leads the soul from morti-
fication to union with God:
51 The position of these two passages highlights their symmetry: the first begins 150
lines into the poem, the second concludes 149 lines before the end of the Miroir proper
at verse 1000.
Vous appellant Pere (parlant à vous

Sans crainte avoir) Enfant, Frere et Espoux,
Vous escoutant, je m’oy Mere nommer,
Sœur, Fille, Espouse . . . (vv. 951–54)
In this way, the Miroir concludes with a triumphant double anaphora,
symmetrical to the “Laissé vous ay” expressing shame. This is made up of
three repetitions of the affirmation “Or vous ay je” and nine causal expres-
sions beginning with “Puisque” (“vous / à vous / il vous / au vostre”). Twelve
elements thus close this final section of the Miroir, declaring unqualified
adhesion to God. According to patristic tradition, the number twelve rep-
resents the Church Triumphant, the ultimate destiny of the Church Suf-
fering and the Chuch Militant.52 Here, it undergirds the representation of
the “deified” self,53 regenerate in Christ:
Puis qu’à vous suis, à aultre ne veulx estre.
Puis que mon cueur au vostre avéz uny,
S’il s’en depart, qu’il soit sans fin puny.
Car plus dur est que la dampnation,
Sentir de vous la separation. (vv. 994–98)
At the end of the thousand verses that constitute the mirror in the Miroir,
it is impossible not to be struck by the presence of sacred numbers inscribed
not in the linguistic thread of the text but in the poem’s deep structure.
This must be understood in light of the importance accorded to num-
bers and their symbolism both in the Bible54 and in neo-Platonism, whose
ideas Marguerite helped to spread in France. Ancient philosophy, inter-
preted through the lens of Ficino and Christianity, attributed a metaphysi-
cal significance to number, of which Renaissance poets often made use.55
In Marguerite’s case, this seems to have been a major force of poetic
52 See René Allendy, Le symbolisme des nombres, essai d’arithmosophie, 2nd ed. (Paris,
1983).
53 The past participle “déifié” appears in verse 884 of the editions of Du Bois and the
first two of Augereau (“Vie mourant d’amour deifiée”). It is replaced by “verifiée” in sub-
sequent editions.
54 Ernst Robert Curtius reminds us that in the Bible “number was sanctified as a form-
bestowing factor in the divine work of creation,” European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), p. 504. Curtius offers many examples of
medieval texts whose composition is based on numerological principles, especially on a
given number of lines, like 100 or 1000. This practice was still current in the 16th century, as
can be seen from the titles of many Latin and vernacular texts: Hecatomythium, Hecatele-
gium, Chiliades, Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, or the Hecatodistichon in memory of Marguerite
referred to in note 2 above.
55 See Kees Meerhoff, Rhétorique et poétique au xvie siècle en France (Leiden, 1986), pp.
15ff.
creation. In the practice of rhetorical copia, the queen favors copia verbo-
rum (elocutio) over copia rerum (inventio) in pursuit of the goal of mor-
tification. Indeed, in the “mirror” itself, inventio—the search for ideas to
support an argument, a form of composition gratifying to the intellect—
plays only a minimal role, being limited to the fourfold allegory of the
soul as mother, daughter, sister, and spouse. It is elocutio that elaborates
on this for more than 750 lines, including the initial double evocation fol-
lowed by the four narratives, by means of all the techniques of stylistic
amplification recommended in contemporary treatises on poetics:56 epi-
thets, periphrases, enumeration, anaphora, comparison, and all forms of
lexical repetition, such as derivation or polyptoton.57
The very project of a composition with an infinite number of verses—
1000 being the symbol of an innumerable quantity—can be considered
part of this endeavor and as an exercise in the mortification of the reason-
ing self. Writing a meditation of 1000 lines is not a challenge taken up as a
means of self-glorification but a trial intended to purify the soul, requiring
it to contemplate its nothingness without possibility of evasion. Proceed-
ing along different lines, our analysis is thus in agreement with that of
Cottrell, which also stresses writing as a form of mortification and rejects
the idea that the MAP was composed in haste.
1001–1434. “Oraison à Dieu”

As is clearly indicated by the words “oraison à dieu,” placed in the mar-
gin next to verse 1001 from Augereau’s editions on, the poem concludes
with a prayer, a supplication. This important structural break, previously
neglected, is marked at the outset by an eloquent apostrophe to the “Pere
et Createur” (with no reference to brother or husband). The soul asks to
be admitted to paradise and not to be denied entry by the enemy, that is,
the devil from hell:
Helas, mon DIEU, mon Pere et Createur, ORAISON À DIEU
Ne souffréz pas l’ennemy inventeur
De tout peché, avoir ceste puissance,
Qu’il me face perdre vostre presence. (vv. 1001–04)
56 See Pierre Fabri, Le Grand et Vrai Art de pleine rhétorique (Rouen, 1521), ed. Alexandre
Héron (Geneva, 1969).
57 The extensive and combined use of these stylistic procedures in works of edifica-
tion or religious propaganda is a shared characteristic of the authors of the “Navarrian
network.” See Isabelle Garnier-Mathez, L’Épithète et la connivence: Écriture concertée chez
les Évangéliques français (1523–1534) (Geneva, 2005), pp. 239–68.
The remainder of the passage explains this request. Unlike the first 1000
lines of the Miroir, no numeric or geometric construction is perceptible
here. Instead, there is a logical movement, a progressive argument, in
which several stages can be delineated. After the exordium (vv. 1001–14),
the prayer develops in four more-or-less equal sections of about 100 lines.
The first expresses a desire for death (vv. 1015–110). The Christian, freed
from fear and united with Jesus by “grande amour” (v. 1037), calls upon
death because it offers ultimate release from the flesh and sin, thanks to
the “grand mystere / De ceste croix” (vv. 1027–28):
Et tout ainsi que paour nous retardoit:
Amour desir de Mort donner nous doibt.
Car, si amour est au cueur, sans mentir 1. Jehan 4
Il ne sçauroit aultre chose sentir. (vv. 1041–44)
Desire for death, a commonplace of evangelical literature, has its most
important biblical source in the Pauline cupio dissolvi et esse cum Christo:
“mort est chose heureuse / À une ame de luy bien amoureuse” (vv. 1075–76).
This whole passage, deeply influenced by the teachings of Briçonnet,
presents a rewriting of common motifs of evangelical discourse, present
notably in two works close to the Miroir in time and in spirit: Marguerite’s
own Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (cf. vv. 283–84 for the desire for
death) and Marot’s Déploration de Florimond Robertet (vv. 353–54). The
rest of the Miroir’s Oraison reminds the reader that, for the soul, death is
nothing but “la porte / Par qui il fault que de sa prison sorte” (vv. 1077–78).
Marguerite’s contemporaries were familiar with the double motif of the
door and the prison. The “portes de mort chrétienne désirée,” about which
Briçonnet wrote to Marguerite (Correspondance, 1:74), appear already in
her Dialogue (vv. 1172 and 1254) as well as in Marot’s Déploration (v. 394),
then later in the MJCC (v. 893), as does the Platonic image of the body as
prison of the soul (Dialogue, v. 178; Déploration, vv. 334–40). The assurance
of the saving function of death is voiced in an ardent appeal in the closing
lines of this first section of the prayer: “O mort o mort, venéz” (v. 1109),
a faith-filled echo of verse 111.
Once beyond the fear of death, the Christian needs to move beyond
the fear of judgment. This is the clear logical connection that leads into
the second section, couched in an eschatological perspective (vv. 1111–96):
“Puisque la mort m’est vie si plaisante, / . . . Craindre ne dois si non le
jugement” (vv. 1111–13). Fear is held at bay by the sinful soul’s twofold dec-
laration. On the one hand, “Dieu est juste” (v. 1123) et ce “Juge / Est mon
Espoux, mon Pere et mon refuge” (vv. 1143–44), which marks a return to
some of the familial metaphors found in the body of the Miroir. On the
other hand, Jesus Christ has become her “Advocat” (v. 1151): “Du juge-
ment n’auray donc plus de crainte” (v. 1191). The soul, well aware of its
weakness, recognizes that it deserves nothing but hell (“Et congnois bien
mon infidelité, / Digne d’Enfer, et sa crudelité,” vv. 1197–98), and it is this
idea which introduces the third section of the “Oraison” (vv. 1197–312).
The denial of the idea of personal merit (v. 1199) leads to the emphasis
placed on “Foy, qui unit par Charité ardente / Au Createur” (vv. 1283–84).
This “grande Charité, et amour” (v. 1300) is then hammered home rhetori-
cally by means of polyptoton and a series of eight repetitions of the noun
amour and a further eight of the verb aymer in twelve lines:
Mon amour n’est pour l’aymer, mais la sienne
En moy l’ayme, que je sentz comme mienne.
Il s’ayme donc en moy, et par m’aymer
Il faict mon cueur par amour enflammer. (vv. 1305–08)
The last section of the prayer leads the soul gradually to silence, in the
face of the incommensurable greatness of this love (vv. 1313–434):
Cesser doy bien parler de l’altitude
De ceste amour . . . (vv. 1375–76).
This ending is marked by two apostrophes; the first, the longer of the two,
addressed to “l’aymant”58—“O vray amant, de Charité la source”—gives
way to the acknowledgement of the powerlessness of human “dire” in the
face of “que c’est d’amour” (vv. 1344–45) and the realization of divine inef-
fability (v. 1353). This is the logical preparation for the end of the text:
“L’impossible me fera doncques taire” (v. 1367).
Before closing, however, the author justifies having spoken by declaring
clearly and for the first time her didactic purpose: “faisant l’edification /
De son prouchain” (vv. 1365–66). Paraphrasing the Pauline Epistles (“O
indicible haultesse,” v. 1387), the prayer continues with an apostrophe to
the apostle (“O bon sainct Pol,” v. 1394). The use of the second person
plural, repeated twice in the space of three lines, resounds as an exhorta-
tion to the reader to learn from the teachings of Saint Paul: “Oyez qu’il dit”
(v. 1387), “Ecoutez-le” (v. 1399). The foreknowledge of the inexpressible
(vv. 1353, 1387) causes a slippage in the enunciative position as the je is
effaced, giving way to the apostle, and melting finally into the nous of all
58 This is to whom the apostrophe is addressed in the first edition of 1531.

Christians. At this point, the poem becomes an ever more authentic Pau-
line miroir; the words of the apostle are highlighted by quotation marks,
intended to anchor these utterances worthy of memory in the heart of the
reader.59 Before falling silent like Saint Paul (“Je me tairay,” v. 1426), grati-
tude for the “tresgrand don de Foy” (v. 1413) leads the sinful soul, aware of
its unworthiness (“pouldre je me confesse et fange,” v. 1427), to a person-
ally signed thanksgiving (“moy sa MARGUERITE,” v. 1430), which marks
the unfailing acceptance of God’s gifts. Taking possession of the text by
means of the play on her name, the female speaker reduces the self to its
spiritual essence and takes on the full and complete union of the “âme”
with God. Having reflected the profound guilt that made this soul unwor-
thy of salvation, the Miroir pays an ultimate tribute to the Creator:
Ne puis faillir à rendre la louenge
De tant de biens, qu’avoir je ne merite,
Qu’il luy plaist faire à moy sa MARGUERITE.
AU ROY DU * CIEL immortel, invisible I. Tim. 1
SEUL DIEU puissant et incomprehensible
Soit tout honneur, gloire, louenge, amour
Par les siecles des siecles sans sejour. (vv. 1428–34)
As at the beginning of the second third of the poem,60 Marguerite here
uses “the language of the evangelical village,”61 which made the Pauline
verse (1 Tim. 1:17) the mark of several works of the “Navarrian network,”
whether on the title page itself62 or in the body of the text, as in the
Traicté du Souverain Bien:
Puis donc que l’espouse sçait son espoux estre tout glorieux, mesme celluy
auquel seul appartient honneur et gloire, pourquoy cherchera elle en aultre
que en luy gloire et honneur?63
59 16th-century quotation marks—whose function was like that of the pictogram of

a hand placed in the margins of manuscripts by medieval copyists to signal aphoristic
phrases—are found four times in the epilogue of the MAP (vv. 1293–1301, 1387–93, 1400–04,
and 1431–34).
60 Verses 491–92: “mon Dieu, honneur et gloire / Soit à vous seul et à chascun notoire.”
61 On this expression, see below.
62 “Au seul Dieu tout honneur et gloire”: Exhortation sur ces sainctes parolles de nostre
seigneur Jesus. Retournes vous et croies à L’evangile [Basle, Andreas Cratander, 1525?], fol.
A1r.
63 Le Traicté du Souverain Bien [Paris, Simon Du Bois, 1526?], fol. c6r. For further details
on what was to become an evangelical and then a Reformed commonplace, see Garnier-
Mathez, L’Épithète, pp. 334–37.
Like the Oraison à Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ published with the first 1531
edition of the MAP and which ends with the words “Louenge à Dieu seul,”
Marguerite’s second Miroir discretely takes up this evangelical leitmotif:
La honte donq puisse je recepvoir
et toy l’honneur, Seigneur, tout seul avoir. (vv. 795–96)64
The linguistic complicity linking the two Miroirs to other texts produced
by the network, despite the years that separate them (and of which this
example is but one among many), is the mark of the persistence of a
shared spiritual ideal among the evangelical community as well as of an
unchanging aspect of the queen’s spirituality.65
II. Le Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié
The Physical Experience of the Mirror

The Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié, Marguerite’s last work, is a peniten-
tial poem tracing the stages of a personal conversion produced by the
contemplation of the crucified Christ, whose suffering is understood as a
direct consequence of the sins of the meditator. This program, developed
in a simple, easily readable prayer in decasyllabic verse, is presented from
the outset:
Seigneur Jesus, que je doy advouër
pour mon exemple et trescler mirouër,
en toy me puis mirer, congnoistre et veoir,
car de me veoir hors de toy n’ay pouvoir.
En me voyant, si grande est ma noirceur,
que je ne suis de moy bon congnoisseur:
dont j’ay besoing que ta clairté premiere,
en m’esclairant, me monstre ta lumiere.66
The mirror motif does not appear here as a simple, abstract image, imply-
ing few or no particular constraints. Understood in the most literal sense,
it becomes the very source of the development of the meditation—and
of the text which recreates it. As Robert Cottrell has shown, it is looking
64 Another use of it is found in Marot’s Deploration de Florimond Robertet, in Œuvres

poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990–93), 1:217, v. 341.
65 See, for example, Marguerite de Navarre, Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, ed.
Renja Salminen (Helsinki, 1985), vv. 421–22 and 676–78.
66 MJCC, ed. Fontanella, vv. 1–8.
at the crucified body of Jesus that prompts the poetic subject to turn its
gaze toward the self and to the recollection of the sins it has committed.67
The body of Christ remains constantly in view and an alternation is
established between different moments of the contemplation of Christ
in agony (his body being described in detail, feature by feature, as in a
series of blasons) and moments of introspection. At each point, the sight
of a body-part disfigured through suffering brings forth, like an accusatory
reflection, the vision of the sins committed by the subject using the same
body-part:
En regardant ce beau nez et traitif,
noircy, sanglant, mieulx semblant mort que vif,
mirer je doy le mien qui de santeurs
de doulces fleurs et plaisantes odeurs
n’a seulement sellon raison usé,
mais follement par plaisir abusé
. . . . . .
Et la santeur du navré ou lepreux,
je la fuyois n’estant hardi ne preux,
mais par orreur le cueur me defailhoit
quant la santeur puante m’assailloit. (vv. 387–92, 397–400)
O beaux cheveuz du vray Nasarien,
en toy me fault mirer mon pauvre rien
mez fols cheveulx que j’ay pignez, frisez,
voyant les tiens rompus et debrisez.
J’ay prins plaisir en choses si caducques,
que j’ay cuydé par les mortes perruques
tant amender la beaulté de nature,
que me faisois une autre creature. (vv. 499–506)
This back-and-forth movement structures the poem, accompanied by a
dynamic of amplification at each stage and fed by biblical allusions and
allegorized speculation. In the second part of the text (i.e., vv. 839ff.), the
subject seems to leave aside anatomical considerations in favor of a more
global focus on the mystery of Redemption and moving toward union with
Christ. Nonetheless, the dynamic of the mirror remains active and the
evocation of the crucified body continues to elicit a penitential response:
67 Robert D. Cottrell, “The Gaze as the Agency of Presence in Marguerite de Navarre’s

Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié,” French Forum 13.2 (1988), 133–41. On the praying voice in
the MJCC, see Ferguson, “Now in a glass darkly.”
Regarde icy, mon corps, pour tez vestures

combien Jesus a de deschiquetures. (vv. 929–30)
O mon dur cueur, ne soye différant,
mais haste toy, mire toy dans ce cœur,
et naye <toi> en sa doulce liqueur.
Malheureux <cœur>, qui as esté plus dur
à aymer Dieu qu’un rochier ou un mur
regarde au cœur par charité fendu,
regarde au sang qui en est descendu. (vv. 1135–41)
From the evocation of the crucified body arise also waves of radiant
images of purification, redemption, and the new covenant between Christ
and his Church:
Esjouys toy, mon ame, et prans ta course,
viens toy mirer, car j’aperçoy la source
de vraye amour et charité non faincte,
qui ne sera pour nul peché estaincte
. . . . . .
Regarde icy dedans ce costé dextre,
par vive foy de l’arche la fenestre,
par qui du sein paternel à nous tombe,
la purifique et tresblanche colombe
qui en son bec tien la branche d’olive,
nous asseurant de paix ferme et nayve,
voyant saillir l’Esglise sans maculle
de ce costé appourtant une bulle
à sez enfans les assurant du don
donné sans prix, c’est d’eternel pardon. (vv. 1037–40, 1045–54)68
Finally, as it nears the end of its spiritual progress, the subject glimpses
the paradisiacal beatitude of union with Christ and redemption from sin
through the sacrifice of the cross:
Icy je perdz de moy le souvenir
. . . . . .
icy je perdz ce que le monde loue
. . . . . .
icy je boy le vin tout à loisir;
du vray plaisir qui passe tout plaisir
68 On the patristic sources of the analogy between the wound in Christ’s side and
the Ark of the Covenant, see Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, pp. 202–04 (where he cites Saint
Augustine).
. . . . . .
Icy la foy m’en lict la teorique,
et charité m’en donne la pratique
icy je mange à la celleste table,
icy reçoy le baiser delectable
. . . . . .
Icy se void le peché rigoreulx,
purgé du sang, estre faict bienheureulx;
la coulpe icy tant salle et tant meschante
du viel Adam, tresheureuse l’on chante.
(vv. 1322, 1324, 1326–27, 1336–39, 1344–47)
At the point of experiencing the annihilation of self, the precondition of
union with God, the poetic speaker invites the reader to take over its role
in the poem’s final lines:
là je le perdz et je ne le voys plus,
vous qui lisés contemplés le surplus. (vv. 1362–63)
The abruptness of this conclusion may seem surprising, especially when
we consider that in the nearly contemporary Prisons, the “moment of
nothingness” (rien) gives rise to an extended development. It would seem
that in the MJCC (and we shall return to this point below), Marguerite set
aside the effusions of her apophatic mysticism in favor of a more tradi-
tional spiritual approach.
A Work Unlike Others

The lengthy development of a blason mirroring the sufferings of Christ
gives the MJCC its originality, even if in Marguerite’s work as in religious
literature in general, the passion is a frequent theme of meditation pre-
cisely because of its central place in Christian doctrine. It is a practice in
which the faithful were encouraged by their attendance at religious ser-
vices and sermons. The tradition (to which we will return in relation to the
interpretation of the text) was strengthened through the influence of the
devotio moderna, focused as it was on the “imitation of Christ,” and had
been embraced by Evangelicals, especially those close to Marguerite who
were in agreement with Luther concerning the centrality of the theologia
crucis.69 This emphasis was not their sole preserve, however. Marot, for
69 See Brunero Gherardini, “La Theologia crucis, chiave ermeneutica per la lettura e
lo studio di Martino Lutero,” Doctor communis 28 (1975), 252–90; idem, Theologia crucis:
L’eredità di Lutero nell’evolutione teologica della Riforma (Rome, 1978).
example, had included in the Adolescence clémentine an “Oraison contem-

plative devant le crucifix,” translated from a work by Nicolas Barthelemy
de Loches that was entirely traditional in outlook.70
In Marguerite’s work, the motif had had an important place ever since
the correspondence with Briçonnet, who recommended the “discipline de
la Croix.”71 In the Petit œuvre dévot et contemplatif (1524–25), the appear-
ance of the cross marks a decisive turning point in the soul’s journey.72
A meditation Devant l’ymaige du crucifix has come down to us in a man-
uscript written before 1525.73 The Oraison à Nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ
(1531) and the Contemplation sur Agnus Dei (after 1547) turn to Christ with
the same astonished pain and gratitude:
Tout vostre corps avez laissé hascher,
Piedz, mains percer, et mort en la croix prendre
Et par ruisseaux vostre sainct sang respandre.74
Dessus la croix par peché attaché,
Tu as vestu le vestement taché
Pour nous donner la blanche et necte estolle.
Comme pescheur as esté descraché
Mocqué, battu et de fouetz haschez,
Prenant plaisir à jouer nostre rolle.75
Further examples could be cited from the Chansons spirituelles. In the
Navire, François I invites his sister to embrace the cross, to realize that
each of her sins is answered by one of Christ’s sufferings, and to take ref-
uge in the Savior’s “cœur ouvert.”76 However, all these reminders of the
passion remain isolated; the MJCC is the only poem where the ongoing
subject of meditation is the vision of the tortured body of the Crucified,
experiencing his humanity through suffering.
70 Raymond Lebègue, “La source d’un poème religieux de Marot,” in Mélanges Abel
Lefranc (Paris, 1936; Geneva, 1972), pp. 58–68.
71 See Briçonnet–Marguerite, Correspondance, 1:32, 40, 197, 199, 200, 206; 2:150, 152,
224.
72 Petit Œuvre dévot, vv. 88ff., in Marguerite de Navarre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Cazau-
ran, vol. 1, Pater Noster et Petit Œuvre dévot, ed. Sabine Lardon (Paris, 2001), pp. 84ff.
73 Vienna, Österreichische Nazionalbibliothek, MS 3525, fol. 12r–v; Marguerite de
Navarre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Cazauran, vol 8, ed. Cooper, pp. 231–32.
74 Oraison à Nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ, vv. 31–33, ed. Renja Salminen (Helsinki, 1981),
p. 40.
75 Contemplation sur Agnus Dei, vv. 41–46, in Oraison à Nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ,
p. 331.
76 La Navire, ed. Robert Marichal (Paris, 1956), vv. 863–921. On the theme of the “cœur
ouvert,” see Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, p. 201.
The Composition, Publication, and Reception of the MJCC

The MJCC was most likely written during the last year of Marguerite de
Navarre’s life, perhaps between April and December 1549, in Pau and in
the château of Odos (near Tarbes). The queen was deeply affected that
year by the sermons preached in Pau during Holy Week by a Franciscan
friar, Brother Gilles. On Holy Thursday, she referred to the sermons in a
letter to Mme de La Rochefoucauld:
Je ne veux faillir à vous dire que toute cette compagnie a tant de conten-
tement de frère Gilles qu’il n’est possible de plus. Il commença la Passion,
il y eut dimanche huit jours, laquelle il a continué jusques aujourd’hui.
Il n’a réservé pour vendredi que les sept paroles que Notre-Seigneur dit en
la croix.77
On 22 April, writing to the same correspondent, Marguerite again praised
the “prescheur qui a fait une Passion triomphante et une Resurrection
qu’il continuera toute cette semaine.” According to Raymond Ritter, the
friar in question could have been Gilles Caillau, the “bon religieux Cord-
elier,” who, Florimond de Raemond tells us, administered extreme unc-
tion to the queen and “l’assista jusques au dernier souspir.”78 Given that
Brother Gilles was a Friar Minor, an order that counted Saint Bonaventure
among its principal theologians, we might suppose that his sermons called
listeners to a spiritual ascesis tied to the representation of Christ’s
suffering.
Less than eight months later, Marguerite passed away in Odos, leaving,
among other unpublished works, her own meditation on the passion, a
poem of nearly 1400 lines, “incorrect, impoly, imparfaict et sans tiltre,” in
the judgment of the Dominican Pierre Olivier.79 Seven years later, Brother
Pierre would “polish” the poem and have it published. In the dedicatory
letter he addressed to Marguerite de France, the author’s niece and sister
of Henri II, Olivier explained the circumstances by which he had come
77 This letter was published by Raymond Ritter, Les Solitudes de Marguerite de Navarre
(1527–1549) (Paris, 1953), p. 151.
78 Ritter, Les Solitudes, pp. 151–52; Florimond de Ræmond, La Naissance, progrez, et
decadence de l’heresie de ce siecle. Livre septieme (Rouen, 1647), p. 856.
79 Pierre Olivier, preface to the Art et usage du souverain mirouer du Chrestien (Paris,
Guillaume Le Noir, 1556), fol. c3v. Beyond his edition of Marguerite’s poem, Olivier, docteur
en théologie, is known by only two works: De inventione dialectica libellus (Paris, Pierre
Vidoue, 1540) and (with his edition of the MJCC) Le Mirouer du chrestien et moyen de cog-
noistre Dieu et soimesme. See Jacques Quétif and Jacques Echard, Scriptores ordinis prædi-
catorum recensiti, 2 vols. (Paris, 1719–21).
into possession of the text. According to his account, the queen’s death,
occurring when “à peine . . . estoient tirées les dernieres lignes,” would
have caused it to remain like the talent “ensevely et sans fruict” (cf. Matt.
25:14–30), had God not ordained otherwise:
Mais le Seigneur Dieu qui nous a laissé et ordonné les livres et escritures
sainctes pour nostre spirituelle consolation, pour nostre salut et à sa gloire: a
tellement proveu, qu’il a permis qu’iceluy me fut communiqué par les mains
royalles de la dicte Princesse, peu de jours avant sa mort . . . et l’ay en telle
reverence que l’ay presque adoré, comme livre contenant divins, celestes et
spirituels propos, langages exquis, et graves sentences. Et ne voulant estre
receleur d’un si grand et royal tresor, craignant aussi d’encourir avec l’inique
et desloyal serviteur la male grace, indignation et punition du Seigneur Dieu,
et la vostre, pour avoir recelé et caché le dict œuvre . . ., je n’ay voulu diffe-
rer d’iceluy proferer, treshumblement presenter et rendre entre les mains
de vostre majesté, à laquelle iceluy œuvre tacitement et de droict se disoit
apertenir, comme à la vraye heritiere de ladicte feu Royne vostre treshono-
rée tante. (pp. c3v–c4r)
This passage confirms what is also suggested by the small number and
imperfect state of the remaining manuscripts—that, at the moment of
the queen’s death, the poem had not yet undergone final revision or been
circulated.
Three manuscripts of the MJCC have survived, none of which can be
considered an authoritative copy prepared with a view to publication.80
Lucia Fontanella, to whom we owe the only critical edition of the work
to date,81 demonstrated that they attest to a first stage of composition,
followed by incomplete revisions. Two manuscripts give the text of the
first phase. The oldest, probably overseen by the queen herself, is now in
Turin (T).82 It has lacunae,83 obvious errors—including errors of meter,
due perhaps in part to dictation—and several passages that are difficult
80 A fourth manuscript, listed in the catalogue of the Monmerqué auction (1851), seems
to have disappeared. Entitled Le Mirouer au Chrestien sur la personne de Jesus-Christ, con-
tenant au vray l’art et usage de soy bien mirer, composé par excellente princesse . . ., it also
contained three sonnets and an epitaph for the queen by Jean de Morel; see Raymond
Lebègue, “Le second Miroir de Marguerite de Navarre,” Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des
Inscriptions et Belles Lettres 107 (1963), 46–56 (p. 52). The terms of the title suggest it post-
dated the 1556 edition.
81 A new edition, being prepared by Nicole Cazauran and Isabelle Pantin, is to be pub-
lished as part of the Œuvres complètes of Marguerite de Navarre, ed. Cazauran.
82 Turin, Biblioteca nazionale, L V 4, fols. 195r–224v. “T” is Fontanella’s designation. This
manuscript also contains the Heptaméron. Fontanella considers that it was “il risultato di
una fase redazionale del testo sotto diretto controllo dell’autrice” (ed., MJCC, p. xv).
83 A number of lines are missing, as is clear where an anomaly in the rhyme scheme
indicates that the second verse of a couplet is omitted: vv. 611–12, 972–73, 1016–17, and
1120–21.
to understand.84 Fontanella selected it as the text on which to base her

edition, thinking that the queen must have given it to her niece Margue-
rite de France, who then took it to Piedmont following her marriage to
the duke of Savoy.
The second manuscript (P1), derived from T, is in the Bibliothèque
nationale de France.85 In it, a number of obvious mistakes are corrected,
but many misreadings have also been introduced. Unlike its probable
model (at least in the form in which we have it), P1 gives a title, followed
by five lines of verse, on the verso of the page preceding the start of the
text (fol. 191v):
Le myroir de Jesucrist crucifie
Cy est la vraye cognoissance
du peche et de l’ignocence
et qui se peult myrer et veoir
en Crist en aura le sçavoir
car sans luy n’avons qu’ignorance.
In addition, following the last line of the MJCC (fol. 217v) there is a
“Huictain d’elle mesme,” which is incomplete with only seven verses:
Je cherche aultant la croix et la desire
Comme autreffoys je l’ay vollu fouyr
Je cherche aultant par tourment en jouyr
Comme autrefoys j’ay craint son dur martire
Car celle croix mon ame à Dieu atire
Dont tous les biens qu’au monde puis avoir
Quicter je veulx la croix me doibt souffire.
The phase of revisions made to the poem is visible in a third manuscript,
P2, also in the BnF, to which it came from the library of Président Bouhier.
In this volume, entitled Les Derniers [sic] œuvres de la Reyne de Navarre
lesquelles n’ont encores esté imprimées, the MJCC is found alongside seve-
ral plays, La Navire, and Les Prisons.86 Robert Marichal dates it to shortly
84 Fontanella signals them at vv. 76, 167, 374, 381, 418, 458, 508, 524, 672, 742, 970, 1048,
and 1276 (ed. cit., p. xii). According to the editor, these lectiones difficultiores prove that
the manuscript is not a faulty copy. They indicate with even greater certainty, however,
that it was still a draft.
85 BnF, fr. 1525, fols. 191v–217v. “P1” is Fontanella’s designation. The manuscript bears
the arms of Just de Tournon, the nephew of the Cardinal, and contains fragments of the
Heptaméron.
86 BnF, fr. 24.298, fols. 91r–114r: “P2” according to Fontanella’s designation.
before Marguerite’s death.87 The text is close to the first redaction but
somewhat more complete and contains fewer errors.88 Obscure passages
have been clarified and the versification is not only amended but also
modernized by the elimination of almost all the feminine caesuras that
remained in the first version, a development in line with what we know
about the evolution of the queen’s poetics.89 P2 bears the title “Le mir-
ouer de la croix,” followed, with a single variant, by the five lines of verse
reproduced above.90
The two posthumous 16th-century editions of the work, prepared inde-
pendently of each other, are based on manuscripts related to P2. The first
was printed in Toulouse in 1552 by Guyon Boudeville, a sympathizer with
the Reformation:
Le mirouer de Jesus Christ crucifié. Composé par feu tres-illustre Princesse,
Marguerite de Vallois, Royne de Navarre.91
The short title is thus identical to that of P1, and this is followed by the
five-line strophe beginning “Cy est la vraye cognoissance” (in its P1 version)
as well as the huitain “Je cherche aultant la croix.” Printed on the verso of
the title page, this “Huitain composé par la feu Royne de Navarre, peu de
temps avant son trespas” is signed with the motto “C’est mon espoir” and
its missing verse has been supplied.92 As for the MJCC itself, the Boud-
eville edition gives a text close to P2, but more complete (missing verses
have been restored) and with many corrections. Above all, however, the
margins are filled with biblical references, often in excess of ten per page,
a mark of the zeal of the editor. Who this might be, it is impossible to
know, since the work bears no liminary indication except for a “Dixain sur
87 Marichal, ed. La Navire, pp. 68–69.

88 It restores the missing lines but also leaves out nine verses which appeared in the
first version: vv. 182, 284, 440, 486, 698, 756, 818, 830, and 904.
89 See Fontanella, ed. MJCC, pp. xlix–xlx. On Marguerite’s progressive avoidance of
feminine cesurae from 1533 on, see Marguerite de Navarre, La Coche, ed. Robert Marichal
(Paris and Geneva, 1971), p. 59 and note 20 above.
90 BnF, fr. 24.298, fol. 91r. The variant concerns v. 2 “et qui le peult myrer et veoir.”
However, another hand has corrected vv. 2–3 in the margin: “et qui s’y peut mirer et veoir /
de Christ il aura le sçavoir.”
91 The title mentions a privilège for three years, which is not printed in this copy. Boud-
eville was hanged in May 1562 as a Protestant. In 1545, he had printed anonymously Mar-
guerite’s Fable du faux Cuyder, based on the 1543 Paris edition. See Jacques Mégret, “Guyon
Boudeville, imprimeur toulousain (1541–1562),” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 6
(1945), 210–301.
92 Line six has been added: “C’est le chemin tresseur pour l’aller voir.” Two references
to Saint Paul (Gal. 6 and Rom. 8) have also been added in the margin.
le trespas de Marguerite de Vallois Royne de Navarre,” printed at the end

of the text and signed “I. Boffeau.”
This extremely rare edition can have had only a limited distribution,
and Pierre Olivier was no doubt in good faith when he declared, in 1556,
that he was bringing to light a text that had remained hidden under a
bushel. The Dominican subjected his own edition, published by Guil-
laume Le Noir in Paris, to careful correction, as he himself states. He also
divided the work into “chapters” with subtitles and placed biblical refer-
ences in the margins, although these are less numerous than and often
different from those in the Boudeville edition. Finally, he gives a new form
to the title: L’art et usage du souverain mirouer du Chrestien,93 probably
with the intention of linking it more closely to the prose work he pub-
lished at the same time to accompany the queen’s poem: Le Mirouer du
Chrestien et moyen de cognoistre Dieu et soimesme.94 If we disregard the
numerous variants Olivier introduced on his own initiative, his text has
many points of agreement with both P2 and the Boudeville edition, which
suggests that he too had access to a manuscript containing the revised
version. What he says in his letter to the queen’s niece about the circum-
stances under which he acquired the manuscript in question weighs in
favor of the revised version’s authenticity.
What are we to conclude from this review of the evidence? We do not
have a text of the MJCC which we can say with certainty reflects the queen’s
final wishes. Are we then constrained, as Fontanella believed, to accredit
only the Turin manuscript? We do not believe so. We have at our disposal
three sources that present independent and relatively similar versions of
a text revised almost certainly before Marguerite’s death. Moreover, these
sources can be tied, with some confidence, to her immediate circle.95 At
the same time, these sources shed light on the reception of Marguerite’s
second Miroir. This was considerably more modest than that enjoyed
by the first, to be sure, since it was limited to two editions that, failing
to elicit further interest, almost disappeared without trace.96 It is worth
93 The complete title reads: L’art et usage du souverain mirouer du Chrestien. Composé
par excellente Princesse madame Marguerite de France, Royne de Navarre. Avec privilege.
A Paris, par Guillaume le Noir, Rue S. Jaques, à la Rose blanche Couronnée, 1556.
94 Le Mirouer du Chrestien et moyen de cognoistre Dieu et soimesme. Composé par
F. Pierre Olivier Docteur Theologien (Paris, Guillaume Le Noir, 1556).
95 In the new edition in preparation by Cazauran and Pantin, the base text will be
Boudeville’s edition.
96 Only a single extant copy of each is known today. A copy of the 1552 edition was
discovered in 1963 in Toulouse (see Lebègue, “Le second Miroir,” p. 53) but has since dis-
noting, however, that among the queen’s last poems—those that postdate
the death of François I and the collected edition of the Marguerites—the
MJCC is the only one that was printed in the years following her death.
Moreover, there were two such publications and each time the editor pre-
sented it as the queen’s poetic legacy, either by using as an epigraph the
“Huitain composé par la feu Royne de Navarre, peu de temps avant son
trespas” or, in the dedication of the Parisian edition, describing the poem
as the author’s last act of charity:
Et tant plus que ladicte mort . . . prevoyoit s’approcher, tant plus elle, à
l’exemple de Jesuchrist s’esforceoit d’aviser un chacun de retorner à soy,
se mirer et cognoistre ses imperfections . . . O saincte, utile et chrestienne
exhortation, laquelle ensuyvant ladicte Princesse mettoit peine nous induyre
(avec sainct Paul)97 à l’inspection de soy, contemplation et spirituel regard
de Jesu christ crucifié, prins et advoué de nous pour vray exemple, trespur
et excellent mirouer: duquel pour nous en monstrer l’art, pratique et usage
nous dressoit et composoit ce present œuvre et sainct poeme.98
Moreover, the poem’s two editions anchored it in two distinct contexts, in
each case, although to differing degrees, with an eye to its appropriation.
The Toulouse edition discretely brings the poem into closer alignment
with the sources of inspiration of the Reformation, whereas Brother Pierre
Olivier, “docteur théologien,” presented it as the illustration of a devo-
tional attitude that he attempted to theorize. The high stakes attaching
to the work for contemporaries are evident.
III. Mirroring the Two Miroirs
Problems of Interpretation: The MJCC’s Objectives and Doctrinal Position

The MJCC constitutes both a poetic and a spiritual legacy. In it, highly
evocative tableaux alternate with moments of interiority. It is marked by
Marguerite’s special skill for moving naturally and without any real change
in style from the most concrete details to the lyricism of a free meditation
on Scripture, or to the expression of an inner experience on the threshold
of the loss of self in union with God. The strong symbolism linking the
MAP, the queen’s first published work, and the MJCC, published shortly
appeared. The only other copy is in the library of the University of Berne (fonds Bongars).
The 1556 edition is held by the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (Paris).
97 Marginal note: “Heb. 12.”
98 Pierre Olivier, dedication to Marguerite de France, Art et usage, fols. A2v–A3r.
after her death, invites us to see her religious writing as forming a coher-
ent whole, as Gary Ferguson has suggested:
The œuvre that opened with the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse closes with the
Miroir de Jésus Christ crucifié. In this work, perhaps Marguerite’s last, we see
the fulfilment of a pilgrimage: the journey of the individual towards Christ
that nears its goal. It is a journey of justification to which all Christians are
called, a journey mirrored in poetry. (Mirroring Belief, p. 75)
For his part, Robert Cottrell goes so far as to propose that, placed under
the sign of specularity, Marguerite’s poetic work acquires a closed struc-
ture, with an end that leads back to its beginning (Grammar, pp. 123–24).
These readings, which have deepened our understanding of the queen’s
religious poetry, raise two related questions concerning, first, the con-
nections between the two Miroirs and, second, the doctrinal position
expressed in Marguerite’s last poem.
The idea of comparing the two Miroirs occurred already to Brother
Pierre Olivier. In the dedication of his Mirouer du chrestien et moyen de
congnoistre dieu et soimesme to Mme de Brissac, he declares that he com-
posed his work to enable the “plus ample et parfaite intelligence” of the
queen’s last poem “et plus encore de l’autre livre d’icelle, qui est inscrit,
le mirouer de l’ame pecheresse” (p. A2v). However, this claim is far from
confirmed by a reading of his treatise, which demonstrates the necessity of
knowing both God and oneself, and describes the three mirrors by which
this can be accomplished: the mirror of the created world (the Book of
Nature); the mirror of the Word of God (the Law and Scripture), which
reveals man’s sin; and the mirror of grace, a summation of the other two,
which, by the contemplation of Christ, “vray et souverain mirouer,” trans-
forms man into a new creation.99 Without being in actual disagreement
with Marguerite’s two Miroirs, Olivier’s treatise never alludes to them in
any way. It thus offers neither a commentary on these works nor a means
of better understanding the connections between them. If the Domini-
can thought it important to mention the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, per-
haps he did so simply to create the impression that a poem sometimes
99 Gary Ferguson shows that Olivier’s text reflects the notion of the great Ages of
Nature, Law, and Grace found commonly in devotional writing of the period, especially
of “Catholic and Evangelical” persuasion (cf. Erasmus, for example), marked by the idea
of “man’s progression through an historical and soteriological framework.” This same
notion is found to a much lesser extent in Protestant writing, marked rather by “its intense
subjectivity” and pessimism about man’s nature. See Ferguson, “Now in a glass darkly.”
suspected of heresy was in fact in the same perfectly orthodox devotional

tradition as the queen’s second Miroir—and as his own treatise.
Considering the two Miroirs side by side yields few immediate insights.
The points of similarity seem limited to some general themes, such as the
soul as a captive of sin (the expression “âme pecheresse” appears in the
MJCC, v. 783), the redemptive nature of Christ’s passion, or the affir-
mation “au seul Dieu tout honneur et gloire” (1 Tim.). The first Miroir
expands theologically on the means by which the soul may find freedom
and on divine forgiveness based on justification by faith and the gift of
grace, through an exploration of the mystical relationships between the
soul and God. By contrast, the second Miroir takes the devotional path
of meditation on the crucifix, without engaging with any of the sensitive
theological issues of the day, making it difficult to assign a clear doctrinal
position to the work. Indeed it is for this reason that it has been possible
to present the MJCC from divergent perspectives. As we have seen, Guyon
Boudeville, its publisher in 1552 whose sympathies lay with the Reforma-
tion, filled the margins of the work with biblical references (nearly 700 in
all). These are sometimes self-evident, as when they refer to passages of
the gospels or biblical episodes to which the poem alludes. Frequently,
however, their connection to Marguerite’s text is much more tenuous,
reflecting a particular choice. Two passages from Saint Paul, for example,
one from Romans 3—on the inadequacy of the Law and justification by
faith—the other from Ephesians 1—on salvation by Christ—are noted in
the margin next to vv. 320–22:
O la bonté, qui tout mon mal surmonte
Pour moy tu rends mon compte et prends ma debte,
Et le profit est mien de ta recepte.100
These lines, recalling simply the principle of redemption recognized by
all Christians, take on a different resonance when presented in terms of
a doctrine of justification about which Catholics and Protestants were in
disagreement. The Boudeville edition contains over 180 references to the
Epistles of Saint Paul and the biblical culture it reflects is more bookish,
more systematic, and above all more insistent than that of Marguerite.
Pierre Olivier’s edition adopts a quite different perspective. Its mar-
ginal biblical references are less numerous and more neutral than those of
Boudeville; on the other hand, it exploits more fully the liminary material.
100 Le Mirouer de Jesus Christ crucifié (Toulouse, Boudeville, 1552), p. 17.

Olivier’s “Epistre contenant l’argument du present traicté,” for example,

takes the liberty of fleshing out Marguerite’s poem in its own terms.
Whereas the MJCC simply sets the believer face to face with Christ, Olivi-
er’s “argument” stresses the role of the “patrons et exemples” who pre-
pared the way for the working of Christ-as-mirror: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
“et tous les autres fideles saincts et sainctes” (Mirouer du Chrestien, fol. 6v).
As noted earlier, Brother Pierre also revised the text slightly; he did so
not only to render it more flowing and easier to read, but also tone down
a number of particular points. For example, when man is accused, as a
result of sin, of having “changé nature, / perdant le bien d’estre à son dieu
semblable / estant du tout converti en vray diable,” Olivier prefers to pre-
sent man as having merely “souillé nature, / Perdant le bien d’estre à Dieu
fort semblable, / Estant pareil au sathan et diable” (MJCC, vv. 83–86). Like-
wise, in the final moments of ecstasy, the “baiser délectable” is replaced
by a “baptiser” (v. 1339), more in keeping with the familiar catechism. The
meaning is not fundamentally altered, but the signs of the individual sub-
ject’s engagement in the discourse are attenuated. For Pierre Olivier, Mar-
guerite was not a mystic absorbed in a dialogue with the divine; she was a
believer moved by charity to offer an example to her fellow Christians.
The way in which the MJCC was made to serve ends that were not its
own is all the more striking as the poem expresses the freedom of thought
and of composition that the queen had acquired at the end of her life. Gary
Ferguson is right to note how in this poem her allegorical writing reveals a
natural agility and profusion, fed by her deep knowledge of Scripture and
of the patristic tradition, devoid of any didacticism.101 Drawing on memory
and on her experience as a believer, Marguerite reconnected, in her last
Miroir, with an ancient devotional tradition of the Church, removed from
the theological conflicts of her day, faithful to the spirit of the sermons of
Saint Augustine, the meditations of Saint Bernard and Saint Bonaventure,
the Esguillon d’amour divin translated by Jean Gerson,102 and Ludolph the
Carthusian’s Vita Christi.103 Does this mean she had given up speaking as
a committed Evangelical, as she did in her first Miroir?
101 In MJJC, “Marguerite’s poetry modulates easily from one image to another, carrying
the reader with it, pointing out sights on a scriptural and patristic landscape,” Ferguson,
Mirroring Belief, p. 204.
102 The Stimulus amoris was attributed to Saint Bonaventure at the time.
103 A wide selection of these texts was available in the royal library at Blois. See Henri
Omont, La Librairie royale à Blois, Fontainebleau et Paris au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1908). These
sources are examined in the forthcoming edition of the Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié.
The Miroirs as a Mirror of the “Language of the Evangelical Village”

Marguerite’s first published poem is part of the orchestrated writing proj-
ect undertaken by the “Navarrian network.” The “language of the evan-
gelical village” comprises a body of lexical signs, stylistic procedures, and
common motifs that are the foundation of the Evangelicals’ linguistic
complicity. Sharing the same ideological project of religious renewal, they
forged as a group an idiolect whose concerted use in works of edification
was intended as a discrete form of propaganda, countering the obscuran-
tism of the Sorbonne in the 1520s.104 The privileged instrument of this
complicity, carrying a remarkable richness of expression, was the applica-
tion of common adjectives like seul, vif, vrai, or humain to key theological
nouns such as Dieu, foi, doctrine, tradition. The nominal groups formed in
this way—seul Dieu, vive foi, vraie doctrine, tradition humaine—allowed
Evangelicals to shape their discourse to avoid censure, at the same time
distinguishing it both from Lutheran writing and from scholastic theology.
While it would be incorrect to call this a secret language, it constituted
nonetheless a linguistic code, whose various elements correspond to iden-
tifiable doctrinal positions, distinguished both from those of the conserva-
tives and those of the more radical reformers.105 A number of examples
will serve not only to confirm that the MAP was part of this theological
and linguistic strategy of the “Navarrian network” but to show that the
MJCC uses it also.
As the first publication of the head of the “Navarrian network,” the MAP
is fully engaged in the promotion of a new understanding of death. The
Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne and Marot’s Déploration had already
introduced the idea of “mort vivifiante,”106 quite at odds with medieval
theology.107 Marguerite was nourished by Saint Paul (especially 1 Cor.
15:26), formed by Briçonnet (“morte est la mort causant division regnant
depuis Adam”),108 and a privileged reader of the texts produced by the
104 See Garnier-Mathez, L’Épithète. The Evangelicals functioned like a “village” in the

sociological sense of the term, that is, a community knit together by specific linguistic
practices whose implications might be perceptible only to its members. This approach
to 16th-century texts is based on theoretical tools borrowed from the methods of Harold
Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, in particular his notion of membership.
105 See Garnier-Mathez, L’Épithète, esp. pp. 170–97.
106 Briçonnet–Marguerite, Correspondance, 1:28: “on parvient à mort vivifiante, et
toutesfois mortiffiant la vie, en vivant on meurt et en mourant on vit.”
107 See Claude Blum, La Représentation de la mort dans la littérature française du xvie
siècle (Paris, 1989).
108 Correspondance, 2:232.
network (“par mort a esté la mort morte; en la mort d’icelluy doulx saulveur,
absorbée et commuée en vie”).109 As such, in her first Miroir, she develops
the motif of the death of death, already present in the Dialogue:
Estre tousjours avecques vous en croix,
Où vous avéz cloué, comme je crois,
Et rendu mortz la Mort, et tout peché. (MAP, vv. 109–11)110
Almost two decades later, we find the same profession of faith, expressed
in identical terms in the second Miroir:
tu as la mort randue en morant morte,
quant l’on pensoit ta puissance moins forte;
l’amer morceau feuz de ceste mordante,
qui te mordant a eu mort evidente:
son esguillon contre toy rien n’a peu,
mais te cuydant rompre a esté rompu;
et plus semblois prochain du mortel port,
plus en mourant randois morte la mort. (MJCC, vv. 877–84)
The paradoxical celebration of the beauty of death in the Oraison that
concludes the MAP declares the ultimate transformation of the soul, with
God “la deifiant et conformant à sa divinité, qui est perfection”:111
O mon vray DIEU, que ceste mort est belle,
Par qui j’auray fin de toute querelle:
Par qui j’auray de vous fruition
Et jouiray de vostre vision:
Par qui seray à vous sy conformée
Que j’y seray divine transformée. (MAP, vv. 1081–86)112
109 Le Traicté du Souverain Bien, fols. e7r–v.

110 See also:
Vie sans fin a faict nostre mort vive.
Mort a donné à vie mort neïvfe.
Par ceste mort, moy morte reçoy vie:
Et au vivant par la mort suis ravie.
En vous je vy, quand à moy je suis morte.
Mort ne m’est plus que d’une prison porte.
Vie m’est mort, car par mort suis vivante. (MAP, vv. 885–92)
111 Briçonnet–Marguerite, Correspondance, 1:103.
112 From edition E onward, the prologue of the MAP echoes vv. 1085–86:
Ainsi le don que liberalement
Le Createur donne au commencement
N’ha nul repos, qu’il n’ayt deïfié
Celuy qui s’est par Foy en DIEU fié.
The final pair of rhyming words reappears in the MJCC to describe Mary,
God’s “parfaicte mere,” the model of the Christian, the first to be deified:
Amour en toy l’avoit tant conformée,
qu’en crucifix, elle estoit transformée,
estant sus piedz eslevée par foy,
que la randoit ferme et semblable à toy. (MJCC, vv. 197–200)
Marguerite’s last work thus testifies to her fidelity to the same sources
of inspiration, since she was introduced to this mystery by Guillaume
Briçonnet and Lefèvre d’Étaples, both of whom were imbued with the
Greek Fathers, Nicholas of Cusa, and Pico della Mirandola. Other indica-
tions in the text point to a similar continuing fidelity.
In evangelical publications, Dieu seul has the role of a divine name,
taking its place among Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s Divina nomina,
a work edited by Lefèvre d’Étaples in 1498. The epithet seul(e), omnipres-
ent in the texts of the network, is intended less to exclude the cult of the
saints than to focus the Christian on the essential One.113 It is part of a
technique of didactic repetition designed to keep the sinner’s attention
directed toward “JESUS CHRIST des ames vray pescheur, / Et seul Sauveur”
(MAP, vv. 1164–65):
Faictes place à ce frere tant doulx,
Et que luy seul soit enfermé en vous:
Sans qu’aultre nom jamais y tienne lieu,
Fors JESUS seul, mon frere, filz de DIEU. (MAP, vv. 359–62)
The repetition of the adjective seul is present throughout the entirety of
the poem, underscoring a complete confidence in God, the Christian’s
unique model:114
Foy et amour m’en donnent oubliance,
Mettant du tout en vous seul ma fiance. (MAP, vv. 377–78)
Mais par amour, qui est en vous si ample,
Icy estes seul, et parfaict exemple. (MAP, vv. 605–06)
The rhyme déifié / fié was used in the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (vv. 145 and
147); the term deifiee also appeared in v. 884 of the earliest editions of the MAP, as noted
above.
113 See Garnier-Mathez, L’Épithète, pp. 125–55.
114 Reformed Christians used similar kinds of repetition in their texts.
The MJCC has recourse to the same attribute of evangelical writing as

an aid to meditation, especially in a double anaphora “toy seul / à toy
seul veulx”:
toy seul peultz dire: “Attollite portas”,
toy seul du ciel ouvert le seul port as.
Viens, forte main, la miene foible prandre,
car à toy seul la veulx lever et tendre:
à nul seigneur ne feray de mon fief
hommaige, fors à mon crucifié;
à toy seul veulx les mains de mon cueur joindre. (MJCC, vv. 697–703)
A number of variants of the two Miroirs also point to the didactic function
of the repetition of “seul” in expressions relating to God: by way of exam-
ple, “Que de luy seul” replaces “Riens, que de luy”115 in the first Miroir;
“Dieu seul” is substituted for “hault Dieu”116 in the second.
If salvation comes from “Dieu seul,” through “la seule bonne grace / Du
tout puissant” (MAP, vv. 69–70), for Evangelicals, unlike Reformed Chris-
tians, it is gained not by “la seule foi” but by “vive foi.”117 The change of
epithet in French marks a specific theological orientation, distinct from
both the scholastic fides charitate formata118 and the Lutheran sola fides.
Highlighted from as early as the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne,119
as it is professed by Marguerite and her evangelical brethren, “ceste foy
est une foy vive qui œuvre par charité,”120 that is, it is radiant with the
115 MAP, v. 1174, a variant found in the edition of the Marguerites de la Marguerite des
princesses (1547).
116 MJCC, v. 204, a variant found in P2.
117 The emblematic lines of Marot’s Deploration sur le trespas de messire Florimond
Robertet clearly proclaim: “Prie à Dieu seul que par grâce te donne / La vive Foy, dont
Sainct Paul tant escrit” (Œuvres poétiques, ed. Defaux, 1:216, vv. 325–26). On the linguistic
formulae used to express different theological positions in relation to the relative roles of
faith and works in the process of salvation (vive foi, foi formée, foi œuvrant par charité, etc.),
see Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, pp. 147–78.
118 Francis Higman reminds us that this expression “démarque nettement les confes-
sions. Pour le catholique, la charité donne forme, corps, à la foi, et est donc en quelque
sorte antérieure à la foi. Pour le réformé, la foi est la source de tout, y compris la charité
chrétienne,” La diffusion de la Réforme en France, 1520–1565 (Geneva, 1992), p. 59. Gary Fer-
guson notes that the expression was used by conservatives, for whom the predominance
of charity was a tool to fight Lutheran heresy (Mirroring Belief, p. 149).
119 “Et que par foy le cueur soit à Dieu joinct, / J’entens vive: c’est le don que Dieu baille,”
Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, vv. 1090–91.
120 Lefèvre d’Étaples and his disciples, Épistres et Évangiles pour les cinquante et deux
sepmaines de l’an, ed. G. Bedouelle and F. Giacone (Leiden, 1976), p. 359. The expression
“faith working through love [charity]” comes from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians
5:6.
love of God shown in tangible acts of charity toward one’s neighbor. If

Reformed and evangelical Christians have recourse to the same Scriptural
reference,121 the latter, instead of stressing the exclusion of works from the
process of salvation, insist rather that charity is born of authentic faith, as
Marguerite explains at the end of the first Miroir, in eight lines that sum
up the poem’s theological message:
Foy donne espoir par seure Verité,
Qui engendre parfaite Charité.
Et Charité est DIEU comme sçavons. 1. Jehan. 4
Si en nous est, DIEU aussi nous avons.
Il est en nous, et trestous en luy sommes.
Tous sont en luy, et luy en tous les hommes:
Si nous l’avons par Foy, tel est l’avoir,
Que le dire n’est en nostre povoir. (MAP, vv. 1415–22)
We see, then, that vive foy is a living faith, generative of works not because
they are necessary in the process of justification, but as a result of the out-
flowing of charity, as well as a faith that brings life, that vivifies man and
leads him to salvation. In this way vive foy can be understood as a meta-
phor of the transformation of the Old Adam into the New. Although the
expression “vieil Adam,” common in evangelical discourse, is not found
in the first Miroir, it is frequent in the second.122 The syntagma vive foy
thus becomes the concrete term expressing the abstract reality of justifi-
cation, without implying the need for works in the process of salvation: it
is vive foy that justifies even the penitent thief crucified alongside Christ,
although he has performed no works. Faith alone (seule), by its nature
living (vive), saves the Christian.123
Two passages from the MAP elucidate this mystery. The first (vv.
792–802) was quoted above. The calming effect on a tormented soul of
the experience of “une si vive Foy” (v. 797) offers a foretaste of salvation:
“Par vraye amour senty ma paour estaincte” (v. 800). The consubstantial-
ity of faith and divine love—faith given by God’s love—is reinforced by a
change in the text that appears starting with the C edition, attributed to
121 “Le juste vit de foy.” This phrase from the prophet Habakkuk 2:4 is quoted by Saint
Paul, Rom. 1:17: “Car la justice de dieu est revelée en icelle de foy en foy, ainsi qu’il est
escript, Le juste vit de foy,” Nouveau Testament, trans. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (Paris,
Simon de Colines, 1523).
122 See vv. 64, 1057, and 1288.
123 To avoid any inaccurate and dangerous association with Lutheran doctrine, the
Evangelicals were careful to replace the expression sola fides with vive foy in their transla-
tions of Luther’s works. See Garnier-Mathez, L’Épithète, pp. 298–305.
Augereau.124 In place of love described as “vray et vivant,” as it was in the

Du Bois editions, the later versions add a pair of words central to evangeli-
cal writing about faith:
Où est amour vraye et vive sans faincte,
Il ne souvient de paour, douleur, ne crainte. (vv. 1047–48)
This substitution calls to mind, for a reader familiar with evangelical
writings, vraye et vive foy radiant with charité. Such a reader pays heed
to those who
annuncent simplement et purement le sainct evangile, incitans et admo-
nestans tous à vivre selon la parolle de nostre seigneur en vraye et vive foy
laquelle produysse et face vray fruict de charité qui sont les seulles œuvres
qui plaisent à dieu et qu’on peut nommer bonnes.125
The substitution can also be understood as an act of resistance by Mar-
guerite in the MAP of 1533, directed against those willing to compromise
with the conservatives and who, from 1529 on, published numerous edi-
tions of the Livre de vraye et parfaicte oraison, a catechetical treatise based
on evangelical texts carefully toned down to avoid giving offense. In an
attempt to render vive foi more orthodox and to mitigate the theology
of justification than underlies it, they replaced it with the expression
foy vivante.126
The centrality of the theology of vive foy can be seen in the poetics
Marguerite uses in the MAP. It depends on the persuasive force of the
epithet vive, its qualifying resonance within a variety of figures of speech:
paronomasia, “la vive voix de DIEU” (v. 531), behind which lies the Pauline
intertext, “la parole de Dieu est vive” (Heb. 4:12); emphasis, “par vive con-
naissance / De [s]on peché” (vv. 791–92), which indicates, by implication,
that the soul is opening up to the action of vive foi.127 Finally, and above
124 For the association of vive foi and charity, see also Marguerite’s Pater noster, Œuvres
complètes, 1:152, vv. 170–73.
125 Exhortation sur ces sainctes parolles de nostre segneur Jesus, fol. B(6)r. The emblem-
atic expression vraye et vive foy was used occasionally by Calvin in the Institution de la reli-
gion chrétienne, but also by moderate Evangelicals like Jean Bouchet or François Habert.
For other examples (like Farel’s Pater noster et le Credo en françoys of 1524), see Garnier-
Mathez, L’Épithète, pp. 159–64.
126 Despite the work’s considerable success (13 editions by 1545), the anonymous
author’s lexical innovation did not attract imitators. See Garnier-Mathez, L’Épithète, pp.
308–10.
127 The epithet is part of a veritable poetics of concentration at the heart of evangelical
discourse. See Garnier-Mathez, L’Épithète, pp. 193–95.
all, it is with this expression that Marguerite closes the “prologue aux lec-
teurs,” added beginning with the last Augereau edition in 1533 (E):
Mais vous, Lecteurs de bonne conscience,
Je vous requiers, prenéz la patience
Lire du tout ceste œuvre qui n’est rien,
Et n’en prenéz seulement que le bien.
Mais priéz DIEU, plein de bonté naïve,
Qu’en vostre cueur il plante la Foy vive. (vv. 27–32)
The expression “Foy vive,” marking the culmination of the prologue and
signaling the persuasive strength, the lively energy, the queen directs
toward her readers, is rooted in the memory from the outset of the poem
like a tangible manifestation of divine grace. By exhorting God to “plant”
living faith in the heart of the reader, Marguerite also activates the vegetal
metaphor that opens the MAP. It is equally in a metaphoric passage that
we find the only use of vive foy in the second Miroir.128 Here it represents
the means by which the Christian receives the spiritual revelation of the
Church springing from the wounded side of Christ.129 Living faith, raising
the heart from a contemplation limited by the senses to a spiritual vision,
opens the soul to the sacred mysteries. Seen in this light, the MJCC can be
read as an exhortation to allow oneself to be seized by the active force of
the same “si vive foy” experienced in the MAP in order to complete the
transformation of the soul in God.
128 Commenting on the passage in the MJCC which takes up the traditional analogy
between Christ and David victorious over Goliath, Gary Ferguson notes that this veri-
fies the tendency, shown by Marguerite in her later works, to speak of salvation by faith
formed by charity only with respect to Christ, not mankind, which the critic suggests
reveals a more marked influence of Reformed ideas. See Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, pp.
176–77: “faith working through charity is no longer seen as the means whereby man may
come to God and work out his salvation, rather it is the means whereby God himself in
Christ has come close to man, and works out his salvation for him”:
O ferme foy, par charité ouvrante,
c’est toy qui es la pierre delivrante
au nom de Dieu, duquel, le jeune enfant,
nud comme ver, encontre ung elephant
s’est defandu par si grande vertu. (MJCC, vv. 1270–74)
While the passage does indeed lend itself to such an interpretation, the reader remains
free to understand it differently, confirming the queen’s decision to avoid dispute and her
simple desire to spread what most stirred her own devotion.
129 See vv. 1045–54, cited above:
Regarde icy dedans ce costé dextre,
par vive foy de l’arche la fenestre,
par qui du sein paternel à nous tombe,
la purifique et tresblanche colombe.
Conclusion
At the end of this analysis, we can note multiple and diverse points of
resemblance between Marguerite’s two Miroirs. These allow us to see the
poet’s commitment to introspection, the necessary first step for any Chris-
tian who seeks to progress along the path of faith, following the divine
model, whether this is reflected in Scripture or made manifest through
contemplation of the crucified Christ. They bear witness to the popular-
ity during the Renaissance of a genre inherited from medieval religious
literature, still appreciated by conservative Christians but also capable of
attracting those following different, even contrasting, religious paths from
those recommended by traditional piety—Evangelicals and Reformed
Christians. They bear witness to the enduring character of the queen
of Navarre’s inspiration, her remarkable fidelity to the spiritual sources
that nourished her faith from the trials of the early years and throughout
her life—the precepts of Guillaume Briçonnet and the teachings of Saint
Paul—manifest both in the biblical intertext and the evangelical language
that characterize both works in different but nonetheless related ways. At
the same time, this series of similarities does not detract from the unique-
ness of each poem, both profoundly inscribed in a particular watershed
moment of Marguerite’s life. The MAP, the first of the long chain of the
queen’s publications, is above all a militant text, turned toward action. It
represents the personal action of the author, playing a role in the soci-
ety of her time by witnessing to her faith. It represents the action of the
spokesperson for the evangelical network taking a position on controver-
sial theological issues—the long poem doing this with no less splash than
a public debate. Finally, it represents the author’s action with respect to
her brothers and sisters in the faith, fellow Christians whom she protected,
supported, and encouraged, by exposing herself, despite all the editorial
precautions taken, to the attacks of zealous censors. In the MJCC, we find
none of this. If this work is no less haunted by the idea of sin, the per-
spective has changed. On the threshold of death, with her royal brother
gone, Marguerite is no longer seeking to galvanize a militant community,
of whose current adversities she is all too aware. She places herself once
again under God’s all-seeing eye, but now to prepare to face him at the
end. If we sought another of the queen’s works close in spirit to the MJCC,
we might turn to the Petit Œuvre dévot, the allegorical representation of
a pilgrim making her way to God, inspired by medieval mystical models.130
130 See Pater Noster et Petit Œuvre dévot, pp. 61–80.

For, after the stoic Evangelism of the Dialogue en forme de vision noc-
turne131 and the militant Evangelism of the MAP, Marguerite’s second
Miroir returns to the Christ-centered piety of this youthful text, in a simi-
lar display of trust and self-abandonment before “ceste croix par grant
devotion.”132 But in the MJCC, the experience of Christ as the ultimate
reality all but coincides with the experience of the final moments of the
queen’s life. The poem is thus also a treatise on the preparation for death
in the tradition of the ars moriendi. And since the moment of death came
too soon for the author to be able to express fully the meaning of her
work, it remains in many ways mysterious and open to multiple interpre-
tations, despite the laudable attempts of posthumous editors to elucidate
it. It is the mystery surrounding this final manuscript of the first woman
of letters in France to be published during her lifetime that gives a special
value to this Miroir, a mirror of Marguerite’s work as a whole.
131 See Jean Lecointe, “Le Devis des larmes: polémique anti-stoïcienne et dialogicité,
autour de La Navire de Marguerite de Navarre,” in Devis d’amitié: Mélanges en l’honneur de
Nicole Cazauran, ed. J. Lecointe, C. Magnien, I. Pantin, and M.-C. Thomine (Paris, 2002),
pp. 369–84.
132 Petit Œuvre dévot, p. 104, v. 591; the poem’s last tercet contains a message analogous
to that of the MJCC: “Et ceste croix par grant devotion / Rememorant sa dure passion / En
nostre cueur ayons nunc et semper.”
Speaking with the Dead: Spirituality, Mourning,
and Memory in the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne
and La Navire
Reinier Leushuis
Introduction
Among Marguerite de Navarre’s spiritual poetry the Dialogue en forme de

vision nocturne (hereafter Dialogue) and La Navire are distinguished by a
unique dialogism that is both formal (they feature an exchange of replies
between two speakers) and thematic (their spiritual content is generated
in a dialogical pattern). The Dialogue, Marguerite’s first major poetic pro-
duction, emerges from the spiritual and dialogical symbiosis of minds that
she, then still duchess of Alençon, experienced with Guillaume Briçonnet,
bishop of Meaux, during four years of intense mystical correspondence. In
a letter dated October 1524, the second to last of the more than 120 they
exchanged, Marguerite submits to Briçonnet’s judgment a short piece of
her writing that critics believe to have been a draft of the Dialogue:1
Et si Dieu veult que quelque chose commencée soit finée, bien que mal et
mauvais langaige, vous en auriez le pouvoir de correction, où vous voirrez le
debat que me faictes avant l’avoir veu estre, non si bien mais suivant vostre
propos, comme si en pareil temps l’Esperit avoit aux deux parlé.2
1 See Christine Martineau and Christian Grouselle, “La Source première et directe du
Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne: la lettre de Guillaume Briçonnet à Marguerite de
Navarre, du 15 septembre 1524,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 32 (1970), 559–
77, and Marguerite de Navarre, Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, ed. Renja Salminen,
Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Series B, 227 (Helsinki, 1985), “Introduction,”
pp. 14–18. Earlier groundwork for the dating of the Dialogue was done by Pierre Jourda,
“Sur la date du Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne,” Revue du Seizième Siècle 13 (1926),
150–61, and Carlo Pellegrini, La prima opera di Margherita di Navarra e la terza rima in
Francia (Catania, 1920), pp. 5–30. More recently, Franco Giacone has questioned the dating
and suggested that Marguerite was alluding rather to the short and somewhat dialogical
Pater Noster, of which Giacone provided the first critical edition, “Le premier ouvrage de
Marguerite de Navarre: Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne ou Pater noster?,” in Margue
rite de Navarre, 1492–1992: Actes du Colloque international de Pau, 1992, ed. Nicole Cazauran
and James Dauphiné (Mont-de-Marsan, 1995; Paris, 2006), pp. 261–89. See also Hans Sck-
ommodau, Die religiösen Dichtungen Margaretes von Navarra (Cologne, 1955), pp. 47–87.
2:292.
162 reinier leushuis
In the previous month, Briçonnet had sought to console Marguerite in

an expansive epistle centered on the joyful freedom found when death
liberates the body from its terrestrial prison and allows the spirit to join
Christ, its spouse, in a unio mystica. The occasion was the death of Mar-
guerite de Navarre’s eight-year-old niece Charlotte, on 8 September 1524,
and the state of extreme sorrow the duchess experienced as a result. This
letter and a previous one on the death of Charlotte’s mother, Claude
de France, earlier that summer epitomize the bishop’s remedial role in
the correspondence as Marguerite’s spiritual guide and mentor, his advice
being focused at this point mainly on her grief and mourning. The effect
of Briçonnet’s letters can be measured in Marguerite’s comment that pre-
cedes the passage quoted above: “Mais que vous diray je de l’espouze dor-
mant entre les bras de son vray amy?” Her reference to Charlotte as the
spouse of the Song of Songs sleeping peacefully in the arms of Christ, her
true lover, reiterates an image that Briçonnet had often used to convince
Marguerite of the bliss of the celestial realm, and shows that the duch-
ess had reached a state of resignation with regard to Charlotte’s bodily
death.
Marguerite’s impulse to start writing poetry and her wish to have it
appraised by Briçonnet in this context of, on the one hand, loss and grief,
and, on the other hand, consolatory letter writing, suggest that she desired
to imitate in a poetic text the exercise in mourning represented by the
epistolary exchange with Briçonnet. In so doing, she follows Briçonnet’s
rhetorical strategy of refiguring biblical imagery from the terrestrial to the
spiritual realm, as in the example from the Song of Songs. More impor-
tantly, the Dialogue’s dialogical exchange of spiritually transcendent lan-
guage, with the mentor-like authoritative figure of Charlotte, mimes the
epistolary exchange with Briçonnet and the spiritual communion it had
generated (“le debat que me faictes avant l’avoir veu estre, . . . comme si
en pareil temps l’Esperit avoit aux deux parlé”).
The queen of Navarre’s poetic œuvre would eventually encompass a
myriad of forms and spiritual and worldly themes. However, one of her
final poems, La Navire, represents a striking return to a similar poetic form
and dialogical pattern in order to deal with the loss of her brother, King
François I. The poem stages François’s spirit as a consoling but authorita-
tive interlocutor, who encourages his sister to overcome her carnal sorrow
by refiguring earthly life at a spiritual level. Although written almost a
quarter of a century after the Dialogue, La Navire presents conspicuous
formal and thematic resemblances with the earlier work, including its use
of a terza rima rhyme scheme, the fiction of the vision, and its dialogical
speaking with the dead 163
structure, which not only mimes the voices of Marguerite and the spirit
of her brother, but also effectively creates a larger dialectic between the
carnal and the spiritual realms.
Even though the two poems stand far apart in Marguerite’s literary
career, their textual similarities, many of which have been noted in vary-
ing degrees by critics, justify a combined examination.3 First, their analo-
gies set them apart from other spiritual poetry composed by Marguerite.
The terza rima, for example, is employed in very few other texts, the
only examples being the Petit œuvre, written around the same time as
the Dialogue, and a few passages from La Coche. Second, even if some of
Marguerite’s spiritual poetry (in particular the Chansons spirituelles) dis-
plays traces of dialogism, nowhere else are two voices staged in such a
powerful mimetic exchange. In this respect, they bring to mind Margue-
rite’s theatrical plays, which also often present multiple voices in versified
discourse with little dramatic action.4 Third, both poems are inextricably
linked to comparable mystical experiences in a time of mourning. Rob-
ert Marichal suggests that Marguerite may well have reread her Dialogue
after François’s death in order to relive her past sorrow and reexperience
the exercise of consolation guided by the voice of Charlotte.5 It is not
impossible that she conceived both poems as private poetic experiences.
Despite the significant amount of doctrinal matter they contain, they
function as introspective self-examinations in the face of death. As such,
they are exercises in working through loss and grief that can potentially
be repeated over time. They are, consequently, much less reader-oriented
3 Among other critics proposing a combined critical reading of these two works, see
Sckommodau, Die religiösen Dichtungen, pp. 63–87; Paula Sommers, “La Navire et le Dia
logue en forme de vision nocturne: dilemmes corporels,” in Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–
1992, pp. 351–64; Nicole Cazauran, “Marguerite de Navarre: le deuil en dialogues,” in Cité
des hommes, cité de Dieu: Travaux sur la littérature de la Renaissance en l’honneur de Daniel
Ménager, ed. Jean Céard, Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud, Michel Magnien, and François
Rouget (Geneva, 2003), pp. 343–57; and Marguerite de Navarre, La Navire ou Consolation
du roi François Ier à sa sœur Marguerite, ed. Robert Marichal (Paris, 1956), “Introduction,”
pp. 9–16.
4 The Dialogue and La Navire are often included in dialogue studies as canonical exam-
ples of early modern French dialogue production. On the Dialogue, see Eva Kushner, Le
dialogue à la Renaissance: Histoire et poétique (Geneva, 2004), pp. 90, 117–19, 263–67, 288–
89, and Mustapha Kemal Bénouis, Le Dialogue philosophique dans la littérature française du
seizième siècle (The Hague and Paris, 1976), p. 214. On La Navire, see Colette Winn, “Toward
a Dialectic of Reconciliation: The Navire and the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre,”
in The Dialogue in Early Modern France, 1547–1630: Art and Argument, ed. Colette H.
Winn (Washington, D.C., 1993), pp. 79–120.
5 Marichal, ed. La Navire, p. 11.
than the rest of Marguerite’s poetic works, in spite of the similarity in

spiritual themes.
In the first part of this essay, I will approach the texts from the twofold
perspective first of literary history and form, then of spiritual and religious
thematics. I will examine their unique shared formal characteristics: the
terza rima rhyme, the dialogical structure, and their status as visions stag-
ing an encounter with a deceased family member. I will show how these
formal aspects are rooted in late medieval and early Renaissance poetic
traditions of loss and mourning, but I will also point out their originality
and innovation. Next I will examine the poems within the larger thematic
context of spiritual and evangelical renewal in France in the early decades
of the 16th century, in particular as it is related to Marguerite’s correspon-
dence with Briçonnet. In the second part of the essay, I will offer an inter-
pretation of the poems, exploring both the larger dialogical opposition
between carnal and spiritual that they stage and the role of the senses,
voice, and speech in these dynamics. In this context, I will trace the poetic
and humanistic influence of two works by Petrarch (his Secretum and
Triumphus Mortis) and emphasize the crucial role of memory, in particu-
lar in La Navire. In general, I will argue that these texts’ poetic and dialogi-
cal aspects mime Marguerite’s concerns with Christian self-consciousness
and human agency in three intersecting thematic domains: the painful
experience of loss and mourning; the desire for spiritual transcendence
(with the dual goal of reconnecting with the lost beloved and reaching a
state of bliss); and, especially in La Navire, the workings of memory and
remembrance in the confrontation with mortality.
I. Poetic Dialogue: Literary Form and Spirituality
From Lived Experience to Poetic Text

The narrative structures of the Dialogue and La Navire are simple but
fluid. In the first poem, Marguerite is in a pitiful state of silent mourn-
ing when she suddenly recognizes her niece Charlotte approaching to
dry her tears with a handkerchief. Marguerite expresses deep sorrow over
the child’s recent death and begs Charlotte to comfort her. Charlotte asks
Marguerite to stop her crying and tells her she has found happiness in the
celestial realm. Their ensuing dialogue is driven by a dialectic between the
worldly and the spiritual realms, by the premise that bodily death is a joy-
ful moment that initiates the life of eternity, and by Charlotte’s catechis-
tic lesson that Marguerite can continue living if she abandons herself in
yearning for a unio mystica with Christ (of whom Charlotte stages herself
as bride), presented as the endpoint of an ascending spiritual journey. The
text is loosely structured in a succession of thematic sequences—each
one introduced by Marguerite’s sometimes rather confrontational ques-
tions or inquisitive comments, followed by Charlotte’s lengthier replies—
dealing with the nature of divine love, charity, and faith; the correct form
of prayer; and the theological debate concerning free will, the role of good
works, and the conferral of grace. The dialogue remains unresolved and
ultimately Charlotte withdraws to the celestial heights, leaving her aunt
in spiritual disarray.
La Navire displays an even less organized narrative and thematic
sequence. The text starts with a voice that has a powerful sensorial impact
on an interlocutor who is later identified as Marguerite. She quickly real-
izes it is the voice of her deceased brother, Francois. The ensuing dialogue
can be divided roughly into two parts: the first half features exchanges that
are more private in nature and pit Marguerite’s grief over her brother’s
bodily loss, her self-centered terrestrial sorrow, and the memory of Fran-
çois’s earthly glory against her brother’s recurring demands that Margue-
rite mortify the flesh and abandon her terrestrial affection for the sake of
obtaining the divine and self-effacing caritas associated with the celestial
realm. Instead of moving closer to François, however, Marguerite expresses
an increasing attachment to her earthly state of being that allows her to
give voice to her personal sorrow through lamenting and the shedding
of tears. In the second half of the poem, and in spite of François’s disap-
proval, Marguerite embarks on communal and commemorative speaking:
she summons to François’s tomb the French people and an array of indi-
vidual courtly and royal figures, urging them to participate in her tearful
grieving and praise of François as sovereign. Finally, François admonishes
his sister to awake from her earthly illusions in order to see God and to
love her brother in a divine manner. The sun rises and, as François’s spirit
retreats to heaven, he urges her to remember his words and reminds her
that they will soon be reunited in paradise. The poem ends with a prayer
by Marguerite in which she thanks the Lord for redeeming her brother
and for making her aware of divine truth.
* * *
After its genesis in 1524 from the dialogical exchange with Briçonnet, the
Dialogue would not appear in print for another nine years. It was pub-
lished in 1533 by Simon Du Bois, in a volume that also contained the sec-
ond edition of the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse and a number of other minor
works.6 Until that time, the poem existed only in a manuscript copy (Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 2371), in which Marguerite is named
“Madame la Duchesse” or “Madame L.D.,” while the 1533 printed text refers
to her as “la Royne de Navarre” (a title she gained through marriage in
1527). For reasons about which we can only speculate, she decided not to
include the Dialogue in her first publication, the 1531 edition of the Miroir
de l’âme pécheresse and the Discord; she also excluded it much later from
the collected edition of her poetry, the 1547 Marguerites de la Marguerite
des princesses.7
It is tempting to surmise that Marguerite needed time to distance her-
self from a document that records a tragedy striking so close to her heart.
Unlike her brother’s death in 1547, from which she was physically distant,
she experienced at close hand the four-week heart-wrenching affliction of
her brother’s young child, who died slowly of rubella, finally perishing in
her aunt’s arms. The situation was aggravated by the fact that her brother
was away on a military campaign in Italy and the queen mother, Louise de
Savoie, who acted as regent during the king’s absence, had also fallen ill.8
This left Marguerite in charge of state and family matters of the highest
urgency, in addition to dealing with her crushing grief. She begs Briçonnet
for his prayers (“je demande le secours de voz bonnes prieres”) and tells him
she is gripped by extreme sorrow (“en l’extremité de ma follie et larmes”).9
The transition between lived experience and the poetic text is difficult
to reconstruct, but we know that around this time Marguerite composed
four rondeaux. Three of these precede the text of the Dialogue in the 1533
edition and set up a dialogical question-answer pattern with Charlotte
that prefigures the one in the poem (Madame, à l’ame de feue madame
Charlotte; L’ame respond à madame dame; and Replicque de madicte dame
à l’ame).10 While these dialogical poems are proof of a textual genesis trig-
gered by the model of Briçonnet’s correspondence (as will be explored
further below), Marguerite turned to another literary model, Petrarch’s
6 See Salminen, ed. Dialogue, pp. 5–6; Pierre Jourda, “Avant-propos” to his edition
of Marguerite de Navarre, Dialogue en forme de vision nocture, Revue du Seizième Siècle
13 (1926), 1; Pierre Jourda, “Tableau chronologique des publications de Marguerite de
Navarre,” Revue du Seizième Siècle 12 (1925), 209–55 (pp. 212–13).
7 Pierre Jourda ventures some hypotheses, acknowledging they remain speculative,
in Marguerite d’Angoulême, Duchesse d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre (1492–1549): Étude
biographique et littéraire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1930; Geneva, 1978), 2:1100.
8 Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1:90–91; Salminen, ed. cit., pp. 13–14.
9 Correspondance, 2:262; 271.
10 Salminen, ed. cit., pp. 7–12; Sckommodau, Die religiösen Dichtungen, p. 64.
Triumphus Mortis (Triumph of Death), to shape the vision of the lost child
in its initial stages. Renja Salminen suggests that Marguerite was directed
to Petrarch’s authoritative poetic model by a dream experience of her
brother. In the same letter to Briçonnet in which she announces the death
of Charlotte, she also mentions that the king, from whom she had initially
hidden the bad news, upon learning of it, told her that the child’s voice
had sounded up to three times in his dream, saying to him “Adieu, mon
Roy, je voy en paradis” (Correspondance, 2:272). François’s dream may well
have directed Marguerite toward the poetic topos of the dream vision,
of which she found an explicit example in the third of Petrarch’s six Tri
umphi, the Triumphus Mortis. Marguerite had access to this text via the
copy in the royal library at Blois, that Charles VIII had brought back from
his Italian campaign.11 In Petrarch’s poem, an allegorical Death appears
to the poet and evokes the vanity of all human endeavor and the fleeting-
ness of earthly life. Death then yields to the spirit of Petrarch’s deceased
beloved, Laura, who appears crowned with jewels and surrounded by
celestial spirits and reminds the poet of the soul’s blissful state after leav-
ing the prison of the earthly body.
Given the dominant influence of Briçonnet’s spirituality on Marguerite’s
poetry, critics tend to overlook the philological evidence of the first 200
verses of the Dialogue (as well as certain passages of La Navire)12 that
undoubtedly points to an imitation of the Tuscan master in both con-
tent and poetic form. Many images and spiritual themes surrounding
death, also recognizable from Briçonnet’s theology, are first filtered into
the poem via Petrarch’s intertext: a short earthly life is a blessing; ter-
restrial gains are ephemeral; death is a liberation from an earthly prison;
the poet’s anguished questioning of how long he needs to remain in his
earthly sorrow; and the overarching antithesis between spiritual death in
earthly life and celestial life following carnal death.13
Another important borrowing from Petrarch’s Triumphus is its use of
terza rima, which interlinks stanzas of three lines so that each strophe’s
11 Ursula Baurmeister and Marie-Pierre Laffitte, Des livres et des rois: La bibliothèque
royale de Blois (Paris, 1992), p. 134.
12 Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1:372–75, and Renja Salminen, ed. cit., pp.
19–24, point to the influence of the Triumphus Mortis and trace Marguerite’s faithful imi-
tation of Petrarchan material. In their otherwise insightful studies, Robert Cottrell, The
Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Spiritual Poetry (Washington,
D.C., 1986), and Paula Sommers, Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s
Poetry of Spiritual Ascent (Geneva, 1989), barely mention the Petrarchan intertext.
13 For a comparison of specific textual passages, see Salminen, ibid.
first line rhymes with its third line and the second line provides the rhyme
for the first and third lines of the next strophe (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.). It was
rarely used in the French Renaissance and had featured previously only
in parts of Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Temple d’Honneur et de vertus (1503)
and La Concorde des deux langages (1511), as well as in some of Mellin de
Saint-Gelais’s works.14 Since terza rima is most famous for being the rhyme
scheme of Dante’s Divina Commedia, Marguerite’s use of this meter led
some early critics to see in it the influence of the famous Florentine poet,
whose work Marguerite undoubtedly knew and refers to in other works.15
While direct textual references to the Commedia in the Dialogue are lack-
ing and the shared characteristics of a vision-shaped spiritual quest are too
general to be conclusive, we can nonetheless interpret Marguerite’s use of
terza rima in connection with the spiritual meaning of her poem. As Rob-
ert Cottrell argues, terza rima reflects the idea of proceeding two steps for-
ward followed by one step backward, and thus mimetically underlines the
cumbersome but steady progress the Christian is required to make on the
ladder toward spiritual transcendence and divine knowledge (Grammar,
pp. 53–54). The Dialogue, however, displays such an ascent and upward
progression only in part, and since Marguerite borrows some of her terza
rima stanzas almost word for word from Petrarch’s Triumphus Mortis,16
this is undoubtedly her immediate poetic model. As I will show below in
detail, instead of depicting spiritual ascent, terza rima, with its “two steps
forward one step backward” motion, reflects Marguerite’s laborious mne-
monic reconstruction of the lost beloved, whose bodily presence she visu-
ally evokes and poetically remembers in a manner similar to Petrarch’s
evocation of the spirit of Laura.
Other general connections, not anchored in specific textual links and
borrowings, can be drawn between the Dialogue’s visionary framework
and other well-known literary models from the Middle Ages and Renais-
sance. In the first place, there is the model of the visio, very close to that
14 See Leon Kastner, A History of French Versification (Oxford, 1903), pp. 167–69 and
idem, “History of the terza rima in France,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Litera
tur 26 (1904), 241–53.
15 See Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1:373–74.
16 The stanza describing death as the end of a dark prison is carried over literally. “La
morte è fin di una pregione oscura / all’anime gentili; all’altre è noia, / ch’ànno posto nel
fango ogni lor cura” (Francesco Petrarca, Rime, Trionfi, e poesie latine, ed. Francesco Neri
[Milan, 1951], pp. 524–25) becomes “La mort est fin d’une prison obscure / A une ame
gentil, et bien amere / A qui a mys au monde trop sa cure,” vv. 178–80. This and all further
quotations from the Dialogue are from Salminen ed. cit. All emphasis is my own.
of the songe, a dream narrative of an encounter with a spirit, as it was

epitomized by the Somnium scipionis and applied not only in the Divina
Commedia and the Triumphus Mortis, but also by Christine de Pizan, in
her Avision Christine and Livre du chemin de long estude, and in an array of
texts by the grands rhétoriqueurs who specifically used the oneiric frame-
work to praise deceased figures of authority.17 What renders Marguerite’s
vision of her niece unusual, however, is that at no point does the narra-
tor make explicit mention of falling asleep, of being in a dream state, or
of waking up at the end. In fact, unlike La Navire, the Dialogue does not
even mention a nightly setting. Given its oneiric atmosphere, critics tend
to overlook this fact. Yet for a proper appreciation of the poem’s spiritual
meaning and its dramatization of an oscillation between the carnal and
spiritual realms, it is important to see how much Marguerite emphasizes
a physical, sensorial, and mnemonic experience of the deceased inter-
locutor, rather than her intangible presence as a purely fictional dream
character.
Likewise, the Dialogue’s major dialogical framework, opposing Mar-
guerite’s carnal attachments to Charlotte’s embodiment of spiritual life,
recalls poems from medieval poetic traditions that stage a voiced opposi-
tion between two allegorical figures to treat the body vs. soul dichotomy,
the so-called débats or discords de l’âme et du corps (some of which feature
an oneiric setting as well).18 In Marguerite’s case, however, the exchange
between herself and her interlocutor acquires an intimacy and imme-
diacy that is absent from these medieval texts featuring a succession of
speeches by abstract allegorizations of body and soul. Marguerite’s Dia
logue rises above the latter genre’s forensic rhetorical nature that usually
stages a stifled contest followed by a virtuous Soul emerging in victory at
the text’s conclusion.
17 The Somnium scipionis is a dream narrative from Cicero’s De republica in which the
Roman general Scipio Aemilianus is foretold his glorious future as a military commander
by his grandfather. It was known throughout the Middle Ages thanks to Macrobius’s
commentary on it. For the use of the dream narrative by the grands rhétoriqueurs, see
Marichal, ed. cit., pp. 51–56, and Christine Martineau-Génieys, Le Thème de la mort dans
la poésie française de 1450 à 1550 (Paris, 1978), pp. 224, 227, 312–13, 338, 353–54, 368, 385,
and 423. See also Sylviane Bokdam, “La forme du « songe » dans la poésie religieuse au
seizième siècle,” in Le Songe à la Renaissance: Colloque international de Cannes (29–31 mai
1987), ed. Françoise Charpentier (Saint-Étienne, 1990), pp. 137–49.
18 Pierre Jourda reminds us that the appeal of these allegorizing dialogue-texts extended
far into the 16th century (Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1:356–57). For examples from Latin and
vernacular traditions, see Michel-André Bossy, “Medieval Debates of Body and Soul,” Com
parative Literature 28 (1976), 144–63.
In Marguerite’s text the dialogical dynamic is closely linked to its con-

tent since it reflects the believer’s troublesome spiritual quest or ambigu-
ous desire for transcendence, rather than serving the moralizing rhetorical
purpose of persuading the reader of a spiritual truth or demonstrating the
attainment of redemption. It is true that Charlotte’s extensive speeches
centered on spiritual bliss and theological dogma occupy by far the great-
est part of the text (a little under 1000 of the approximately 1300 lines).
Charlotte, who at times displays Socratic traits, strikes us as the dominant
or “winning” interlocutor, while many of Marguerite’s utterances place her
in the position of the submissive pupil who expresses her willingness to
learn Charlotte’s lessons. However, we should not overlook the fact that
the dialogical exchange does not conclude Socratically in a climactic
attainment of wisdom and that the ending proposes no satisfying out-
come or synthesis of voices. Rather, in the manner of a typical humanist
dialogue, it remains unresolved and proposes no easy conclusion to the
reader, who is left with the impression that the exchange could continue
indefinitely.19 The last line of the poem expresses this unsettled tension
when Marguerite complains that Charlotte has left her alive but worse
than dead (“Laissée m’a vivante, pis que morte,” v. 1260).
As noted above, the dialogical dynamic in the Dialogue is born from
Marguerite’s correspondence with Briçonnet and her experience of it
as a sacred communion with a higher authoritative voice. Marguerite’s
imploring request for Briçonnet’s consoling voice is first transposed onto
Charlotte in the three rondeaux that, as we have seen, precede the text
and set up the dialogical question-answer pattern between Charlotte and
herself. Throughout the dialogue, Marguerite and Charlotte function as
two complementary counterparts allowing for spiritual exchange and
transformation: Marguerite’s imprisoned mortal body versus Charlotte’s
immortal and liberated soul; Marguerite’s tears at the loss of the beloved
versus Charlotte’s joy at union with Christ her spouse; the older and sin-
ful Marguerite facing death in terrestrial life versus the younger and vir-
ginal Charlotte, reborn in celestial life after death. This almost dialectical
scheme extrapolates to the two dialogical forces outside the text, God and
the reader, when Marguerite expressly asks Charlotte to serve as an inter-
mediary between her and God (“Si me fault il bien fort vous requerir / Que
19 For the Renaissance dialogue as an open, and open-ended, literary form in relation
to humanist thought, see Kushner, Le dialogue, pp. 22–24, and Virginia Cox, The Renais
sance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo
(Cambridge, Eng., 1992), pp. 3–6.
me soyés envers luy advocate, / Pour sa grace trouver que veulx querir,”
vv. 304–06) and when Charlotte in her answers to Marguerite addresses
a Christian readership (“Mais le chrestien, de Jesuchrist vray membre,
/ . . . / Se resjouyt de voir son corps en cendre,” vv. 139–41). At the same
time, however, we always hear spontaneously and individually motivated
voices rather than rigid dialectics or a polemical discourse rousing the
readership in support of any particular theological dogma.
* * *
Unlike the Dialogue, the Navire did not appear in print during the author’s
lifetime. The text was hardly known until 1896 when Abel Lefranc redis-
covered and edited MS fr. 24.298 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France,
containing almost 12,000 verses of previously unpublished poetry by Mar-
guerite.20 This manuscript contains two major texts related to the pass-
ing away of her brother: the Comédie sur le trespas du Roy and La Navire.
These works should be seen as part of a group of texts, a “cycle du grand
deuil,”21 that relates to the illness and death of François I. They also include
several Chansons spirituelles (Pensées de la Royne de Navarre, estant dens
sa Litiere durant la maladie du Roy; Autres Pensées faites un mois après la
mort du Roy; and Rondeau fait au mesme temps),22 a short verse epistle
addressed to her brother after his demise,23 as well as a passage in Les
Prisons praising the ruler’s past glory.24 Written in the immediate after-
math of the event, the Comédie, like La Navire, is a consolatio (the term
comédie was used loosely in Marguerite’s time for a variety of theatrical
forms) and indebted to the rhetorical planctus of a sovereign.25 Unlike La
Navire, however, the play dissimulates the sorrowful event under the veil
of an eclogue, in which three bucolic characters lament the death of their
god Pan (François I) in a succession of recitative and song.26 The choice
20 Les Dernières Poésies de Marguerite de Navarre, ed. Abel Lefranc (Paris, 1896).
21 See Marguerite de Navarre, Théâtre profane, ed. V. L. Saulnier (Geneva and Paris,
1963; 1978), p. 207.
22 Marguerite de Navarre, œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole Cazauran, vol. 9, La Complainte
pour un detenu prisonnier et Les Chansons spirituelles, ed. Michèle Clément (Paris, 2001),
pp. 83–91.
23 Marguerite de Navarre, Suyte des Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, tres
illustre Royne de Navarre, ed. Ruth Thomas (The Hague, 1970), pp. 65–71.
24 Marguerite de Navarre, Les Prisons, ed. Simone Glasson (Geneva, 1978), vv. 2709–864
(pp. 225–30).
25 In the planctus, the poet combines public mourning with commemorative praise of
the deceased (see below).
26 Marguerite de Navarre, œuvres complètes, ed. Cazauran, vol. 4, Théâtre, ed. Genev-
iève Hasenohr and Olivier Millet (Paris, 2002), pp. 409–41.
of this allegorical form supports an alternative explanation proposed by

some critics for Marguerite’s refusal to publish La Navire and most of
these texts of mourning (with the exception of the verse epistle and a
few of the Chansons spirituelles). While I believe that Marguerite’s deci-
sion should be attributed primarily to the fact that she considered these
texts, as well as the Dialogue, private poetic and spiritual experiences of
mourning, if one focuses uniquely on their commemorative praise of the
deceased king it can be argued that her choice is puzzling. This is all the
more so, since the publication in 1547 of the Marguerites de la Marguerite
des princesses (in which the exceptions appeared)27 or at least that of its
second volume (the Suyte des Marguerites) in October of the same year,
several months after the composition of La Navire, could easily have been
arranged so as to include them. Robert Marichal therefore surmises that
Marguerite’s public silence surrounding the mourning of François and her
decision not to publish La Navire, in spite of the fact that it contains sig-
nificant passages of public and official mourning for the departed ruler,
were inspired by fear. The image she paints of François I as a king inclined
toward reformist ideas could have created trouble in the atmosphere of
tightening Catholic censorship toward mid-century. For instance, she had
left out the confirmation of loyalty to the Catholic faith that François I
presumably pronounced on his deathbed.28
La Navire received its title from the first words of the text in which Mar-
guerite’s brother compares her spiritual distress to that of a ship stranded
far from its true harbor: “Navire loing du vray port assablee,” v. 1.29 How-
ever, it is also known by a modern title suggested by Gaston Paris shortly
after Lefranc published the manuscript, Consolation de François Ier à sa
sœur, which emphasizes its character as poetry of mourning and conso-
lation. The absence of an original title is in line with the generally poor
state of the manuscript, from which some verses are entirely lacking due
to the oversight of the scribes. The detailed circumstances of the poem’s
genesis are described by Marichal, who dates its composition to June or
July of 1547. When the king had died on 30 March, Marguerite had been
unable to be at his bedside. Although informed of events shortly thereaf-
ter, she remained unaware of the circumstances of his death until June,
when she received an Oraison funèbre pronounced by Pierre Du Chastel.
27 See Jourda, “Tableau chronologique,” p. 226.

28 Marichal, ed. cit., pp. 64–67.
29 All quotes will be from the Marichal edition. A feminine noun in middle French,
navire has become masculine in modern French.
Enlightened by the details provided in Du Chastel’s account, she wrote La

Navire while residing at the priory of Tusson.30
Other than her own Dialogue, which she may well have revisited in
composing La Navire, there are no other major poetic intertexts directly
at work in this poem, as was the case with Petrarch’s Triumphus Mortis
for the Dialogue.31 It is her use of the terza rima, however, that leads us
to consider a possible indirect influence of the Triumphus. La Navire con-
tains a number of textual references to Petrarch’s vision but it is not clear
if Marguerite remembers the text through revisiting her own Dialogue or
if she had it again under her eyes as she composed the later poem.32 In
any case, particularly noteworthy is the radiant and more hopeful ending
of La Navire, compared to Marguerite’s sorrowful state after Charlotte’s
departure, since Marguerite is steeped in the light of the rising sun of
redemptive truth, in a way reminiscent of the sunrise at the end of the
Triumphus Mortis.33 Again, moreover, the use of terza rima and its back
and forth movement is related to a Petrarchan mnemonic reconstruction
of the lost beloved’s physical presence (see further below).
In terms of its imitation of poetic models, La Navire differs in another
respect quite significantly from the Dialogue. It displays a much greater
indebtedness to the poetic traditions surrounding death, flourishing so
abundantly in a period deeply conscious of mortality and ubiquitously
presenting its imagery.34 Whereas in the Dialogue Marguerite’s lament of
Death’s cruel snatching away of Charlotte’s bodily presence lingers only
briefly in the initial speeches before giving way to discussion of spiritual
and theological issues, in La Navire Marguerite dwells extensively both
on the loss of her brother’s physical presence and on her commemorative
praise of the ruler’s noble deeds. In so doing, the poem fuses two existing
poetic traditions, the consolatio and the planctus, both of which feature
30 Marichal, ed. cit., pp. 1–5; see also the pertinent parts from Du Chastel’s Oraison,
ibid., pp. 307–14.
31 Intrigued by Marguerite’s use of terza rima, earlier critics tended to speculate also on
La Navire’s formal indebtedness to Dante’s Divina Commedia but recognized that the simi-
larities of a spiritual quest and the encounter and dialogue with a guiding spirit remain
general and correspond to a variety of other canonical texts from mystical and theologi-
cal traditions by writers such as Boethius, Nicholas of Cusa, and Catherine of Siena. See
Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1:573–74, and Marichal, ed. cit., pp. 39–42.
32 For the verses in question, see Marichal, ed. cit., p. 43, v. 1, and Salminen, ed. cit.,
pp. 19–24.
33 According to Marichal, “la même lumière baigne la conclusion des deux poèmes”
(ed. cit., p. 43).
34 See Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1997), esp. pp. 156–72.
descriptions of the earthly aspects of dying and bodily obliteration, and

lament death as the personification of a non-redemptive force destructive
of the vanitas of all earthly beauty. First, then, La Navire displays numer-
ous elements of the more intimate lyric genre of the consolatio.35 In reply
to his sister’s recalling of his corporeal beauty and her sorrowful laments
on death’s obliteration of his presence, François’s consoling voice reminds
her of the vanity of the flesh, of the continuous presence of death in our
midst, and of the baseness of the body as an earthly prison made of mud
and dirt and destined to rot and decay. François thus appeals to themes
associated with the general idea of memento mori, “remember you will
die,” whose application in the text I will discuss further below.
In its second half, however, La Navire draws heavily on the tradition
of the planctus, the déploration or complainte funèbre in French, which
frames mourning and sorrow publicly and eternalizes the earthly mem-
ory of an authority figure in a poem that functions in many ways as a
commemorative tombstone. The genre was extremely popular among
the grands rhétoriqueurs, poets who were highly involved in the vicissi-
tudes of aristocratic figures for the simple reason that the latter employed
them and they stood at the forefront of producing consolatory, laudatory,
and commemorative poetry to be pronounced at funeral services. Chris-
tine Martineau-Génieys has meticulously mapped their extensive corpus
in the decades preceding La Navire: poets such as Georges Chastellain,
Pierre Michault, Jean Molinet, Jean Robertet, Guillaume Crétin, and Jean
Lemaire de Belges chant the macabre omnipresence and inescapability of
an allegorized Death, who can strike anyone at any time and who anni-
hilates all earthly vanities (Le Thème de la mort, pp. 191–437). In general,
these works (a) depict the pain suffered by the deceased ruler’s subjects,
(b) draw his or her laudatory portrait, (c) provide a narrative of the ruler’s
last moments, and, most importantly, (d) insist on the sovereign’s eternal
memory and the perpetuation of his or her glory after bodily death, a
theme they mimetically emphasize by figuring the text as a lasting funer-
ary monument.
It is certain that Marguerite was familiar with many of these funerary
texts, some of which were written in honor of deceased figures from her
own entourage. Marichal goes so far as to suggest that, in the absence
of an actual Déploration de François Ier, it may have been assumed by
35 For the ancient tradition and examples of the consolatio, see E. R. Curtius, European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), pp. 80–82.
court poets that Marguerite’s Navire was intended as such (ed. cit., p. 52).
However this may be, the building blocks of the déploration funèbre are
all present in the latter part of the poem: Marguerite repeatedly praises
François not just as her intimately beloved brother, but as her former sov-
ereign; she commemorates his virtues, honor, and nobility and lauds his
noble deeds, actions, and sayings, as well as his courageous attitude in
facing the enemy during his captivity at the hands of the Spanish. Finally,
she extols François’s exemplary attitude, during his last moments, in the
face of death. A most powerful passage of collective lament in the style of
the rhétoriqueurs comes toward the end of the text. In verse 958, Margue-
rite addresses a long litany, starting with an imperative to cry (“Pleurez” is
repeated over fifteen times), first to her own voice and eyes, then to a col-
lectivity of men and women, nobles and clerics, merchants and warriors.
This is followed by an appeal to several of François’s close family mem-
bers (his second wife, Queen Éléonore; his daughter-in-law, Catherine de
Médicis; his daughter, Marguerite; and his son, the future King Henri II)
as well as to his courtly subjects to gather at the deceased ruler’s tomb
and to follow her example in remembering the various noble and virtuous
deeds he performed toward each of them.36
Even if traditional déplorations often adopt a dream narrative,
Martineau-Génieys is right to correct Marichal’s erroneous view of La
Navire’s formal setting as that of a dream (Le Thème de la mort, p. 558),
a misunderstanding repeated by some later critics. However much both
the Dialogue and La Navire may depict an oneiric and nightly atmosphere,
similar to traditional dream narratives of encounters with spirits, in these
two works we can speak only of a vision (visio) since there is no textual
evidence suggesting a state of dreaming (somnium).37 Moreover, while
36 “Eleonor, o noble Royne, approche, / Viens de tes yeulx son sepulcre honorer; / Sa
femme fuz, rien ne luy est plus proche” (vv. 988–90); “Toy, Catherine, es de larmes garnie, /
Car perdu as ung pere, tu sces quel, / Qui ne fus onc de son amour bannye” (vv. 1012–14);
“. . . o tres heureux Henry, / Qui ne faict cas de chose basse et mince. / O ceur de Roy,
comme le plus merry / Qui oncques fut, je prens la hardiesse / De t’apeller dessus ce corps
pery” (vv. 1094–98); “Las! venez tous, et que chacun se range / Prez de ce corps digne que
vous pleurez, / Et demandez que Dieu de mort nous venge” (vv. 1285–87).
37 The only verses that might be interpreted as referring to a state of sleep come toward
the end of La Navire when François urges Marguerite: “Esveille toy, laisse ton mortel songe /
Voy le soleil tant clair et veritable / Qui chassera la nuict et sa mensonge” (vv. 1321–23).
However, the rhyme with “mensonge” suggests that the word “songe” refers only to the
illusion of a sinful carnal life. The previous verse (“C’est que tu dors et ne veulx t’esveiller,”
v. 1320) suggests also that Marguerite’s sleep and awakening refer symbolically to the sin-
ful state in which she currently dwells and the blessed state she is urged to reach, not to
actual dreaming and being awake.
in the Dialogue Marguerite attempts to discern the visual apparition of

Charlotte as if she were some sort of hallucination, François’s presence
in La Navire is mediated exclusively through voice and the memories it
triggers.
In a further important respect Marguerite’s Navire substantially departs
from the déploration tradition. In its rhetoric of Death’s horrific and maca-
bre power, the latter failed to grant much value to death’s liberating and
redemptive aspects. In La Navire however, Marguerite, as she had already
done in the Dialogue, fully exploits the spiritually beneficial aspects of
bodily death as a redemptive instrument of grace. In so doing, she fol-
lows the example of Clément Marot’s Déploration de Florimond Robertet
(1527),38 a poem in which the allegory of death is related for the first
time in this genre to the liberation of the body from a world of sin in
order to allow the spirit into the celestial realm.39 In fact, the echoes of
consolatio in François’s voice that I discussed above and his use of the
typical vocabulary of memento mori depart from tradition because they
are interspersed with repeated reminders that his bodily death has been
redeemed in union with the body of Christ and with numerous exhorta-
tions addressed to Marguerite that she prepare for death by focusing on
it as a joyful transition toward heaven.
A last major formal aspect to consider is La Navire’s dialogical frame-
work. In broad terms, the text’s dialogical dynamics mime the body/soul
dichotomy in much the same way as in the Dialogue. In that sense this
text too draws on the poetic tradition of the disputatio between flesh
and spirit, the discord de l’âme et du corps: Marguerite’s voice expresses
earthly yearnings and sinful attachments whereas François’s voice gives
shape to the blissful realm of the soul.40 However, the progression of
the dialogical interaction differs from that in the Dialogue. The earlier
text, as we have seen, overcomes the stifled opposition of allegorical fig-
ures through a more intimate dialogical flexibility that allows not only
Marguerite’s transformation, but also an open-endedness that stresses the
dialogical process itself and preempts a climactic victory of one voice over
38 “Et toutesfois, sans moy qui suis la mort / Aller ne peulx en l’eternelle vye,” Clément
Marot, Œuvres complètes, ed. François Rigolot, 3 vols. (Paris, 2007), 1:196 (vv. 299–300).
39 Marichal, ed. cit., p. 54; Martineau-Génieys, Le Thème de la mort, pp. 439–85, esp.
pp. 452–55.
40 Winn, “Toward a Dialectic,” pp. 86–88. Winn argues that there is a series of other
related thematic dualisms rendered in the dialogical opposition (pp. 100–12).
the other. La Navire seems at first to echo the medieval discords more
than the Dialogue, in the sense that we cannot detect a real progression
in Marguerite’s voice toward François’s view. In fact, she becomes all the
more determined in her earthly attachments and fixed on her memories
of her brother. At the same time, however, the text does not allow either
voice or position to triumph over the other, and thus remains almost as
open-ended as the Dialogue. Marguerite’s brief final prayer implies a sense
of transformative grace when she understands that divine truth has been
revealed to her, but it evinces only hope for her future spiritual transfor-
mation, not actual transformation itself.
Robert Cottrell thus argues that dialogue in La Navire is no more than
a “closed system,” an alternating succession of speeches by interlocutors
“locked” in their positions (Grammar, p. 207). Jean Lecointe, by contrast,
considers Marguerite’s limited speaking in the Dialogue a real obstacle to
its “dialogicity” and argues that it is precisely because she so stubbornly and
elaborately defends her position in La Navire that the latter text represents
a richer dialogue from the point of view of textual symmetry. According to
Lecointe, Marguerite explores dissent and confrontation between the two
interlocutors in La Navire and thus intensifies a dialogism that is latent in
some texts of the déploration genre, in particular Marot’s Déploration de
Florimond Robertet. In this way, she creates a more “polyphonic” literary
genre capable of exploring a complex range of conflicts and emotions in
her experience of mourning, such as the right to abundantly express sor-
row and to shed tears in the context of evangelical versus Stoic treatments
of this issue.41 Whether Marguerite is staging the interlocutors as operat-
ing from locked positions or deepening the representation of the experi-
ence of mourning by exploring a range of passions and attitudes toward
it,42 what we can say for sure is that the dialogical form allows La Navire
to transcend poetic formulas and to deepen substantially the interaction
between literary form and spiritual content.
41 Jean Lecointe, “Le Devis des larmes: polémique anti-stoïcienne et dialogicité, autour
de La Navire de Marguerite de Navarre,” in Devis d’amitié: Mélanges en l’honneur de
Nicole Cazauran, ed. Jean Lecointe, Catherine Magnien, Isabelle Pantin, and Marie-Claire
Thomine (Paris, 2002), pp. 369–84 (pp. 370, 377).
42 For dialogical aspects in poetic traditions of mourning and consolation in general,
see Alexandre Tarrête, “Remarques sur le genre du dialogue de consolation à la Renais-
sance,” Bulletin de l’Association d’Étude sur l’Humanisme, la Réforme et la Renaissance 57
(2003), 133–52. See also Cazauran, “Marguerite de Navarre: le deuil en dialogues.”
From Spiritual and Religious Experience to Poetic Text

The formal and poetic aspects of the Dialogue and La Navire are inextrica-
bly linked to the spirituality and, in case of the Dialogue, the theological
doctrine that fuel them. Despite the time separating their composition, the
two works present remarkable similarities in this respect. I will now trace
briefly the spiritual and doctrinal issues at stake in the two poems and
offer a number of insights that nuance existing scholarship. From the out-
set it should be stated that neither poem engages in a polemical defense
of or attack against doctrinal positions, let alone attempts to conduct sys-
tematic theological thinking. Given the general emphasis in Marguerite
de Navarre’s poetry on mystical access to God through faith and charity
rather than on rational theology, the works’ sole theological contribution
is the Dialogue’s poetic rendering of the contemporary debate on free will
and justification by faith. For the rest, all spiritual and theological matters
are subjected to the poems’ larger purpose of dialogical self-examination,
private mourning, and spiritual transcendence.43
Clearly the Dialogue, conceived from the epistolary exchange with
Briçonnet, is marked by the latter’s spirituality that features a powerful
Christocentrism, self-annihilating patterns of mystical ascent, and an
uneasy interaction between human poetic language and the divine logos
whereby the former can only adequately render the latter through a pro-
cess of dissolution and silencing that is antithetical to the text’s own rhe-
torical nature. While this spirituality influences Marguerite’s entire poetic
output,44 the Dialogue and La Navire constitute two fundamental cases
in point.
I alluded above to Marguerite’s use of the mystical marriage theme,
as it was introduced by Briçonnet, to recast earthly sorrow in terms of
43 For the religious background to these years and Marguerite’s proximity to the Meaux
Group, see Henry Heller, “Marguerite of Navarre and the Reformers of Meaux,” Biblio
thèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 33 (1971), 271–310; Michel Veissière, “Ce que croyait
Guillaume Briçonnet, évêque de Meaux,” in La vie, la mort, la foi, le temps: Mélanges offerts
à Pierre Chaunu, ed. Jean-Pierre Bardet and Madeleine Foisil (Paris, 1993); V. L. Saulnier,
“Marguerite de Navarre aux temps de Briçonnet: Étude de la correspondance générale
(1521–22),” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 39 (1977), 437–78, and 40 (1978), 7–47
and 193–237; Cottrell, Grammar, pp. 3–33; and Gary Ferguson, Mirroring Belief: Marguerite
de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (Edinburgh, 1992). For her relationship with Italian reform-
ers, see Richard Cooper, “Marguerite de Navarre et la réforme italienne,” in Marguerite de
Navarre, 1492–1992, pp. 159–88.
44 “The spirit of Briçonnet is everywhere apparent in Marguerite’s poetry,” Cottrell,
Grammar, p. 30.
celestial bliss. In response to her aunt’s lament that she could have made
a good match in marriage (vv. 85 and 106–11), Charlotte answers that she
has obtained greater honor by being married as a virgin to Christ and thus
remained without sin: “Mais mon espoux m’a faict plusgrant honneur /
De me prendre en ma virginité” (vv. 112–13). Several other themes deriv-
ing from Briçonnet display a similar reworking along this Pauline axis of
an opposition between the flesh and the spirit (carnal versus spiritual,
earthly versus celestial): the lifeless tree from which Adam ate the fruit
of sin becomes the fruit-bearing tree of Christ’s cross (vv. 577–94); the
earthly body perishes in order to become a member of the larger body of
Christ, subject to its head (“Mais le chrestien, de Jesuschrist vray membre, /
Croyant pour vray estre uny à son chef, / Se resjouyt de voir son corps en
cendre,” vv. 139–41); divine love is an all-consuming fire that destroys the
attachments of earthly affection for the greater glory and enjoyment of
the life of the spirit (vv. 235–61).45
The spirituality of the Dialogue, inspired by Briçonnet, is driven by an
upward movement, sometimes borrowing neo-Platonic ladder imagery
(“Faisant de tout ce que l’on voit eschelle, / Tousjours montant sans y
faire grant pose,” vv. 737–38), in which one simultaneously mortifies the
body and strives for the unio mystica of the soul with Christ enjoyed by
Charlotte (“Je suys de Dieu l’amye toute belle,” v. 127). As Cottrell demon-
strates, this process entails both a mortification of the body and a pulveri-
zation of the believer’s consciousness of an independent self and the false
perception of the latter’s agency or will (Grammar, pp. 39–56). While I will
return to the issue of agency, it is important to note that Charlotte insis-
tently reminds Marguerite that the only path to union with Christ’s mysti-
cal body is that of self-renunciation and the abandonment of all earthly
and individual attachments under the guidance of divine love (variously
referred to by means of metaphors of an all-consuming fire or a sweeping
flood, torrent).46
This general upward movement of spiritual transformation toward
celestial bliss, most strongly expressed in Charlotte’s voice, has led critics
to argue that the poem reflects traditional medieval models of mystical
45 For a detailed comparison between passages in the correspondence with Briçonnet

and the Dialogue, see Salminen, ed. cit., pp. 24–35.
46 See for instance the body (v. 141); family bonds (vv. 190–92); reason (vv. 226–28);
worldly goods, pleasures, and honors (vv. 1129–37); and, most importantly, the ambition
to know truth (vv. 925–40).
ascent, filtered through Briçonnet’s lens. For instance, Hans Sckommo-

dau claims that the poem’s structure reflects the three stages of the scala
perfectionis: purgatio, illuminatio, and perfectio (Die religiösen Dichtungen,
pp. 77–84). Likewise, Paula Sommers makes the case for the presence of
tertiary structures of ascent in the entire corpus of Marguerite’s devotional
poetry and argues that the Dialogue moves upwards from Marguerite’s
emphasis on individual faith to Charlotte’s celebration of a communal
Christian caritas, to which all personal faith should be directed (Celestial
Ladders, pp. 40–42). It should be noted, however, that in terms of theo-
logical content these readings focus mainly on Charlotte as the principal
interlocutor and tend to undervalue both Marguerite’s participation and
the overall mimetic role of the dialogue.
Another important aspect of Briçonnian spirituality in the Dialogue,
discussed at length by Cottrell, is the dilemma of poetic language as an
earthly product in the face of the divine logos—in the words of Briçon-
net, the Tout-Verbe (Grammar, pp. 19–33, 46–56). Following Augustine,
Briçonnet believed that human language, although redeemed through
the incarnation of Christ (the Word of God made flesh), remained imper-
fect. His spiritual rhetoric—or, as Cottrell terms it, his “mechanics of
signification”—implies that we first understand words, in particular those
of Scripture, as worldly signs in a sensorial realm (verba) and only after-
ward learn to interpret them spiritually as referents to transcendental
truths (res). In addition, words in their worldly and literal meaning are
Rien (Nothing) and their sole purpose is to be dissolved in spiritual mean-
ing, le Tout (All). This hermeneutic process parallels the believer’s annihi-
lation of all consciousness of the self in ascending toward the enjoyment
of Christ. Thus, for Cottrell, the poetic force of the Dialogue consists in
its continual oscillation between, on the one hand, the representation of
the individual believer’s journey to unio mystica, which implies a linear,
rational narrative and a worldly use of words, and, on the other hand,
the poetic rendering of the dissolution that is the actual enjoyment of
the unio mystica, in which words cease to be meaningful and dissolve
into pure spirituality. Aside from the profound insight Cottrell provides
into the relationship between poetic language and religious experience
in Marguerite’s time, his reading also emphasizes that writing poetry for
Marguerite, both at this stage and later in La Navire, is motivated by a
larger concern with the question of human agency and participation in
matters of faith and spirituality, a concern exemplified in these poems
in a context of mourning, transcendence, and (particularly in La Navire)
memory.
Likewise, critics have considered the Dialogue’s extensive material on

doctrinal issues of faith, grace, and free will almost exclusively as her
response to contemporary debates raging in theological and humanist
circles, or at least claimed that they should be seen in the sole context
of Marguerite’s alleged Lutheran sympathies and her tense dealings with
the Sorbonne. One could argue, however, that the Dialogue’s sometimes
testy exchanges between Charlotte and her aunt on this issue are driven
by Marguerite’s desire to explore poetically and dialogically her individual
concern with human will and its ability to participate in matters of faith
and grace. It should be kept in mind, for instance, that all the textual pas-
sages in question are constructed as Charlotte’s replies to Marguerite’s
deeply personal anxieties. This apprehension about what Marguerite is
able to do is epitomized when, following a passage in which Charlotte
seeks to convince her aunt that she herself is in a state of celestial bliss,
Marguerite desperately asks: “Mais dictes moy: que fera vostre tante?”
(v. 201). Moreover, as many critics concede, these passages neither con-
tribute new theological subject matter to existing debates nor do they
militantly defend ideological positions.47 In the last section of this essay,
I will therefore argue that these two poems express Marguerite’s concern
for individual agency in these domains, in particular, mimetically, through
their form as poetic dialogues.
We cannot ignore, however, that the dialogue between Marguerite and
Charlotte contains many doctrinal elements of theological debate. Almost
half their exchange (vv. 457–690 and vv. 871–1244, roughly 600 of the 1294
lines) involves questions of free will, the importance of good works, and
justification by faith and thus refers to the debate raging contempora-
neously between Erasmus and Luther.48 On the one hand, Marguerite’s
voice doubtfully but insistently asks for advice on the legitimacy of man’s
claim to enjoy free will or franc arbitre (“Las! Madame, donnés moy con-
gnoissance: / Ne m’a pas Dieu donné ung franc arbitre / Pour en avoir
entiere jouyssance?” vv. 457–59; cf. vv. 874–76) and on the possibility of
preparing salvation through good works (“Mais, Madame, pour ceste grace
avoir, / Ne me doibs je pas bien fort preparer / A y faire mon possible
47 For theological and doctrinal issues, see Sckommodau, Die religiösen Dichtungen, pp.
73–77; Salminen, ed. cit., pp. 36–43; and Marguerite Soulié, “Les convictions religieuses de
Marguerite de Navarre, d’après le Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (1524),” in Devis
d’amitié, pp. 329–45. Ferguson, Mirroring Belief stands as the authoritative work on the
theological, doctrinal, and spiritual aspects of Marguerite’s devotional poetry.
48 See Salminen, ed. cit., pp. 36–43 for Marguerite’s familiarity with the Erasmus-Luther
debate and Luther’s writings on free will.
et debvoir?” vv. 499–501; cf. vv. 517–19). On the other hand, Charlotte’s
extensive answers stress man’s imprisonment in an utterly sinful nature
which precludes him from any kind of agency to even discern good from
evil (“Qui de peché est pris et ataché / Serf de peché sans liberté devient,”
vv. 475–76), thus making salvation entirely dependent on God’s grace ini-
tiating man’s faith (see vv. 310, 382, 412–13, 478–83, 492, 933, and 1147)
and rendering the question of merit through justifying works superfluous
(“Vous ne ferés par rigle ny compas / Plus grans oeuvres qu’ung Turc ou
ung Juif, / Et pour cela saulvé ne serés pas,” vv. 565–67). Through Char-
lotte’s voice, the Dialogue seems to bolster Luther’s famous argument of
justification by faith alone, including its corollaries that man has neither
free will nor the capacity to choose the good, and that performing good
works does not lead to salvation.
Gary Ferguson’s insightful study, however, has significantly nuanced
this view of the Dialogue as a Lutheran text by showing that, at a deeper
level, its soteriological thinking can be traced back to Augustine and early
Catholic theologians (Mirroring Belief, pp. 26–42). These generally held
that man had possessed free will in a prelapsarian state, but that it had
been rendered dysfunctional by sin and could only be restored by God’s
grace. Thus, following Bonaventure and Briçonnet, Charlotte describes the
working of grace as tripartite: “Mais la bonté de Dieu, qui tout previent, /
Luy presente grace preveniente, / Voir à l’heure que de luy ne souvient. /
Puis luy donne la grace illuminante, / Qui commence faire ung peu la foy
luyre. / Aprés y mect grace perficiente” (vv. 478–83). This idea allows for
a degree of human collaboration in the reception of grace: prevenient
grace may be a purely gratuitous gift from God, but it implies that the
believer can decide to refuse or to collaborate with the other two stages.
More importantly, Ferguson points to Charlotte’s insistence on a free
will restored to man after receiving all three stages of grace, a doctrinal
view rejected by Lutheran reformers: “Franc arbitre luy est lors redonné, /
En luy trouve sa liberté perdue / Par trop avoir en peché sejourné” (vv.
493–95; cf. vv. 880–82). In terms of the believer’s degree of agency in this
matter, Charlotte, although adamantly refusing that works compel grace,
implies that the intrinsic merit and righteousness of human beings is reac-
tivated once mystical union with Christ has been achieved, so good works
performed are a result of man’s Christocentricity, another idea foreign to
Lutherans: “Si vous avés vouloir de faire bien, / C’est le vouloir de Dieu,
car le seul vostre / Est vouloir mal, quant riens n’y a du sien” (vv. 532–34;
cf. vv. 955–57).
Although Charlotte repeatedly stresses the sole power of faith for

salvation,49 this aspect too needs to be treated with caution when we
assess the text’s position between competing doctrines. Her repeated use
of the epithet vive in combination with foy (“C’est vive foy qui scait si bien
conduire / Cueur, ame et corps,” vv. 484–85)50 cannot be overlooked in
the context of the ideologically and doctrinally motivated uses of the same
term by Catholic, reformist, and evangelical writers in Marguerite’s time.51
Generally speaking, the term vive foy in the Dialogue echoes Augustine’s
idea that intellectual faith itself is not enough for justification but needs
to be accompanied by hope and love, which can take the form of active
charity. While scholarly positions diverge on the meaning of the term
for Catholics and reformers,52 one can say that Catholic writers tend to
use it to indicate faith as shown in works of charity, which are a form
of human participation in salvation, whereas for Calvin and Protestant
writers, vive foy meant mostly foy confiance, a personal faith characterized
by an unwavering trust in God’s promises, regardless of the good works
it may make us perform as a result. Charlotte’s voice occupies a middle
position that could be characterized as Fabrist or Erasmian: vive foy is
both foy confiance and a faith that must express itself in good works and
a loving bond with one’s neighbor if it wants to be effective: “J’entens en
Dieu totalle confiance, / . . . / Croyant du tout sa promesse certaine, / . . . /
Et cest amour se monstre deffendant / En son prochain, soustenant pour luy
peine” (vv. 601–10; cf. vv. 1018–50 and 1195–1244).
* * *
In La Navire Marguerite is less concerned with embedding individual
mourning and spiritual transcendence in theological and doctrinal con-
siderations. Instead, François’s voice concentrates solely on those aspects
of Briçonnet’s spirituality and contemporary theological debates that con-
cern a personal experience of unio with Christ: the celestial life of the
49 See for instance vv. 230, 465, 484–86, 569, 581, 595–600, 658, 696, 767, 843, 1057, 1090,
1118, 1142, 1184, 1188, and 1244.
50 See also vv. 696, 767, 1090–91, 1118, 1188, and 1244.
51 For a detailed contextual study of the use of the vive foy locution in the Dialogue, see
Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, pp. 147–67, an analysis that should be read in conjunction with
Isabelle Garnier-Mathez’s exhaustive historical and linguistic study of these and similar
epithets in writings by French Evangelicals, L’Épithète et la connivance: Écriture concertée
chez les Évangéliques français (1523–1534) (Geneva, 2005); for vive foy, see pp. 157–97 and
288–98. My discussion is much indebted to these two studies.
52 Garnier-Mathez, L’Épithète et la connivence, pp. 157–59, seems to settle the issue.
disembodied spirit, love as caritas, and faith (vive foy) as a strong personal
trust in God. Broadly speaking, the more Christocentric outlook featured
in La Navire strips these elements of the dogmatic freight they carried
in the Dialogue. François’s consolatio, in particular in the long first part
of the poem before Marguerite initiates her planctus, effectively blends
imagery from Briçonnet’s allegorizing spirituality with ladder elements of
neo-Platonic ascent and repeatedly depicts vive foy as a transformative
abandonment to the figure of Christ. Thus, as Marichal notes, because of
its lack of theological debate and its emphasis on individualized mystical
experience, La Navire paradoxically stands closer to Briçonnet’s teachings
than the Dialogue.53
François urges Marguerite to refigure her misguided carnal love (“faux
amour,” v. 94; “aymant la chair,” v. 97) into truthful divine love, which he
associates both with the figure of Jesus as lover and with a collective cari
tas depicted as a fire that absorbs all individual love: “Parfaict amour, c’est
le Dieu eternel, / Qui dans les cueurs sa charité respend” (vv. 82–83); “Icy
se faict de charité le feu” (v. 422); “Parfaicte amour de l’aymer te convye, /
Veu que Jhesus, le tres parfaict amant, / De la porter pour toy a eu envye”
(vv. 871–73; cf. vv. 466–68 and vv. 1393–95). This love first destroys and
empties, then transforms and fills anew the believer:
Amour le veult defaire et deformer,
Et en l’Amy aymant parfaictement
Perdre du tout et en luy transformer.
Qui sent d’amour l’aneantissement,

Se resjouyst, perdant ce qui n’est rien
Pour recepvoir son Tout entierement. (vv. 88–93)
Likewise, the fallen carnal body is refigured in the spiritual and truth-
ful body of Christ: “Amour te painct ung corps de fange et boue / Pour
t’amuser, ignorant ce vray corps / Que Dieu puissant son filz nomme et
advoue” (vv. 811–13); and the tangible cross the believer worships in prayer
becomes the figurative living cross of redemption in Jesus’s suffering:
Or, prent sa croix pour faire ung eschauffaut
De terre au ciel . . .
. . . . . .
En ceste croix verras ta vie luire,
53 Marichal, ed. cit., p. 17. For a detailed overview of the similarities in spiritual imagery
between the Dialogue and La Navire, see Marichal’s annotations.
Car le Vivant pour toy la croix a prise,

. . . . . .
Embrasse la, ceste croix, et la prise. (vv. 862–68)
The spiritual transformation François asks Marguerite to pursue is framed
in terms of an upward flight (“Et prens ton vol à la vie eternelle!” v. 333), a
ladder-structured ascent (“Qui vit en chair, il vit en une abisme / De tout
péché, demeurant en l’eschelle / Tousjours au pied, sans regarder la cime,”
vv. 328–30), and a transgressive upward leap (“Si à moy veulx venir, faictz
donc ung sault / Hors de ta chair et toy mesmes renonce,” vv. 460–61). As
in the Dialogue, its result is framed as citizenship in the celestial realm
(“. . . sachant qu’en Paradis / Citoyen suys de la grande cite,” vv. 476–77).54
The poem’s only vestige of concern with the believer’s free will fur-
ther reveals François’s Christocentric perspective on this issue: once one
receives grace and fully loves God, individual and divine wills coincide,
making the question of an idiosyncratic free will irrelevant: “Qui ayme
Dieu et de luy seul deppend, / Qui son voulloir au sien veult conformer /
Beaucoup y gangne et bien peu y deppend” (vv. 85–87). Likewise, the
notion of vive foy acquires the narrower meaning of a pure and firm
confidence in God, both in Marguerite’s reference to François’s earthly
endeavors (“Roy tres crestien, vivant en ferme foy / Envers son Dieu sans
une seulle doubte,” vv. 136–37) and in François’s explanation of its guiding
value for Marguerite’s upward spiritual journey (“Haulce ton ceur et soyes
poursuivant / Ce que la foy peu à peu t’aprendra,” vv. 850–51).55
Finally, in spite of the absence of a substantial treatment of the doc-
trine of grace, I concur with Jean Lecointe’s observation that the text’s
concluding prayer mimes the infusion of grace in Marguerite’s mind:56
O Vérité que je sçay deriver
De Dieu, tu as ung pouvoir invincible
. . . . . .
Tu rendz en moy facille l’impossible,
. . . . . .
Par ceste mort tu m’as humiliee
Jusqu’en enfer: j’ay senty ses lyens,
Et puis m’en as par grace deliee. (vv. 1441–49)
54 Cf. Dialogue: “Si Foy vous faict cheminer ce grant pas, / Citoyenne serés de ma cité”
(vv. 1184–85).
55 See Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, pp. 169–70.
56 Lecointe, “Le Devis des larmes,” p. 370. See also Sommers, Celestial Ladders, pp.
79–82.
It should be noted in particular how these verses direct human agency

toward an overcoming of earthly sorrow in spiritual transcendence (“Tu
rendz en moy facille l’impossible”), thus mirroring Marguerite’s under-
standing of the process of grace as containing some element of human
participation. These concluding verses (vv. 1441–64) are both detached
from and inextricably linked to the preceding dialogue: François has
withdrawn to the celestial realm yet Marguerite’s transformation is still
a direct result of their exchange. If her voice in conversation with her
brother expressed earthly intransigence, it now conveys a serenity and a
sense of resignation radically different from her previous words. This state
of mind is depicted as the result of grace’s assistance, both in personal
mourning (she thanks the Lord for having comforted her sorrow and states
that grace has “unbound” her [“deliee”] in relation to François’s physical
loss) and in prevailing over earthly love through charity: “O Charité, au
Seigneur ententive / En ta brebis pis que morte et perie / Tu as usé de ta
bonté naïfve” (vv. 1456–58).
II. Poetic Dialogue: Human Agency in Mourning and Memory
At this point I propose to contribute to our understanding of the Dialogue

and La Navire by revisiting their form as poetic dialogues. The experiences
of mourning, consolation, and remembrance, as well as the problematic
desire for spiritual transcendence, are to a large extent both represented
and mimetically intensified by the poems’ formal characteristics as dia-
logues written in terza rima. This poetic dialogism lends them a unique
status: it transforms what might have been a rather formal poetry of loss,
sorrow, consolation, and remembrance, in combination with equally for-
malistic elements of doctrinal debate and praise of the deceased, into
poetic exercises in self-examination, spiritual transcendence, and memory
that valorize human agency and Christian self-consciousness as embodied
in particular by the interlocutor Marguerite. In this context, the term “dia-
logical” has a twofold meaning: it refers not only to the rhetorical struc-
ture of a spoken exchange between two interlocutors, it also implies the
sensorial realm of voice, speech, and hearing that is created in a dialogical
fiction.
First, the poems’ dialogical structure should be understood as the split-
ting of an inner poetic voice into two distinct voices. Jacqueline Cerqui-
glini has shown how a separation of the poetic I into an I “locuteur” and a
you “allocutaire” in French late medieval poetry reflects a “temptation of
dialogue” and a “pluralization of voices.”57 As for the Dialogue, Eva Kushner

has elucidated this doubling of the poetic voice by labeling the exchange
between the conflicting views of Marguerite and Charlotte “an inner dia-
logue between two aspects of the author’s self and therefore a gradual
process of inner persuasion” (Le dialogue, p. 117). These critics show that
the dialogical text can serve to explore a private inner world and in this
way is distinguished from texts that mimetically represent opposed voices
in an outward ideological domain.
In this light, an illustrious inner dialogue comes to mind to which Mar-
guerite might have had access: Petrarch’s Secretum (De secreto conflictu
curarum mearum), whose title exemplifies the meaning of the Latin secre
tus as “severed from,” “isolated.”58 The Secretum is an examination of the
sinful Christian conscience through a meditation on mortality in an inte-
rior dialogue between the voices of Petrarch and the spirit of Augustine. It
is staged in a secluded dream space and, Petrarch insists, in the absence of
other participants or witnesses. In the Proemio, Petrarch, otherwise intent
on poetic fame, calls the work a private colloquy not to be published dur-
ing his lifetime and recorded for the sole purpose of reexperiencing its
joy in the future. In other words, the text functions as Petrarch’s model
self-interrogation in the face of death, to be conducted repeatedly and
privately over his lifetime.59
57 Jacqueline Cerquiglini, “Le lyrisme en mouvement,” Perspectives médiévales 6 (1980),

75–86; idem, « Un engin si soutil »: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture au XIVe siècle (Paris,
1985), pp. 91–103.
58 I have previously argued for the influence of Petrarch’s text on Marguerite’s Dialogue:
Reinier Leushuis, “Dialogue, Self, and Free Will: Marguerite de Navarre’s Dialogue en forme
de vision nocturne and Petrarch’s Secretum,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 66
(2004), 63–83. For the probability of Marguerite’s familiarity with Petrarch’s text, see pp.
75 and 76n.
59 “I decided to set down in writing this intimate conversation so as not to forget its
details . . . I do not want this work to be put in the same category with my others, nor
do I intend that it should enhance my reputation. The aim of the book transcends those
considerations. I have written this book to experience as often as I want, by reading it, the joy
I experienced when we had the conversation. This little volume, therefore, is not intended
for wide circulation, but will remain among my private papers—in keeping with its title.
For it is a private conversation, and so shall be called,” Petrarch’s “Secretum” with Introduc
tion, Notes, and Critical Anthology, ed. Davy Carozza and H. James Shey (New York, 1989),
p. 39. All italics are mine. Cf. “Hoc igitur tam familiare colloquium ne forte dilaberetur,
dum scriptis mandare instituo, mensuram libellus huius implevi. Non quem annumerari
aliis operibus meis velim, aut unde gloriam petam (maiora quedam mens agitat) sed ut
dulcedinem, quam semel ex collocutione percepi, quotiens libuerit ex lectione percipiam.
Tuque ideo, libelle, conventus hominem fugiens, mecum mansisse contentus eris, nominis
proprii non immemor. Secretum enum meum es et diceris,” Francesco Petrarca, Prose, ed.
In the dialogue’s first book, Augustine prepares Petrarch for an exami-

nation of his conscience by heuristically leading him through the true
method of critical meditation on the self, i.e., a meditation that is not
mere self-deception on the part of the sinful soul. Only critical medita-
tion can lead to the recognition and avoidance of sin and guide the self
to true happiness and virtue. In this way, the first book lays the foun-
dation for the second book’s discussion of the seven deadly sins and for
the third book’s deeper analysis of Petrarch’s specific sins, lust and pride.
Augustine insists that Petrarch should constantly meditate on death and
mortality in order to free his soul from sin and earthly pleasures: “the first
step in . . . rising to a higher kind of life is meditation on the fact of death
and human unhappiness” (p. 45) (“ad tollendumque se se altius, primum
veluti gradum obtinere meditationem mortis humaneque miserie,” p. 34).
This meditatio mortis should not be a casual thinking about death and
its terrifying prospect, but a repeated meditative exercise—“the constant
recollection of your mortality” (p. 52) (“mortalitatis vestre recordatione
continua,” p. 48)—that will free Petrarch instead of frightening him.
Petrarch’s role in the dialogue mimetically underscores the necessary
perseverance in this meditation. While Augustine hammers home the
memento mori theme from his first pronouncements (“have you forgotten
that you will die?” “there is no more effective way of . . . finding peace of
mind . . . than to meditate on the fact of death,” p. 41; “non te mortalem
esse meministi?” “ad . . . componendumque . . . animum . . . nichil efficacius
reperiri quam . . . meditationem mortis,” p. 28), Petrarch repeatedly forces
him to return to it and to show the difference between self-deceiving fears
of dying and a true meditation on mortality. The dialogical process itself
stages an exercise in incessant meditatio mortis: “practicing dialogue” itself
means for Petrarch creating an awareness of mortality that frees the soul
from sin in order to obtain virtue and happiness.
Augustine is adamant about man’s agency in this meditatio mortis: giv-
ing the example of his own conversion, he states that he owes it to a com-
mitment of his will: “at last a deep meditation brought home to me the
full extent of my unhappiness. And so, after I committed my will fully, I
was instantly able to act and with amazing and blessed swiftness I was a
changed man” (p. 48).60 The application of our will in the meditation on
G. Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, E. Carrara, and E. Bianchi (Milan, 1955), p. 26. Italics are in the
text.
60 “donec alta tandem meditatio omnem miseriam meam ante oculos congessit. Itaque
postquam plene volui, ilicet et potui, miraque et felicissima celeritate transformatus sum”
(p. 40).
mortality is a crucial part of the exercise: “the will must be there and a will
so strong that it would properly be called yearning” (pp. 59–60) (“Volun-
tas igitur presto sit, eaque tam vehemens ut merito desiderii vocabulum
sortiatur,” p. 64). Moreover, the idea of the application of the will is inte-
grated into the structure of the dialogue as it becomes clear that dialogical
self-examination is a process that continues beyond their meeting. When
Petrarch says he wishes to return to his studies in what seems to be a
setback to the examination of his sins (since he had confessed that his
studies are a form of pride), Augustine reminds him that his will is lack-
ing, but adds that he feels confident Petrarch will return to these thoughts.
Instead of concluding climactically in a victory of newfound wisdom, the
author, to greater effect, mimetically underscores the ongoing process of
self-examination and meditatio mortis in inner dialogue.
In short, Petrarch’s Secretum stands as a model for the use of literary
dialogue with an imagined authoritative and spiritual other voice (Augus-
tine) that constitutes an exercise in inner debate, self-examination, and
memory in the face of death and mortality. Moreover, it valorizes the
Christian subject’s will and agency both within the space of the text (the
dialogical interaction mimes the continuous performance of the exercise)
and over the span of a lifetime (by reason of repeated meditation).
* * *
Both the Dialogue and La Navire are similar to the Secretum in their cre-
ation of inner dialogue. They figure a space secluded from other worldly
voices and uniquely occupied by those of the sinful self and the spiritu-
ally authoritative other (Marguerite and Charlotte / François). Moreover,
as we saw above, Marguerite, like Petrarch, was reluctant to publish her
Dialogue and La Navire, although she likely returned to the earlier poem
when composing the later one. These facts, while circumstantial, justify a
reading of the two works in the light of the Secretum, namely as inner and
private dialogical exercises, written for the purpose of self-examination,
memento mori, and transcendence in the face of death and mortality, and
valorizing human agency and will in these processes and experiences.
Beginning with the Dialogue, one notices first Marguerite’s strong appeal
for a consoling voice within herself, capable of responding to her sorrow,
in the same way as she had implored Briçonnet to continue their spiri-
tually comforting epistolary exchange during the months of Charlotte’s
demise. This appeal for inner dialogue is most passionately expressed in
the rondeau that opens the 1533 edition, a true De profundis clamavi ad
te, proffering a desperate and imploring Respondés moy as an insistent
refrain:
Respondés moy, o doulce ame vivante,

Qui, par la mort qui les folz espouvente,
Avés esté d’ung petit corps delivre,
Lequel huyt ans accomplis n’a sceu vivre,
Faisant des siens la vie trop dolente;
Dictes comment en la court triumphante

De vostre Roy et pere estes contempte,
En declairant comme amour vous enyvre:
Respondés moy.
Las! Mon enfant, parlés à vostre tante

Que vous laissés aprés vous languissante,
En desirant que peine à mort me livre!
Vie m’est mort par loysir de vous suivre,
Pour soulager ma douleur vehemente,
Respondés moy.
From the outset, shared intimacy and love for the other (“Amour a faict
mon cueur inseparable, / Avec vous si lyé par nature,” vv. 34–36) are the
birthplace of dialogue: “Que cueur à cueur veulliés à moy parler, / Don-
nant d’esprit à esprit reconfort” (vv. 44–45). Even though Charlotte’s voice
seeks to refigure this earthly bond at the spiritual level (their union is
transcended by union with Christ, the divine spouse; earthly affection is
absorbed into communal caritas represented by God), this intimate inner
dialogue guarantees a space to the voice of Marguerite’s earthly self and,
by its very nature, prevents her dissolution in unio mystica. In this sense,
the force of Charlotte’s voice as a doubled inner voice is that she connects
two dialogical spaces: on the one hand, the colloquy with Marguerite’s
earthly self and, on the other hand, communication with the divine
through the mystical marriage with Christ. Charlotte thus stands at the
center of a larger dialogical structure that connects the terrestrial and
the individual (earthly love and affection) with the celestial and com-
munal (caritas). Instead of dissolving one into the other, as her calls for
self-annihilation seem to imply, Charlotte’s position between these two
dialogical forces guarantees for Marguerite a sense of agency and partici-
pation in her experience of mourning and spiritual transcendence.
Moreover, the Dialogue as inner dialogue mimes ongoing and deliber-
ate self-examination in the face of death and an active search for truth
in the process of spiritual transcendence. Even if Marguerite claims that
she wants to abandon her own will to follow Charlotte (“. . . de bon cueur
j’abandonne / Mon viel Adam et propre voulenté,” vv. 682–83), she ultimately
never does. From the opening section onward, Marguerite repeatedly
inquires into the nature of Charlotte’s suffering: “Quelle douleur sentites

au partir, / Que trop grande je croys, quoy que l’on dye?” (vv. 167–69).
This active and inquisitive meditatio mortis is paralleled by Marguerite’s
constant questioning and thirst for knowledge throughout the text, in par-
ticular in the long discussions on free will:
Las! Madame, donnés moy congnoissance
Ne m’a pas Dieu donné ung franc arbitre
Pour en avoir entiere jouyssance? (vv. 457–59)
Mais, Madame, donnés moy congnoissance

. . . . . .
C’est de scavoir si j’ay arbitre franc. (vv. 871–74)
Mais encores demander il me fault

Comme je puis bien entendre ou scavoir
Si j’ay ce don de foy . . . (vv. 1192–94)
Toward the end, she becomes outrightly rebellious regarding the possi-
bility of loving her enemies in a perfect state of caritas (“Cecy ne peult,
Madame, estre planté / Dedens mon cueur, mes ennemys aimer,” vv.
1051–52). Charlotte, far from satisfying Marguerite’s quest for knowledge,
remains antagonistic: she asks her aunt to be silent about issues (“Tante,
tante, de cecy vous fault taire,” v. 76) and reproaches her for erring (“Vous
errés trop, ma tante, en cest affaire,” v. 88) or for being in defiance of
Christ (“Helas! tante, et quelle deffiance / Avés de luy,” vv. 355–56). In the
free will debate, she warns Marguerite not to seek too much knowledge
and to leave the issue to the theologians: “Ceste chose soit de vous enten-
due, / Sans desirer plus avant en scavoir, / Car les plus clercz y troublent
bien leur veue” (vv. 496–98).
Despite its appearance of mimed theological and doctrinal cate
chetics, the Dialogue is first and foremost Marguerite’s private and self-
examinatory debate, staged in a doubled inner voice and triggered by
the author’s confrontation with death and mortality. As for Petrarch,
self-examination here is a dialogical exercise in the meditation on mor-
tality and thus an application of the agency needed for this exercise. In
figuring Charlotte as the counterforce seeking to neutralize individual
participation in mourning and spiritual transcendence, against her aunt
Marguerite, desiring knowledge and requiring participation, Marguerite
the author valorizes dialogue as a sustained literary exercise in human
agency and participation in the experiences of mourning, salvation, and
spiritual transcendence.
* * *
A reading along similar lines is equally fruitful for understanding La Navire.
The text’s dialogical dynamics reflect many aspects of the Secretum and
Dialogue discussed above. First, the dialogue is generated in the form
of an intimate symbiosis with an authoritative other voice. François, as
other, is to a degree also a doubling of the voice of Marguerite’s self. This
becomes clear in Marguerite’s use of the image of the cymois, the cloth in
which infants are swaddled, which symbolizes the bond she had with her
brother in life. In Marguerite’s gradual recognition of her brother’s voice
at the beginning of the exchange, the image functions to create a symbi-
otic sense of dialogue as a doubled inner voice: “Es tu celluy que plus que
moy j’aimois, / Et aymeray et ayme si tres fort / Que Amour, enfans, nous
lya d’un cymois?” (vv. 49–51). This idea is underscored when Marguerite
stresses the unsurpassed quality of their past conversations when Fran-
çois was alive: “Je l’ay perdu le plus saige entretien / Qui oncques fut!”
(vv. 118–19). Generally speaking, once we consider François’s voice as the
doubling of Marguerite’s inner voice, their dialogical exchange can also
be seen to display the characteristics of a self-examination on the spiri-
tual issues discussed above through an ongoing meditation on death and
mortality.
The interlocutor Marguerite can hardly be said to process François’s
lessons over the course of the text however, mainly because she refuses
to abandon earthly memories. One could argue, as does Lecointe, that
this intransigence guarantees the very duration over time of the exercise
in self-examination, allowing Marguerite to deepen her sense of mourn-
ing. At the same time, we have seen that La Navire lacks the flexibility
of dialogical dynamics that, in the Dialogue, allows for a degree of trans-
formation and mobility on the part of Marguerite and thus for an ongo-
ing mimetic staging of human agency and participation in experiences of
mourning and spiritual transcendence. In other words, since Marguerite
and François are locked in alternating speeches rather than engaged in
real dialogical interaction, François, unlike Charlotte, fails to function as
a true intermediary between the earthly and divine realms. Moreover,
as noted earlier, the final “sunrise” prayer, while miming the redemptive
effect of transformative grace, suggests the possibility of future transcen-
dence rather than describing an actual experience. While staged as a
result of the encounter, Marguerite’s hope for transformation in the final
verses is not embedded within the dialogical interaction, from which it is
clearly detached. In this sense, the dialogue fails to perform a constructive
exercise in mourning, salvation, and spiritual transcendence, as does the

Dialogue.
It is precisely Marguerite’s inability to abandon earthly memories, how-
ever, that invites us to pursue a different approach to assess the mimetic
quality of La Navire’s poetic dialogism. In relation to the later work, we
need to shift the emphasis from dialogue understood as a structuring of
exchanges between interlocutors toward dialogue understood as a mimetic
exchange of spoken language in a sensorial realm that consists of voice,
speech, and audition. In La Navire, these sensorial aspects of dialogue can
be seen in connection with the role of the senses in the working of mem-
ory, namely as an instrument to recall a lost presence visually and acous-
tically. In exploring the link between dialogue and sensorial memory, La
Navire’s poetic dialogism also valorizes human participation and agency
in the experiences and processes of mourning, spiritual transcendence,
and remembrance, but in ways that are different from the Dialogue.
Let us begin by examining the general role of sensorial memory for the
staging of the interlocutorial other in the dialogical realm. In both the
Dialogue and La Navire, but most persistently in the latter, Marguerite
attempts to recall and rescue from oblivion, visually and acoustically, her
interlocutors’ physical presence. It is significant that both Charlotte and
François urge Marguerite to obliterate all earthly memories created by the
senses. More precisely, they call on her to reduce earthly memory to its
single operation of memento mori: in line with Augustine’s lesson in the
Secretum, Marguerite needs to remember that the body must perish in
order to allow her to abandon the fallen earthly state and to proceed in
spiritual ascent and self-annihilation toward unio mystica with Christ. La
Navire in particular, as I will show below, can be read as a mnemonic exer-
cise that continually explores rather than resolves this tension between
the sensorial memory of a carnal past and a “divine” memory that allows
us to remember God.
In the opening of the Dialogue, Marguerite’s memory is activated by
the sensorial experience of Charlotte’s lost carnal presence: “Mais en mon
doeul et piteux souvenir, / Ayant esté sans parler longue piece, / Il me
sembla que je la veis venir” (vv. 10–12). The combination of mourning and
remembering (“doeul et souvenir”), whereby the latter is described as
piteux, both sorrowful and imperfect, gives rise to visual perception (“je
la veis venir”) and, ultimately, recognition: “La recogneue pour Madame et
ma niepce” (v. 15). At the same time, Marguerite realizes this is a vision,
not real seeing, and that Charlotte is not actually present (“il me sembla
que je la veis venir”). She then urges her interlocutor to speak to her:
“Si celuy seul qui a force puissante / . . . / Ne vous deffend parler à vostre
tante” (vv. 22–24) and to look upon her sorrow: “Ne laissés pas de regarder
ma peine!” (v. 33), while continuing to be aware of the fact that Charlotte’s
presence is intangible and does not replace real sensorial presence: “Bien
que soyés de mes yeulx invisible, / Et l’oreille de la voix soit privée” (vv.
25–26). The realm of the dialogical visio and the working of memory thus
mutually reinforce each other and have essentially the same sensorial
function. Both are driven by sight and speech (and the latter’s corollary,
hearing) to recreate and preserve a lost presence in the form of an inter-
locutorial other, who is physically intangible but nevertheless capable of
being seen and of speaking.
The mnemonic working of the senses to recreate a lost actual presence
in an oneiric-poetic reality that allows visual and acoustic presence offers
further evidence of a Petrarchan influence, since it echoes the figuring
of Laura in the Triumphus Mortis. Here, Petrarch and the spirit of Laura
recall in a dreamed dialogue the painful details of her death and glorify
their past earthly love. After an elaborate visionary description of the
triumphant allegorical pageant of Lady Death, that accompanies Laura,
the latter’s address to the poet in the second part of the poem features
remembrance as a recreation of visual and acoustic presence. Petrarch
first describes Laura as “parlando e sospirando” (“speaking and sighing”;
TM II, 11),61 which is followed by her voice calling forth his visual recogni-
tion: “Riconosci colei che ’n prima torse / i passi tuoi dal publico viaggio?”
(TM II, 13–14),62 and then instantly triggering it, as is clear from Petrarch’s
reply: “« Come non conosco io l’alma mia diva? » / risposi in guisa d’uom
che parla e plora / « Dimmi pur, prego s’ tu se’ morta o viva! »” (TM II,
19–21).63 Petrarch’s “in guisa di,” “as if I were” or “similar to,” reminds us that
the poet-narrator’s speaking is an oneiric semblance of terrestrial speech.
The dialogue between Petrarch and Laura in the poem thus emerges from
mnemonic recognition and the sensorial recreation (through speaking
61 References follow the standard conventions for Petrarch’s Triumphi: the initials
of the title followed by the chapter and verse number. The Italian text is quoted from
Rime, Trionfi, e poesie latine, ed. Neri, the English translation from Petrarch, The Triumphs
of Petrarch, trans. Ernest Hatch Wilkins (Chicago, 1962), which I have altered in a few
instances. All italics are mine.
62 “Do you recognize her who first, and long ago, / Guided your steps away from the
common path?”
63 “How could I fail to know my heavenly guide? / I answered, alike to one who weeps
and speaks, / Tell me, I pray, are you in life or in death?”
and listening, but arguably also weeping and sighing) of a lost real pres-
ence that is now intangible yet still capable of dialogical interaction.64
Moreover, Petrarch’s confusion over Laura’s presence as dead or alive
(“Dimmi pur, prego s’ tu se’ morta o viva!”) marks the poetic realm shaped
by sensorial memory as an intermediary space, containing neither tan-
gible physical presence nor some kind of pure spiritual transcendence
(an absolute absence of physicality). Laura’s reply “Viva son io e tu se’
morto ancora” (TM II, 13–14)65 not only introduces a spiritual thematic
that Marguerite eagerly explores (sinful carnal existence is a form of death
transcended after physical death), but also highlights Laura’s living pres-
ence in the dialogue. This idea is reinforced by the repetition of the epi-
thet “Viva” at the beginning of the next verse, which powerfully opens her
reply to Petrarch’s anguished question.
Fabio Finotti’s claim about the role of memory in the Triumphi, most
accurately illustrated by the Triumphus Mortis, can shed further light on
this issue: the poem is less motivated by a forward- or upward-moving
transcendence of history, as in the Dantean spiritual journey of the Divina
Commedia (to which Petrarch responds and which he imitates in the idea
of a series of liberating “triumphs” over earthly behaviors and attitudes),
than by a retrogressive mentality that seeks to arrest and eternalize physi-
cal earthly presence through the workings of memory and the poetics of
the humanistic dream vision:
Laura does not return as Beatrice did to guide the poet in another world,
to a point where he could go on without her . . . In Triumphi it is Laura who
is the ultimate object of Petrarch’s desire. Nor are there any other spirits
who disrupt the dialogue between the two lovers, maintaining the tone of
an intimate and private conversation [my italics]. Laura, in fact, returns first
and foremost for remembering . . . The present is not modeled on what one
wishes to attain in the future, as in the Divina Commedia, but on what one
wishes to relive from the past . . . Time stops in this enchanted, transformed
remembering.66
64 We should keep in mind that Petrarch seeks to recreate Laura’s presence immedi
ately after the tragic event of her death (“La notte che seguì l’orribil caso,” TM II, 1), at a
time when sensorial memory is still very active. Carlo Vecce draws attention to the con-
creteness and realness of oneiric events in this text in comparison with Petrarch’s other
poetic dream narratives: “La lunga pictura: visione e rappresentazione nei Trionfi,” in
I Triumphi di Francesco Petrarca: Gargnano del Garda (1–3 ottobre 1998), ed. Claudia Berra
(Bologna, 1999), pp. 299–315.
65 “I am in life, and you are still in death.”
66 Fabio Finotti, “The Poem of Memory: Triumphi,” in Petrarch, A Critical Guide to the
Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago, 2009), pp. 63–83
Finotti’s claim about Petrarch’s Triumphi is useful for analyzing Marguerite’s

two poems, since it sheds light on the tensions present in the workings of
memory and the senses when the poet is faced with the mortality of the
deceased beloved. It thus allows us to question the uni-directional spiri-
tual transcendence often said to characterize this poetry.
Laura’s injunction to the poet-narrator to keep his speaking short so
as to benefit most from their dream encounter—“Ma ’l tempo è breve
e nostra voglia è lunga; / però t’avvisa e ’l tuo dir stringi e frena / anzi
che ’l giorno, già vicin, n’aggiunga” (TM II, 25–27)67—aside from reflecting
the general obsession with the fleetingness of time in Petrarch’s poetry,
further connotes the poem’s space as a unique, if temporary, sensorial
conjunction of dream vision (which will soon be cut short by daylight),
memory (which is at risk of deterioration), and dialogue. This verse indeed
sets up the dialogical framework that starts immediately: “Ed io: « Al fin
di questa altra serena / ch’à nome vita . . . »” (TM II, 28–29; cf. 121)68 and
that Petrarch maintains throughout the rest of the poem with the usual
diegetic indicators: “rispose” (TM II, 31, 126), “rispos’io” (TM II, 172), “dissi”
(TM II, 42, 185), “disse” (TM II, 46, 88).69
* * *
At this point we can reconsider the use of terza rima in the Dialogue
and La Navire. This, I believe, was motivated by Marguerite’s reading of
Petrarch’s Triumphus Mortis and should be understood in connection
with her laborious (and in La Navire conflicted) mnemonic and sensorial
recreation of the lost beloved in a dialogical realm. While a detailed analy-
sis of terza rima in the Triumphus Mortis falls outside the scope of this
essay, the five terzine that depict the apparition of Laura as it precedes
and sets up the poem’s dialogical exchange merit our attention. In these
strophes terza rima mimetically renders the thematic intertwining of the
workings of memory and Laura’s sensorial presence in the dream vision.
(p. 80). See also Sara Sturm-Maddox, “Arbor vittoriosa triunfale: Allegory and Spectacle
in the Rime and the Trionfi,” in Petrarch’s Triumphs: Allegory and Spectacle, ed. Konrad
Eisenbichler and Amilcare Ianucci (Toronto, 1990), pp. 113–34, and Maria Cecilia Bertolani,
Il corpo glorioso: Studi sui Trionfi del Petrarca (Rome, 2001), pp. 71–102.
67 “Our time is short, and our desire is long: / Therefore take thought, and count and
check your words / Before we be parted by the light of day.”
68 “And I: When earthly life comes to its end . . .”
69 According to Carlo Vecce, more than in other Triumphi, the dream narrative empha-
sizes the acoustic and sensory presence of Laura over visionary markers (“La lunga pic
tura,” p. 303).
The poet describes how night spread its coolness over the dark earth after
Laura’s death:
quando donna sembiante a la stagione,
di gemme orientali incoronata,
mosse ver me da mille altre corone,
e quella man già tanto desiata
a me, parlando e sospirando, porse
ond’eterna dolcezza al cor m’è nata:
« Riconosci colei che ’n prima torse
i passi tuoi dal publico viaggio? »
Come ’l cor giovenil di lei s’accorse,
così, pensosa, in atto umile e saggio,
s’assise e seder femmi in una riva
la qual ombrava un bel lauro ed un faggio.
« Come non conosco io l’alma mia diva? »
risposi in guisa d’uom che parla e plora
« Dimmi pur, prego, s’ tu se’ morta o viva! » (TM II, 7–21)70
The sensorial perception of Laura is enhanced by the poet’s visual rec-
ognition of the concrete movement (“mosse ver me”) that separates her
from the multitude of “a thousand other crowns,” apparently other noble
ladies in the throng of followers of Death in the first part of the poem. This
is followed by a terzina whose rhymes build up a succession going from
the poet’s act of remembering his past desire (“già tanto desiata”) to the
concrete, sensorial perception of Laura’s hand reaching out to the poet
(“porse”), which then recreates the poet’s love in the present dream vision
(“eterna dolcezza al cor m’è nata”). In a mirror image of this sequence
(separation from the multitude—recognition—love), now concerning
Petrarch himself, the verb “porse” from the previous tercet’s b verse, which
70 When toward me, from among a thousand crowns,

There came a lady like unto the Spring,
Crowned with a diadem of orient gems.
Speaking and sighing, she held out to me—
Bringing eternal sweetness to my heart—
The hand that I so greatly had desired.
“Do you recognize her who first, and long ago,
Guided your steps away from the common path?”
Pensive she was, and humble, and yet wise,
As when my heart was first aware of her.
She sat, and I beside her, by a stream
Overshadowed by a laurel and a beech.
“How could I fail to know my heavenly guide?”
I answered, alike to one who weeps and speaks,
“Tell me, I pray, are you in life or in death?”
indicates Laura’s reaching out in the present dream vision, is picked up in

the next tercet’s first rhyme “torse,” pointing to Laura’s action in the past
(“’n prima”), namely to guide the poet’s steps away from the crowd (“pub-
lico viaggio”), as well as in this tercet’s last rhyme to refer to the mne-
monic recreation of the poet’s past recognition of and love for Laura (“’l
cor giovenil di lei s’accorse”). Yet the “Come” that opens this last line of the
tercet compares and blends this past sequence of recognition-followed-
by-love with present narrative events (“just as [“come”] when my young
heart had become aware of her, so also [“così”] now she, pensive, sat and
made me sit by a stream”), thus stressing the mnemonic recreation and
continuation of Laura’s sensorial presence in the dream vision.
Similarly, the rhyme of this tercet’s b line (“viaggio”) is repeated in the
“saggio” (a) and “faggio” (c) of the next tercet in a poetic progression that
figures a transcendence of the poet’s past earthly wanderings (“viaggio”)—
i.e., before having encountered the spiritual beacon that is Laura—toward
the perfection of Laura in the present dream vision, namely as “humble
and wise” (“umile e saggio”) and as symbolized by the laurel and beech
(“faggio”), the two trees that traditionally associate Laura with Petrarch’s
literary fame. This movement from past to present is then projected into
the future in the next interweaving. This tercet’s b line, “riva,” evoking
the concreteness of their isolated locus amœnus, the birthplace of oneiric
intimate dialogue in the present, triggers the two principal rhymes of the
following tercet (“diva” and “viva”) that eternalize Laura beyond her death
in her status as (forever) divine and alive. We also note that the lines
containing these last two rhymes are rendered in Petrarch’s voice that
not only speaks in present direct discourse but effectively answers Laura’s
initial question and thus initiates the mimetic of the dialogical exchange
that dominates the poem from this point onward.
Before turning to La Navire and the mnemonic issues it raises, let us
briefly take into consideration the introduction of Charlotte in the open-
ing of the Dialogue. The Dialogue’s terza rima scheme operates in a man-
ner similar to that of Petrarch. It mimes the mnemonic reconstruction of
the child’s presence that was lost so very recently (Petrarch’s line “la notte
che seguì l’orribil caso” may have had an eerily familiar ring for Margue-
rite). Like Petrarch, Marguerite uses terza rima in this mimetic function
in the series of tercets that follows the depiction of her sorrowful state
of mind but precedes the actual dialogical exchange. Marguerite’s suffer-
ing, denoted in the b rhyme of the poem’s third tercet, “Telle douleur ne
pourroit soustenir” (v. 8), is first recast in two rhyme words in the next
tercet that establish a pattern going from memory of a lost past—“Mais
en mon doeul et piteux souvenir” (v. 10)—to visual representation of con-

crete presence—“Il me sembla que je la veis venir” (v. 12). Shortly after
this, Marguerite reconstructs Charlotte’s lost physical presence in the dia-
logue’s sensorial realm:
Bien que soyés de mes yeulx invisible,
Et l’oreille de la voix soit privée
Qui en mon cueur donnoit joye indicible;
Bien que soyés, triumphante, arrivée

Où sans cesser buvés en la fontaine
De charité; aux esleuz derivée;
. . . . . .
Amour a faict mon cueur inseparable,

Avecques vous si lyé par nature,
Que le despart m’en seroit importable.
Je seuffre ennuy aultant que creature

En peult porter au corps pour vostre absence,
Pensant aux ans de votre nourriture.
Mais mon esprit, qui a la congnoissance

De vostre bien, et vie par la mort,
Remplit mon cueur de grant resjouyssance,
Qui me contrainct vous supplier bien fort

Que cueur à cueur veulliés à moy parler,
Donnant d’esprit à esprit reconfort. (vv. 25–30; 34–45)
After a tercet that emphasizes Charlotte’s absence and the loss of past phys-
ical presence by means of its riming epithets (“invisible/privée/indicible”),
the next strophe reframes the previous tercet’s b rhyme (“privée”) posi-
tively as presence in the realm of the vision (“triumphante, arrivée” and
“aux esleuz dérivée”), even if Charlotte’s presence is less concrete than
Laura’s in Petrarch and depicted in celestial terms. The same pattern is
repeated in the two following tercets, which describe Marguerite’s sor-
row over the loss of the child’s bodily presence. She remembers this
presence (“pensant aux ans de vostre nourriture”) in particular as a close
blood relationship (“mon cueur inseparable,” “lyé par nature”) and feels
its absence as bodily pain (“en peult porter au corps”). Yet the following
tercet positively recontextualizes the b rhyme in “absence” (v. 38) as “con-
gnoissance” and “resjouyssance,” words that reflect Marguerite’s spiritual
and emotional awareness (“mon esprit,” “mon cueur”) of Charlotte’s pres-

ence in the vision. Finally, the rhyme that refers to the notion of death
in life (“vie par la mort”) is transcended in the rhyme words connoting
the comforting and living sensorial presence of Charlotte as interlocutor
in the dialogue (“vous supplier bien fort,” “reconfort”), a presence that is
both spiritual (“d’esprit à esprit”) and emotional (“cueur à cueur”). Signifi-
cantly, the b rhyme “parler” is recast literally: it triggers the actual start of
their exchange in the next tercet, where Charlotte replies to Marguerite’s
address and thus initiates real mimetic dialogue.
The terza rima in the opening tercets of La Navire has a mimetic func-
tion that is reminiscent of, but also distinct from Petrarch and the Dia
logue, since it both connects and deliberately fails to connect memory
with sensorial presence. Rather than creating a progression, terza rima
here mimes an oscillation, prefiguring La Navire’s central conflict between
the sensorial memory of François’s carnal past and the imperfect aware-
ness of his divine presence. It is also notable that La Navire starts imme-
diately with François’s voice and thus lacks the sensorial progression from
visual to acoustic that we see in Petrarch and the Dialogue; here we are
immediately in the sensorial realm of mimetic dialogue.
The tercets following the first hearing of François’s voice mimetically
render its sensorial effect on Marguerite:
Que je devins, quant ceste voix j’ouys,
Je ne le sçay, car soubdain de mon corps
Furent mes sens d’estonnement fouys!
O quelle voix! Qui par sus tous accordz

Me fut plaisante, douce et tres agreable,
Qui des vivans sembloit et non des mors. (vv. 22–27)
However, instead of a constructive progression going from François’s
past physical presence to its sensorial recreation in the vision, the rhyme
words reveal an oscillation between a recollection of the living François
and an unwanted awareness of the dead François. This back-and-forth
movement expresses Marguerite’s trouble in re-materializing François as
a living spirit. The effect of François’s voice on Marguerite’s perception in
the first tercets (“ouys,” “corps,” “fouys”) at first suggests the other’s marked
sensorial presence in the vision’s poetic space, which the second tercet
seemingly carries on when it alludes to the pleasure (“accordz,” “agre-
able”) his voice triggers. However, the last line of this tercet, instead of
continuing this progression, allows the b rhyme “corps” (connoting senso-
rial presence) from the previous tercet to fall back to the negative “mors”
(connoting physical absence). Although the meaning of this line suggests

recreated presence (“des vivans sembloit et non des mors”), reminiscent of
Marguerite’s perception of Charlotte in the Dialogue (“Il me sembla que je
la veis venir”), the final rhyme word “mors” only evokes François’s contin-
ued absence in comparison with Charlotte’s concrete “venir.” It is a far cry
from Laura’s affirmative “Viva son io” or even from the “congnoissance /
De vostre bien” that Marguerite experiences with regard to Charlotte’s
presence in the Dialogue.
After three tercets in which François attempts to make his presence
further known, a similar pattern emerges in Marguerite’s reply:
Es tu celluy par qui l’eau trouble et noire,
Sans nul espoir, il y a quatre moys,
Parfaicte amour de larmes m’a faict boire?
Es tu celluy que plus que moy j’aimois,

Et aymeray et ayme si tres fort,
Que Amour, enfans, nous lya d’un cymois?
Et ses liens prindrent toujours renfort,

Tant que la corde en chesne fort fut faicte,
Tousjours croissant et plus fort que la mort.
Es tu celuy en qui joye parfaicte

Trouvee avois, sy remply de vertu
Que mort debvoit differer la deffaicte? (vv. 46–57)
The indication of earthly time in the past (“il y a quatre moys”) is first
expanded in a tercet whose rhyme words positively reinforce the two
interlocutors’ strong affectionate symbiosis in the past (“aimois,” “fort,”
“cymois”), whereby v. 50 even suggests its continuation in the present and
the future (“aymeray et ayme”). Yet the next tercet develops the preceding
tercet’s b rhyme “fort” into a and c rhymes that suggest an insurmountable
conflict between past and present, life and death. While the content of the
tercet evokes strong ties to earthly existence created by the love between
Marguerite and François (“ses liens prindrent toujours renfort,” “en chesne
fort,” “plus fort que la mort”), the rhyme word “mort” stresses the crushing
contrast between past “renfort” and François’s irremediable current state.
Rather than producing any kind of sensorial presence in the poetic vision,
it suggests an absolute absence in the present time: Marguerite refuses to
face François’s real death at all costs by dwelling on his lost carnal pres-
ence. Likewise, the b rhyme of this tercet, “faicte,” comparing the strength
of the bond of their past earthly love to that of oak, in the next tercet turns
first into “parfaicte,” a parallel epithet describing the joy of this symbiosis,
then into a negative and definitive “deffaicte.” This last tercet treats of a
living François (death had to defer its action), but it is a François living
in the past and irrevocably dead in the present poetic realm. In other
words, the use of terza rima mimes the oscillation between an attempted
mnemonic and sensorial recreation of a “living” François as poetic pres-
ence (like Laura and Charlotte) and its paradoxical failure: in the verses
meant to glorify François’s past earthly presence, the epithets riming in
terza rima unremittingly suggest his irrevocable absence in death: “fort,”
“renfort,” “mort” / “faicte,” “parfaicte,” “deffaicte.”
* * *
Keeping in mind the conflicted mimetics of terza rima in La Navire’s open-
ing tercets, let us now extrapolate this insight to the larger question of the
role of the senses in the poem as it relates to the thematics of memory and
remembrance. Generally speaking, in the first part containing François’s
consolatio, the dialogue emphasizes a sensorial perception that involves in
particular voice, speech, and hearing but also sight, albeit somewhat less
concretely (Marguerite never actually sees François, who is only present
as a voice she hears, but there are several important references to sight).
This dialogical realm of speaking and hearing stands in relation to the role
of memory as the poem stages it.
In contrast with Petrarch’s visionary Triumphus Mortis and Marguerite’s
more visually engaging Dialogue, La Navire’s dialogue, lacking a concretely
described setting, is born out of silence into a sphere dominated solely
by speech. François’s voice powerfully breaks the silence when it appeals
to Marguerite to annihilate her carnal existence (“Navire loing du vray
port assablee, / . . . / Tire toy hors de ton corps non sçavant,” vv. 1–4). The
resulting sensory effect on Marguerite is immediate: “Que je devins, quant
ceste voix j’ouys, / Je ne le sçay, car soubdain de mon corps / Furent mes
sens d’estonnement fouys,” vv. 22–24; “O quelle voix! qui par sus tous
accordz / Me fut plaisante, douce et tres agreable” (vv. 25–26). François
imperatively urges his sister to listen to his voice: “Entendz la voix qui te
veult destorner / D’un perilleux estat en ung tres seur” (vv. 32–33); Escoutte
moy . . .” (v. 243). Moreover, the diegetic markers that indicate the changes
of interlocutor throughout the text insistently add acoustic precisions
concerning the interlocutor’s reply (tearful, divine, irritated, etc.):
Ainsi luy dis d’une esploree voix;
Il respondict d’une venant des cieulx (v. 62–63)
Lors ceste voix d’armonie paree

Me dict . . . (vv. 175–76)
En ce disant, j’ouys sa voix honneste,

Mais d’un accent ung peu enflammé d’ire,
Disant . . . (vv. 292–94)
Mais ceste voix se haulça par rigueur,

Disant . . . (vv. 397–98)
While the interaction between Marguerite and François is acoustic, we
should not overlook the many additional references to the sense of sight,
either as absence (“Ton frere suis, lequel plus tu ne vois,” v. 64), as express-
ing Marguerite’s desire to see François again in life (“O la journee . . . / Où
de mes yeulx j’espere veoir mon frere!” vv. 382–84), in François’s evoking
of the celestial realm (“Icy void l’on comme Dieu seul opere,” v. 445), or,
finally, in Marguerite’s strong evocation of earthly memories (“Je voy tous
jours ton visage et beau taint,” v. 766).
On the one hand, François urges his sister to transcend a terrestrial
functioning of the senses:
Mais si charnel encore est ton regard
Que rien que chair en moy tu ne regarde (vv. 184–85)
Mais qui par foy l’oeil a eu esveillé,

En regardant d’amour son Dieu et père (vv. 442–43)
Cloz à la chair ton oeil interieur,

Voirras en clair (vv. 485–86)
On the other hand, Marguerite laments the loss of her brother’s earthly
existence, which is cast in terms that emphasize both visual and acoustic
aspects:
Trop tost, trop tost t’a osté de mes yeulx (v. 59)
O la presence à tous yeulx agreable (v. 121)
Je ne voys plus tel maistre et instructeur (v. 230)
Privee suis de l’ouyr et du veoir (v. 256)
Mais je n’ois plus en terre ung tel langaige (v. 229)

The acoustic memories, in particular, are often framed as a memory of the
dialogical exchanges that took place between them in the past: “Quant
tu vivois, j’oyois ton sainct devis / Ton bon propos, tant vertueux et saige”
(vv. 226–27).
The major difference from the Dialogue is that in La Navire Marguerite
only remembers in order to mourn François’s loss and absence; she fails to
reactivate this memory sensorially in the present exchange by reconstruct-
ing the other’s presence visually and dialogically. Even if Marguerite ada-
mantly points to the experience of hearing François’s voice and describes
its acoustic qualities, we do not have the impression that she is actually
talking with him (“Ainsi parla ceste voix,” v. 244), let alone seeing him. The
sensorial acts of speaking, hearing, and seeing are thus mnemonic devices
in the sole sense of remembering as commemoration (the glorification of
François’s past earthly living) not as “re-membering,” i.e., the visual and
acoustical recreation of his presence.
This dichotomy only intensifies over the course of the poem. While Mar-
guerite at first acknowledges that carnal memory needs to be transcended
by divine wisdom (“Mon ame fit à l’heure son debvoir / D’habandonner sa
terrestre memoire / Pour se adonner à ce divin sçavoir,” vv. 43–45), Fran-
çois’s calls to mortify the flesh only lead to Marguerite’s increased efforts
to keep recalling her brother’s physical presence. She refuses to forget,
obsessively forcing herself to remember:
Cours sont les jours, courtes me sont les nuictz
Pour y penser et pour ramentevoir
Ce que oublier je ne veulx ny ne puis. (vv. 253–55)
Ramentevant jusqu’à la moindre chose (v. 268)
O! pleust à Dieu que ensemble je retinse

Le souvenir des actes et beaux faictz (vv. 631–32)
Car nonobstant que tousjours en toy pense,

Ou de toy chante, ou je parle ou j’escriptz,
Memoire est trop chiche en ceste despence. (vv. 637–39)
At the poem’s midpoint, Marguerite enhances her sensorial commemo-
ration when she evokes an allegorized Love, who paints François’s lasting
bodily portrait in her heart:
Ce pauvre Amour, veritable et gentil,
D’un souvenir et memoire eternelle
. . . . . .
Il painct au vray ta personne tant belle
Que la pareille en mon temps ne se treuve:
Devant mes yeulx tousjours je la voy telle.
. . . . . .
Possible n’est donc qu’il ne me souvienne

De ce qui est sy bien à mon ceur painct. (vv. 754–64)
In these stanzas, the sense of sight perpetuates and eternalizes Margue-
rite’s carnal memory of François (“souvenir et memoire eternelle,” “tous-
jours je la voy telle”). This is mimetically amplified in the ensuing litany of
fourteen tercets that recall François’s beauty of body and soul (the latter
manifest in his fortitude during his Spanish captivity) and repeat an obsti-
nate “Je voy (tousjours)” as a deliberate ut pictura poesis:
Je voy tousjours ton visage et beau taint (v. 766)
Je te voy prins en païs estranger (v. 772)
Je te voy là avec telle constance (v. 781)
Je te voy là vertueux en torment (v. 790)
Je te voy là estimant moins que riens

Mort et prison . . . (vv. 799–800)
The working of the senses is entirely commemorative: “Je voy tousjous,”
“I see still,” indicates at all times the lingering memory of earthly visions
of François’s past physical presence. The senses fail to recreate any kind
of current sensorial presence for François as interlocutor in the dream
vision, unlike Charlotte, where sensorial recreation led to real spoken
interaction (“Que cueur à cueur veulliés à moy parler, / Donnant d’esprit
à esprit reconfort,” vv. 44–45). Finally, in the last third of the poem, as
I have already described, sensorial memory turns into an all-out encomi-
astic commemoration of King François I as a sovereign, according to the
fixed scheme of the déploration funèbre.
A closer look at François’s use of memory, however, reminds us that
in pressing his sister to annihilate earthly sensorial perception and car-
nal memories he does not want her to break radically with this function.
Whereas in the Dialogue Charlotte points out to her aunt that she had
reached celestial bliss by painlessly obliterating all memories of her past
terrestrial existence (“Car sans regret de pere, mere ou seur, / Ne memoire
avoir de riens ça bas / Mon ame print à soy mon redempteur,” vv. 190–92),71
71 Charlotte here exemplifies Briçonnet’s thinking on the worldly annihilation neces-

sary for the experience of the divine, which can be seen, according to Nicolas Russell, as a
“radical act of forgetting,” Transformations of Memory and Forgetting in Sixteenth-Century
François imperatively instructs Marguerite to remember their past con-

versations in earthly life: “Souvienne toy, ma seur, et te recorde / Que
maintefoys telz propoz t’ay tenu” (vv. 112–13). The “telz propoz” refer to
the preceding 13 tercets that discuss how the vanity of the flesh as a form
of misguided love needs to be remedied by divine love: “Amour . . . / Qui à
la chair par vain plaisir s’attache, / Ameine au cueur regret, peine et doul-
leur” (vv. 76–78). Therefore François’s request that Marguerite remember
his past and earthly discourse about overcoming past and earthly vani-
ties creates a continuity with the current dialogue; in so doing, he mimes
the exercise of memento mori, similar to that Augustine forces Petrarch
to undertake in the Secretum, namely one in which a past sinful state of
being (vanity of the flesh) needs to be sensorially remembered for the sole
purpose of renouncing and overcoming it in present spiritual awareness.
A key passage in François’s discourse in the first third of the poem can
be interpreted along the lines of an Augustinian meditatio mortis:
Dieu m’a tiré de sa terrestre garde,
Dont tout bon cueur, ainsi que prisonnier,
En veult saillir, et l’issue luy tarde.
D’un coffre vieulx, cage, estuy ou panier,

D’une prison et fosse tres obscure,
Rompue au main estant faicte d’hier.
Tu en faictz cas, o pauvre creature!

Estime tu ung corps faict pour pourrir,
Suyvant sans plus ton instinct de nature?
N’est faict vivant l’homme pour tost mourir?

Sçais tu pas bien que sa vie est plus breve
Que d’un courier ou poste le courir?
Sçais tu pas bien qu’il n’i a jamais treve

Avec la mort que pour bien peu de temps,
Dont l’attente est trop ennuyeuse et griefve?
. . . . . .
Tu le sces bien, mais tres mal tu l’entendz. (vv. 187–204)
France: Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne (Newark, Del., 2011),
p. 8.
François’s “remember you will die” (“Sçais tu pas bien qu’il n’i a jamais
treve / Avec la mort . . .?”) is an effort to correct Marguerite’s misguided
remembrance of carnal life. Reducing her sensorial memory of his “ter-
restre garde” to a “corps faict pour pourrir,” he seeks to prepare her to
transcend earthly cognitive awareness in favor of a deeper spiritual under-
standing that she has not yet reached (“Tu le sces bien, mais tres mal tu
l’entendz”). François wants Marguerite to remember his past bodily pres-
ence only as fallen and rotten flesh.
Thus François does not call for the obliteration from memory of senso-
rial experience, but for its redirection towards a spiritual level. We wit-
ness this phenomenon each time he brings up the use of the senses in
relation to past, present, and memory: “Ton frere suis, lequel plus tu ne
vois” (v. 64) is followed by “Ma seur, d’autre oeil il fault que tu regarde”
(v. 70). The beneficial language Marguerite heard spoken about God from
others in the past (“Toy qui as tant de Dieu ouy le bien dire,” v. 295) is
recast as “la Parolle vive” (v. 301), the voice of God himself: “Escoutte, seur,
comme il frappe à ta porte, / En t’apellant d’une voix sy tres doulce” (vv.
601–02). Likewise, in a series of tercets in which he describes the realm of
the blessed, he tries to guide his sister toward the divine seeing he himself
performs in a concrete celestial “here and now”: “Je voy icy la puissance
infinie” (v. 413); “Icy void l’on comme Dieu seul opere” (v. 445). In verses
412–59, “icy” is repeated no fewer than 17 times.
Halfway through the poem we find another example of François’s
attempt to redirect carnal sensorial memory, reduced to memento mori,
into spiritual memory. After Marguerite’s long lament full of visual
memories of her brother’s earthly deeds and words, François angrily inter-
rupts her:
Amour te painct ung corps de fange et boue
Pour t’amuser, ignorant ce vray corps
Que Dieu puissant son filz nomme et advoue.
Laisse de moy tous ces charnelz recordz,

Recorde toy de Celluy qui l’ouvrage
Faisoit en moy par ses divins accordz. (vv. 811–16)
The shift in bodily sensorial experience, namely from François’s fallen
body to Christ’s “vray corps,” is paralleled in this passage by an equally piv-
otal shift from carnal memory (“ces charnels recordz”) to divine memory
(“Celluy qui l’ouvrage / Faisoit en moy par ses divins accordz”). Marguerite
poetically stresses this idea by reframing the final noun-object “recordz” in
verse 814 as an active verb in the imperative, “Recorde toy,” at the begin-
ning of the next line.72
This line “Recorde toy de Celluy qui l’ouvrage / Faisoit en moy par ses
divins accordz” urges Marguerite, in simple terms, to remember God. This
raises an intriguing theological question that Augustine treats in Book 10
of his Confessions: how do we actually remember God if, in order to do
so, we need to access an image or representation in our memory that was
created neither directly by our sensorial perception of reality nor indi-
rectly by the capacity to combine other images already contained in our
memory through sensorial perception? For Augustine, God’s presence in
memory (memoria Dei) does not derive from these common procedures of
storing, organizing, and managing mnemonic representations of worldly
things.73 Indeed, as Nicolas Russell observes, “[t]he difference between
Augustine’s vast store of worldly memories and his memory of God is
not simply that they have different objects; they are, in effect, different
kinds of memory” (Transformations, p. 30). The former creates an illusion
of an absent actual or physical presence, while the latter does not refer
to an absent reality but is a form of real and permanent presence. Spiri-
tual memory has access to the same storehouse of our memory, but its
objects, God or the divine, are stored as actual realities, not as images or
representations. In that sense “divine memory” can be said to be a form
of knowledge or understanding that, once grace is conferred upon us and
we live in faith, we “remember” we have (or, conversely, that we forget we
have when we live in sin).74
At first reading, La Navire stages an opposition between these two
forms of memory. In a way, the dialogical structure can be understood as
a tragic conflict wherein François constantly urges Marguerite to abandon
one kind of memory for the other and the latter constantly fails. However,
as we have seen, François also does not want her to radically break with
all earthly sensorial memory because it is still needed for the exercise of
72 For the larger issues of memory and forgetting that La Navire raises, see Russell,
Transformations, pp. 21–31, to whose critical analysis I am much indebted.
73 Augustine covers memory in Book 10, chapters 8–26.
74 For an overview of the role of memory in Augustine’s thought, see Joseph Mourant,
Saint Augustin on Memory (Villanova, Penna., 1980); Roland Teske, “Augustine’s Philoso-
phy of Memory,” in Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman
Kretzmann (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), pp. 148–58, and Jaroslav Pelikan, The Mystery of Con
tinuity: Time and History, Memory and Eternity in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Charlot-
tesville, 1986), esp. pp. 19–26 and 65–67. For Augustine’s understanding of the connection
between memory and our knowledge of God, see also Mary Carruthers, The Book of Mem
ory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), p. 199.
meditatio mortis. In other words, for François too, the point of departure
for the operation of divine memory necessarily has to be in the realm of
sensorial memory and the processes of representation and referral that
govern it. Thus, François does not urge Marguerite to forget his earthly
carnal presence but to remember from it only that which represents God’s
creation non-sensorially. After all, the poem does not enact a mystical,
grace-like conferral of divine memory on Marguerite, nor does she ever
transcend sensorial remembrance of her brother. Even if one reads the
final prayer as miming the action of grace, it does not bring up a divine
memory as reactivated by God. In François’s understanding of divine
memory, the senses and the representational function they have in car-
nal memory are still required. Thus we cannot speak of a radical divide
between two forms of memory. Remembering the divine within ourselves
always requires memento mori, carnal remembrance of our mortality.
These dynamics of memory finally allow us to assess human participa-
tion and agency in La Navire. By its very nature, memory is a paradoxical
form of agency. On the one hand, the Western tradition developed an
elaborate ars memorativa, i.e., exercises in controlling and using memory.
On the other hand, we have no real control over forgetting.75 This makes
the imperative by mystical writers such as Briçonnet—and, by extension,
his spokespersons François and Charlotte—to forget all carnal memo-
ries so paradoxical. While on many levels they seek to obliterate human
agency and to value divine intervention, they urge Marguerite to initiate
and actively participate in the one mental process that is ultimately far
beyond our control. As Russell points out, “forgetting is something of a
mystery” and thus very much dependent on a divine gift, or act of grace,
rather than our own capacities (Transformations, p. 11).
La Navire fully explores the paradoxical nature of participation in
memory processes. The conflict is twofold: on the one hand, between
Marguerite’s sensorial remembrance of her brother and François’s idea
of knowing God as a non-sensorial presence in our memory, and, on the
other hand, between François’s understanding of this divine memory as
necessarily obliterating all traces of self-consciousness, including earthly
memories, and the need for the self’s agency and will to first use (in the
exercise of memento mori) and then forget all carnal memories in order
to realize this divine remembrance. What emerges from this analysis,
75 Russell, Transformations, p. 10. For medieval ars memorativa, see Carruthers, The
Book of Memory.
however, is a picture of the text that grants a much greater role to human
agency and participation than has generally been recognized. Rather than
an agonistic struggle between the carnal and the spiritual, as La Navire is
often understood to be, and in which Marguerite’s failure to fully abandon
earthly sensorial memory tragically confirms François’s position that only
God’s grace can redeem humankind’s fallen state and reactivate divine
memory, the text’s poetic dialogism valorizes human participation and
agency at all levels of mourning, remembrance, and spiritual transcen-
dence. This conclusion concerning La Navire holds true also for the Dia
logue. While the latter text seems so much a story of failed transcendence
that tragically stresses humankind’s sinful state and weakness, reiterating
the importance of divine intervention, we have seen that from its poetic
and dialogical dynamics there emerges a more complex picture that sug-
gests the role of individual self-awareness and human agency in the pro-
cesses of mourning and spiritual transcendence. With respect to both
poems, then, it is possible to advance a more nuanced and less dualis-
tic understanding of their meaning, which at first sight seems to reiter-
ate the familiar Pauline dichotomy between carnal and spiritual, and its
uni-directional movement of transcendence from the one to the other.
Marguerite’s skilful literary and mimetic handling of the form of the poetic
dialogue allows her to raise crucial questions—unique for mystical and
spiritual texts dealing with death, mortality, and transcendence—about
what humans can do.
LES PRISONS’ POETICS OF CONVERSION
Cynthia Skenazi
In some ways, the publication of Marguerite de Navarre’s Prisons recalls

the poem’s narrative of entrapment and liberation. Two secretaries tran-
scribed the text, after which their respective copies were incorporated
into two different manuscripts that were forgotten in the Bibliothèque
nationale de France for three and a half centuries. The first manuscript
contains Marguerite’s later works; the second one bears a title added by
an unknown reader: L’Heptaméron ou histoires des amants fortunés, des
nouvelles de la Reyne de Navarre Marguerite de Valois. Un poème en trois
livre [sic] intitulé Les Prisons par la mesme Reyne.1 In 1896, Abel Lefranc
published the first critical edition of Les Prisons, based on this second
copy, which offers a more accurate version of the text.2 In 1880, Le Roux de
Lincy and Montaiglon had already included a number of excerpts from Les
Prisons in their second edition of the Heptaméron, but a superficial read-
ing had led them to conclude that Marguerite was not the author. They
noted that the words “par la mesme Reyne” are crossed out in the title
of the manuscript. Moreover, an inscription written in ink by different
readers appears on the back of Les Prisons’ first folio—“Pour Phillender –
Cristus passus est pro nobis. Ce p[rese]nt livre appartient à Dame Marye
Philandrier”—with two more inscriptions figuring on the second folio—
“Pour Philander,” “Pour ma seur Marie Philander. G [?] Philander.”3 Lefranc
argued that the queen’s name was erased from the title at a later date,
and that the manuscript belonged to the architect and humanist Guil-
laume Philander (1505–65), who was part of the queen’s circle of protégés;
Philander then gave the book to his sister, hence Le Roux de Lincy’s and
Montaiglon’s confusion concerning the question of authorship. Lefranc
also pointed out Les Prisons’ numerous similarities with Marguerite’s other
works and hailed the text as her “opus maius,” “the crowning achievement
1 Respectively, BnF, fr. 24.298 and fr. 1522. See Marguerite de Navarre, Les Prisons, ed.
Simone Glasson (Geneva, 1978), pp. 59–66. All further references come from this edition.
2 Marguerite de Navarre, Les Dernières Poésies, ed. Abel Lefranc (Paris, 1896).
3 L’Heptaméron des nouvelles de très-haute et très-illustre princesse Marguerite
d’Angoulême, reine de Navarre, ed. Antoine Le Roux de Lincy and Anatole de Montaiglon,
4 vols. (Paris, 1880), 1:152–65.
212 cynthia skenazi
of her poetic career.”4 Since then, critics have unanimously endorsed this
view and speak of Les Prisons as Marguerite’s “spiritual testament,” her
“grand œuvre in the alchemistical sense,” a “summa” which “incorporates
into one work the themes, topoi, and strategies” of her lyrical output.5
Les Prisons, Marguerite’s longest poem, consists of 4928 decasyllabic
verses divided into three books of increasing length (618, 1906, and 3214
lines respectively). The work describes the quest for freedom of a figure
named Amy (Friend/Lover), whose journey leads him through a series of
allegorical prisons epitomizing the deceptive pleasures of the world. Les
Prisons’ longest part focuses on the protagonist’s spiritual enlightenment
and celebrates his loving union with God; there follows an account of the
Christian deaths of four of Marguerite’s close relatives, and a meditation
on the gulf separating Tout (God) and Rien (human beings). Amy con-
cludes his story by claiming that true freedom is to be contained in God’s
love. The date and the circumstances of the composition of Les Prisons
remain uncertain, but Marguerite was certainly at work on the poem dur-
ing her stay in the priory at Tusson, because she describes the final ill-
ness and death of François I on 31 March 1547. Although Marguerite was
not with her brother when he died, and the details of her account are
drawn from Pierre Du Chastel’s Oraison funèbre delivered on 23 May 1547,
it is likely that she had a copy of the eulogy at an earlier date. For Pierre
Jourda, her serenity when she speaks of her deceased brother suggests
that she wrote Les Prisons several months after the king’s death.6 Parts of
the poem could, however, have been written prior to this event.
Les Prisons exemplifies the ways in which an exceptionally learned
female author related to the literary and religious culture of her milieu,
and confirms the lasting influence on her of Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop
of Meaux. The poem’s promotion of a devotion based on the Bible as the
sole source of true doctrine, its emphasis on faith, and its perspective
on confession are indicative of the religious views of Marguerite’s circle.
In addition, Les Prisons bears the imprint of a wide range of philosophi-
cal, religious, and literary readings. Rather than cancel each other out,
4 Dernières Poésies, ed. Lefranc, pp. xlvi–l.

5 Dernières Poésies, ed. Lefranc, p. xlv; Michel Dassonville, “Le Testament spirituel de
Marguerite de Navarre,” in From Marot to Montaigne: Essays on French Renaissance Lit-
erature, ed. Raymond C. La Charité, Kentucky Romance Quarterly 19 supplement 1 (1972),
109–24; Robert D. Cottrell, The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s
Poetry (Washington, D.C., 1986), p. 243.
6 Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, Duchesse d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre
(1492–1549): Étude biographique et littéraire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1930; Geneva, 1978), 1:583.
les prisons’ poetics of conversion 213
these various influences involve each other and open up the possibility of
simultaneous readings. This polyphonic dimension is especially striking in
relation to the prison image that underlies the work as a whole, since it
combines two broad and interconnected traditions: the tradition of ideal-
ism extending from Plato to Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, which is cen-
tral to Christianity, and that of medieval love poetry. In both traditions,
the prison is a closed and open “system.”7 Within a Platonic or Christian
frame, the world is a prison for those who are obsessed with wordly goods
and do not realize that true freedom is associated with love for a higher,
spiritual “principle” or for God.8 At the same time, as Briçonnet makes
clear in a letter to Marguerite, the prison image paradoxically suggests
freedom because it evokes God’s love for his creation and human beings’
love for God:
Prison d’amour est ouverte. S’en vad et vient qui veult. Amour est la portiere
et clef de la prison d’amour, qu’il ayme ceux qui l’ayment: “Ego dilligentes
me dilligo”. C’est à dire qu’il [Dieu] tient en prison ceux qui l’ont prins pri-
sonnier, se captivent et emprisonnent l’ung l’autre, disans chascun d’eux:
“J’ay trouvé ce que mon ame ayme. Je l’ay tenu, tiens et ne laysseray jamais”.
Trop plus est la prison puissante du Tout-Puissant que la nostre . . . Car
l’on enferme songneusement ce que l’on ayme et selon l’amour est la
solicitude.9
Courtly literature elaborates on similar antitheses: for the amant parfait,
love represents an allegorical prison but is also an experience of freedom.10
Building on these literary, philosophical, and religious traditions, Margue-
rite’s poem opens the prison image up to a broader meditation on God,
love, and freedom.
As epitomized by the complexity of its central image, Les Prisons capi-
talizes on the persistent ambiguity of a metaphoric language irreducible
to singularity of meaning; it dramatizes a world of dissemblance, empty
forms, and illusory appearances that the protagonist demystifies but to
which his story is bound. This is a consistent and controlled strategy by
which Marguerite forces us to seek a truth that becomes valuable only
when it is found, or rather produced. The metaphors we encounter can
7 See Cottrell, Grammar, pp. 244–47.

8 Cottrell, Grammar, p. 245.
2:289.
10 Cottrell, Grammar, pp. 245–46.
214 cynthia skenazi
be taken as glittering signs of God’s presence or as dangerous fictions

which lead us astray. Les Prisons recounts the effort to unsettle all com-
placencies, to leave behind familiar shores, to shed aesthetic gardens of
self-absorption, to expose oneself to the possibilities and dangers of error.
Interpretation, I will argue, generates the meaning of this quest and its
mode of expression. In this respect, Les Prisons is engaged in a reflection
on the power of literature to engender the reader’s quest for God’s love.
Conversion
Les Prisons is the retrospective story of a man who has reached self-
understanding in God and looks back at the illusions and follies that held
him captive for so long. The conclusion of this quest—its endpoint—
is also its beginning. Marguerite’s text addresses the relation between
theology and poetics: by the end of his journey, Amy has moved away
from a poetics of reification—epitomized by the series of his prisons—
to embrace a poetics of “translation,” and has become the scribe of the
words that God dictates within him. Conversion—involving death of a
former self and spiritual rebirth—is the organizing and poetic principle
of the work as a whole. This experience introduces a radical discontinu-
ity between a then and a now. Before his spiritual enlightenment, Amy’s
views on human life were partial, confused, and problematic; by the end
of his journey to God, he has come to see himself and the world around
him from a perspective of certainty and transcendence. His confession is
a systematic rejection of convictions and beliefs he once held; it is a testi-
mony to the necessity of the extinction of a false self if one aspires to an
authentic life. It is because of this rupture in the sequence of his life that
his story is definitive and concluded.
Saint Augustine’s Confessions set the pattern for all subsequent Chris-
tian narratives of conversion. Following this example, Amy’s confession is
in part the story of how Les Prisons came to be written, and his repeated
addresses to Amye at the opening of each of the three books create a
chronological illusion that leads us to understand the traveler’s conver-
sion as preceding the telling of his life. In addition to Saint Augustine’s
account, Marguerite certainly had in mind the Divine Comedy (a work
strongly influenced by the Confessions), for she had admired Dante’s poem
since her youth. In 1547, moreover, Jean de Tournes published a new edi-
tion of Dante’s Commedia, with a preface by Maurice Scève. Marguerite’s
Prisons alludes several times to the Divine Comedy: Amy has read Dante’s
work to Amye and urges her to read it again (p. 131, vv. 1041–46). Like Saint
Augustine’s and Dante’s journeys to God, Marguerite’s poem is a medi-

tation on the ineffable joy of Christian revelation; it demonstrates how
an apparently unique and personal experience of conversion is, from the
perspective of eternity, a manifestation of God’s love for all human beings.
Along with the conventional link between love and poetry, Marguerite’s
poem focuses on the connection between love and interpretation, insofar
as God’s love becomes the exegetical principle by which the ambiguities
of human language disappear. This relationship, which is equally appar-
ent in Dante’s Divine Comedy, had also been emphasized by Saint Augus-
tine in his De Doctrina Christiana.11
In the Divine Comedy, Dante follows Beatrice whose name suggests
the redemption granted by Jesus, whereas in Les Prisons, the male figure
Amy shows a female character Amye the path to divine love. This inver-
sion may suggest Marguerite’s conviction that all human beings qualify
equally for salvation, regardless of any secondary factors, such as gender.
As Saint Paul stated in his Epistle to the Galatians: “There is no longer
Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and
female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”12 Yet, as we shall see, salva-
tion is principally a matter of God’s grace; in addition, like the pilgrimages
of Saint Augustine and Dante, Amy’s itinerary stresses the danger of fall-
ing under the spell of vices. Marguerite’s protagonist is especially vulner-
able to the three concupiscences condemned by Saint John in his First
Epistle: “the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches”
(1 John 2:16). At the end of Book II, an old man refers to this passage to
urge Amy to flee these vices:
Gardez vous bien, de toutes voz puyssances,
Des deux premiers qui sont concupiscences,
L’ung de la chair, remply d’ordure et vice,
L’autre des yeux, apportant avarice;
Le tiers, orgueil de vie, et le plus faulx
De tous les troys, engendrant plus de maulx
Que cueur ne peult penser, ne bouche dire;
. . . . . .
Voyez Sainct Jehan, dedans sa Canonique,
Commant il dit que en la subjection
Des troys puyssans va en perdition
Le monde . . . (pp. 131–32; vv. 1025–31, 1058–61)
11 See Cottrell, Grammar, pp. 11–18.

12 Gal. 3:28. Quotations from the Bible are taken from the New Revised Standard
Version.
216 cynthia skenazi
Book I of Les Prisons is about the dangers of earthly love and concu-
piscentia carnis; Book II unmasks the evil of concupiscentia oculorum and
pride of life; Book III starts with a satire of the presumption of intellec-
tual knowledge, concupiscentia mentis. As we shall see, these vices have
a natural propensity to generate other sins. Les Prisons therefore contin-
ues Marguerite’s constant meditation on the gap that separates Nothing
from All (the creation from its Creator). Amy’s confession tells the story
of a soul’s journey to overcome fear and despair. To discouragement, the
poem opposes hope and confidence in God. Amy’s transformation is the
expression of Marguerite’s unshakable trust in God’s love for all human
beings. As the poem makes clear, faith in Christ alone saves. Faith is a gift
from God that enlightens the mind with truth and fills the heart with love.
Sharing these certitudes—writing Les Prisons—is a sign of true devotion
and therefore of charity. Les Prisons consequently fully complies with the
two fundamental laws of Christianity spelled out by Jesus himself in the
gospels:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul,
and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And
the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two
commandments, hang all the law and the prophets.13
Book I. Concupiscentia Carnis
Following Saint Augustine’s and Dante’s journeys to God, Amy’s quest

for true freedom is marked by broken paths, detours, and a number of
failed conversions. The first of these unsuccessful attempts to reform his
life appears in Book I, which tells the story of Amy’s passion for Amye.
The poet’s erotic love for his mistress is an allegorical prison that he has
built for himself; it has the shape of a tower of stone, brick, and wood.
Amy cherishes his captivity and kisses the door and the fence of his jail.
He finds chains and enslavement in his lady’s perfect physical beauty and
the fire of passion becomes a hell of torment, yet he takes pleasure in
his suffering. So great is his joy to spend his life in solitary confinement
that he defends the dungeon against the attacks of the sun. He is held so
fast in prison that he does not know what freedom is. On several occa-
sions, he repairs the fissures made by sunbeams until he finds himself
13 Matt. 22:37–40; cf. Mark 12:29–31 and Luke 10:27.

surrounded one night by a fire that destroys the tower. The fire is not that
of his passion but stems from the sun. Looking through the window, he
sees Amye throwing down firebrands on his head, and he is burned to
cinders. Despite his lady’s fickleness and her desire to torment him, he
persists in loving her, but the sun condemns Amye. Amy finally decries
the passion that held him captive for over ten years.
Amy’s criticism takes the form of a satire of the conventions of courtly
love. All the metaphors and commonplaces of this literary genre (love’s
fatal glance, the parfait amant’s submission to his beloved, his poetic ide-
alization of her physical perfection, his obsessive love, and the beloved’s
cruelty) now appear to him as seductive traps. Amy sees the hypocrisy of
this language from the theological endpoint of his journey. The fire that
ravages his tower destroys his aesthetic illusions; he now finds his prison
ugly and dirty, and the chains that he used to compare to precious jewels
look to him like coarse ropes. Amy’s change of heart in Book I provides
Marguerite with the opportunity both to criticize and to emulate contem-
porary love collections, thereby demonstrating her literary skills. There
are echoes of Le Roman de la Rose and of Antoine Héroët’s Parfaicte amye
(1542) in Amy’s account of his tower of love. In this respect, Les Prisons
creates conditions for change by neither an absolute negation nor a com-
plete break with a given poetics, but by appropriating and conserving the
rhetoric it seeks to unmask and replace. As Marguerite was well aware,
effective criticism is dialectical, not oppositional. Amy especially stresses
a neo-Platonic blending of carnal passion with love for God that is so strik-
ing in Héroët’s work.14 He speaks of his tower of love as “un plaisant ter-
restre paradis” (p. 78, v. 88), “mon salut” (p. 78, v. 89), and again as “mon
paradis” (p. 84, v. 269). Such expressions represent a distortion of love’s
spiritual meaning. Amy’s accusation directly targets Petrarch’s Canzoniere
(a prestigious inheritor of the medieval rhetoric of courtly love), which
was so fashionable in Marguerite’s time. References to love as a “doulce
poison” (p. 90, v. 426), paradoxes, such as the icy fire, used to express
the contradictory effects of love, all the Petrarchan conceits and imagery
which proliferated in French love poetry from the 1540s on, now appear
to Amy as blatant lies.
14 Antoine Héroët, La Parfaicte Amye, ed. C. Hill (Exeter, 1981). On Héroët and Mar-
guerite, see Robert Cottrell, “The Poetics of Transparency in Evangelical Discourse: Marot,
Briçonnet, Marguerite de Navarre, Héroët,” in Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance Essays
for Donald A. Stone, Jr., ed. Barbara C. Bowen and Jerry C. Nash (Lexington, Ky., 1991),
pp. 33–44.
218 cynthia skenazi
Looking back at this sequence of his life, Amy realizes that, like Pygmal-
ion madly in love with his statue of a beautiful woman, he worshipped his
own representation of Amye. He was obsessed with himself rather than
with his beloved and was, in his own words, “prisonnier de moymesmes”
(p. 86, v. 321). This refusal to go beyond oneself was a self-petrification,
epitomized by Amy’s tower of love and his repeated efforts to repair the
cracks endangering his solitary confinement. The threat of Amy’s first
prison is the threat of narcissism, and ultimately of idolatry, the very sin
that the poet-lover of Petrarch’s Canzoniere confesses in his final prayer
to the Virgin. Amy similarly observes that he loved Amye “non comme
creature, / Mais comme ung Dieu” (p. 108, vv. 324–25), and at the end
of Book II, an old man tells him that “cest amour se peult dire ydolatre”
(p. 116, v. 563). In Marguerite’s time, the word “idolâtre” retained its Greek
meaning of eidolon (image): Amy was led astray chasing earthly, hence
illusory and deceptive images of love.
Speaking of Laura no longer as the infinitely beloved, Petrarch calls her
a “Medusa” in the last poem of the cycle: “Medusa et l’error mio m’àn fatto
un sasso.”15 Petrarch was turned to stone because of idolatry, but he at
least had some secular consolation, for his portrait as a weeping lover was
immune to the ravages of time since stone lasts forever. In Les Prisons, on
the other hand, fire ravages Amy’s dungeon of love, but the edifice was
doomed to crumble because its foundations were built on sand (p. 90,
vv. 427–34).16 Although the tower was burned, it ultimately fell prey to
Time, which destroys all human enterprises. Amy’s next prison in Book II
warns us again not to mistake the shadowy and insubstantial domain of
temporal existence for the true revelation to come.
Book II. Concupiscentia Carnis, Concupiscentia Oculorum, Superbia
The destruction of the tower of love marks the beginning of Amy’s new
life, but instead of bringing renewal and freedom, the protagonist’s escape
turns into a parody of a real conversion, a tragic fall into matter. In Book II,
Amy’s second prison may be without bars and restraints, but it proves to
be as confining as the first and even more dangerous. Guided by the sun,
the poet marvels at the wonders of nature, he admires the harmony of the
15 “Medusa and my error have made me a stone,” Petrarch, Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse
and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 583, v. 111.
16 The reference is to Matt. 7:26–27.
landscape, the diversity of the animal realm, and the harmonious move-
ment of the celestial bodies. His aesthetic enthusiasm recalls his previous
attachment to Amye in Book I and encourages him to see the presence
of the divine everywhere. Marguerite’s poems often refer to the biblical
notion of Nature as the Book of God, and Book III of Les Prisons later
expands this motif in a mystical perspective (pp. 160–61, vv. 733–45).17
In a letter to the queen dated 5 March 1522, Briçonnet similarly wrote:
O infinitude de bonté et, par ce, boniffiant tout estre, et n’est creature en
l’air, eaue, feu ou terre, ayant vie sensible ou vegetative, ou qui seullement
eust etre sans vie, que voz rayons de bonté ne penetre, les gardans et conser-
vans en vous qui est leur estre! De tous estes la forme et substantificque
forme, tout formant et donnant estre. (Correspondance, 1:188–89)
Yet in Les Prisons, the natural world that ought to point Amy towards
God serves only to blind him. Amy falls into the trap of a literal reading
of God’s ubiquitous presence in all things and thinks that since God is life,
therefore nature, the soul, and the world are identical. By ignoring God’s
transcendental dimension, he confuses the Creator with his creation and
worships a material representation of the divine.
Having left the countryside, the traveler reaches a wealthy city; the rapid
pace of his journey spatially visualizes a movement of conquest insofar as
ambition and the lust for possession now dominate Amy’s myriad obser-
vations and activities. From antiquity, the denunciation of the artifices
and dangers of urban life had been a commonplace.18 Marguerite’s elabo-
ration on this motif is also inspired by her strong, ironic personal obser-
vations of the striking differences between moral and religious ideals, on
the one hand, and practice, on the other hand. As he enters the city, Amy
admires the castles, the gardens, and the palaces; he immediately wishes
to acquire land and to build a thousand houses because these magnificent
buildings epitomize their owner’s financial and social accomplishments.
It is hard to forget that François I built seven palaces, that he had royal
architects, patronized the publication of several architectural treatises,
and was the dedicatee of many of them.19 Countless members of the Euro-
pean wealthy classes shared the king’s passion for building, yet the price
17 Barbara Marczuk-Szwed, L’Inspiration biblique dans l’œuvre de Marguerite de Navarre:

poésie-théâtre (Cracow, 1992), pp. 91–93.
18 See Les Prisons, ed. Glasson, p. 270.
19 Guillaume Philander, for instance, whose name appears on the manuscript of the
Prisons, dedicated part of his commentaries on Vitruvius’s Architecture to François I as
well as to Marguerite.
220 cynthia skenazi
to pay to satisfy this lust for immortal glory was high. Amy observes—in
passing—that architecture often generates “procès, debatz et guerres”
(p. 102, v. 160): debts, trials, bankruptcy, tensions with workers, unfinished
constructions, such were the daily worries of Marguerite’s own brother
and his entourage.20
Despite these difficulties, Amy is nonetheless convinced that palaces
and castles are “paradis de delices / Dont les beaultez font ignorer les
vices” (p. 102, vv. 147–48). His reaction highlights the seductions and pit-
falls of a société du spectacle, in which man is obsessed with “the pride in
riches,” in Saint John’s words (1 John 2:16). In a world that defines the indi-
vidual in terms of ownership, pride persuades men of their right to suc-
ceed by every possible means. Book II unmasks the pursuit of profit, the
corruption of lawyers and judges, the dishonesty and greed of merchants,
the abuses of power by mighty princes, the ambition of kings. Once again,
these remarks belong to a long tradition of moral commonplaces, but Mar-
guerite was in a good position to measure their effect among her peers.
Amy’s encounter with members of the Church confirms many contempo-
rary observations, including those of Clément Marot, François Rabelais,
and Martin Luther: priests sell indulgences in an exchange of money for
redemption, wealthy patrons seek personal glory through their charitable
donations, hypocrisy and cynicism replace true devotion, religion is about
rituals rather than faith, and nobody cares about reading the Bible. Cor-
ruption permeates every level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and religion
is but a tool for personal profit. Protestants and Catholics had the same
indignant reaction against the misuses of religious practice.
As Briçonnet wrote to Marguerite of the Church in 1521, “la challeur
d’avarice, ambition et voluptueuse vie a deseché son eaue de vie, doctrine
et exemplarité” (Correspondance, 1:85). Amy’s stay at court provides further
evidence of the pervasive presence of these vices. The court—the queen’s
own social milieu—epitomizes the godless reign of selfishness and wordly
pleasures. In France, Philibert de Vienne’s Le Philosophe de Court (Lyon,
1547) and Claude Chappuys’s Discours de la Court (Paris, 1543) testify to
the influence of Castiglione’s famous Book of the Courtier on Marguerite’s
contemporaries. Indeed, Castiglione’s dialogue was a best-seller in Mar-
guerite’s time; first published in 1528, many French, Spanish, German, and
English versions of the work circulated throughout 16th-century Europe.21
20 See Cynthia Skenazi, Le Poète architecte en France: Constructions d’un imaginaire

monarchique (Paris, 2003), p. 164.
21 See Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier (University Park, Penna., 1996).
Amy fulfills all the requirements for a successful career as outlined by Cas-
tiglione: he learns how to behave with elegance and grace; excels in sports
(particularly in the martial arts); studies rhetoric and music; develops an
appreciation for dance; participates in feasts, tournaments, and banquets.
His youthful and handsome appearance is, of course, de rigueur in social
entertainments in which women set the tone. These qualities do not make
Amy a role model, quite the contrary. His ambition and lack of moral prin-
ciples are however representative of many courtiers’ behavior. Turning
Castiglione’s neo-Platonic ethical and religious ideals upside down, Amy
uses his good physical appearance and newly acquired good manners for
his own profit and delights in the sensual pleasures of an easy lifestyle.
Finally, like any good courtier, he perfects his rhetorical skills, but instead
of using his eloquence for the common good, he becomes an expert in
flattery and dissimulation in order to satisfy his personal lust for power
and to climb the social ladder.
Once again, an outside force makes Amy realize that he has built a
new prison for himself. An old man who calls himself Amateur de Science
suddenly appears, and it becomes clear that his age is a sign of wisdom.
He urges Amy to flee the world, for as Saint John wrote, “the world with
its lust is passing away, but he who does the will of God abides forever”
(1 John 2:17). The old man’s admonitions recall Marguerite’s Discord estant
en l’homme par la contrarieté de l’esprit et de la chair et paix par vie spir-
ituelle, with its meditation on Saint Paul’s denunciation of the body as a
locus of corruption and a seat of wordly pleasures:
Qui suit la Chair, à DIEU ne sçauroit plaire:
Qui suit la Chair, il est à DIEU contraire:
Qui suit la Chair, il n’est point filz de DIEU.22
In Les Prisons, the old man warns the traveler of the danger of the “troys /
Cruelz tyrantz” (p. 130, vv. 1021–22) ruling the world. At first, these tyrants
seem to be Ambition, Hypocrisy, and Carnal Pleasure, but Avarice soon
becomes a predominant figure and Hypocrisy is downgraded to the status
of an attendant of Ambition. The old man associates these vices with the
three beasts of Dante’s Inferno (the leopard, the lion, and the wolf, epito-
mizing, respectively, carnal pleasure, pride, and avarice, p. 131, v. 1045).23
In the Divine Comedy, these three beasts which block the wayfarer’s path
22 Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, tresillustre Royne de Navarre, ed. Ruth

Thomas (New York, Paris, and The Hague, 1970), p. 76.
23 Dante Alighieri, La Divine Comédie, ed. Henri Longnon (Paris, 1966), p. 12, vv. 31–34.
222 cynthia skenazi
are not sins but dispositions toward sin, and they afflict every man, with-
out exception, to a greater or lesser degree. Amateur de Science then
advises Amy to read history and ancient philosophy and to study the Bible
in order to become a virtuous man. So great is Amy’s desire to follow
the old man’s advice that he leaves the world at once and abandons his
former self. Yet it is not enough to know what must be done, one must
also know how to do it. As Saint Paul states in his Epistle to the Romans:
For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can
will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the
evil I do not want is what I do. (Rom. 7:18–19)
In the same way, Marguerite’s traveler misinterprets his mentor’s claim
that history, philosophy, and the Bible can cure the soul. He becomes a
scholar and falls into an intellectual form of pride: the lust for knowledge.
Book III. Concupiscentia Mentis
Amy’s tireless intellectual activities at the opening of Book III parallel his
erratic travels around the world at the beginning of Book II. Night and
day, he reads; like a sponge, he absorbs as much learning as he can. His
ambitious program extends well beyond the old man’s recommendations.
Amy becomes acquainted with philosophy (p. 136, vv. 37–48), poetry (pp.
136–37, vv. 49–64), law (pp. 137–38, vv. 65–84), mathematics (p. 138, vv.
85–108), music (pp. 138–39, vv. 109–14), medicine (pp. 139–40, vv. 115–68),
history (pp. 141–42, vv. 169–96), rhetoric (pp. 142–43, vv. 197–228), and
theology (pp. 143–46, vv. 229–328). To this extensive list, he adds cosmog-
raphy (p. 148, vv. 364–69). Amy’s encyclopedic interests echo the human-
ists’ enthusiasm for learning, which informs many texts of Marguerite’s
contemporaries. Interestingly, the enumeration of his fields of study does
not follow any order: it neither recalls the hierarchical principle of the
scala intellectualis (an ascent leading from lower to higher levels of under-
standing), which appears frequently in Renaissance literature, nor does it
conform to the seven liberal arts required for a Bachelor of Arts.24 Despite
24 For his first degree—the Bachelor of Arts—a student was required to master the
seven liberal arts, which consisted of three language arts, the trivium (grammar, rhetoric,
dialectic), and four quantitative arts, the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astron-
omy). Having left the Faculty of Arts, he could then enter one of three Faculties, in order
of respective prestige: Law, Medicine, Theology. These last three disciplines are also part
of Amy’s studies.
the number of lines dedicated to theology, this discipline is but one of the
many interests of the speaker, rather than the culmination of his scholarly
investigations. Indeed, cosmography—not theology—is the last field of
research mentioned. It soon becomes clear that human knowledge cannot
give Amy access to true freedom. The long list of the disciplines he eagerly
studies visually conveys the feeling of an accumulation of inert materials.
Moreover, the contradictions of the books he reads stress the weakness of
reason and understanding. In every field of knowledge, human language
leads to dissimulation and error because it eludes the possibility of univo-
cal meaning; words are intrinsically ambiguous and shifting.
Amy nonetheless enjoys his scholarly retreat, which he finds a delightful
paradise, well protected from the world (p. 150, vv. 421–22). In his enthu-
siasm to master all the sciences, he does not realize that God should be
the beginning and end of all studies. He foolishly thinks that God rewards
man’s actions, and is unaware of the importance of grace. Unknowingly,
he builds another solitary place of confinement: a white-walled temple
whose pillars are made of books. At the top of this structure, he places the
Bible as the goal of all studies (p. 144, vv. 272–73) and crowns the edifice
with laurel. “Plus on cuyde sçavoir, plus on devient ygnorant et aveugle,”
Briçonnet wrote to Marguerite on 6 March 1522 (Correspondance, 1:178).
Amy’s intellectual quest proves to be a sterile pursuit and even represents
a form of transgression because Amy conceives truth in human terms. As
Gérard Defaux has observed, this anti-intellectualist perspective, which
finds its inspiration in Saint Paul’s and Saint John’s Epistles as well as in
Saint Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, was especially alive in Margue-
rite’s evangelical circle.25 Amy’s thirst for learning is a manifestation of
cuyder (false belief) and of the evil curiosity from which God sought to
protect man by forbidding Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of Knowledge.
Amy’s confidence in the human mind to find truth is an act of pride inso-
far as it neglects to take account of man’s fallen condition. Knowledge
is good if it leads to God; uninformed by grace and faith, it becomes an
allegorical prison:
O prisonnier dedans la lettre morte
Par ung Cuyder qui te fermoit la porte,
Tant qu’en lisant plus de lettre apprenoys
25 Gérard Defaux, Le Curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse du monde dans la première moitié

du XVIe siècle: L’Exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, Démosthène, Empédocle) (Lexington, Ky.,
1982), pp. 79–107.
224 cynthia skenazi
Et meins au vray sçavoir tu parvenois,

Quelle clarté t’a l’Esprit revelé,
Qui dans la lettre es encloz et cellé? (p. 198, vv. 1905–10)
In response to a letter of Marguerite dated from the end of November
1522 and signed “la trop en corps Marguerite,” Briçonnet commented on
a passage of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (5:19), alluding to bodies
too much concerned with wordly matters:
Madame, plusieurs sortes de gens sont trop en corps. Il en est qui telz se
montrent et en font les œuvres dont parle Monsieur sainct Pol au Ve chapi-
tre ès Galathes, où il descript les œuvres de la chair et du corps . . . Ilz sont
trop en corps estans charnelz et mectant entierement leur plaisir, cure et
solicitude. . . . Madame, il en est d’aultres qui, pouzé qu’ilz aient non seulle-
ment leur ame predominant à leur corps et l’esperit à leur ame, ne sentent
rien du monde et, combien que cheminans en la terre et en la chair, toutes-
fois leurs œuvres sont spirituelles. . . . Neantmoings sont trop en corps, non
materiel mais spirituelz, quant ilz abusent de leur grace et par presump-
tion veullent sans helles voller pour cuider comprendre l’incomprehensible.
(Correspondance, 1:223–27)
The Fourfold Method of Biblical Exegesis
Briçonnet’s comment may help us to see Amy’s itinerary from his first
prison to the third one as a series of different perspectives on the relation-
ship between body, soul, and salvation. Amy’s journey represents a type
of education founded on the reading of the Bible, that closely follows the
then commonly applied fourfold method of biblical exegesis. In the tower
of love, Amy’s exclusive point of reference is his senses and he does not
distinguish the visible realm from the spiritual path to which it can lead.
He takes the letter for the spirit and is a prisoner of a literal understanding
of events, as he himself later acknowledges: “Velà commant, enfermé dans
la lettre, / En liberté je pensoys du tout estre” (p. 146, vv. 329–30). Later
on, he realizes that, in Saint Paul’s words, “the letter kills, but the Spirit
gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). Leaving his first place of confinement, he discovers
the wonders of nature at the beginning of Book II and favors an allegorical
reading of the world built on the hidden, rather than on the visible. The
wise old man’s speech at the end of Book II embodies the tropological
reading of the Scriptures; he converts Saint Paul’s admonition into moral
principles and urges Amy to leave the world at once. Amy’s final revela-
tion of God’s love, to which I shall return shortly, represents the fourth,
highest, and transcendental reading—the anagogical or mystical—the
eschatological dream of Christianity.
The distinction between these four senses depends on an act of inter-

pretation, not on an intrinsic separation of truth and lies. The motif of the
sun provides a suggestive way to see how Marguerite’s poem elaborates
on the various levels in a polyphonic perspective. In a letter to Briçon-
net dated 21 July 1523, Marguerite used the metaphor of light, ubiquitous
among evangelical writers, to express her hope of being enlightened by
faith in order to see the “vray soleil luisant, feu eschauffant et lumiere
enluminant” (Correspondance, 2:53). Briçonnet had already answered her
request in a previous letter. Using the same figurative language as the
queen, he wrote:
Qui demande il veoit. Foy est grande et longue veue. . . . il me semble que
toute la vie du chrestien, lequel de soy comme de soy est aveugle, doibt
estre pour aprendre à veoir, rectiffier et clariffier sa veue.” (Correspondance,
1:182–83)
This remark is at the heart of Les Prisons’ quest as a whole. In Book I,
the sun destroys Amy’s tower of love and the speaker understands this
action literally. In Book II, the sun is again high in the sky at noon when
the protagonist meets Amateur de Science. The old man speaks of the
moral enslavement resulting from the engagement with a world based on
appearances and of Amy’s blindness to virtue; the sunbeams suggest the
light of human understanding. This light is very different from the divine
fire that frees Amy from his temple of books and presides over his union
with God. Following Nicholas of Cusa among others, Briçonnet often
speaks of the gap between human reason and spiritual contemplation of
the divine in terms of light: “Sy le soleil creé se communique à toute crea-
ture capable de veoir et se donne à congnoistre, et neantmoings tous les
yeulx ensemble ne sont suffisans de recevoir et endurer toute sa lumiere,
pour la grandeur, excellence et plenitude d’icelle lumiere excedant toute
capacité oculaire, trop plus superhabondamment se communicque le
vray soleil” (Correspondance, 1:26). Marguerite’s Miroir de l’âme pécheresse
(1531) has recourse to the same metaphor:
Quand le soleil d’une seule estincelle
Aveugle l’œil, sa grant lumiere cele:
Mais demandez à l’œil qu’il a senty;
Il dira tout; mais il aura menty.
Car aveuglé de petite lumière,
Il ne peult veoir la grant’clarté entiere.26
26 Marguerite de Navarre, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, in Marguerites de la Marguerite

des princesses, p. 21.
226 cynthia skenazi
In the preface to his Commentarii initiatorii in quatuor evangelia (1522),

Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples wrote similarly: “De même que l’immensité et la
majesté de ce qu’il faut croire confondent l’intelligence humaine, la source
de la lumière solaire blesse l’œil sensible; la première ne comprend pas,
exactement comme le second est aveuglé.”27
As these quotations make clear, a human being is unable to see God
or to speak of him. Like Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Lefèvre, and
Briçonnet, Marguerite emphasizes the inadequacy of words when it comes
to expressing the divine. Only through dissimilarities and approximations
can human language suggest God’s ineffable presence.28
Revelation
Critics have often stressed the similarities between Clément Marot’s and
Marguerite de Navarre’s religious and poetic views.29 Les Prisons confirms
this perspective: many aspects of Amy’s quest for freedom evoke the
search for Ferme Amour in Le Temple de Cupido. Both poets start their
respective journeys by worshiping sensual pleasures and confusing Eros
with Caritas. The more they travel, the further they find themselves from
the true object of their desire: God’s love. In both works, the attack against
wordly temptations becomes a pretext for the poetic creation of “artificial
paradises” built upon the cult of sensual pleasures. In both works also,
the journey turns out to be an “itinerary” (from the Latin intus, inside)
since both protagonists find their respective goals—Ferme Amour, true
freedom—neither by their senses nor by their intellect but in and through
their own heart and the reading of the Bible.30 Marot and Marguerite
capitalize on Saint Paul’s observation in the first Epistle to the Corinthi-
ans: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of
these is love (caritas)” (1 Cor. 13:13).
27 Quoted in Guy Bedouelle, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples et l’intelligence des Écritures

(Geneva, 1976), pp. 155–56.
28 See Jan Miernowski, “La Parole entre l’Etre et le Néant: Les Prisons de Marguerite de
Navarre aux limites de la poésie exégétique,” French Forum 16 (1991), 261–84.
29 Edwin M. Duval, “Marot, Marguerite et le chant du cœur: Formes lyriques et formes
de l’intériorité,” and Mary McKinley, “Marot, Marguerite de Navarre et ‘L’Epistre du
Despourveu,’ ” in Clément Marot, “Prince des poëtes françois”, 1496–1996: Actes du Colloque
international de Cahors-en-Quercy, 1996, ed. Gérard Defaux and Michel Simonin (Paris,
1997), pp. 559–71 and 613–26.
30 Clément Marot, Le Temple de Cupido, in Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard
Defaux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990–93), 1:219ff; Les Prisons, p. 152, III, vv. 495–98.
In the longest part of Les Prisons’ Book III (and more broadly in the poem
as a whole), faith determines a transformation of the problematic into the
certain and the transcendent. Before his conversion, Amy is trapped by
his own decisions and is never sure of the meaning of his actions; what
he is remains obscure to him. Marguerite focuses on that border zone
where human actions are hinged together with divine power. When Amy
follows the disposition of his own ethos, he is the responsible cause of his
actions, yet, at the same time, he seems to be a plaything in the hands of
God; the two levels are inseparable. Just like faith, hope, and love, true
freedom involves placing one’s stake or wager on what is unknown and
incomprehensible, risking oneself on a terrain that remains impenetrable,
entering into a game not knowing whether it will bring success or doom.
The most sincere prayer is still a chancy appeal to God, and only by his
reply will Amy learn what being enraptured by divine love really involves
and means. Like Adam with whom he identifies, Amy is saved by God’s
intervention, and the story of his liberation is described in explicitly bibli-
cal language. God’s grace takes the dramatic form of a “Glesve trenchant,
flamboyant, clair et beau,” which frees Amy from the “cuyder vain et sot”
of his temple of books (p. 151, vv. 462–65).31 God speaks to those who
listen to him, and the voice of the prophets announcing his reign can still
be heard: “Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do
not see, who have ears, but do not hear” (Jeremiah 5:21). In the same way,
Ezekiel attacks those “who have eyes to see but do not see, who have ears
to hear but do not hear” (Ezekiel 12:2).
Amy’s revelation is a transparent allusion, in particular, to Exodus’s
third chapter. The protagonist hears the voice that spoke to Moses from
the burning bush: “Je suys qui suys, que œil vivant ne peult veoir” (p. 153,
v. 520). These words made Moses aware of his own weakness and of the
need for a spiritual understanding of God’s commandments; they have the
same effect on Amy. In addition, the notion of freedom, which informs Les
Prisons, is at the heart of Exodus 3: the Lord orders Moses to rescue his
people from the hands of the Egyptians who are oppressing them and to
bring them to a land of freedom, flowing “with milk and honey” (Exodus
3:8). In a Christian perspective, God’s concern over the suffering of his
people in Exodus 3 prefigures Jesus’s love for all human beings.
31 Glasson’s edition of Les Prisons, p. 301, suggests several biblical references for this
image, including Saint Paul’s Epistles (Heb. 4:12 and Eph. 6:17).
228 cynthia skenazi
Touched by this miracle, Amy understands that true freedom means

to commit oneself wholly to the word of God, to be contained in God’s
love. Conversion is an act of divine grace, but this experience of spiritual
renewal depends on a willingness to accept God’s gift. The first step in
this direction is the awareness of the gulf between Nothingness and All,
between human being and Creator. Significantly, Amy’s revelation occurs
at the very moment he is reading a passage from the Gospel of Saint
Luke, stating that Jesus favors the “petis” and “personnes basses” over the
“sçavants, gentz doctes et discretz” because God reveals his secrets to the
humble (p. 152, vv. 485–89).32
From this point on, Amy is “inhabited” by the Word. This part—the
longest of Les Prisons as a whole—draws from many sources, includ-
ing Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Nicholas of Cusa, Briçonnet, and
Lefèvre d’Étaples.33 Jean Dagens also noted Marguerite’s debt to Margue-
rite Porete, a beguine condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake
in Valenciennes in 1310.34 Marguerite was probably ignorant of Porete’s
name and knew Le Miroir des âmes simples et anéanties in an anonymous
manuscript copy. Porete follows Jean de Meung’s Roman de la Rose and
Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy to deplore the blindness and per-
versity of human nature as it strays away from God. For Porete, as for
Marguerite, the Scriptures reveal their hidden meaning to those who are
humble of heart and who put their trust in God. To the learned, the Bible
remains obscure insofar as reason can grasp neither the mystery nor the
wisdom of God. Porete praises faith and the divine light that sets human
beings free from prison; she ecstatically sings of her loving union with God.
Interestingly, Porete’s expression “Gentil Loing Près,” to name Jesus, also
appears in Les Prisons (p. 182, v. 1399). Despite these similarities however,
Porete’s allegorical characters (Soul, Reason, Love) and their somewhat
scholastic and abstract discussions of specific religious questions stand in
32 Similarly, in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, conversion is linked to Augustine’s read-

ing of a sentence from Saint Paul’s Epistles, after hearing a child’s voice chant repeatedly
the words “tolle, lege, tolle, lege” (“take, read, take, read”).
33 See Les Prisons, ed. Glasson, pp. 11–57.
34 Jean Dagens, “Le ‘Miroir des simples âmes’ et Marguerite de Navarre,” in La Mys-
tique rhénane, Travaux du Centre des Études Supérieures specialisé d’histoire des religions
de Strasbourg. Colloque de Strasbourg 1961 (Paris, 1963), pp. 281–89. Margaret Porete, Le
Miroir des âmes simples et anéanties, ed. Max Hust de Longchamp (Paris, 1984). The queen
of Navarre may have seen a copy of Porete’s Miroir at the convent of the sisters of the
Reform of Fontevrault in Orléans, to which she extended her patronage. See Romana
Guarnieri, “Il movimento del Libero Spirito,” Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 4
(1965), 490–91.
sharp contrast to Les Prisons’ poetic design. Furthermore, some of Amy’s

major considerations—such as the separation between Tout (God) and
Rien (human beings), which is a recurrent aspect of Marguerite’s work—
are absent from Porete’s Miroir des âmes simples.
More than any text, the Bible is the true source of Amy’s exultant cel-
ebration of God; it is the subject and the object of his ecstatic discourse,
and it provides Marguerite with the language to convey the ineffable joy
of Christian revelation. Critics have often commented on Marguerite de
Navarre’s poetry as a signifier of silence. Language is indeed unable to
express God,35 yet Les Prisons’ final and longest section emphasizes the
redundancy, the inexhaustible fertility of the divine word, reproducing
itself and renewing its meaning. This endless flow of language recalls
Briçonnet’s way of answering Marguerite’s letters: appropriating the
queen’s own figurative language, the bishop often twisted the wording of
her metaphorical requests (longing for the sun and complaints of hunger
and of thirst are among the most recurrent) to give them new meanings
that seem to defy all logical contradictions. Likewise, Amy’s praise of God
is a labyrinth of words and sounds extending indefinitely through a pro-
liferation of analogies, repetitions, and variations. Elaborations on God’s
statement “Je suys qui suys” (Exodus 3:14) and on words condensing Jesus’s
Law (“Mot,” “Nom,” “Loy,” pp. 151–2, vv. 467–72; pp. 172–3, vv. 1087–106) are
striking occurrences of this process of expansion. It is true that obsessive
repetitions are typical of mystical texts, but one is prone to forget that
this feature is also a recurrent aspect of the rhétoriqueurs’ poetics. Les
Prisons praises poetry, which allows human beings to see per speculum
in aenigmate. Significantly, the divine fire burns Amy’s third prison but
spares the books that constitute its pillars. After the destruction of his
Babel tower of paper, the speaker realizes that faith alone enables him to
grasp the deeper meaning of human knowledge: God is the principle of
understanding of every field of study.
The Fourth Prison
Amy’s life story then seems to stop short and the poet engages in an
extensive account of the deaths of four of Marguerite de Navarre’s close
relatives: her mother-in-law (Marguerite de Lorraine, Charles d’Alençon’s
35 See Cottrell, Grammar, p. 10.

230 cynthia skenazi
mother), her first husband (Charles d’Alençon), her mother (Louise de

Savoie), and her brother (François I) (pp. 207–30, vv. 2165–864). This sec-
tion confirms the contribution of early modern women to funeral poetry
and offered the queen an opportunity to excel in a fashionable rhetorical
genre, yet its raison d’être does not seem obvious. For Pierre Jourda, the
long description of the royal deaths constitutes an unnecessary digression
and a proof of Marguerite’s lack of artistic taste.36 In contrast to this nega-
tive judgment, I would like to stress the crucial function of these eulogies
in the context of the poetics of conversion that underlies Les Prisons as
a whole.
According to Philippe Ariès, the attitude of a society toward its dead
is closely connected with the way the specific group envisions itself and
defines its values.37 Les Prisons’ four récits de mort represent an attempt
by Marguerite to secure the immortality of her deceased relatives; fur-
thermore, their commemoration is a way of advertising the political, reli-
gious, and ethical excellence of the queen’s family. Such propaganda is
particularly striking in the rehabilitation of Charles d’Alençon’s role at the
battle of Pavia in 1525 since his fleeing from this defeat with tragic con-
sequences for the French was criticized by some contemporaries (p. 212,
v. 2318). Likewise, François I’s numerous love affairs become an opportu-
nity for Marguerite to praise her brother’s desire for amendment and his
faith in God (pp. 225–29, vv. 2727–846). Indeed, all four defunct persons
become role models for the living. Now a eulogy is a memento mori and
Marguerite’s poem reminds us that choices take on their true significance
only when life is over; human actions are a kind of wager on God, for
whose support one hopes. In a Christian and Platonic perspective, death
represents Amy’s liberation from his fourth and ultimate prison: that of
his body. Plato’s Phaedrus describes the soul as imprisoned in the body; a
similar concept appears in biblical texts, especially in Saint Paul’s distinc-
tion between the spirit and the flesh. For Saint Paul, death is the begin-
ning of a new life, an experience of spiritual regeneration that frees human
beings from sin and brings the soul close to Jesus (Rom. 6:4–7). “So it is
with the resurrection of the dead,” Saint Paul argues in the First Epistle to
the Corinthians: “If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body”
(1 Cor. 15:44). In a letter to Marguerite dated 18 May 1522, Briçonnet used
36 Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, 1:618.

37 Philippe Ariès, L’Homme devant la mort (Paris, 1977), p. 596.
the Pauline analogy of the body and the seed (1 Cor. 15:36) in a similar
perspective:
comme dict sainct Pol: “Insipiens tu quod seminas non vivificatur nisi prius
moriatur.ˮ Celuy est bien hors du sens qui cuide cuillir fruict de sa semence
s’elle ne meurt premierement par mortifficacion en terre. . . . Il fault mourir
pour vie avoir, non de mort naturelle qui trop souvent mene à la perpetu-
elle, mais en vivant mourir, pour en mourant vivre. (Correspondance, 1:197)
Likewise, Marguerite’s Miroir de l’âme pécheresse praises death as the ulti-
mate expression of Christian conversion:
Mort a donné à vie mort naïve.
Par ceste mort, moy morte reçoy vie;
Et au vivant par la mort suis ravie.
En vous je vy, quand en moy je suis morte,
Mort ne m’est plus que d’une prison porte.
Vie m’est mort; car par mort suis vivante.
Vie me rend bien triste et mort contente.38
“Amour desir de mort donner nous doit,” Marguerite claims in the same
poem (1:54). This statement appears repeatedly in her works.39 In Les Pris-
ons, death is the beginning of a vita nova, and this conviction reminds
Amy again of the abyss that separates human beings from God. After a
meditation on the chasm between Rien and Tout, Amy concludes the
poem by rephrasing Saint Paul’s “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17):
. . . où l’Esprit est divin et vehement,
La liberté y est parfaictement. (p. 242, vv. 3213–14).
Confession
In contrast to this triumphant final line, the first words of Les Prisons
strike a much humbler tone: “Je vous confesse, Amye tant aymée” (p. 75,
v. 1), Amy says to his silent auditor. One might of course understand con-
fesser in a medieval or Petrarchan tradition appropriate to a discussion
of love; yet given Les Prisons’ devotional orientation, it is impossible to
ignore the verb’s religious meaning. Interestingly, Amy confesses his sins
38 Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, 1:48.

39 See Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses: Oraison de l’âme fidele, 1:129–30; La
Comedie du desert, 3:202; Chansons spirituelles XXIX, 3:155.
232 cynthia skenazi
to Amye rather than to a priest. “Marguerite herself was not a professional

theologian . . . [nor] an innovator of theological speculation,” but an inter-
ested follower of the religious debates of her time. “Her privileged social
position, which secured for her the best education and the conversation
and correspondence of the most outstanding men,” enabled her to be
receptive to both new and old religious ideas and to incorporate them
into her writings.40 She was not in favor of a schism between Catholics
and Protestants for religious and political reasons, but like other members
of her circle, she used her literary works to promote a devotion based on
faith and on the Scriptures. Les Prisons’ representation of confession is a
suggestive example of Marguerite’s efforts to recover the essential mean-
ing of the sacraments. Following the lead of her evangelical circle, she
appropriated the practice of self-examination promoted by the German
Reformation and adapted it to Amy’s story.41
Confession to a priest had been a religious obligation since the Middle
Ages, but Luther completely undermined this requirement. He argued that
the practice tormented rather than consoled the Christian. “The truth of
punishment causes contrition, and the truth of the promise causes conso-
lation if it is believed,” Luther proclaimed in his Babylonian Captivity of the
Church, “and by this faith a man merits forgiveness of sins.”42 For Luther,
what matters is faith, not confession. He insisted that confession must
always result from the willed choice of the penitent; moreover, the sole
purpose of this exercise of self-denunciation was to focus one’s attention
on the future rather than on past sins. Contrition is true if it bears fruit in
a changed heart, spirit, disposition, and life. Following Luther, members
of Marguerite’s circle—including Lefèvre d’Étaples, Gérard Roussel, and
Louis de Berquin—wanted Christians to confess their sins freely to God
and to one another; they claimed that the remission of sins is granted by
God alone (not the Church or a priest) and that confession is linked to the
40 Gary Ferguson, Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (Edin-

burgh, 1992), p. 42; cf. pp. 116–25 and 163–77.
41 For a broader perspective on this question, on Luther’s influence in France (espe-
cially on Lefèvre d’Étaples), and on the wide circulation of Luther’s works in Paris, see
Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) and
Her Evangelical Network, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston, 2009), esp. 1:45–55, 66–67, 123–28;
2:565.
42 Martin Luther, De Captivitate Babolynica Ecclesiae Praeludium (1520), in Martin
Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 60 vols. (Weimar, 1883–1983), 6:45. English trans-
lation by Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton,
1977), p. 57. Luther’s book was censured by the Sorbonne in 1521.
promise of forgiveness.43 Like Luther, they stressed that God is willing to

hear every sinner’s petition. In Les Prisons, Marguerite presents a similar
perspective: Amy’s repentance and desire for amendment go along with
his unconditional faith in God. This expression of total confidence in God
reappears in the récits de mort, in which three out of four of Marguerite’s
relatives make their confession (pp. 207–25). As Gary Ferguson notes, they
are in addition anointed, receive their last Eucharistic viaticum on their
deathbed, and “in true evangelical fashion, they are usually consoled also
by the reading of the Passion.”44 In all these passages, Marguerite avoids
controversial and practical matters (such as the role of the priest and the
nature of his intervention), but stresses personal repentance and the cru-
cial function of Christ’s absolution.
Using a variety of metaphors, Luther teaches sinners that forgiveness
is not a consequence of human virtues and of good works but depends
on Christ alone, who acts as a mediator between human beings and God.
God looks at Christ’s righteousness, not at man’s sinfulness; therefore, if
one has faith—confidence, trust—in God, God assuredly forgives us. It
is however essential to Luther’s view of consolation that all traces of the
psychology of merit be eliminated: sinners remain sinners, with all their
weakness and corruption, but their sins are not counted against them
because they believe in God. Likewise, in Les Prisons, the only disposi-
tion necessary to salvation is the desire for grace and the awareness of a
human being’s limitations and sinful nature.45 Throughout Marguerite’s
poem, faith is a personal, loving, and trusting relationship with God.
Although charity and the necessity of performing good works are valu-
able, they are but an expression of faith. Only faith can give human beings
hope for redemption.46
This notion has a direct impact on Les Prisons’ design insofar as Amy’s
successive prisons dramatize the failure of a journey undertaken without
God’s help. The best for which a human being can hope is to ward off
vices, to place his faith (his confidence, his trust) in God’s mercy, and
43 See Reid, King’s Sister, 1:66, 252, 368, 531.

44 Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, pp. 117–25. See on pp. 122–24, Ferguson’s comments on
the passage concerning Charles d’Alençon’s death (Les Prisons, pp. 213–16, vv. 2358–2424).
The dying duke refuses to consider extreme unction as a simple rite and emphasizes the
true nature and proper use of a sacrament which brings healing.
45 Tentler, Sin and Confession, pp. 19 and 57. Calvin emphasized the same elements; see
Reid, King’s Sister, 2:544.
46 As Gary Ferguson notes, charity is “the means whereby God himself in Christ has
come close to man, and works out his salvation for him” (Mirroring Belief, pp. 176–77).
234 cynthia skenazi
to avoid being pushed back into sin. On the one hand, Amy’s confession
intends to lead Amye (and the reader) to God; on the other hand, the
poet’s frequent failures to find true freedom stress the need for divine
guidance to reach this ineffable joy. Each of his liberations is due to an
outside force: in Book I, the sun destroys the tower of love; in Book II, the
old man warns him of the dangers of the theater of the world; in Book III,
God saves him from the temple of science. At least Amy does not seem
to repeat the same mistakes: he does not listen to the sun’s warnings and
keeps consolidating the breaches in his tower (Book I), but he follows the
old man’s advice and leaves the world immediately (Book II). Yet is Amy’s
quest a circular one, or does his journey follow an ascending path? The
answer to this question is by no means straightforward.
Interpretation
For Robert Cottrell, Amy’s journey is circular: it begins and ends in God.
This conception eliminates any possibility of progression; throughout his
journey, Amy remains essentially the same. Cottrell stresses the pres-
ence of recurrent notions that take on different meanings in the various
sequences of the protagonist’s life (Grammar, pp. 11–12, 251–53). In Book I,
for instance, Amy’s love for Amye makes him deaf and blind to anything
that distracts him from his passion. After his conversion, the protagonist
shows again a total indifference to the outside world, although the object
of his desire is now God. The first place of confinement (the tower of
love) epitomizes sensual and wordly pleasures; it is the negative image
of Amy’s spiritual freedom in the prison of God’s love. In addition, Amy
often speaks of God in geometrical terms and privileges the image of the
circle as epitomizing confinement, unity, and transcendence: “sercle rond
sans la circumference, / Par tous costez egal, sans difference, / Commence-
ment ne fin ne s’y retrouve” (p. 162, vv. 795–97). A few lines further on,
he similarly speaks of the “divine eternelle rondeur” (p. 163, v. 802).47 In
contrast to Cottrell’s static view of Amy, Paula Sommers argues that every
sequence of the protagonist’s life brings him closer to the light of revela-
tion. Sommers highlights a pattern of spiritual ascent inspired by Saint
Bonaventure’s tripartite division of purgatio, illuminatio, and perfectio.
47 On the sources of this image in Marguerite’s poem, see V. L. Saulnier, “Marguerite de
Navarre aux temps de Briçonnet: Étude de la correspondance générale (1521–22),” Biblio-
thèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 40 (1978), 193–237 (pp. 204–07). For a broader perspec-
tive on the circle image, see Georges Poulet, Les Métamorphoses du cercle (Paris, 1961).
Throughout Les Prisons, love traces a movement of expansion: Amy’s tra-

jectory descends from erotic love to ambition and intellectual presump-
tion, and then ascends to God and caritas.48 One might object that Amy’s
journey to God actually marks a descent toward greater humility, which
emphasizes the fallen human condition. Irina Iakounina, for her part, tries
to reconcile Cottrell’s and Sommers’s positions by focusing on the poem’s
circular and linear designs. She explains this double structure in terms
of a dialogue on love between Saint Augustine and Plato. Les Prisons fol-
lows Plato’s ladder of love and begins by describing the protagonist’s sen-
sual love for a fellow being (Book I); Amy then expresses a higher form of
love—the love of beauty—at the beginning of Book II. Love takes on an
even higher, more intellectual meaning when Amy becomes a scholar, pas-
sionate for knowledge (Book III). Although Amy follows Plato’s hierarchy
of love, Iakounina contends that he listens to Saint Augustine, for whom
each step of the Platonic ladder represents a sin which turns humankind
away from God.49 One might argue that, in Les Prisons, continuity and
rupture go hand in hand. Amy’s lust for the flesh, for instance (which Iak-
ounina sees as epitomizing the first stage of the protagonist’s develop-
ment), is still present during the protagonist’s stay at court (Book II).
These various commentaries do not cancel each other out but stress
the polyphonic quality of Les Prisons and the effectiveness of Marguerite’s
rhetorical strategy. My own reading has outlined the function of interpre-
tation. Amy speaks from the retrospective point of view of a man who
has found true freedom in God and looks back at the story of his sin-
ful life. Yet the focus of his account is not Amye, who silently listens to
him, but the reader. The poem provokes our personal meditation on key
notions—freedom, love, faith, hope, grace—and asks us to translate our
moral values and religious principles into life choices. Amy’s story invites
us to humble our wisdom and our presumption for knowledge; it urges
us to think critically about ourselves and to direct our gaze toward God.
Instead of answering our questions, Les Prisons forces us to question our
answers.50

tual Ascent (Geneva, 1989).
49 Irina Iakounina, “Step Upward, Step Down: The Path to Perfection in Marguerite de
Navarre’s Prisons,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 71 (2009), 457–73. Iakounina
does not give an accurate account of Cottrell’s and Sommers’s respective positions, how-
ever. In addition, she does not mention important biblical references. Saint Augustine, for
instance, quotes Saint John’s First Epistle (2:16) when he condemns the concupiscences
associated with each step of the Platonic ladder (the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye,
the pride of life).
50 I thank Dora Polachek for her careful reading of this essay.
CHANSONS SPIRITUELLES—SONGS FOR
A “DELIGHTFUL TRANSFORMATION”
Jan Miernowski
For my sister, Elżbieta Niemcewicz

The Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses (1547) is the only exten-
sive collection of Marguerite de Navarre’s poetry published during her
lifetime, possibly with some input on her part. It ends with a series of
short poems believed to have been written toward the end of Margue-
rite’s life, namely after 1533, and appearing under the heading Chansons
spirituelles.1 The word chanson is equivocal in 16th-century French. It can
be translated as “song” as well as, roughly speaking, “poem in the form
of a song.” Hence, first of all, the problem of the generic identification of
the chansons spirituelles, especially their relationship to music. Second,
chansons spirituelles are poems or songs of a very specific kind: they brand
themselves as “spiritual.” This raises the question of the place of chan-
sons spirituelles within Marguerite’s spirituality, as well as, more widely,
within the context of the vigorous theological debates which took place in
the 1520s–40s. Third, the generic and the spiritual character of the queen
of Navarre’s songs should be considered against the background of her
very original and complex poetics. In this respect, chansons spirituelles are
embodiments of a poetic and religious chant2 that seems to be, alongside
narrative fiction, theatrical play, and allegorical poetry, one of the main
modes of Marguerite’s artistic and spiritual expression. The question is
how this chant relates to other forms of the queen’s writing, especially
how it can be understood in relation to her poetic word on the one hand,
1 See the excellent critical edition by Michèle Clément (Paris, 2001), vol. 9 of Marguerite
de Navarre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole Cazauran, which will be the reference for the
present essay. The Chansons spirituelles were previously edited by Georges Dottin (Geneva,
1971). I would like to thank my colleagues Robin Worth and Ullrich Langer for revising my
manuscript and Jill Rosenshield for her expert advice on early modern prints. The research
for the article was made possible in part by grants from the Center for European Studies of
the University of Wisconsin-Madison and from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies
“Artes Liberales” of the University of Warsaw.
2 The meaning I ascribe to the term “chant” in relation to the poetics of the Chansons
spirituelles will be explained below.
238 jan miernowski
and, on the other, to the mystic silence for which she longs. Finally, the
performative aspect of the chansons spirituelles calls for an approach
which extends literary interpretation of these texts into the realm of the
historical anthropology of religious practices. Indeed, Marguerite’s poetic
chant not only has a particular discursive and musical texture, it also con-
stitutes a puzzling religious gesture. It is therefore probable that the chan-
sons spirituelles are possessed of a quasi-ritual dimension.
The Song
The Chansons spirituelles were first published by Jean de Tournes in Lyon

in the the 1547 edition of the “pearls” of Marguerite’s poetry: Marguerites
de la Marguerite des princesses, tresillustre royne de Navarre. On page 467,
the reader finds the title Chansons spirituelles clearly displayed and sep-
arated from the preceding Complainte pour un detenu prisonnier by an
ornamental printer’s headpiece. Contrary to what one might expect, the
two poems that follow this general heading are entitled not “Chansons”
but “Pensées” and constitute the queen’s poetic thoughts devoted to the
illness and death of her beloved brother, François I. Both funerary medi-
tations are nevertheless clearly meant to be sung, since the tunes that
should be used for this purpose are provided in the form of incipits of
other songs which must already have been familiar to the reader. The two
“Pensées” are followed by a rondeau, also written at the time of the king’s
death. It is only the fourth piece of the Chansons spirituelles section of
the book that is actually entitled “Chanson,” as if the author wanted to
remind the reader of the generic nature of this poem, as well as of the
subsequent 28, which are all entitled “Autre chanson,” followed by a final
“Chanson de Noël.”3
Such an insistence on labeling as chansons the texts that follow the
initial “Pensées” and rondeau seems to indicate a certain anxiety on the
part of the author or publisher with regard to the generic and composi-
tional coherence of the Chansons spirituelles section of the book. A simi-
lar concern is visible in the Bibliothèque nationale de France manuscript
3 The same sequencing and labeling of texts is applied at the beginning of the
Chansons spirituelles section in the next, posthumous edition of the Marguerites, pub-
lished by Jean Ruelle (Paris, 1558). Both editions are available in the digitized Gordon Col-
lection of the University of Virginia: <http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/rmds/portfolio/gordon/
completed_titles.html>.
chansons spirituelles 239
fr. 24.298, which is the source of 15 additional chansons, supplementing,

in modern editions, the 32 texts published in the Marguerites de la
Marguerite.4 Here too the genre designation—Chansons spirituelles—
written prominently across the page, introduces the series of poems.
Curiously, two of them are additionally labeled “Chanson,” as if the scribe
wanted to reinforce their generic identification.5 The reason for this extra
titling seems to be their location in the manuscript: both follow poems
which are lengthy poetic dialogues, Dialogue de Regulus et de Lucia and
Dialogue de Dieu et de l’Homme. In sum, in the printed Marguerites and in
the manuscript BnF, fr. 24.298, the scribe, the printer, or indeed the author
herself mixed chansons with poems which seem to be something else—
poetic meditations, dialogues, even a rondeau—but which are also close
enough to the loose form of the chanson that he or she felt compelled to
repeat the generic designation of the chanson which immediately follows
such “interlopers.”
We are therefore faced with two tendencies which, at first sight, seem
to go in opposite directions. First, we see an apparent tolerance for asso-
ciating different poetic genres under the general heading Chansons spi-
rituelles. Such heterogeneity has caused some hesitation on the part of
the modern editors of Marguerite’s spiritual songs, Georges Dottin and
Michèle Clément. Both keep the two initial “Pensées” as part of their cor-
pora, while numbering continuously all 47 chansons from the Marguerites
and from BnF, fr. 24.298. However, Michèle Clément also includes in her
critical edition the rondeau and the dialogue between God and Man, while
eliminating the dialogue between Regulus and Lucia, on the grounds that
it does not fit the religious character of the Chansons spirituelles. Associ-
ated with the apparent generic heterogeneity of the corpus is a second
tendency, however: namely the insistence with which some strategically
located texts are labeled “Chansons.” This pertains to poems which follow
texts that have other generic characteristics, thus potentially blurring the
reader’s capacity to recognize a “genuine” chanson. These two concurrent
tendencies lead me to believe that: first, the internal coherence of the
4 BnF, fr. 24.298, discovered and published in 1896 by Abel Lefranc, contains late works
by Marguerite de Navarre, such as the long allegorical poem Les Prisons. According to
Michèle Clément, the manuscript dates from the late 16th century. The two initial “Pen-
sées,” occasioned by the death of François I, as well as the first chanson from BnF, fr.
24.298 are also found in BnF, fr. 12.485. The total of 32 chansons spirituelles includes the
two poems entitled “Pensées” but excludes the rondeau that follows them as well as a final
sonnet that closes this section in the Marguerites.
5 Chansons 35 and 40 in the Clément edition.
240 jan miernowski
Chansons spirituelles sections of the Marguerites and of MS fr. 24.298 do

not rely primarily on the generic homogeneity of their components but on
some other factor, possibly a thematic one; and second, chanson consti-
tutes a distinct poetic form, although its identification is tricky, especially
with regard to its complicated relationship to music.
Let’s begin with the second hypothesis, postponing consideration of
the first until the second part of this study.
In order to appreciate how difficult it is to define a chanson in 16th-
century France, one can consider the attempts made by theorists of poetry
during Marguerite’s lifetime and shortly after her death. In his 1548 trea-
tise, Thomas Sébillet characterized the chanson in relation to the ode,
which he also called “chant Lyrique”:
La chanson approche de tant près l’Ode, que de son et de nom se ressem-
blent quasi de tous points: car aussi peu de constance a l’une que l’autre
en forme de vers, et usage de rime. Aussi en est la matière toute une. Car
le plus commun sujet de toutes deux sont, Vénus, ses enfants, et ses Chari-
tes: Bacchus, ses flacons, et ses saveurs. Néanmoins tu trouveras la Chanson
moindre en nombre de couplets que le chant Lyrique, et de plus inconstante
façon et forme de style, notamment aujourd’hui, que les Musiciens et Chan-
tres font de tout ce qu’ils trouvent, voient, et oient, Musique et Chanson,
et me doute fort qu’entre ci et peu de jours ils feront de Petit-pont, et de la
Porte-Baudets des chansons nouvelles.6
The chanson is very much like the ode; it is characterized by the same
looseness of prosody and an identical thematic interest in love and wine,
but it is shorter and even more variable in form.7 Understandably, one
might be disappointed by Sébillet’s lack of precision, especially when we
take into account that the ode, of which the chanson is a more amor-
phous byproduct, is itself a downgraded version of the cantique. Both the
cantique and the ode are variable in form, such lack of consistency being
especially felt in the case of the latter, since it is appreciated by lovers who
are as quick to change their mood and their outfits as is the ode to alter
its sound, rhyme, and metric structure. In chapter six of Sébillet’s treatise,
the chanson thus comes after the cantique and the ode as the third, that
is, the loosest and the shortest form, and it would have dissolved into a
6 Art poétique français, in Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance, ed.

Francis Goyet (Paris, 1990), p. 127.
7 Du Bellay’s laborious distinction between the ode and “vers Lyriques” on the one
hand, and “Chansons vulgaires” on the other, is based not on prosodic but on stylistic
criteria. See La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, ed. Jean-Charles Monferran
(Geneva, 2001), p. 134.
kind of generic limbo if the theorist had not saved it in extremis from
insignificance by propelling it to the role of a general term encompassing
the other two:
Et ne t’ébahis au reste de ce que j’ai séparé ces trois, le Cantique, l’Ode, et
la chanson, que je pouvais comprendre sous l’appellation de Chanson: Car
encore que nous appelions bien en Français, Chanson, tout ce qui se peut
chanter: et ces trois soient indifféremment faits pour chanter, comme leurs
noms et leurs usages portent, toutefois connais-tu bien qu’ils ont en forme
et style quelque dissimilitude, laquelle tue t’eût fait douter, et comme je l’ai
exprimée, ne te peut que soulager.8
Despite Sébillet’s final assurances to the contrary, his reader cannot feel
much “relieved” by this very cursory sketching out of the differences
between the cantique, the ode, and the chanson. Nor does the last term
gain any precision when it is blown up to encompass all poetry that is
destined to be sung.9
As disappointing as it might be on a theoretical level, such concep-
tual expansion of the chanson corresponds, according to Sébillet, to the
cultural practice of his time. Indeed, as he notes, musicians and singers
use anything they can find in their frenzy to produce chansons nouvelles.
This is a marketing phrase found in the title of numerous 16th-century
collections of songs. It advertises lyrics—often recycled from previous edi-
tions but sometimes also released before the literary debut of the text—
published either to supplement an existing melody or, inversely, writ-
ten in anticipation of a tune to be composed. “Which should come first,
poetry or music?” is a much-debated question among French Renaissance
theorists of poetry. In his critique of Du Bellay’s Deffense et illustration
de la langue françoyse, Barthélemy Aneau sharply rejects the notion that
poets should follow the lead of musicians in composing their verses.
Peletier du Mans is less categorical in his Art poétique of 1555. He admits
that in composing his poems, he has increasingly taken into account
the needs of their possible setting to music.10 As has been stressed by
Edwin Duval, it was common practice among the poets of the generation
of Clément Marot to compose their poetry in anticipation of its future
8 Art poétique français, pp. 127–28.

9 On Sébillet’s strategy in grouping literary genres, see Jean-Charles Monferran, L’École
des Muses. Les arts poétiques français à la Renaissance (1548–1610): Sébillet, Du Bellay, Pele-
tier et les autres (Geneva, 2011), pp. 136–46.
10 Art poétique français, pp. 211 and 297.
242 jan miernowski
musical adaptation.11 In fact, poetry could easily either precede or follow

the melody with which it was ultimately associated, as is illustrated by the
example of the first collection of psalms translated into French by Marot
and additional poetic versions by Calvin.12
Behind these discussions lies, of course, the larger question of the rela-
tionship between music and poetry in the French Renaissance.13 From
this point of view, Marguerite’s Chansons spirituelles appear at a very
interesting moment in literary history. We are no longer in the years of
the Seconde Rhétorique, when—according to the famous distinction made
by Eustache Deschamps—poetry was considered to be a “natural music,”
made of rhythmic speech (“paroules metrifiees”), molded into verses of
rondeaux, ballades, and lais, distinct from but also complementary to the
“artificial music” of instruments. Nor are we yet at the time of the Plé-
iade, with its grandiose dreams of orphic chant, which would unite the
words of the poet with the sounds of his lyre in a harmonious ascent to
the neo-Platonic One.14 With Marguerite’s Chansons spirituelles, we are
between these two moments of literary evolution, in the time of “popu-
lar songs” (“chansons vulgaires”), so much disdained by Du Bellay. The
superstars of this period were Clément Marot and, to a lesser extent,
Mellin de Saint-Gelais. The latter was at one and the same time a poet, a
composer, and a performer; it is the former, however, who dominated the
publishing market of chansons nouvelles, either with his original lyrics or
through his influence on recognized and anonymous imitators. According
to Annie Cœurdevey, 151 poems by Marot were adapted to music by 90
known composers and published in numerous collections between 1528
and 1597.15 These statistics pertain solely to Marot’s non-religious texts,
and his psalms enjoyed an immense popularity on their own. Indeed, in
11 Edwin M. Duval, “From the ‘chanson parisienne’ to Scève’s French Canzoniere: Lyric
Form and Logical Structure of the Dizain,” in A Scève Celebration: Délie 1544–1994, ed. Jerry
C. Nash (Saratoga, 1994), pp. 71–85 (p. 76).
12 See the analyses by Pierre Pidoux, reported by Jean-Daniel Candaux, “Les Pseaumes
de Marot chez les Huguenots: La musique,” in Clément Marot, “Prince des poëtes françois”,
1496–1996: Actes du Colloque international de Cahors-en-Quercy, 1996, ed. Gérard Defaux
and Michel Simonin (Paris, 1997), pp. 477–81 (p. 478).
13 See the excellent synthesis on this topic by Jean Vignes in Poétiques de la Renais-
sance: Le modèle italien, le monde franco-bourguignon et leur héritage en France au XVIe
siècle, ed. Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn (Geneva, 2001), pp. 638–58. See also
pp. 29–47 by François Cornilliat.
14 See François Rouget, L’Apothéose d’Orphée: L’esthétique de l’ode en France au XVIe
siècle de Sébillet à Scaliger (1548–1561) (Geneva, 1994).
15 Annie Cœurdevey, Bibliographie des œuvres poétiques de Clément Marot mises en
musique dans les recueils profanes du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1997).
the later 1530s and throughout the 1540s, humming the psalms set to dif-
ferent popular tunes became very fashionable at the French court. Marot
himself acknowledges this fact in an epistle addressed to Marguerite de
Navarre from exile in Ferrara in 1536. In this nostalgic vision, the poet
dreams that he is back at the French court, close to his beloved queen,
singing her the psalms which for her are “chansons,” that is, familiar songs
accompanying her daily life.16
Most importantly, according to musicologists, the close cooperation of
Marot with composers and performers fostered a musical language which
largely abandoned the complexities of the previous era in favor of mel-
odies based on regular rhythms, often associated with popular dances.17
These are the years when printers such as Pierre Attaignant popularized
homophonic, strophic songs, often associated with the so-called chanson
parisienne, and which would evolve in the second half of the century into
syllabic airs de cour.18 Such formal moderation of the musical accompani-
ment and the increased care for the intelligibility of the poetic text must
have played well with Marot’s poetics of artful ease and simplicity. It must
also have been appreciated by Marguerite de Navarre, both on ideologi-
cal and on artistic grounds. Indeed, the queen’s spirituality and her poet-
ics favored the mind and the voice of simple people, those idiotae who
are poor in spirit and therefore closer to God than the wise men of this
world.
It is therefore quite understandable that the shadow of Marot should
preside over the section of Chansons spirituelles in the Marguerites of 1547.
Indeed, one may wonder if by placing the Chansons spirituelles at the very
end of her book, the queen was not following the example of Marot’s
Adolescence clémentine of 1532, which also ends with a subdivision of
16 Epistre XVII, vv. 119–20, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux, 2 vols. (Paris,
1990–93), 2:120, referred to by Olivier Millet, “Marot et Calvin: Chanter les psaumes,” in
Clément Marot, “Prince des poëtes françois,” pp. 463–76 (p. 464).
17 Frank Dobbins, “Les premières mises en musique des chansons, des épigrammes
et des rondeaux de Marot,” in Clément Marot, “Prince des poëtes françois,” pp. 483–502
(p. 498). See also Georgie Durosoir, “Les genres de la musique vocale,” in La notion du genre
à la Renaissance, ed. Guy Demerson (Geneva, 1984), pp. 249–52.
18 See Georges Dottin, La chanson française à la Renaissance (Paris, 1991), pp. 13–22; The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London, 1980),
4:135–45; G. Thibault, “Musique et poésie au XVIe siècle avant les ‘Amours’ de Ronsard,”
in Musique et poésie au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1954), p. 82; Kenneth Jay Levy, “Vaudeville, vers
mesurés et airs de cour,” ibid., pp. 186–99; Laurence F. Bernstein, “The ‘Parisian Chan-
son’: Problems of Style and Terminology,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 31
(1978), 193–240; and Georgie Durosoir, L’air de cour en France, 1571–1655 (Liège, 1991).
244 jan miernowski
chansons.19 Moreover, in Marguerite’s collection of poetry, Chansons spi-

rituelles are immediately preceded by a Complainte pour un detenu pris-
onnier, a long poetic lamentation whose lyric subject is an imprisoned
Evangelical, who begs God, Fortune, and his human protectors for mercy.
A critical tradition dating back to Abel Lefranc and passed on through
Pierre Jourda identifies this fictional figure with Marot. Michèle Clément
also places much emphasis on this association in her recent critical edi-
tion. According to Clément, Marguerite introduces the Chansons spiri-
tuelles with a poetic complaint voiced by a fictional Marot, whom she
imagines calling out for help, most probably amidst the tribulations at
the court of Ferrara in 1536. The queen deliberately gives voice to the
prisoner’s complaint in order to present her subsequent chansons as tes-
timonies to her deep sense of failure in ensuring the reign of the gospel
in the world and as a symptom of her will to adopt a more intimate, less
militant tone.20
Whatever may have been the level of the queen’s engagement in the
ideological action of the “Navarrian network” (to adopt Jonathan Reid’s
term) in the late 1530s and in the 1540s—that is, during what we assume
to be the time of the composition of most of the chansons spirituelles—it
is obvious that Marguerite refers the reader to Marot’s poetics at the very
outset of her song collection. Indeed, according to her explicit indication,
the second poem of the series should be sung to the tune of “Jouyssance
vous donneray,” that is the fourth piece in the Chansons section of Marot’s
Adolescence clémentine. This song was immensely popular and set to music
by no less than seven different composers, including Claudin de Sermisy,
whose version was published by Attaignant around 1528.21
One might be surprised by Marguerite’s choice of “Jouyssance vous
donneray,” a melody associated with vibrantly erotic lyrics, as the musical
accompaniment for a text that is her second poetic meditation devoted to
the death of her royal brother. The reason for this decision is not only her
ardent love for François I, a passion she expressed in some of her letters
in a style close to what one might expect from an affectionate spouse.
19 Symptomatically, both the Marguerites and the Adolescence would be followed by

their respective Suites.
20 See Michèle Clément, ed. cit., pp. 21–24. For a different view, see Jonathan A. Reid,
King’s Sister—Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) and Her Evangelical Net-
work, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston, 2009), 2:568–69.
21 See Chansons spirituelles, ed. Dottin, p. 171, and Annie Cœurdevey, Bibliographie,
pp. 10–12.
Such association of a love song with a funeral lament has a profound spiri-
tual meaning, on which I will comment shortly. It may also be explained,
however, by an editorial practice pervasive in the market of French chan-
sons: the free circulation of melodies and lyrics. To put it simply, from the
second and third decades of the 16th century onward, that is, from what
Georges Dottin calls “le grand départ de la chanson française,” anything
could be put to music and any music could be used to sing any fragment
of poetry. Writing in 1539, Gratien du Pont sums up the first aspect of this
phenomenon:
Car stille de Chanson est plus subiect au chant que chant au stille. Et com-
bien que l’on face chant sur mainctz Rondeaux, Ballades, Vers epars et
aultres dictes tailles. C’est au plaisir des Musiciens qui composent lesdits
chantz. . . . Dont tous les dessusdictz stilles sont à la subiection du chant,
non des regles de Rhetoricque.22
In other words, while in the late 15th century, the chanson was still a rather
fixed prosodic genre, subject to the metric rules of a virelai or a rondeau,
by the time of Marguerite de Navarre any suitable poem, or indeed frag-
ment thereof, could be made into a song. Such an expectation is widely
inscribed in the numerous anthologies of chansons published in Renais-
sance France, and it manifests itself in eight out of 47 of Marguerite’s
Chansons spirituelles, in the form of the recommendation of a tune that
can be used to sing the poetic text (“Sur le chant de . . .,” “Sus . . .,” “Autre,
sur le chant . . .”).23 These recommendations are usually to be understood
only as open-ended suggestions, as is shown in a 1579 anthology where a
“Chanson nouvelle d’une jeune fille se complaignante de son amy, qui l’a
laissée” is explicitly marked as adaptable to any melody: “Et se chante à
plaisir.” Indeed, chansons were free-market commodities, ready to be sold
on the streets, as advertised in these lyrics, clearly destined to be a “voix-
de-ville,” that is, a homophonic song reproducing commercial “cris”:
22 Gratien du Point is thus expanding on Pierre Fabri’s conceptual distinctions. Fabri

acknowledges that one can sing a ballade or a rondeau, but this does not mean that bal-
lades and rondeaux can be called “chansons.” Gratien du Pont refuses to ascribe the cat-
egory “chanson” to any specific rhetorical form, the only formal feature being a certain
amount of repetitions of words or lines. See Art et science de rhétorique métrifiée, reprint of
the 1539 edition (Geneva, 1972), fols. 38v–39r, quoted in Chansons françaises de la Renais-
sance, ed. Georges Dottin (Paris, 1991), p. 12; Pierre Fabri, Grant et vray art de pleine rheto-
rique, reprint of the 1521 edition (Geneva, 1972), Book 2, fol. 34v.
23 Chansons 1, 2, 7, 17, 19, 32, 34, 41.
246 jan miernowski
Argent cassé, vieille monnoye,

L’emouleur gaigne petit,
Croye de Champagne croye,
Oublie, oublie, où est-il?
À deux liards les chansons tant belles,
Douces meures, fruict nouveau,
À mes beaux cerneaux, noix nouvelles,
Capandu, poires de certeau.24
Lyrics are waiting to be sung, soliciting the attention of musicians, who
are eager to respond to such calls, as did Claudin de Sermisy by compos-
ing music to many of Marot’s chansons.
Did Marguerite de Navarre expect an equally enthusiastic response
to her chansons spirituelles on the part of musicians and the public? Did
she see her chansons primarily as songs to be sung collectively, melodies
to be hummed to oneself, poems to be read aloud in a circle of courtly
ladies and gentlemen, or rather did she intend them to be read quietly
in the private context of individual meditation? It is probably fair to sup-
pose all the above. From the tunes indicated for some of the chansons
one may clearly infer that the queen foresaw the musical performance
of her texts. Most of the songs are built on repetitive structures which
lend themselves to rhythmical and melodic arrangements. In many cases,
the incipit or a portion of it is systematically repeated throughout the
text.25 Elsewhere the queen puts forth the entire first strophe as a repeti-
tive pattern.26 Moreover, while writing many of her poems she must have
been humming well-known songs, which, in turn, she may reasonably
have expected her readers to recognize, anticipating them singing along,
even without the need for explicitly indicating the tunes in the printed
or manuscript collections. This is how Georges Dottin was able to iden-
tify 16 more songs, mostly from the 15th century, which Marguerite de
Navarre tried to emulate.27 Such echoing of popular tunes by the queen
24 “Chanson nouvelle de tous les cris de Paris, sur le chant de la nouvelle volte de
Provence,” in Sommaire de tous les recueils des Chansons Tant Amoureuses, Rustiques que
Musicales: Avec plusieurs Chansons nouvelles, non encore mises en lumière (Lyon, 1579), fols.
63r–64v.
25 Chansons 8, 9, 14, 16, 20, 21, 22, 28, 37. Gratien du Pont insists on the role of repetitions
in a chanson: “en chansons fault redire souvent ung mot, ou toute la ligne consequtive-
ment” (Art et science de rhétorique métrifiée, fol. 39r).
26 Chansons 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 36, 38.
27 Chansons 3, 5, 6, 11, 16, 20, 24, 28, 29, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 44, 45. See appendices in
Dottin’s and Clément’s editions. It would be fascinating, although risky, to hypothesize
as to which of the musical genres of chansons fashionable in the 1530s and 1540s, defined
by Dottin—the “chanson galante de cour,” the “chanson rustique,” or the “chanson
consists mostly of the borrowing of incipits or refrains, often modified for

the occasion but still easily recognizable. Even the long poetic dialogues
interjected amidst Marguerite’s chansons may have been conceived of as
material for potential songs. First, it was a widespread practice in the 16th
century to compose chansons by picking up only some of the lines of lon-
ger poems. Second, the Dialogue de Regulus et de Lucia and the Dialogue
de Dieu et de l’Homme have, respectively, 70 and 56 lines, which is far from
being the record among the texts contained in the Chansons spirituelles
section. Chanson 34, for instance, to be sung to the tune “Avez poinct veuz
la Peronnelle,” and which immediately precedes the first of the dialogues,
counts 164 lines. Finally, the dialogic structure is not found exclusively in
poems labeled “Dialogues.” Other songs have a highly elaborate dialogic
structure as well, such as chanson 23, where each strophe starts with a
question addressed to a wandering soul, followed by the soul’s answer,
and ending with a longer doctrinal explanation:
Ame, où vas tu sy soudain?
Je cours à plaisir mondain.
C’est en vain;
Car plaisir mondain est faux,
Tu te fourvoye,
Qui en tristesse et tous maux
Fine sa joye.
At the same time, the musical dimension of the Chansons spirituelles does
not preclude the possibility that Marguerite de Navarre destined them—
either poem by poem or as a whole section of the Marguerites—for col-
lective or solitary reading. Using the fashionable form of the chanson, she
may have gambled not only on the musical success of her lyrics, similar
to that enjoyed by Marot’s songs, but also on a more literary reception
and some kind of collegial readership, like the one she imagined for the
novellas of the Heptaméron.
Of course, there is one important difference between Marguerite’s chan-
sons nouvelles and her nouvelles nouvelles (as novellas were often called
in Renaissance France). In contrast to the queen’s Chansons spirituelles,
the Heptaméron did not receive any definite title during her lifetime.28
The religious allegories of the narratives have therefore to be inferred
narrative”—Marguerite had in mind when writing those poems which do not refer either
explicitly or implicitly to identifiable tunes.
28 The first printed edition of the Heptaméron is posthumous and the dates of the
extant manuscripts are uncertain.
248 jan miernowski
through a process of fascinating yet laborious interpretation, while the

spiritual character of the songs is explicitly advertised from the start. To
understand in what sense chansons spirituelles are indeed “spiritual,” one
must first remember that the free-market circulation of lyrics and melo-
dies involved both lay and religious works, and easily bridged thematic
divides. For instance, love songs, which obviously outnumbered any other
chansons, could provide melodies for religious lyrics as well as for politi-
cal songs.29 Indeed, before being recommended as an accompaniment in
Marguerite’s Chansons spirituelles, Marot’s “Jouyssance vous donneray”
served as the melodic line for the French translation of psalm 43, as
well as for three other religious songs, one anti-Protestant and two pro-
Reformation pieces.30
At this point, then, we must consider the question of the contrafactum,
a notion often associated with Marguerite’s Chansons spirituelles. A con-
trafactum is created when lay and religious songs trade their respective
lyrics or melodies.31 The genre traces its origins back to the Middle Ages,
for instance to the 13th century’s religious adaptations of erotic poetry by
Gautier de Coinci. As has been demonstrated by Dottin, the range of such
exchange is extensive: the religious remake can borrow the entire profane
text, only altering certain key words, such as replacing “ma Dame” with
“mon âme”; it can reuse merely the rhymes of the original lyrics, or even
limit its borrowing to the metric structure; it can also echo a thematic
scenario, as is the case in chanson 34, where the soul fleeing the tribula-
tions of the world emulates—on the spiritual level—the adventures of
Peronnelle, a young girl who leaves her parents’ home in order to follow
a group of passing soldiers.
Marguerite was certainly aware of numerous Protestant contrafacta,
such as the 1546 Chrestienne Resiouyssance by Eustorg de Beaulieu, who
wrote his pious propaganda in accordance with the latest fashionable
tunes. It is nevertheless incorrect to say that Marguerite’s Chansons spi-
rituelles are, generally speaking, simply a collection of contrafacta. First,
29 For example, a “Chanson nouvelle faite sur l’establissement du connetable de France

et se chante sur le chant Adieu Mamye,” in S’ensuyt plusieurs belles chansons nouvelles
(Paris, 1542).
30 For the bibliography on the extensive recycling of this song (including two other
occurrences in Marguerite’s plays), see Howard Mayer Brown, Music in the French Secular
Theater, 1400–1550 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 244–46.
31 For a systematic review of this question, see Dottin, ed. cit., pp. X–XVII.
some of her songs were written without any preexisting tune in mind.32
Second, as suggested earlier, some of these texts may not have been
primarily destined for musical performance, but rather conceived of as
devotional poetry which might ultimately—or not—be turned into songs.
What is even more important, however, is Marguerite’s unique concep-
tion of spirituality, which sets her poems far apart from Protestant and
Counter-Reformation contrafacta, and indeed from other Chansons spiri-
tuelles published during her time.
The Spirit
How does Marguerite understand the concept of “spirit”? What does it

mean for her that her chansons are “spiritual”? Despite her profound reli-
gious preoccupations, Marguerite de Navarre was a queen and a poet, not
a theologian. She did not write any theological treatise, nor leave a devo-
tional journal reflecting her religious and philosophical ideas. The closest
we can get to knowing what she thought, therefore, is to analyze her works
as well as the writings that she may have directly or indirectly known and
to consider them as mirrors of her religious beliefs.33 A particular role in
such a venture is played by the letters-treatises written between 1521 and
1524 by the bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briçonnet, Marguerite’s mentor
and protégé.34
As is often the case in this epistolary exchange, in her brief letter of
17 November 1521, Marguerite launches Briçonnet on a new path of theo-
logical reflection. This she does by submitting to him a metaphor for his
consideration: God is a heavenly organist blowing the wind of his spirit
into human pipes, large and small. In his lengthy response, the bishop
develops this metaphorical image into a treatise on the nature of human
32 Dottin gives the example of chanson 35, which was set to music after the queen’s
death by two different composers: De Bussi vel De Bussy in 1554 and Roland de Lassus in
1567 (ed. cit., p. 164).
33 This is the method adopted in the fundamental book by Gary Ferguson, Mirroring
Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (Edinburgh, 1992).
As noted by Viviane Mellinghoff-Bourgerie, Briçonnet’s letters should not be considered
as the simple reflection of an intimate relationship between a spiritual director and his
penitent; see “Échange épistolaire entre Marguerite d’Angoulême et Guillaume Briçonnet:
discours mystiques ou direction spirituelle?,” in Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1992: Actes du
Colloque international de Pau, 1992, ed. Nicole Cazauran and James Dauphiné (Mont-de-
Marsan, 1995), pp. 135–57.
250 jan miernowski
beings and their relation to God and to each other (Correspondance,

1:65–70). Briçonnet states that spiritual harmony is contrary to its worldly
counterpart. In the latter case, in order to play in tune all the pipes must
receive as much air as is required by their individual size: the small ones
little air, the big ones proportionally more. Spiritual harmony, by contrast,
relies only on the small pipes—“L’esperit divin ne remplist que les petitz
vaisseaulx, esquelz mieulx se garde sans eventer la doulce et bonne odeur
que ès grans”—while the big ones are broken by earthly pleasures and
affections. Moreover, unlike the material organ, the spiritual instrument
is stronger when its small human pipes are weaker. This is so because
the flesh and the spirit are communicating vessels, bound by an inversely
proportional relationship: the stronger one is, the weaker is the other. In
order to fortify our spirit, we should therefore diminish our flesh.
Despite differences in fortitude between the particular pipes composing
the spiritual organ, Briçonnet is quick to stress that the Divine Organist
sends wind to all of them—that is, the grace of the Holy Spirit—according
to their faith. This does not mean that every pipe produces an equal sound
and harmony or indeed that it plays at all. As is the case with material
organs, only those pipes play that are activated by the musician, in this
case God. Such a conception of divine election, however, does not con-
demn humans to passivity. On the contrary, people who understand this
“evangelical doctrine,” people who are “spiritual” in the sense given to the
term by Saint Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians 6:1, know that all that is
good in Christians results from their collaboration with divine grace. Thus
spiritual harmony unites believers among themselves and binds them to
the goodness of God, who bestows his grace in order to perfect and bring
about their actions:
tous chrestiens sont unes orgues pour perpetuelles louenges du debonnaire
Seigneur et chacun d’eulx tuyaux ès dicts orgues toutz rempliz de son esperit,
qui touche les cœurs de chacun ès operations vertueuses qu’ilz font. . . . Car
le bien que nous faisons, qui est ung son et harmonie plaisant à Dieu, n’est
aultre chose que estre remply de grace et touchéz de la bonté divine, nous
prevenant en multiplicité de grace et en nous ouvrant et parfaisant toutes
operations.35
Thus at the outset of Marguerite’s intellectual, religious, and artistic life,
Briçonnet develops the musical theme suggested by the queen into a
coherent doctrine about the flesh and the spirit, the works of humans
35 Correspondance, 1:68–69. See also 2:243.

and the grace of God. How is Marguerite able to use and expand these
teachings later in her Chansons spirituelles?
Chanson 24 raises similar issues to those discussed by Briçonnet in
his considerations on spiritual harmony. It revolves around two specific
questions asked by a man to God: first, how to deal with the soul’s fear
of damnation, and second, who will free the soul from “the body of this
death”?36 The answers provided by God are very much in line with Briçon-
net’s teachings. The soul should find solace in a shock therapy consist-
ing of the realization of its sinfulness and of the worthlessness of any
of its deeds. After confessing that it is void of any good, it will aspire to
become nothing, indeed it would prefer never to have come to be. This
drive to nothingness, so characteristic of the Pseudo-Dionysian mysti-
cism that Briçonnet, Lefèvre d’Étaples, and other members of the Meaux
circle inspired in the queen, corresponds to the image of the small pipes
of God’s organ in the bishop’s letter, “[l]esquelz sont . . . toutz foiebles et
qui tousjours tendent à plus se afloiblir.”37
The answer to the second question also has affinities with Briçonnet’s
thought. Salvation will come not from the senses or from reason but from
the grace of God, for which the soul is predestined (“predestinée”). This
heavily loaded theological term appears only once in the Chansons spiri-
tuelles and does not seem to have the same connotations as in Calvin’s
teachings.38 It refers rather to the election by God of certain pipes of his
organ: although all of them are powered by the wind of the spirit, only
those produce a sound that the divine organist chooses to activate.
While they insist on the role to be played by the faithful, Briçonnet’s and
Marguerite’s doctrines of divine election thus simultaneously exclude any
presumptuous ambition to earn salvation through one’s deeds. Referring
the queen to the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, the bishop of Meaux
reminds her that the graces bestowed on humans by the Spirit of God
should not be left unattended to burn out, but should be continuously
36 As noted by Clément, ed. cit., the last expression comes directly from Rom. 7:24 (“de
corpore mortis”). In this passage, Saint Paul opposes the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
to the law of sin and death.
37 Correspondance, 1:67. On the influence of Pseudo-Dionysian mysticism on Margue-
rite, see my Signes dissimilaires: La quête des noms divins dans la poésie française de la
Renaissance (Geneva, 1997), pp. 33–99.
38 See, however, vv. 11–20 of the Dialogue de Dieu et de l’Homme, which may provide
insight into the problem of human regeneration. On this topic, see Carol Thysell, The Plea-
sure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian (Oxford, 2000), pp. 66–78. On the
Evangelicals’ understanding of predestination, see Reid, King’s Sister, 2:491ff.
252 jan miernowski
fed by acts of love and “œuvres flamboiantes.”39 On the other hand,

Briçonnet is equally eager to stress that salvation comes from our faith in
the grace of God, which is a divine gift and not the result of our actions.40
Marguerite insists as well that Christ, the fountain of salvation, gives
living waters freely, without cost or labor: “Sans or, argent, ny avoir / L’eau
donne en abondance, / Non par labeur, ne devoir, / Par merite, ou puis-
sance; / Mais par pure Election” (chanson 14, vv. 43–47).41 This does not
imply, however, that human actions are meaningless. Chanson 29 is a pre-
cise roadmap for those who aspire to become “Christ-like,” a spiritual goal
dear to Lefèvre d’Étaples and his followers, after being highlighted by the
immensely popular 15th-century devotional treatise Imitatio Christi:
Ses biens aux povres fault donner
D’un cœur joyeux et volontaire,
Et les injures pardonner,
Et à ses ennemis bien faire;
Laisser vengeance, ire, et envie,
Aymer l’ennemy si l’on peult,
Aymer celle qui n’ayme mye;
Il ne fait pas le tour qui veult. (vv. 9–16)
The voluntarism of these lines is quite striking, but not devoid of ambigu-
ity. While one should voluntarily (“d’un cœur volontaire”) renounce earthly
possessions, the refrain of the song seems less upbeat: “Il ne fait pas le tour
qui veult.” Does it mean simply that such heroic actions are not easy and
that some of us will not have enough determination to accomplish them?
Or might it mean that it is not enough to aspire to such moral heroism,
that human will by itself is incapable of good deeds? The first meaning
corresponds to the commonly admitted, idiomatic sense of the phrase
“faire le tour,” which refers to the success of someone’s risky endeavor,
while the second, setting “qui veult” apart, potentially puts human voli-
tion into question.
The apparent ambivalence of the refrain of chanson 29 clearly shows
the different discursive possibilities embedded in the argumentation of
a theologian on the one hand and in the song of a poet on the other.
39 Correspondance, 1:103. See also 1:144, where Briçonnet’s theology of human deeds
meets his call for the queen to become a potential leader of spiritual revival in the
Church.
40 Correspondance, 1:119: “Nous sommes saulvéz par foy en la grace de Dieu et non de
nous. Il vient du don de Dieu et non par noz œuvres.”
41 See also chanson 7, vv. 33–40.
However, the differences between Briçonnet’s doctrine and Marguerite’s

spirituality should not be reduced to the diversity of discursive forms used
by the two authors. In his extensive and nuanced analysis of Marguerite’s
beliefs, Gary Ferguson notes how in her later works—including the Chan-
sons spirituelles—Marguerite is less keen to stress the role of good works:
“just as she came to conceive of justification in increasingly Christocentric
terms, so more and more in her later poetry she gives the impression that
works are not so much a test of faith, of which they are an integral and
necessary part, as the work of Christ himself in the life of the believer.”42
Such a Christocentric conception of human deeds could also be inferred
from Briçonnet’s vision of the divine organist, who blows his spirit into all
kinds of pipes but touches only some of them in order to produce the spir-
itual harmony of good works among people. Nonetheless, it is true that
one can hardly find in the Chansons spirituelles a call for active coopera-
tion with God’s grace as clearly articulated as in the bishop’s letters. Gary
Ferguson ascribes this evolution in Marguerite’s opinion on justification
to her exposure to Calvin’s Institutio christianae religionis, first published
in 1536. Such possible influences do not contradict however the queen’s
firm attachment to the Catholic Church and her ardent desire to see it
spiritually reformed and revived.
In mapping out the complex confessional landscape stretching between
Rome and Geneva, Thierry Wanegffelen has pointed to the real presence
of Christ in the Eucharist as the decisive criterion of Catholic religious
sensibility.43 This Catholic dogma is vividly expressed in Marguerite’s
Chansons spirituelles, thanks to the possibilities offered by the metaphoric
language of poetry. Chanson 6 is a dialogue between a wise woman and
a young hunter who inquires where and how can he find the quarry he
pursues. The woman replies that the stag he looks for is so kind and ten-
der that if he gives it his heart, it will teach him how to eat its body and
its blood. In this metaphorical representation, the Eucharist is depicted
as the hunter’s “curée,” a piece of raw meat cut off from the freshly killed
animal. The crudity of this image could easily be taken for a piece of
Calvinist propaganda, if it were in the least satiric or ironic. Such is not
the case however. On the contrary, the bloody image is a metaphor for a
42 Ferguson, Mirroring Belief, p. 169. See also pp. 10–53 and 167–78.
43 Thierry Wanegffelen, Ni Rome, ni Genève: Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au
XVIe siècle (Paris, 1997).
254 jan miernowski
state of perfect communion between Christ and the faithful.44 It should

be stressed that more than an orthodox representation of the doctrine
of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Marguerite’s poetic repre-
sentation depicts the mystical union of God and the human being. It is
indeed a very original kind of transubstantiation, by which the flesh of the
believer is transformed into the agonizing body of the Lord:
En ceste delicate chair
La vostre sera transmuée;
O bien heureux qui peult toucher
À ceste grand teste muée,
À la chair courue et huée,
Mise à mort, rostie pour nous,
Sur la croix pendue à trois cloux! (Chanson 6, vv. 71–77)
Partaking in the sufferings of Christ on the cross amounts to having one’s
body metamorphosed into mystical venison. Moreover, this relation is
reciprocal, since the stag will take the hunter at the same time as it is
taken by him (“En vous pregnant, se lairra prendre,” v. 64). Indeed through
the rich connotations of Marguerite’s metaphors, one has the impression
that the faithful incorporates the body and blood of Christ, really present
in the Eucharist, as much as he or she is incorporated by the Lord himself.
Such is the meaning of another image of the union of the divine and the
human in chanson 26: Christ the good shepherd, who promises to feed his
lambs with his “pain, qui est blanc, non bis.” This transparent allusion to
the Eucharistic feast is followed by the announcement of union with the
Lord after death:
Mortes je les voy escorcher,
Pour les reünir en ma chair:
Je les fais menu destrencher,
Lors sont vivantes;
Et en moy qui les ayme cher,
Sont triomphantes. (vv. 37–42)
Mystic union with Christ takes the form of a bloodbath: the lambs are
skinned, butchered, quartered, piecemealed, in order to be all the more
alive and triumphant in the glory of God’s overwhelming love.
44 For other references to the Eucharist, see chanson 6, vv. 51–52; chanson 30, v. 27;
chanson 33, v. 3.
Beneath the vivid colors of Marguerite’s poetic representation, one can

perceive quite distinct doctrinal lines. The queen is receptive to the teach-
ings of Briçonnet and attuned to the questions fiercely debated around
her, yet her poetic voice articulates an original spirituality, accentuating
issues of special importance to her. Such is her recurrent insistence in the
Chansons spirituelles on combining the doctrine of divine election with a
clear-cut opposition between Law and Faith:
Le Fidele dedens la Loy
Tout caché, tremblant, et peureux
Par la lumiere de la Foy
Voit cler; et devient amoureux
De Dieu, qui le convoye:
Voicy nouvelle joye.45
The transition between Law and Faith, each placed strategically at the
end of a verse, is grounded in a specific epistemology and a characteristic
anthropology.
Illuminated by faith, humans come to “see”; in other words, they under-
stand their ontological weakness and the Truth which is Christ himself. In
order to achieve such illumination, one has to open his or her “spiritual
eye”: “Changeons tristesse en joye / Et en chant nostre dueil, / À fin que
mieux on croye / Ouvrons de l’esprit l’œil” (chanson 32, vv. 1–4). Again here,
Marguerite seems to follow the teachings of Briçonnet, who distinguishes
three levels of cognition: corporal vision pertaining to the senses; the “eye
of the soul,” limited to intellectual understanding; and the “spiritual eye,”
which provides a vision “ineffable, innominable et incomprehensible en
son amplitude et inacessibilié, et neantmoings tant necessaire que, sans
elle, l’entendement est mort, estaint et inutille.”46 Spiritual vision super-
sedes reason, while making intellectual apprehension possible, albeit in a
paradoxically negative way, since true comprehension consists in under-
standing that spiritual light is incomprehensible.
This is why Marguerite’s “spiritual eye” should not be mistakenly iden-
tified with a Ficinian “internal vision” (interior visus) or “eye of reason”
(rationis oculus). It is rather synonymous with the “eye of faith” that figures
in the Heptaméron and in Les Prisons.47 Contrary to the rational character
45 Chanson, 8, vv. 26–31. See also chansons 5, 9, 37, 44.

46 Correspondance, 1:184, 189, and 32.
47 Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, ed. Renja Salminen (Geneva, 1999), p. 188; Les
Prisons, ed. Simone Glasson (Geneva, 1978), Book III, vv. 2184–86. See my “L’intentionnalité
256 jan miernowski
of the Ficinian concept, the “eye of faith” associates cognition with inten-
tionality, following its patristic, and more specifically Augustinian, origins.
It refers to the orientation of human will toward God, who is absolutely
transcendent and not, as held by neo-Platonic thought, gradually attain-
able through a continuous hierarchy of beings. The “spiritual eye,” the “eye
of faith,” is properly the vision of the human heart. For Saint Augustine,
the faithful are literally called upon to look with their hearts (“Non videtur
oculis, sed corde”), in other words to relinquish all transitory things and to
orient their intention, purified and simplified in faith, toward heaven.48
The concept of “heart” is fundamental for Marguerite’s spirituality, and
indeed for the anthropology of the Evangelicals in general.49 It is however
not synonymous with the notion of “spirit,” but rather subordinated to it
within a hierarchy of ontological levels of the human being, a hierarchy
which is dynamically oriented upward in a never-ending movement of
transcendence. Such hierarchy determines the compositional structure of
chanson 41. Marguerite starts with the paradox familiar from Briçonnet’s
meditations on spiritual harmony: considered from the point of view of
human judgment, her body, her heart, and her spirit are weak, but this
fragility is in fact a consolation, full of the promise of heavenly rewards:
Mon esprit, mon cueur et mon corps,
Selon ton haultain jugement,
Sont si débiles et si mortz
Qu’ilz n’ont aucun soustenement;
Mais leur foiblesse,
En leur tristesse,
Purgatoire et pugnition,
M’est seure consolation. (vv. 1–8)
In the subsequent three stanzas, the queen applies this principle to each
of the parts of her being. Her body crumbles under the weight of sorrow;
her heart is annihilated by a sense of loss; her spirit, which is yet founded
on human reason, causes her the most suffering: the entire hierarchy of
dans l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 63

(2001), 201–25 (pp. 206–11).
48 In psalmum XXXIII enarratio. Sermo II, Habitus die Dominico, 15, in Patrologiae cursus
completus. Series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–91), 37:1641.
49 See John D. Lyons, “The ‘Cueur’ in the Heptaméron: The Ideology of Concealment,” in
Les Visages et les voix de Marguerite de Navarre: Actes du Colloque international sur Margue-
rite de Navarre (Duke University), 10–11 avril 1992, ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris, 1995), pp. 107–23,
as well as the studies by Gérard Defaux on the rhetoric of pectus, such as “Montaigne et la
rhétorique de l’indicible: l’exemple ‘De la tristesse,’ ” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renais-
sance 55 (1993), 5–24.
her human faculties disintegrates in order to give way to the overwhelm-

ing power of God.
Briçonnet had proposed a similar radical anthropology in responding
to Marguerite’s self-accusation of being too much attached to earthly
concerns (Correspondance, 1:223–28). The bishop distinguishes between
different categories of people who are “too corporeal” (“trop en corps”).
First come those who, like a mole, remain completely blinded by their
pursuit of carnal pleasures. A variant of this attitude consists in placing
one’s salvation in material gestures and other superstitious ceremonies.
Second, there are the owls, which dwell in obscurity and avoid the light:
they aspire to know the world, but have no interest in its Creator. Such
excessive interest in knowledge is also to be rejected. A true Christian
should be irrational and surrender reason for the sake of the spirit. Thus
a three-stage hierarchy is established: the flesh should be obedient to the
rational soul, which in turn should give way to the spirit. As we can see,
Briçonnet’s letter goes further than Marguerite’s chanson 41. The queen
distinguishes the heart and the “spirit grounded in reason,” but these two
volitional and rational aspects are encompassed by the bishop into the one
notion of the soul. Moreover, to the levels described in Marguerite’s chan-
son, Briçonnet adds another: that of the divine spirit that fills the human
being. Interestingly, even at that highest level one risks becoming “trop en
corps.” Such are people who misuse the grace bestowed upon them and
either want to understand what cannot be understood or despise all life,
even when drunk with God’s love.
According to Briçonnet, Marguerite is not free from any of these errors:
“Et tous trois sont trop en corps, desquelz estes vous, Madame, qui vous
dictes trop en corps” (Correspondance, 1:228). This criticism is neverthe-
less tempered by a final wish that the queen, truly dead in her flesh, be
alive in Jesus. This is the bishop’s concluding reference to the dialectic of
death and life, which he evoked at the outset of his letter:
Par vie mourant, morte est mort vivant et engendrant enfans de mort, qui
sont en la mort de vie viviffiéz et adoptéz enfans d’esperit, pour en vivant
mortiffier les œuvres du corps mortiferes et veneficques qu’il exerce en sa
tirannise et dominacion dont est privé par vie d’esperit regnant, qui ne peult
que œuvres spirituellement engendrer. Enfans qui cheminent par esperit et
longitude de foy dilatée par latitude de charité, dressée et eslevée par haul-
teur et sublimité d’esperance, telz sont hors de corps terrestre et charnel.50
50 Correspondance, 1:223. See also 2:179, 207.

258 jan miernowski
The children of death become children of the spirit through the death of
corporeal life and indeed through the death of death itself, thanks to the
sacrifice of Christ on the cross. The poisonous and deadly works of the
flesh are mortified; the body dies making room for the triumphant spirit,
which can perform its works only spiritually. The children of the spirit are
thus free of the flesh and able to move through a tri-dimensional spiritual
space determined by the three theological virtues of faith, charity, and
hope.
Marguerite’s Chansons spirituelles display a similar exaltation of death,
ardently desired, and paradoxically turned into spiritual life through the
death of Christ on the cross. Such is the case in this apostrophe to Christ,
which ends chanson 42:
Faictz reformation
De ta formation,
Tue d’Adam vivant
L’ame qui n’est que vent;
L’ame vivant en moy

Me mect en tel esmoy
Que je ne te puis veoir,
Ny croire, ne sçavoir.
Mectz à mort l’animal

Cause de tout mon mal;
Toy seul le peulx tuer,
J’ay beau m’esvertuer.
Plante en son lieu, Seigneur,

Ton esprit enseigneur
Qui est vivifiant,
Voire et deyfiant. (vv. 141–56)
The human soul is nothing but emptiness and should be killed by God.
Alongside the body, it is part of the human animal that has to give way to
the spirit of God, which will bring the human being to life and even deify
him or her. Briçonnet insists that such deification is not only an annihila-
tion of the body, but the absorption of the rational spirit of humanity into
the divine spirit of God:
Sy raison regne en l’homme, il est necessaire que la sensualité meure; sy
l’esperit domine, raison doibt caller la voylle. Quant la divinité regnera et
que Dieu sera tout en tout (“Erit Deus omnia in omnibus”), lors l’esperit sera
absorbé en la divinité et ne vivera plus, ains regnera. La divinité, deiffiant
l’esperit et le conformant à elle, luy donnera vie incomprehensible et trans-

cendant l’intelligence de tout esperit.51
This sublime state of transcendent being cannot even be called “spiritual
life”; it is properly a “divine life” and will be reached only if we free our-
selves from our corporeal prison.
The ascent toward transcendence is therefore a kind of death drive.
Such spiritual attraction to death must have played a particular role in
Marguerite’s evangelical entourage. Symptomatic in this respect is the
Traicté du Souverain Bien, printed sometime before 1527 by Simon Du Bois,
the queen’s protégé and a key publisher in the “Navarrian network.” The
book is dedicated to Marguerite, who is depicted as the bride of the Song
of Solomon, sustained by her groom with different gifts and in particular
with a “spiritual vision” that allows her to judge the true value of things.
And indeed, the central question of the book is to know the nature of the
supreme good. Different answers are successively discussed and rejected:
the supreme good is not the divine graces, since we need to multiply them;
nor is it the knowledge of the Scriptures, because what is more important
is to have faith in these and to be able to prove it by one’s deeds; even
charity cannot be considered the supreme good, since it grows each day
and the supreme good is, by definition, timeless and cannot increase since
it eternally is. The final answer to the quest of the bride may seem surpris-
ing: the supreme good is death, which, far from being a privation of life,
constitutes the beginning of true life and the eternal fruition of all that
is good. Having come to this conclusion, the ecstatic bride is annihilated
and absorbed into her divine groom.
Without question, death is at the heart of the spirituality of the Chan-
sons spirituelles. I would suggest that it is also the unifying thematic prin-
ciple which underlies the literary project of the queen’s chansons, that is,
the pieces assembled both in the Marguerites and in BnF, fr. 24.298 under
the title Chansons spirituelles, including the initial “Pensées,” the rondeau,
and the two dialogues of the manuscript series. Of course, presiding
over the whole collection is the death of François I, which serves as the
gateway to the Chansons spirituelles in the form of the two funeral medi-
tations followed by the rondeau on the same topic. The mourning of Fran-
çois I is also heavily present in the MS fr. 24.298 songs. The progression
51 Correspondance, 1:173, with the reference to 1 Cor. 15:28, much appreciated by

Marguerite.
260 jan miernowski
body—heart—rational soul, that we identified in chanson 41, culminates

in the painful memory of that loss. Reason fails precisely because it brings
to Marguerite memories of the one she will see no more. The next stanza
recapitulates the pitiful situation where the death of Marguerite’s royal
brother results in the disintegration of her own self. Yet such cataclysmic
defeat turns in fact into a spiritual triumph: the more her body, her heart,
and her rational spirit are diminished, the stronger she feels the power of
the One who has reduced her to nothing:
Dont c’est tout cueur, corps et esprit,
Ont perdu leur force et le sens:
Mais plus leur pouvoir est prescript
Plus cestui là de dieu je sens,
Qui a la gloire
De la victoire
De m’avoir mise toute à riens,
Rompant mes terrestres liens. (vv. 33–40)
Death, therefore, is not an irreparable loss, but rather the supreme good.
Yes, the Chansons spirituelles are a testimony to the queen’s mourning of
her brother, which is synonymous with the end of her own life. Yet this
collection of spiritual songs should not be understood as a poetic tomb, a
monument to the memory of the king of France. Paradoxically, François
I’s death is the blessed godly intervention, a divine grace, which touches
the “weak pipe” of the royal sister in order to produce the beautiful sound
of spiritual harmony. This death is as essential to the spiritual and liter-
ary project of the Chansons spirituelles, as are fundamental for Les Prisons
the exemplary agonies which crown this lengthy and complex allegori-
cal poem, and which involve Marguerite’s mother-in-law Marguerite de
Lorraine, her husband Charles d’Alençon, her mother Louise de Savoie,
and again her brother François. In both cases, the deaths of Marguerite’s
relatives are not circumstantial additions to the artistic and ideological
project of these poems; rather they constitute the capstone of their com-
positional structure and the climax of their spiritual evolution.
With François I dead, Marguerite lives no more. Yet such a brutal
rupture with earthly concerns is in fact rapture into the heavenly realm;
such annihilation of the self “trop en corps” (as Marguerite deplored her
state in the correspondence with Briçonnet) is a fusion with the divine
“All in all.”52 Briçonnet affirms it repeatedly in his letters, following the
52 This expression, much favored by Briçonnet and borrowed from 1 Cor. 15:28, appears
also in Chansons spirituelles, no 13, vv. 34 and 37, and no 17, v. 28.
teachings and borrowing the vocabulary of Charles de Bovelles and Nicho-

las of Cusa: annihilation (aneantissemen) goes hand in hand with mystical
ascent (assurection).53 From this ontological roller coaster, Marguerite de
Navarre takes up the paradoxical dialectics of Nothingness and All:
Vous estes donc la Vie d’un chacun,
Mais sans vous morts et moins que pouldre et cendre,
Et vous en nous par grace voulez rendre
Ce qui n’est Rien estre fait Tout en un.
Et nous faisant cognoistre nostre Rien

Et vostre Tout par grace et par puissance,
Nous renonçant avons la jouyssance
De vous, Seigneur, [le] seul bon et seul bien.54
Time and again, Marguerite’s chansons tell the story of the transforma-
tion, “reformation,” of what God has created, the conversion of human
Nothingness into the Divine All. Chanson 1 asks God to “transform” her
sorrow into joy (v. 135); chanson 2 deplores that her body and her spirit
are “converted” into a plaint (vv. 43–45); the rondeau states that the death
of the brother has “changed” his sister’s fear into a great desire to die (vv.
6–7); chanson 3 implores the grace of life in God for the soul whose heart is
abandoned and who has experienced death; chanson 6 praises the hunter
for allowing his body to be “transmuted” into the body of the Christ-stag
he hunts; in chanson 7 the crucified Pelican promises to “transform” into
himself any soul who will recognize its nothingness (v. 53); each strophe
of chanson 8 is devoted to a joyful transformation—winter into spring, a
dead tree into a flourishing one, a fearful nightingale into a singing one, a
Christian soul imprisoned by the prescriptions of the Law into a faithful
being enamored with God and confident in his or her salvation, and so
on; in chanson 10 the prodigal son begs his heavenly Father to “remake”
him into a new man “par mutation admirable,” (vv. 43–48); in chanson 11 a
soul illuminated by grace thanks God for “making” its Nothingness to be a
divine All; in chanson 12 the soul, depicted as a young bride, rejoices that
God has drawn her to himself (“tiré à soy”). The list could go on.55 Each
chanson presents the case of a human soul which either longs to be spiri-
tually transformed or rejoices because it undergoes such transformation.
53 For instance, Correspondance, 2:176, 221, 223.

54 Chanson 11, vv. 21–28. See also chanson 7, vv. 41–48; chanson 13, vv. 18–37; chanson 21,
vv. 13–28; chanson 30, v. 41; chanson 41, v. 39; Les Prisons, III, vv. 2865ff.
55 It could include in addition, for example, the chanson inserted into novella 19 of the
Heptaméron, also focused on a spiritual transformation.
262 jan miernowski
In each instance, such transformation is presented as the death of the

“old” and carnal self, a death which at the same time is a joyful amorous
union:
Le doux regard de ton amour
Est un bien, sur tous desirable:
Il tue l’Ame sans sejour;
Et morte, à CHRIST la fait semblable.
O mutation delectable,
Quand Rien en son Tout fait retour!
Làs, avancez donc ce bon jour.56
A “delightful transformation” . . . Death as an ecstatically joyful act of
love may be considered the central topic of Marguerite’s Chansons spiritu-
elles. At the end of the road map of chanson 29, which lists the deeds that
the faithful should accomplish in order to imitate Christ, there is a stanza
devoted to the love and joy of dying:
De la mort fault estre vainqueur,
En la trouvant plaisante et belle,
Voire et l’aymer d’aussi bon cœur,
Que l’on fait la vie mortelle;
S’esjouyr en melancolie,
Et tourment, dont la Chair se deult,
Aymer la mort comme la vie;
Il ne fait pas le tour qui veult.
Death is beautiful; it is a glorious, happy encounter with Christ and there-
fore, paradoxically, it is the start of a new life. Thanks to Jesus’s passion
and resurrection, death is a source not of fear but of joy, of ineffable amo-
rous pleasure.57 It is therefore quite fitting that the second poetic medita-
tion announcing François I’s death should be sung to Marot’s erotic tune
“Jouyssance vous donneray.” Marguerite’s decision does not stem from
any incestuous cravings, nor is it yet another instance of the arbitrary
circulation of lyrics and melodies on the free market of French chan-
sons nouvelles. Rather, her brother’s death, as terribly painful as it is for
the worldly flesh, is paradoxically a blessing, a decisive step on the road
56 Chanson 30, vv. 36–42. Line 40 provides the conclusion for Ehsan Ahmed’s important
article devoted to the role of death, in particular that of François I, in Marguerite’s chan-
sons spirituelles: “Marguerite de Navarre’s Chansons spirituelles and the Poet’s Passion,”
57 Chanson 7, vv. 5–20; chanson 15, vv. 41–55. See also Correspondance, 1:58, 138, 197.
On spiritual joy in the Heptaméron, see Judith Perrenoud-Wörner, Rire et sacré: la vision
humoristique de la vérité dans l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre (Geneva, 2008).
to annihilation and mystical ascent, a promise of “jouyssance” that the

divine spouse gives to the poor sister, completely crushed in her transitory
being.58 The paradoxical transformation of death into amorous pleasure
is the driving force of Marguerite’s chansons. It also provides the conclu-
sion to chanson 24, discussed above. This joyfully proclaims the love that
awaits the soul freed from its fears of corporal and spiritual death, saved
by the grace of God: “La douceur goustera d’aymer / Après avoir gousté
l’amer” (vv. 31–32).59
The “delightful transformation” of death into an act of love also pro-
vides an overarching compositional unity to the series of chansons spiritu-
elles. It is within this thematic logic that one may understand the insertion
of the two dialogues into the series in BnF, fr. 24.298: the Dialogue de
Regulus et de Lucia and the Dialogue de Dieu et de l’Homme. The first of
these is Marguerite’s remake of Horace’s ode III, ix and brings together
two ex-lovers, who, after being in love for some time with other partners,
decide to break their respective commitments and to make up again. This
renewed relationship is supposed to provide the characters of the dia-
logue with a “beatitude,” for which one should be ready to relinquish even
the sweet rewards of heaven. The light and profane tone of this piece
has prompted modern editors of the Chansons spirituelles to eliminate
it from the series, while including the Dialogue de Dieu et de l’Homme,
clearly devoted to theological matters.60 Yet in light of the importance
of the “delightful transformation” of loving death, one should perhaps
reconsider this editorial decision. In fact, there are numerous contrast-
ing echoes between the two dialogues, as well as between the chansons
forming their respective contexts. For instance, the theological dialogue
starts with the human being asking its divine “Master” for guidance and
enlightenment. This may be a veiled response to the possibly symbolic
58 Similarly, in the Comédie sur le Trépas du Roy, where chanson 2 is integrated into the
plot of the play. Amarissime, who mourns the death of Pan, wants to sing “loing de toute
musique.” Yet it is still “Jouyssance vous donneray” which provides the melody for her cry
of despair (v. 41). Such conjunction of death and “jouyssance” announces the conclusion
of the play, where Amarissime joins Paraclesis in singing that Pan is not dead but alive:
“Ma pauvre voix vous accompagnera / En ceste joye, ainsi qu’en la tristesse” (vv. 541–42),
Œuvres complètes, ed. Cazauran, vol. 4, Théâtre, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Olivier Millet
(Paris, 2002), pp. 420 and 440–41.
59 This verse clearly resonates with the names of Agapy and Amarissime in Comédie
sur le Trespas du Roy.
60 The Dialogue de Regulus et de Lucia has migrated to vol. 8 of the Œuvres complètes,
ed. Cazauran, where Richard Cooper provides valuable notes and commentary (Paris,
2007), pp. 532–34, 661–63.
264 jan miernowski
names of the characters of the first, erotic dialogue, since there is clearly
little chance that Lucia (lux, that is light, possibly the light of faith) will
find eternal solace with Regulus (regula, in other words, the rule of the
law).61 Indeed, the second dialogue opposes the constant peace of God’s
love to the erratic inconstancy of pagan lovemaking. The whole dialogue
between Man and God is the story of human Nothingness returning to the
divine All in order to forget itself and put its soul at rest for eternity. By
contrast, the pagan inconsistency of the characters of the Horatian dia-
logue seems all the more disturbing. It comes therefore as no surprise that
a similarly dramatic representation of change in time can be found in the
immediate vicinity of both dialogues. Chanson 40, which directly follows
the theological debate, is almost in its entirety the desperate cry of a soul
unable to recover its past, lost in its present, and unsure of its future: “Je
ne suis celluy que suis,” “Je ne sçay que je seray,” “Je ne fuz ce que je fuz.”
It is only the concluding stanza which provides solace in transcendent
timelessness: “Qui est, est, et le sera, / Le constant tousjours demeure.”62
Chanson 34 introduces the dialogue between Regulus and Lucia, while
demonstrating that the amorous encounter with Christ is joy bursting out
amidst melancholy and sorrow. In other words, the spiritual transforma-
tion that is the thematic core of Marguerite’s chansons is by no means a
banal love story with a happy ending. Rather, it is an extreme existential
experience in which human suffering becomes bearable only thanks to
the miraculous gift of hope. Such is the dramatic journey undertaken by
the soul in chanson 34. It starts with the contemptuous gaze of those who
consider this unfortunate pilgrim an outcast who crumbles under every
possible misfortune, bereft of any joy. The first half of the chanson depicts
her ascent to the “mount of all tribulation,” a deserted, wild place, covered
with thorns and inhabited by serpents and toads, crows and owls. Here
one cannot find man-made beauty either, nothing that might rejoice the
“carnal eye,” not even a church or temple, any picture or painting. There
is nobody to talk to, nobody to listen to, nothing and no one to see. Yet
amidst this landscape of biblical desolation, the pilgrim soul is not dis-
couraged. She lives only with her thoughts, which she pursues crying and
then laughing, pleased with her own suffering (“Souvent en l’entreprenant
61 The couple Lucia-Lux and Regulus-Regula may allude to chanson 8, vv. 26–31, quoted
above.
62 Chanson 40, vv. 5, 9, 13, 21–22.
pleure, / Et puis rid, aymant sa douleur,” vv. 91–92). All this erratic and
strange behavior relies however on her love for her “Amy,” who sustains
her with faith. In him, she finds the earth lush with green vegetation, all
the joy possible, a nourishing manna, and a harmony so beautiful that
neither human being nor bird can emulate it. Filled with genuine love, the
pilgrim soul lives in her Lover all the more as she dies to herself. The dra-
matic antinomy tearing apart the chanson finds its paradoxical conclusion
in the last stanza devoted to the “happy death” of the enamored soul:
Or est la malheurese heureuse,
Et son malheur faict très heureux,
Puisqu’elle [est] parfaicte amoureuse
De son trespas faict amoureulx.
The Chant
What kind of poetics corresponds to such a radical and paradoxical spir-

ituality? The question seems all the more important since within Mar-
guerite’s elaborate literary discourse one finds inscribed a forceful refusal
of literature. While ascending the mount of tribulation where she exiles
herself in order to find solace with her divine Lover, the pilgrim soul of
the richly metaphorical chanson 34 leaves behind all writing instruments
and books:
Là ne cr[o]ist papier, encre ou plume
Pour escripre ce qu’elle veult,
Ny livre, livret ny volume;
Toutefois elle ne s’en deult. (vv. 69–72)
As we know, the merry company exchanging entertaining tales in the
Heptaméron starts this literary venture by excluding all literary men who
might impair the truthfulness of the stories with the beauty of their rheto-
ric. Similarly, the third book of Les Prisons, also written in the last years
of the queen’s life, depicts the ruin of the library of universal learning,
which is the ultimate prison built entirely out of books, and in which the
protagonist of the poem was jailed before being set free by the destructive
and liberating fire of the Spirit.
We must remember, however, that such insistent refusal of literary art
takes place within the framework of the queen’s most artful poetry and
narratives. Hence the paradoxical combination of radical humility and
an equally extreme ambition, which Isabelle Pantin sees as being at the
266 jan miernowski
root of Marguerite de Navarre’s writing.63 All the evidence indicates that

the goal of the queen is to point the reader toward a truth incapable of
being expressed in words—i.e., the deadly and amorous union of human
Nothingness and divine All—and to do this using familiar literary forms
of her day: farce and morality, allegorical poetry and novellas, chansons
spirituelles.
The search for the artistic forms of expression of Evangelism and of
Marguerite’s spirituality has increasingly interested students of the early
French Renaissance.64 The Chansons spirituelles add a very specific dimen-
sion to the already complicated paradox of speechless speech that under-
lies Marguerite’s writing: I refer to what the French Renaissance called
le chant, and which may be rendered by the English word “chant,” with all
its sacral connotations. The poets of the Pléiade presented themselves as
Orphic vates, able to magnetize the crowds and lead them up the chain
of being toward the transcendent One. It is very difficult to judge the
real significance of such cultural belief.65 As much as the idea of Orphic
chant shaped the social and political role of the poet in the second half
of the century, it is fair to suppose that it was nevertheless “only” a very
powerful metaphor. Such indeed is the metaphoric meaning that Peletier
du Mans gives to chant, pointing out that the rhythmic nature of poetic
verse makes it more similar to a song than to a non-rhythmic discourse
in prose.66 It may be the case that poetic chant had a less metaphoric
meaning for the generation of evangelical writers, deeply involved in the
ideological debate over the relationship between the sacred and the pro-
fane. In a short but fundamental article, Edwin Duval sees the chant as
the pinnacle of the expressive modes common to Marguerite de Navarre
and Clément Marot, and which include, in ascending hierarchical order:
63 Isabelle Pantin, “L’ordre des fables: l’allégorie dans les Prisons de Marguerite de
Navarre,” in Devis d’amitié: Mélanges en l’honneur de Nicole Cazauran, ed. Jean Lecointe,
Catherine Magnien, Isabelle Pantin, and Marie-Claire Thomine (Paris, 2002), pp. 385–86.
64 Among the latest, very interesting attempts: Nicolas Le Cadet, L’Évangélisme fiction-
nel: Les Livres rabelaisiens, le Cymbalum mundi, L’Heptaméron (1532–1552) (Paris, 2010);
Dariusz Krawczyk, Dialectique de la parole: Étude de la poésie et du théâtre de Marguerite
de Navarre, Ph.D. diss., Université Paris X-Nanterre, University of Warsaw (2007).
65 The question of early modern belief is examined by George Hoffmann in his most
recent studies aiming at revisiting the classical works by Lucien Febvre.
66 “Car si les Poètes sont dits chanter pour raison que le parler qui est compassé d’une
certaine mesure, semble être un Chant: d’autant qu’il est mieux composé au gré de l’oreille
que le parler solu: la Rime sera encore une plus expresse marque du Chant: et par con-
séquent de la Poésie,” Art poétique, II.1, in Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renais-
sance, p. 286, quoted and discussed by Vignes, Poétiques de la Renaissance, p. 644.
silence, discursive speech, lyric poetry, and the chant. Offering the most
adequate expression of the “heart,” that is of the inner self of the two
poets, the “poetics of chant” provide, according to Duval, a complement to
the “poetics of silence,” so convincingly analyzed by Robert Cottrell.67
At first sight, it might seem as if the spirituality of “delightful transfor-
mation” does not lend itself to elaborate artistic expression: a soul eagerly
awaiting union with Christ through the death of the carnal self should
strive not only for ontological nothingness but also for silence. Such is the
conclusion Marguerite may have drawn from Briçonnet’s letter devoted to
the allegorical reading of marriage. In this elaborate allegory, the human
soul plays the role of the wife, who should be kept in strict obedience
and submission to Christ her husband. This specifically includes the wife’s
obligation to remain silent, since her speech is the allegorical image of
earthly temptations, while her Lord speaks the words of the spirit: “De
l’unyon du mariage où la femme est muette s’engendrent enfans d’esprit,
qui sont filz de Dieu, et de celuy où elle parle, enfans de chair, qui sont
serfz. Femme parlant en mariage est, comme rebelle et desobeissante,
excluse avec son fruict de la part et portion hereditalle” (Correspondance,
2:256–57). It is better that the wife-soul have her tongue cut out than that
she speak in place of her husband-Christ; it is better that her limbs be
severed than that she mingle in his business. All that is left to her is to
moan (“gémir”) in the pain of childbirth. Of course, such harsh images are
merely an allegory. Briçonnet is quick to stress that only “spiritual people”
(“[les] spirituelz”) are able to understand such language (“jargon”). Only
“spiritual people” know that earth, flesh, and woman are “dead in spirit”
and that, on the contrary, a soul united with Christ is dead in its body,
numbed to any pain and rejoicing (ibid., pp. 257–58).
Although presented here in an allegorical mode, human speech none-
theless has some troubling connotations, since it refers symbolically to
earthly concerns and pride. Similarly, in her correspondence with Briçon-
net, the queen does not seem overly optimistic about the status of human
chant, which stems from our unworthiness:
nostre indignité de le louer n’empesche en rien sa dignité de l’estre. Mais
s’yl ne luy plaist rompre noz obstacles, racorder, tirer et monter noz las-
ches cordes et qui plus est luy mesmes jouer, chanter et soufler en nous
67 Edwin M. Duval, “Marot, Marguerite et le chant du cœur: Formes lyriques et formes

de l’intériorité,” in Clément Marot, “Prince des poëtes françois,” pp. 559–71; Robert D.
Cottrell, The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry (Washington,
D.C., 1986).
268 jan miernowski
le psaulme et canticque à luy agreable et se presenter par nous chans à

sa voulanté, ce sera grand pauvretté de nostre musicque. Car il est Tout et
nous Riens. Ce qu’il faict est faict et tout le demourant de nous contrefaict.
(Correspondance, 2:107)
Our chant would be pitiful if God in his infinite wisdom and goodness did
not sweep away our resistance and if he himself did not tune our instru-
ments. Indeed, it is only he who can fill our Nothingness with his own
chant, since all we can do is counterfeit his creation.
Where does this leave Marguerite de Navarre and her Chansons spiritu-
elles? Is her chant an example of the unruly speech of a disobedient wife,
a moan of suffering, or a cry of joy? Is it the voice of the Lord speaking
through the feeble instrument of the human heart, or is it a more or less
skillful forgery?
These questions in fact surface right at the beginning of the series of
chansons published in the Marguerites de la Marguerite. The three initial
pieces devoted to the death of François I form a steady progression, start-
ing with anxious waiting for news of the ailing king, continuing with a
cry of despair in reaction to François I’s demise, and concluding with the
rondeau which presents the death of the brother as a resurrection of the
sister’s heart.68 What is interesting is that, parallel to this funerary narra-
tive, Marguerite conducts a metadiscursive reflection on the possibilities
or rather the failures of human discourse. Indeed, the queen begins by
saying that it is impossible to express her suffering in speech or writing.
She has to hide it because no spoken or written words can match it, and
because there would be no more sorrowful text had she revealed it:
Si la douleur de mon esprit
Je povois monstrer par parole,
Ou la declarer par escrit,
Onques ne feut sy triste rolle;
Car le mal qui plus fort m’affole
Je le cache, et couvre plus fort;
Parquoy n’ay rien qui me console,
Fors l’espoir de la douce mort.
Je sçay que je ne dois celer

Mon ennuy, plus que raisonnable;
Mais si ne sçauroit mon parler
Atteindre à mon dueil importable,
68 Ehsan Ahmed neglects the rondeau, which indeed seems more devoted to the Resur-
rection than to the Passion (“Marguerite de Navarre”).
À l’escriture veritable
Defaudroit la force à ma main.
Le taire me seroit louable,
S’il ne m’estoit tant inhumain. (chanson 1, vv. 1–16)
Yet while it is impossible to express the queen’s sorrow, it would be
properly “inhuman” to silence it completely. The only way out of this
conundrum is in tears, sighs, and screams. These inarticulate sounds are
Marguerite’s only “rhetoric,” the speech and the writing (“mon parler et
mes escritz”) that she addresses to God (vv. 17–21). Thus in chanson 1, writ-
ing amounts to managing, literally disposing on paper, her suffering (“sur
le papier / Un peu de ma douleur j’ordonne,” vv. 102–03).
This anti-rhetoric breaks down at the news of François I’s death in the
preteritio of chanson 2. The queen is overtaken by despair and consequently
left speechless: “Mon mal ne se peult reveler, / . . . / Il ne m’en fault donc
plus parler” (vv. 55–58). Yet here silence takes on an eloquent poetic form.
It is therefore not surprising that in the third piece of the series, inciden-
tally using the elaborate forme fixe of the rondeau, Marguerite regains her
voice, symptomatically switching her narrative from the first to the third
person. In this dramatic transformation of her discursive posture, she now
states that she wants to talk, indeed to talk about death, because death,
that is the death of her brother, has resuscitated her heart: “de la mort
veult parler: / Car en a bien resuscité son cœur” (vv. 13–14). This reversal
of Marguerite’s muteness into elaborate poetic speech is grounded in the
“delightful transformation” which forms the foundation of the spiritual-
ity of her chansons. Now Marguerite realizes that her brother’s death has
changed her fear into a “great desire to die”; suffering becomes sweetness,
since she knows that death is the pathway to God. Death takes the form
of communion, a sacramental piece of bread that one has to swallow, to
incorporate, in order to be allowed to partake of Christ’s glory in heaven.69
Only ignorant people abstain from this quasi-sacred meal and, indeed,
Marguerite did not partake in it when she confessed in chanson 2 that
she was unable to speak. Now, in the rondeau, along with her brother,
she swallows the “morsel” of death. In so doing, they both follow in the
footsteps of Christ, who says in chanson 7: “J’ay gousté le morceau de Mort
en patience; / Nul ne le goustera qui ayt en moy fiance” (vv. 29–30).
69 See this topic also in the Heptaméron, ed. Salminen, p. 447, and in La Navire, vv. 246
and 249. See also chanson 2, vv. 56–57; chanson 3, vv. 6–9; chanson 7, vv. 29–30; chanson
42, vv. 131–32.
270 jan miernowski
The “delightful transformation” of amorous death is therefore the spiri-

tual fact that authorizes Marguerite’s speech. Nonetheless, speech is only
a temporary solution (“En attendant,” rondeau, v. 13). Its transitory nature
reminds us of Hircan’s reply to Oisille in the prologue of the Heptaméron.
The pious woman suggests that the ladies and gentlemen spend their time
reading the Scriptures as well as singing from the heart and reciting aloud
the psalms and canticles inspired by the Holy Spirit.70 Hircan agrees with
this proposition, but points to the complementary need for some more
corporeal exercise, which is still necessary because the merry company is
not yet mortified enough to do without it. His words reveal that Hircan
is thinking about sex, but eventually he settles for storytelling. It would
seem that Marguerite’s chansons spirituelles offer a similar short-term
solution, temporarily dictated by the carnal nature of men, undertaken in
anticipation of the human being’s final and joyful annihilation. Hence the
strongly articulated discursive structures of the chansons, which seem to
contradict Marguerite’s initial claim that all her rhetoric consists of tears
and moaning.
In fact several chansons have a clear argumentative orientation.
Chanson 33 seems to be the best example in this respect. It is made up
entirely of couplets composed of a conditional sentence and of a theo-
logically absurd conclusion in the form of a question (“Si Dieu m’a pour
chef Christ donné, / Fault il que je suive aultre maistre?” vv. 1–2). The
all-encompassing answer comes at the very end of the poem, pointing
unsurprisingly to God, whom one should revere and love. Chanson 5 has
a somewhat similar rhetorical structure, since each stanza starts with a
conditional sentence, while the second half consists in a recommendation
addressed to the faithful, instructing them how they should respond to
diverse temptations and doctrinal aberrations advanced by the enemies
of the faith (“Si quelque injure l’on vous dit, / Endurez le joyeusement,”
vv. 1–2). Both chansons are thus structured around sharply sketched ideo-
logical oppositions.71 Both argue in favor of specific solutions within clearly
drafted alternatives laid before the reader. These argumentative features
give several chansons a strong rhetorical orientation, transforming them
70 “. . . chante de cueur et prononce de bouche les beaulx psalmes et canticques que

le Sainct Esprit a composez au cueur de David et les autres aucteurs” (Heptaméron, ed.
Salminen, p. 9).
71 The same is true of chanson 45, that opposes earthly and spiritual loves, and chanson
46, which contrasts in each of its strophes the sorrow caused by sin and faith in salvation
for the sinner.
into prayers or, more rarely, maledictions.72 It also happens that the voice
of the poet addresses several interlocutors within the same poem, as is the
case in chanson 3, where Marguerite turns alternatively toward God, the
human soul, and the community of the faithful.73
Around such argumentative and dialogic rhetorical structures many
chansons construct fictional situations, either by reusing metaphors and
parables borrowed from the Scriptures or by referring to consecrated lit-
erary devices and genres. I have already alluded to some of these poetic
fictions: the speech the Christ-like Pelican addresses to humanity from
the height of the cross in chanson 7 or the dialogue between the wise
woman and the young hunter in chanson 6. Symptomatically, the spiritual
awakening of this last character is represented through a metadiscursive
metaphor: the hunter understands his past errors and is overwhelmed
with faith, much in the same way one catches a well-known tune or dis-
covers the meaning of a literary fiction: “Le Veneur entendit la game, / Et
descouvrit la Poësie” (vv. 81–82).74
The modalities of this kind of interpretation for the reader may vary.
All depends on the interaction between the markers of literature and
those of spirituality distributed throughout the text. In some chansons,
the metaphor used is a biblical parable, indicating clearly that the fiction
should be transposed directly into religious teaching.75 More often, reli-
gious and lay imagery overlap. Such is the case with the chansons using
the paradigm of pastoral fiction, which can be understood as a reference
both to the genre of idyllic poetry and to the biblical parable of Christ the
good shepherd.76 The same can be said about the love songs which mingle
lay and religious connotations. In some cases, references to profane and
sacred love can still be distinguished by a reader trained in both kinds of
literature. For instance, chansons 4 and 20 clearly allude to the genre of
the congé, in which the poet says farewell to a lady and to love. On the
other hand, in chanson 28 one can easily discern stylized allusions to the
72 Chansons 15, 17, 19; chanson 16 curses the devil and chanson 27 curses “cuyder.”
73 See also chansons 23 and 43. The model for such multidirectional enunciation may
be Pseudo-Bonaventura’s L’aiguillon d’amour divine (1489). Jean Gerson, who published
this devotional treatise, instructs the nun to whom it is dedicated to talk to her soul, while
transforming such a didactic speech into prayer addressed to God.
74 It should be noted that “entendre la game” is an idiomatic expression meaning “to
understand.”
75 Such is the case with chanson 10 and chanson 42, built around the parable of the
prodigal son.
76 Chansons 14, 26, and 36.
272 jan miernowski
Song of Solomon. There are however texts where the religious content of
the song is revealed only at the very end of the poem.77 There are others
where it does not surface at all, as is the case with chanson 36, which is a
joyful outburst of love:
O bergere ma mye, je ne vis que d’amours.
Vray amour est ma vie
Qui d’aymer me convie,
Par quoy je n’ay envie
Que sans cesser l’aymer tousjours.
O berger ma mye, je ne vis que d’amours. (vv. 1–6)
Following is a series of short quatrains with lines of six or eight syllables,
shouting in the most chaotic manner a love which makes the poet laugh
and cry, but which nowhere is clearly restricted to a religious register.
Even the final call inviting the shepherdesses to love love itself (“Soyez
donc amoureuses / D’amour”) does not necessarily have to be understood
as pointing to Christ, but might also reflect some kind of extreme neo-
Platonism, of which Dagoucin in the Heptaméron is a good example.78
Nevertheless, such interpretative ambivalence does not seem to be a
problem, since the point of the song is merely to chant the joy of love
celebrated in one’s most intimate interiority:
Ma joye non pareille
De chanter m’apareille;
Je crie à toute aureille:
Aimez amour ou soyez sourdz. (vv. 35–38)
With chant resembling a scream of amorous joy, there is little room
left for rhetorical persuasion or even fictional storytelling. Such a recep-
tion of the chansons spirituelles is well staged in the Comédie de Mont-
de-Marsan, where La Bergère quotes, among other fragments of songs,
precisely the incipit of chanson 36. No wonder the other characters of
the play—La Sage, La Mondaine, and La Superstitieuse—are completely
unable to understand that the mystical shepherdess sings about her love
for God and not about some mundane love affair. Even more strikingly,
they seem not to realize that La Bergère quotes scraps of songs, taken out
77 Chanson 39, based on the opposition, fundamental to Evangelicals, between “ferme

amour” and eros. See Gérard Defaux, “Marot et ‘Ferme Amour’: Essai de mise au point,” in
Anteros: Actes du Colloque de Madison (Wisconsin), mars 1994, ed. Ullrich Langer and Jan
Miernowski (Orléans, 1994), pp. 137–67.
78 Heptaméron, ed. Salminen, pp. 57–58.
of context and without any logical order. They persist in their attempts to
respond rationally to her fragmented chant, as if it represented coherent
reasoning.
Chanson 36 and its recycling in the Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan thus
offer a radical alternative to the strong discursive structures of Margue-
rite’s chansons spirituelles, discussed earlier. On the one hand, as we have
seen, Marguerite is keen to use some basic rhetorical strategies as well
as simple literary and biblical references in order to shape the chansons’
communicative impact and their fictional appeal. On the other hand, the
chansons tend toward something I would call the “poetics of screaming.”
The scream is an expressive mode which transcends rhetorically balanced
forms and indeed speech itself:
En lieu de te prier
Je ne fais que crier;
Mon parler n’a couleur
Pour monstrer ma douleur. (chanson 42, vv. 49–52)
The scream takes the place of a more articulated complaint and prayer:
O Roy de tous les Roys
Devant qui je souspire,
Rien que crier je ne fois,
Ne me vueille esconduire. (chanson 19, vv. 28–31)
It is indeed the voice of Christ, calling out to the Father from within
human Nothingness:
Car Tout en Rien crie et clame
Voire inenarrablement;
Dieu par Foy Pere reclame,
Qui l’exauce promptement. (chanson 21, vv. 18–21)79
Tending toward the inarticulate scream, Marguerite’s chant is a more
radical form of expression than the song. It goes beyond rational dis-
course and lyrical patterns of speech; it even seems to go beyond music.
It reaches, above the melodic lines, beyond the limits of the human
voice, where, in the rarefied atmosphere of the highest altitudes, it meets
silence. Of course such a scream is inarticulate, impossible to explain, to
transpose into a coherent story or logical argument. It introduces the risk
of a breakdown of communication, as is indeed the case with the ending
79 Michèle Clément, ed. cit., refers this fragment to Rom. 8:26.

274 jan miernowski
of the Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan. It fractures the sequential flow of the

poem as it disrupts the plot of the theatrical play, where the transition
from dialogue to chant is often signaled by a brusque prosodic change.
At the same time, the poetics of screaming also permeates some of the
chansons in their entirety, as is the case for example with chanson 18,
a triumphant chant shouting out joy at the victory of Christ over evil.
Hence the tone of urgency which is clearly audible in Marguerite’s chan-
sons. The chant is the scream of a soul yearning to be annihilated in God,
the painful and delightful whisper of a human being craving the death of
the carnal, transitory self and amorous fusion with the beloved Christ. All
of this has to be accomplished quickly, if possible now, while the song is
being chanted, in an outburst of laughter and love—“Je parle, je ris, et je
chante,” “Je chante et ris, / Et nuit et jour / Parle d’amour”—in the acceler-
ated pace of a dance—“Chantons, dansons, et courons sy soudain / Que
nous passons en sautant cerf et daim.”80
The Rite
It seems that chant shaped by the poetics of haste and screaming not only
transcends argumentative speech and lyric poetry; it also aims beyond
the realm of the chanson and indeed beyond chansons spirituelles as they
were known to the Renaissance audience. The model in this last respect
was largely created by Protestants. In the collection published by Mat-
thieu Malingre sometime in the 1530s and entitled Chansons nouvelles
demonstrantz plusieurs erreurs et faulsetez, one finds a song which is a true
poetic art of the militant chanson spirituelle: “Aultre chanson demonstrant
la maniere comment les chrestiens se doibvent esiouyr et chanter selon
Dieu.”81 Malingre starts, as might be expected, by dismissing the profane
“drunkard’s songs.” Christian singers should despise the world and its
temptations and draw their songs from the Scriptures: “Les chansons soi-
ent spirituelles, / De saincte scripture extraites, / Delaissant ces chansons
charnelles.” He stresses that a truly Christian chanson has to rely on faith;
it should come less from the mouth and more from a heart touched by
80 Chanson 13, v. 27; chanson 37, vv. 32–34; Comédie de la Nativité de Jésus Christ, vv.
660–61, in Théâtre, p. 56. On the relationship between laughter and mysticism, see Antonia
Szabari, “The Way of Imperfection: Laughter and Mysticism in Marguerite de Navarre’s
L’Heptaméron,” French Forum 33.3 (2008), 1–16.
81 Matthieu Malingre, Chansons nouvelles demonstrantz plusieurs erreurs et faulsetez
[Neuchâtel, 1530–40], no pagination.
the spirit.82 Yet this voice from the heart, and which has to be addressed
to the heart of the listener, should nevertheless be clearly understandable.
The foundation of Malingre’s poetics of chanson spirituelle is Saint Paul’s
injunction to edify one’s neighbor (1 Cor. 14):
Au faict St. Paul vrayement nous monstre
Comme doibvent les vrays chrestiens
Prescher, prier, chanter aussi,
Tout soit en voix intelligible,
De coeur, d’esprit, en sens rassis,
Dont fruict à tous soit perceptible.
For Malingre, a chanson spirituelle should be of benefit for the instruc-
tion of the congregation. Such, indeed, is the aim of countless Protestant
collections, starting with the previously mentioned contrafacta of Eustorg
de Beaulieu and continuing with the songs published during the wars of
religion.83
A similarly utilitarian approach is visible on the Counter-Reformation
side of the confessional divide. Presenting her translation of Marco Anto-
nio Flamino’s poetry to Marguerite de Valois, Anne de Marquets desires
to convert the pagan Muses to a useful end (“convertir en mieux et en
quelque œuvre utile”).84 The point is, first, to prudently choose a laud-
able topic—for instance the nativity of Christ or the praise of the Virgin
Mary—and, second, to compose poetry worthy of such subject matter.
Hence the poet’s insistence on justifying her writing, since one is never
commendable enough to undertake such a lofty task and to produce a
piece of work of the required dignity. The resulting collection of poems is
therefore a sacrificial offering, or rather a counter-gift for the redemption
that is bestowed upon the poet.
In sum, the prevalent impression one gets from reading the chansons
spirituelles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation is that these
songs are largely conceived of as works, indeed good works of a Christian
poet and of a pious heart. The theological status of those works is here
a secondary question: they can be testimony to the poet’s election or a
82 See also Matthieu Malingre, Moralité de la maladie de chrestienté (s.l., 1533): “Car
on doit plus chanter d’esprit / En verite St. Paul l’escrit / Que l’on ne fait à pleine voix”
(p. Fviir).
83 For instance: Chansons spirituelles à l’honneur et louange de Dieu, et à l’edification
du prochain (s.l., 1569), Cantiques ou chansons spirituelles, pour la consolation des Fideles
affligés en France (Pons, 1590), etc.
84 Anne de Marquets, Les divines poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (Paris, 1569),
p. Eiv.
276 jan miernowski
meritorious deed which will contribute to his or her salvation. In both

cases, the song has a dutiful place within a well-regulated economy of
God’s grace and human works.
Such are certainly not Marguerite’s chansons spirituelles. A scream of
pain and joy, a cry of death, and a shout of love can hardly be understood
as a model of behavior for the faithful or as his or her contribution to the
workings of Providence. Even the more rhetorically structured and liter-
arily elaborated of the queen’s chansons are marked by a kind of hasty
disorder which makes them ill fitted for the ceremonial tone of the devo-
tional chant produced by the antagonistic confessions struggling for God’s
grace and people’s attention in Renaissance France.
Yet Marguerite de Navarre’s Chansons spirituelles also have a quasi-
ritual dimension. They can be conceived of not only as texts, but also as
gestures which have some kind of sacred meaning and efficacy. Edwin
Duval has noted that in chanson 6 and in the play L’Inquisiteur, fictional
characters undergo a conversion while listening to chansons.85 Such a
staging of spiritual transformation does not mean that the queen’s chan-
sons spirituelles are pieces of persuasive speech aimed at converting the
reader to a given doctrinal truth. In Marguerite’s spirituality and religious
practice, truth is not a matter of communication. In La Nativité, Satan
mockingly asks the shepherds if they think they understand the Scrip-
tures. One of those poor in spirit replies:
Nous en faisons humblement la lecture.
Maistre n’avons sinon sa charité,
Qui nous apprend toute la verité;
Plus en sentons, moins en povons parler,
Car fort amour faict ce secret celer.86
The true meaning of the Word of God is charity that remains incompre-
hensible to those who have not been touched by God’s grace. The shep-
herds keep the truth secret not because it is a logical assertion but because
it is a practice of love which sets them apart from the world. Truth is
not a magical formula which can be shared only with the initiated; it is a
movement of the heart. This early modern sense of “secrecy” makes truth
seem foolish, yet this foolishness is “true,” because in the quasi-rituality of
Marguerite’s spiritual writings, truth is not a statement to be grasped by
85 Duval, “Marot, Marguerite,” pp. 565–66. See also the editors’ incisive remarks Œuvres
complètes, vol. 4, Théâtre, p. 267.
86 Théâtre, p. 75.
reason, but something which has to be acted upon, played out in one’s life
and death. Such a pragmatic conception of truth is illustrated again by the
clash between Satan and the shepherds, who testify to their faith that the
newborn they found in the manger is God:
Sathan:
Je n’en croy rien. Vous venez du sabbath,
Où enchanteurs vous ont trop amusées
Et tellement en doctrine abusées
Que vous croyez ce qui ne sçauroit estre.
Les Bergers et Bergeres ensemble:
Il est vray.87
Indeed, the poor shepherds have been “enchanted” as they come to
believe in something which “cannot be.” However, such enchantment is
not a magic trick, but the miracle of a faith which blindly trusts and acts
upon what is pure folly for the world.
Chanting is such an act of folly. It is senseless: at least some of the words
have no distinguishable, logical meaning. Yet it “enchants”: it awakens
love. In so doing, chanting creates a new language and thus establishes a
new Pentecostal communion whereby many tongues are united into one
voice.
Such is the ritual impact of chant in the Comédie sur le trespas du Roy,
written after François I’s death and in many respects parallel to the Chan-
sons spirituelles. Cast into despair by the death of Pan, Amarissime sings
of the bitterness of her sorrow: “Esprit et corps de deuil sont plains, / Tant
qu’ilz sont convertiz en plains” (vv. 167–68). This complaint is overheard
by Agapy, the embodiment of Charity (agapè). He is unable to understand
the meaning of the song and even suspects the singer of being lighthearted
or foolish: “Quel son, quel chant est ce que j’oy de loing, / Tant que je
pers le sens et la parole?” (vv. 153–54). Yet he is irresistibly attracted by
the song, in which he hesitantly recognizes a well-known melody, whose
lyrics have nevertheless been altered:
Ceste voix là me tire à soy,
Car elle est semblable à la mienne,
Et sens une douleur en moy
Toute telle comme la sienne.
87 Ibid., p. 72. Cf. a similar clash in Le Malade: “La Chambriere: Se fier aux promesses /
De Celluy qui jamais ne ment. / Le Medecin: Qui vous a appris ces haultesses / Et ce gentil
jargonnement? / Ce sont parolles d’enchanteurs, / Parler ainsi par parabolles” (p. 256).
278 jan miernowski
Sa chansson me semble ancienne,

Si sont les motz de neuf ouvraige;
D’où que ce soit que la voix vienne,
Ignorer n’en puis le langaige. (vv. 173–80; Théâtre, pp. 425–26).
This attraction is not the result of skillful persuasive strategies, as was
common in Protestant and Catholic contrafacta. Agapy is fascinated by
Amarissime’s chant because he knows very well the “language” in which
the song is written. It is the idiom common to both characters, the “jar-
gon” of bitter suffering and of everlasting love.88 “Deuil” and “amytié” are
thus united in their lament and in their hopeful expectation of a liberating
death. The stage is set for the coming of Paraclesis, representing the Holy
Spirit, who finally “enchants” Agapy:
Paraclesis:
Pan est vivant, encores le vous dictz,
En ces beaux champs et plaisans paradis,
Où sans cesser avec sa lire chante.
Agapy:
Je m’esbahy en escoutant ces dictz,
Et ma douleur se rappaise entendis.
Paraclesis, je croy que tu m’enchante. (vv. 410–15; ibid., p. 436)
The play ends with a chorus of voices that sing in unison of eternal life
and of triumph over death.89
* * *
In the late 1520s or early 1530s, Simon Du Bois published a pamphlet defin-
ing the strategic aims of the “Christian struggle.”90 As might be expected,
the faithful are advised not to trust human traditions but to rely on the
Word of God in order to stand firm in their faith. True worship of the
Lord is the sacrifice of one’s soul, consumed by the love of God and of
neighbor (“Là est le vray cult: où l’ame par l’esprit de Dieu se offre holau-
caste immaculé en flamme de amour de Dieu et du prochain”). Margue-
rite de Navarre’s Chansons spirituelles, although written toward the end
of the queen’s life, seem to stay true to this early evangelical program.
They reflect a very private, intimate rite in which the soul, confident in the
88 This new language is also referred to extensively in L’Inquisiteur (Théâtre, pp. 293,
297, 299).
89 Cf. L’Inquisiteur, where the servant hears different children singing, yet perceives one
voice: “Ilz ne sont poinct entre eulx bandez, / Rien qu’une voix je n’y cognoys” (Théâtre,
p. 285).
90 Le combat chrestien (Alençon, 1529/34), fol. 26v.
possibility of union with the divine All, accepts gracefully the annihilation
of the carnal self. This “delightful transformation” is an act of joyful love. It
is also the source of the chant composed in a new and largely incompre-
hensible language, words that resonate with voices, tell impossible stories,
or turn into screams. They are sung to tunes which are quite old or not
yet invented. They cannot “convert” anybody, because it is beyond the
power of human works to do such a thing, as it is beyond human power
to counterfeit the works of God. Yet they can “enchant” those who are
already enchanted by the Spirit of God and who recognize in them the
harmony of death and love.
Staging the Spiritual: the Biblical and Non-Biblical Plays
Olivier Millet
Marguerite de Navarre’s theater, which consists of eleven surviving plays,

shares a number of fundamental artistic and literary characteristics with
the rest of her work.1 Marguerite often writes dialogically—allowing var-
ied voices, varied points of view, sometimes complementary, sometimes
oppositional, to be heard—and this lends itself naturally to the stage and
to the use of masks. A good deal of 16th-century poetry is marked by a
taste for allusions to events in the life of the poet and in the world, as can
be seen in the works of Clément Marot and of Marguerite herself. In her
non-biblical plays, these references are spoken directly to the audience,
which is called to witness and implicated in an allegorical interpretation,
dependent in part on current events, that often eludes us today. Margue-
rite makes innovative use of music and song, which had an important role
in both the religious and secular theater of the period. In some plays, she
uses her own songs or those of writers close to her, like Marot or Bonaven-
ture des Périers. The dramatic literature of her time, generally composed
in verse, also furnished examples of changes in meter or strophic form
and rhyme-play, quite in keeping with her own poetic practice. These are
well suited to stage use where, along with changes of character, speaker,
situation, or theme, they mark shifts in the dramatic action. In the context
of her work as a whole, then, her theater appears to be a natural extension
of the other poetic and literary genres in which she wrote.
In addition, Marguerite’s plays are closely related to her other works
notably with respect to the expression of moral conceptions of love and
religious ideas. This coherence is suggested moreover by the way her
work was published. For example, the sung parts of Trépas appeared in
1 Their titles follow, given as they appear in Marguerite de Navarre, Théâtre, ed. Gene-
viève Hasenohr and Olivier Millet (Paris, 2002), vol. 4 of Œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole
Cazauran. Also given are the short titles used in this essay; square brackets indicate a title
created by modern scholars: Comédie de la nativité de Jésus Christ (Nativité), Comédie de
l’adoration des trois roys à Jésus Christ (Rois), Comédie des Innocents (Innocents), Comédie
du désert (Désert), Le Mallade (Malade), L’Inquisiteur (Inquisiteur), Farce de Trop Prou Peu
Moins (Trop Prou), Comédie [des quatre femmes] (Quatre femmes), Comédie sur le trespas
du roy (Trépas), Comédie jouée au mont de Marsan le jour de Caresme prenant mil cinq cens
quarente sept (Mont-de-Marsan), [Comédie des parfaits amants] (Parfaits amants).
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the 1547 printed edition of the Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses

as chanson spirituelle 2, whereas the play as a whole comes down to us
in a single manuscript. In addition, this play is the product of the same
personal circumstances as her long poem La Navire: both are expressions
of the grief caused by the death of her brother, King François I. The Mon-
daine, a character in Mont-de-Marsan, sometimes speaks like the François
character in La Navire, and Quatre femmes in particular has resonances
with the characters and themes of the epistles that surround this play
in the Marguerites and of La Coche. These resonances, echoing from one
work to another, demonstrate that for Marguerite theater was a distinct
form of expression, yet inseparable from her thought and her writing as
a whole. What the theater allows is the embodiment on stage, before a
viewing audience, of what in the other works is written to be read, recited,
or sung, that is, only to be heard or imagined. The result is at times a
particular form of writing and an aesthetic which accentuate characters
thinking or doing, but which also suggest what is unsaid yet able to be
perceived by the audience watching their movements across the stage,
their gestures, their interactions, their silences. An effort of imagination
is required of the modern reader who must supply these dramatic effects,
and no explanatory commentary can replace the stage production these
texts call for and on occasion have received in the 20th century (especially
Mont-de-Marsan).
A number of sources suggest that Marguerite was very responsive to the
broad range of dramatic forms covered by the 16th-century term comédie,
a general designation denoting a play or theatrical performance. She
remarks in a letter written in January 1543: “Nous y passons nostre temps
à faire mommeries et farces.”2 Brantôme speaks of the “commédies” and
“moralités” composed by the queen and of her dramatic “pastorales” that
she had performed by “les filles de sa court.”3 Florimond de Raemond,
although a less reliable witness, speaks of “une traduction tragicomique
presque de tout le Nouveau Testament,” and adds that this was performed
by the “meilleurs comédiens qui fussent lors en Italie” with “Comédie
et farce.”4 Without delving into the question of the theatrical genres
2 Quoted from V. L. Saulnier, ed., Marguerite de Navarre, Théâtre profane (Paris and
Geneva, 1963; 1978), p. XVIII.
3 Pierre de Brantôme, Recueil des dames, ed. Étienne Vaucheret (Paris, 1991), p. 177.
4 L’Histoire de la naissance, progrez et décadence de l’hérésie de ce siècle (cited from the
1623 Rouen edition, 8.3, p. 849).
staging the spiritual 283
suggested by these references, we should note that we are dealing in

particular with mummeries: festive court performances with disguises that
frequently took place during the time of carnival,5 and in which courtiers
and those close to the queen took part.
The “Epistre présentée à la Royne de Navarre par Madame Ysabeau et
deux autres Damoyzelles habillées en Amazone en une mommerie,” writ-
ten by Marot,6 allows us to glimpse this kind of performance given for
Marguerite by those in her circle, no doubt in 1534. We have some indica-
tions of a performance of two plays by Marguerite herself: Quatre femmes,
very likely before the start of Lent in 1542 (which that year began on
22 February) and Mont-de-Marsan, performed on 13 February 1547 (1548
new style), the eve of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.7 This is
alluded to in verse 451, which speaks of “tous les junes d’un caresme.” The
end of Quatre femmes anticipates a ball following the performance, again
something which places it in the context of a mummery. Parfaits amants
is a court entertainment which belongs to the same sort of festive activ-
ity, in this case marking the visit of Jeanne d’Albret, accompanied by her
husband Antoine de Bourbon, in the spring of 1549.8 The final verses of
this play imply that the princely couple was present, acting as judges in
a Court of Love. The other plays were also doubtless performed, but we
have no evidence pointing to the exact circumstances under which this
took place. Still, there are indications that suggest a particular time of the
year. Trépas, composed in 1547 after the death of François I, ends with
a liturgical citation from the book of Job, quoted in Latin. The passage
is taken from the liturgy of the first Sunday of September, which might
correspond not to a performance of the play (about which we know noth-
ing) but to the date of its composition. In fact, scholars situate the play
after an initial period of mourning, which the queen spent in the priory
of Tusson, in the spring and summer of 1547.9 Nativité takes place “en
cette fin d’an” (v. 992), which can only mean Christmas, as indeed the
5 Carnival may be taken in the broadest sense as the part of the year from Christmas
to New Year and from Epiphany to the start of Lent, that is, generally speaking, winter
after Christmas.
6 Clément Marot, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990–
93), 2:75–76.
7 See the Introduction to these two plays in the Hasenohr-Millet edition.
8 For this play also, see the Introduction in the Hasenohr-Millet edition.
9 Again, see the Introduction to this play in the Hasenohr-Millet edition as well as
n. 76, p. 595.
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invitation to “faire feste” at the conclusion makes clear (v. 1282). In sum,
there are two kinds of context. On the one hand, there are the religious
celebrations of Christmas and the days following, which apply to the bibli-
cal tetralogy: Nativité, Rois (6 January), Innocents (28 December), and Désert
(the liturgical evocation of this episode in the life of Jesus also happen-
ing on 28 December). However, we do not know the year in which these
biblical plays were written or might have been performed. On the other
hand, the remaining plays—either court mummeries or, broadly speak-
ing, farces like Malade, Inquisiteur, Trop Prou, and Quatre femmes—must
have been performed on what was usually the most frequent occasion
for this kind of entertainment: jours gras (days when the Church allowed
meat to be eaten). Performances were thus associated with two different
but related periods: religious festivals of the traditional liturgy and the
jours gras, in particular during carnival or at mid-Lent, or, more broadly,
court celebrations.
Marguerite’s four biblical plays, based on liturgical texts, illustrate a
particular moment of the sacred calendar and of the Christian commemo-
ration of salvation: that of the gospel accounts of the birth and infancy of
Jesus. Considered in the light of traditional liturgical drama and mystery
plays, the originality of Marguerite’s work is striking. She privileges medi-
tational and lyrical aspects to the detriment of the concrete or picturesque
elements evoked in the gospels (cf. below). Centered on the figure of the
Virgin Mary, who, in keeping with tradition, symbolizes the community of
the Church, these four plays aim to arouse a profound sense of belonging
to the spiritual community of believers. The discussions they contain are
merely a convenient way of setting forth in greater detail all the aspects
of Christian redemption, the central theme of the plays. Although they
are also rooted in Marguerite’s evangelical thinking, they convey no direct
echo of current events, let alone of polemical topics (cf. Nativité, vv. 616–
19). On the contrary, their aim is to use a meditative mode to detach the
audience from such concerns.
This is not true of the rest of the corpus, what we will call the non-
biblical plays, inasmuch as their plots and characters are drawn not from
the Bible but from other traditions, be they theatrical or literary. In this
sense they are “profane,” to use the general title V. L. Saulnier ascribed
to them in his ground-breaking edition. These non-biblical plays are
nonetheless imbued with religious significance, being intended to serve
as propaganda for the evangelical movement. By virtue of their religious
content, they remain inseparable from the biblical plays, which form
something of a spiritual background that helps explain their meaning. But

unlike the biblical plays, the non-biblical ones touch on current religious,
political, familial, and worldly issues—contemporary and contingent for
the author, the audience, and, in the case of plays that were printed, the
readers of the period. This is certainly the case for the three evangelical
moralities, Malade, Inquisiteur, and Trop Prou, each written in a more or
less allusive mode. Engaged with the present, then, the plays grow out of
the queen’s biblical and spiritual meditations in response to a religious
crisis, at a time when there were bad spiritual doctors and fearsome
inquisitors to be converted to the true faith, as well as representatives of
the order of the flesh who posed a real threat to evangelical believers. The
present of the plays is also, at times, personal as well as public and courtly,
the present of an event that touched Marguerite’s own life, as in Trépas or
Parfaits amants. The meaning of Quatre femmes, a play which takes place
at the time of a celebration and a ball, shines a moral and aesthetic light
on what it means to love and to dance during jours gras. Mont-de-Marsan,
finally, uses the circumstances of its performance (the transition from car-
nival to Lent) to stress the implications of the little three-character drama
that forms its first section, played out between debauchery, asceticism,
and evangelical wisdom (see below). While the play’s second section may
refer to a contemporary religious dispute (Marguerite vs. Calvin), above
all it conveys dramatically the gulf separating the militant Evangelism of
the earlier plays from truly supernatural and mystical questions, which
brings us back to the meditations found in the biblical plays (especially
Désert). Even when they have a religious message, then, the non-biblical
plays address the world and its problems, the flesh and its difficulties,
human conflicts between the different social and religious “orders” that
the characters often symbolize. Marguerite’s theater can thus be divided
into two distinct groups, the biblical plays and the others, as long as we
do not consider them to be separate. Rather, we must understand the rela-
tion between them in terms of two different kinds of time, in fact insepa-
rable, which marked the everyday life of Christians in the past: feast days
and “profane” days, liturgical celebrations and worldly social life, each of
which was part of the pulse—social and personal, cosmic and religious,
interior or outward—of Christian time.
Only within this general framework can one understand Marguerite de
Navarre’s theater, rather than in the light of the dramatic genres to which
each play might be assigned. In fact, at this time, before the humanist
transformation of the theater introduced by the Pléiade in the middle of
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the 16th century, the generic distinctions in use (farce, morality, sottie or
fool’s play, etc.)10 did not necessarily determine the form of dramatic com-
positions. In the absence of treatises on poetics defining genres and forms,
it was traditions based on the calendar and liturgy, local and social insti-
tutions (companies of sots and confréries joyeuses), as well as theatrical
and literary traditions, that shaped performances and modes of dramatic
writing. Marguerite certainly did not write her plays for companies of sots
or for confréries joyeuses. We can suppose that the actors available for her
plays were limited, at least for the most part, to those who formed the
inner circle of her own or her brother’s court, especially the ladies, young
ladies, and children. She wrote as one wrote for the theater in her time
(and as she did with the rest of her poetic production), using modes of
composition and style to some extent codified by convention. In Malade
or Trop Prou, for example, we see Marguerite soften the coarse register
or the linguistic expressions of madness customary in the farce and the
sottie, maintaining a degree of dignity, without however giving up belly
laughs, burlesque gags, or puns. Finally, the contemporaneous existence
of evangelical, satiric, and propagandist plays,11 which use techniques of
the morality (personifications, etc.) and a farcical tone to expose, to criti-
cize, but also to edify, provides an important touchstone when we seek to
understand Marguerite’s originality in Malade, Inquisiteur, Trop Prou, and
Mont-de-Marsan. The use she makes in the biblical plays of the tradition
and art of religious mystery plays12 is no less personal, once again making
the notion of genre inadequate for their appreciation.
The question of the means by which Marguerite’s theater has been
transmitted to us remains to be considered, since this too can shed light
on how the author understood her own dramatic work. The manuscript
tradition and printed editions also contain evidence allowing external
dating of the plays, by which they can be situated in relation to each
other and to the rest of the queen’s literary production. The edition of the
Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, printed in Lyon by Jean de
Tournes in 1547, was reissued four times during the 16th century without
10 On this subject, see the articles “Théâtre comique médiéval” and “Théâtre reli-
gieux médiéval” in the Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française, ed. Jean-Pierre de
Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty, and Alain Rey (Paris, 1987).
11 See Le Théâtre polémique français, 1450–1550, ed. Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Jelle
Koopmans, and Katell Lavéant (Rennes, 2008).
12 See Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême, Duchesse d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre
(1492–1549): Étude biographique et littéraire, 2 vols. (Paris, 1930; Geneva, 1978), 1:434–54.
significant changes (1549, 1552, 1554, and 1558).13 It contains two distinct
groups of dramatic works. The first volume places the four biblical plays
between L’Oraison à Jésus-Christ and Le Triomphe de l’Agneau. There is
no other source from the period, either manuscript or printed, for these
plays. Their first modern edition appeared in 1873 (in F. Frank’s edition of
the Marguerites) and the second in 1924 (by F. Schneegans), followed by
those of B. Marczuk (2000) and G. Hasenohr (2002). The second volume of
the 1547 edition, entitled Suyte des Marguerites, contains Quatre femmes,14
followed by Trop Prou. In 1547, then, Marguerite chose to publish from
her dramatic œuvre only the four biblical plays, a court comedy, and her
most enigmatic evangelical play. Assigning them to two separately titled
volumes, she also made a clear distinction between the two branches of
her theater. The other non-biblical plays remained in manuscript dur-
ing the 16th century, with the probable exception of Trépas.15 They were
printed only in the 19th century and then again when V. L. Saulnier edited
them together in 1946, giving them the collective title Théâtre profane.
They survive in three manuscripts. The manuscript now in the Biblio-
thèque nationale de France, fr. 12.485, the first part of which can be dated
before November 1543, was prepared on the queen’s orders by one of her
secretaries. It contains Malade, Quatre femmes,16 and Inquisiteur.17 The
1547 edition of the Marguerites is not based on this manuscript, which
was however added to later and includes, in its fourth part, written after
1549, Trop Prou. The manuscript BnF, fr. 24.298, containing La Navire and
Les Prisons, also includes Trépas and Mont-de-Marsan. Parfaits amants is
found alone in BnF, fr. 883.
In addition, certain plays can be roughly dated with respect to their
composition or their performance, as shown in the table below, which
follows the order of the plays in the Saulnier edition (but not all of his
suggestions as to dating):
Malade: between 1530 and 1535

Inquisiteur: 1535–36
Quatre femmes: early 1542
13 See the reprint, ed. Ruth Thomas, French Renaissance Classics (Paris, New York, and
The Hague, 1970).
14 Its title here is Deux Filles, deux mariées, la vieille, le vieillard et les quatre hommes.
15 On this play, see below. It seems to have been published posthumously in 1552.
16 Its title here is Autre farce, les deux filles, les deux femmes et la vieille.
17 Its title here is Autre farce: l’Inquisiteur.
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Trop Prou: between 1544 (?) and early 1547 (date of the privilège of the
printed version)
Trépas: (perhaps September) 1547
Mont-de-Marsan: 13 February 1548
Parfaits amants: 1549
The edition by Geneviève Hasenohr and Olivier Millet (Paris, 2002) places
Trop Prou before Quatre femmes because of doubts about the terminus a
quo of the former. As Trop Prou can be dated before 1547, moreover, it
becomes clear that the non-biblical plays were produced between 1535
and 1549. It is also clear that—for reasons we do not know but perhaps
because by then they evoked a historical context that was no longer cur-
rent—the queen decided not to print two plays she might have included
in the 1547 collection of her works, Malade and Inquisiteur.
A final question that remains to be discussed is that of the chronologi-
cal relationship between the biblical plays and the others. Since the 19th
century, the former have usually been considered to be earlier than the
latter and thought to date from around 1530;18 their style, it was claimed,
was closer to what was imagined to be “medieval” theater than is the case
with the non-biblical plays. For several reasons, this hypothesis seems
untenable. With respect to tradition, Marguerite innovates just as much in
her sacred plays as in her comedies. Moreover, the fact that biblical stories
offer a ready-made scenario, unlike the subjects of her other plays, might
easily produce a deceptive impression (traditional as opposed to more
modern). Scholars have noted that the queen ordered a copy of the Mys-
tère des Actes des Apôtres to be made for her between 1536–38, which sug-
gests that she had an interest in the genre of the mystery at precisely the
period when we know she was already working on the non-biblical plays,
and perhaps too on the biblical ones. Finally, in Nativité, Rois, and Désert,
God is referred to several times as l’Éternel. This term can be traced to its
appearance in the French translation of the Bible attributed to Olivétan
(1535), which introduced it and popularized its use as a translation of the
Hebrew tetragram representing the unutterable name of God. The inno-
vations of this translation are apparent in Clément Marot’s French rendi-
tion of the Psalms: for example, in psalms 1 and 51, dating from before
1539. Marot’s influence on Marguerite seems likely, which would put the
18 For her part, Barbara Marczuk dates the biblical plays to between 1530 and 1540. See
Marguerite de Navarre, Les Comédies bibliques, ed. Barbara Marczuk, with Beata Skrzes
zewska and Piotr Tylus (Geneva, 2000).
biblical plays at the earliest in 1535, a turning point in Marot’s career as

an evangelical poet. This is the time when the queen began to write non-
biblical plays, so there is at least a partial chronological overlap between
her two kinds of dramatic writing. Since there is also an ideological and
spiritual commonality between them, despite the differences of emphasis
just noted, they form two aspects of a single body of work.
Building on these general remarks, we will first consider some broad
dramaturgical questions, then the biblical plays, then their spiritual mes-
sage—which is partially shared with the non-biblical theater—before
finally turning to an examination of the plays in this second group.
General Principles of Dramaturgy
Marguerite had a sense of the theater. Her characters sometimes address

the audience directly, in keeping with the dramatic tradition of her day,
when the relationship between the stage and the audience was not based
on the projection of an artistic illusion before detached viewers but sought
to render visible on stage the invisible, that is, what the public believed
or ought to believe. It is from the standpoint of this theatrical culture and
by examining a number of dramatic techniques that she inherited that
we can see how Marguerite created, being perhaps the first to do so, a
distinctive theater expressing a personal vision. In Nativité, God shows
the infant Jesus to the audience as well as to the angels, speaking words
from the Bible: “Or voyez vous cy mon cher fils eslu” (v. 1216). In Nativité
(vv. 856ff.), Rois (vv. 1295ff.), and Innocents (vv. 31ff.), the religious teaching
of the dramatic action is laid out for an audience including royalty, clearly
the French court. Inquisiteur reminds us that the non-biblical theater is
also situated within the Christian space-time of the audience when, at
the end of the play, one of the children turns to those watching to say:
“A Dieu. Le chef de l’assistance, / Dieu, vous doint [donne] bon soir, bonne
nuyct, / et vivre de [sa] connaissance” (vv. 663–65). Here, the social hier-
archy of the audience disappears. The words of the child include every-
one, in the name of God, in a classless assemblage. Trop Prou goes even
further in this egalitarianism, inherited from the farce, when Trop speaks
directly to the audience: “Vous qui avez si belles testes, / Si vous ne res-
semblez aux bestes, / Vous pouvez bien mon nom savoir” (vv. 51–53). The
result is at once comic and enigmatic, which does not necessarily make us
like the boastful smooth-talking character presenting himself. Innocents,
by contrast, says explicitly: “Rois de là-bas, écoutez promptement” (v. 31).
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Given the royal status of some in the audience, nothing better suggests
the use of a stage set-up traditional in productions of mystery plays. This
involved several levels: an upper one (paradise), the place for God (the
king of heaven) and his angels; and a lower one—where earthly kings
would be placed—divided into several distinct sections which provided
a succession of locations for the action of the play to unfold (a road, a
crib scene, a palace, etc.). In front of all this, or on a lower level, was the
audience, including real kings, arranged according to social hierarchies
or perhaps not. “Là-bas” in the passage just quoted refers at once to the
lower level of the stage, where we see the house of Mary and Joseph or
the tyrannical King Herod in his palace, as well as to the place occupied
by the audience, the French court.
The non-biblical plays use the same compartmentalized stage arrange-
ment, except that in this case there is no call for the upper, heavenly level.
On a horizontal platform (with the exception of Trépas), without visible
supernatural or transcendent forces, the characters come and go, meeting
as the plot requires, in the kinds of places this would demand. A curtain
would suffice to delimit these places, or even a simple written sign indi-
cating, for example, that next to a bedroom there is another room where
someone can go to be alone (Malade). The relationship with the audience
depends on whether the play is a mystery or a farce, yet both participate
in a general aesthetic which tends to include the audience in the effects
of the performance. A third kind of connection between the stage and
the audience occurs in court mummeries when, as at the end of Quatre
femmes, the play’s characters take part in a court ball just beginning. As
a consequence, a second-level performance (the play) acted before an
audience of courtiers merges into a first-level performance (a court ball).
The play’s characters return to being courtiers, now dancing either for
the others or, if everyone is dancing, along with the others. But even this
very worldly play ends with an echo of the religious and edifying message
of a mystery play: one of the “Filles” sets out the moral denouncing the
human failing which would “chercher secours de créature,” whereas in
order to “savoir l’avenir” (which is the issue for the four women charac-
ters), one must turn to “Celuy seul qui sur tous ha le pouvoir” (vv. 702–15).
At the end of the same speech in this courtly play, the Fille is neverthe-
less careful to refer to the king (François I or Henri de Navarre) present
in the audience: “Ainsi que roi en terre [Dieu] vous fait voir, / Vous doint
[= donne] regner au Ciel pour heritage” (vv. 714–15). In this way, Margue-
rite’s theater, whether biblical or not, is always based, visibly or implicitly,
on a material and symbolic organization of space which arranges heaven
and earth, time and eternity, hierarchically. It speaks to collective humanity

as a whole or to organized political society. The plot which takes place in
this kind of theatrical space always suggests a moral, religious, and politi-
cal parable, regardless of whether the plays are biblical or not.
In the context of this arrangement of the stage and given the absence
of acts and scenes in the modern sense to divide the action, the audience
follows the actors as they move from one place to another, from one part
of the set to another, or within the same set. These movements are some-
times indicated by stage directions but the majority of place changes are
implied by the text itself. The aesthetic is one of successive “tableaux,” and
the characters go from place to place (including within a single tableau)
until the action is completed, without any reference to the passage of real
time. Something has to keep the audience’s attention while the characters
move from one tableau to another or, within a tableau, from one place
to another, which, for the sake of verisimilitude, implies the passage of
a minimal amount of time. This is accomplished by transitional passages
in the text, moments during which a different character speaks, someone
already in the place to which another is headed. In the biblical plays, for
example, God, with his angels, is on the upper level, from where he can
see everything, and when the angels descend to earth, on the lower level,
a transitional monologue fills the time during which the angels move
from paradise to earth (see, for example, in Nativité, Mary’s monologue,
vv. 305ff.). In Innocents, Rachel must be on a middle level between earth
and heaven during her lament for the slaughtered children, whom she
sees without being nearby. This mother, symbolizing Israel, is a timeless
personification of motherhood and of Israel; her place is neither in para-
dise nor on earth among the living contemporaries of Jesus. Her mono-
logue allows time for the children massacred by Herod’s guards to leave
the stage while she speaks and for their souls to climb singing to paradise
(vv. 1000ff.). The non-biblical plays use the same kind of procedures and
staging, although the compartmentalization of space is horizontal (with
the exception of Trépas). In Inquisiteur, for example, there is an indoor
space (the bedroom of the inquisitor, in slippers) and an outdoor space
where the inquisitor, now wearing gloves, and his servant join the chil-
dren in the cold. Marguerite makes use of these conventions with consum-
mate skill, with only the odd exception, due perhaps to oversight. In Rois
(vv. 851ff.), Herod speaks to the learned Jews and the kings at the same
time, although they are not meant to be in the same space since one group
should not hear what Herod says to the other. We have to imagine, then,
a complex compartmentalization of the royal palace’s interior, with two
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separate areas in close proximity. This kind of traditional staging implies

the need for transitional monologues, which Marguerite uses very effec-
tively. As in mystery plays, where the religious meaning is dominant, the
biblical plays begin and end with a scene in paradise, with the exception
of Nativité, which begins with Joseph talking to Mary, and Désert, in which
Joseph’s monologue precedes the scene in paradise.
As for the physical stage sets, the texts of the plays require very little
beyond general indicators (which can be largely symbolic) needed to
identify the various locations. Costumes and the occasional prop, espe-
cially in the non-biblical plays, suffice to evoke the real world by means
of social differences (age, rank, occupation) or purely symbolic ones (hats,
asses’ ears, etc.). Some spaces must serve multiple functions and represent
several places—a meadow and a road, for example—allowing characters
to meet or to part, while remaining physically abstract, as in Trop Prou or
Mont-de-Marsan. In Mont-de-Marsan, it is not possible to tell if the shep-
herdess of the second part is already present silently in the background,
perhaps a meadow, during the discussions of the three women in the first
part. In any case, they do not notice her. In general, then, the plays are
easy to stage, which is a mark not of theatrical deficiency, but rather of a
desire to ensure that they can be performed with ease and, in some cases,
to interiorize the action.
To conclude our examination of these general matters, we can note
Marguerite’s acute sense of what movement on the stage can accomplish,
as can be seen in certain details of the texts. In Parfaits amants, for exam-
ple, the old woman invites the “Tierce Fille” to come closer (“Et venez çà,”
v. 105) so that she can whisper discretely what she would do if her lover
deceived her with another woman. The audience learns what must only
be murmured when they hear the maiden reply: “Quoi? Nouvelle acco-
inctance! [= je chercherai un autre ami!].” The young actress might speak
these words either in a low voice, like a secret that the audience can hear, or
loudly, in indignant defiance, after she pulls away. But most of the actions
on stage, including the funniest, are left to the actors’ initiative, just as the
execution of the musical or sung interludes (whether monodic, accom-
panied or unaccompanied by instruments, etc.) depends on the musical
resources available at the moment of a given performance. Finally, the
texts themselves present a variety of meters and strophic forms that, along
with the characters’ words, mark variations in tone or successive stages of
the plot, such as changes of tableau, changes of scene within a tableau,
and so on. This aspect of the plays has not as yet received the extensive
treatment it deserves.19 Marguerite’s very varied and subtle use of meter

is not merely a poetic element of the text, it is also an essential aid to the
actors’ memorization of it and to its production.
A final procedure that Marguerite inherited from tradition is the cre-
ation of characters by multiplication or differentiation of a single type,20
something found in both the biblical and non-biblical plays. Individuals
are picked out from undifferentiated groups of characters in the Bible,
like the shepherds on Christmas night or, in the comic theater, like the
fools in sotties. They are given names and distinctive voices, making an
individual of each representative of the general type. In this way, from a
single value or attitude expressed by the original type, Marguerite creates
a plurality of characters who together represent the plurality of individu-
als making up any social, moral, or spiritual grouping. This differentiation
also makes the dialogue and action livelier by avoiding situations in which
two protagonists simply oppose one another, each the sole representative
of an antagonistic point of view. Instead of hearing and seeing each give a
speech while waiting for the other to do the same, we witness the interac-
tion of several characters, which varies the speakers, makes the exchange
of ideas more rapid, and creates opportunities for lively movement on the
stage. Trop and Prou together face Peu and Moins; six children confront
the inquisitor and his servant; the massacre of the Innocents is divided
into four tableaux of increasing pathos (four children, four mothers, four
massacring soldiers). Such multiple figures, including the personifica-
tions representing abstractions found in the biblical plays, also bring in
psychological and spiritual nuances. They are always ordered, sometimes
hierarchically, so as to produce a dramatic vision of the moral and reli-
gious choices with which Marguerite’s plays are concerned. In this the-
ater, whose meaning is always symbolic, they render the abstract human.
Thus, in Trop Prou, the negative comic pair, Trop and Prou, is differenti-
ated. Trop is the father of Prou, he controls him with a scrutinizing eye,
and so on. These two characters also confide in one another, so that long
monologues can be avoided, while together they also represent a whole
potential group which they symbolize in a lively manner. By such means,
Marguerite considers multiple ways of finding or rejecting salvation or,
19 For the biblical plays, consult the remarks of Marczuk in her edition, pp. 58–61.
20 Anne Armand examines this question in depth in her thesis, Le texte du conflit dans
le théâtre de Marguerite de Navarre (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris X-Nanterre, now Paris
Ouest, 1984). I thank the author for her generosity in lending me this essential study.
294 olivier millet
in the plays focused on human love, of defining happiness. Critics have

noted that a series of monologues and replies responding to each other
can become somewhat mechanical; such a series also has the function,
however, of exploring varied approaches to a single moral or spiritual
reality by letting different voices express distinct points of view on the
same subject and thus, also, of avoiding overly schematic oppositions. In
its own particular way, in conformity with the workings of the theater,
Marguerite’s dramatic dialogism represents simultaneously on the stage
alternatives that are set out didactically in her non-dramatic poetry and
evoked narrativally in the Heptaméron.
The Biblical Plays
The four biblical plays form a coherent tetralogy telling of the birth and
infancy of Jesus Christ—“le Petit,” as Satan calls him (Nativité, v. 1209),
echoing a major theme of the non-biblical plays. As in mystery plays, in
particular the passion cycles of the late Middle Ages and most especially
those of Arnoul Gréban, from which Marguerite sometimes takes inspi-
ration, scenes of the Savior’s coming into the world are presented, their
meaning explained to a contemporary audience. Successive episodes are
drawn from biblical material contained in the Gospel of Matthew and its
parallels, read in the light of the liturgical tradition, of passion plays, and
occasionally apocryphal legends that are part of the Christian tradition.
In this way, when a defeated Satan leaves the stage and returns to hell
in Nativité (vv. 1197ff.), this is in keeping with mystery-play tradition. But
within this general framework, Marguerite introduces fundamental inno-
vations in several ways. We see this first in the series of four short dra-
mas, each between 1077 and 1579 lines, brought together as a tetralogy of
separate yet connected plays: Nativité prepares the way for Rois (vv. 277ff.)
and Innocents (vv. 334); in Rois, Herod’s fate is sealed, preparing for Innocents
(vv. 1409 and 1453); Rois recalls Nativité (vv. 45–48 and 1385); Innocents sum-
marizes Rois (vv. 28ff.); at the end of the play, Désert recalls Innocents
(vv. 1401ff.) when Joseph is informed that there is no more to be feared
from Herod and that he can return to the land of Israel with Mary and
the child. There is no known precedent for this format. Before Marguerite,
there were either paraliturgical nativity plays, devoted to the events of
Christmas night, or passion plays which, after a long prologue covering
the Old Testament, had scenes on earth depicting the period from the
annunciation to the ascension of Christ, that is, the whole of his earthly
life. Marguerite, for her part, while focusing solely on the story of Jesus’s
infancy, recalls the great Christian themes of redemption and the whole
of salvation history. This she does by means of a meditation in which first-
person lyricism finds its place, rather than objectively representing on the
stage the gesta salvatoris. For example, Innocents echoes the trial of Justice
and Mercy, which in Gréban’s Passion formed a grandiose opening scene.
Here, interiorized in the souls of the Innocents, it becomes the theme of
God’s discourse when he declares:
Car Charité qui soy-même surmonte
En eux par moy engravée et empreinte
Je recongnois, qui ma justice dompte. (vv. 929–31)
The Virgin Mary is the protagonist of this tetralogy; other characters
are defined in relation to her attitude and her choices. This is all the more
striking as Marguerite did not choose to compose, as she might well have,
a series of plays on the life of the Virgin in the narrative, picturesque, and
classicizing mode of Battista Spagnoli (known as the Christian Virgil of
his day and a model for Marot), although the French translation of one of
his Latin poems on this subject had been dedicated to her.21 If the Virgin
has a central role for Marguerite, this is because, in the queen’s eyes, she
is best placed to meditate on the mystery of the incarnation and the gift
of grace; that is, this choice is an expression of Marguerite’s Christocen-
trism. The same point of view also explains why Marguerite eliminates
most of the apocryphal elements, those not reported in the Bible, con-
cerning the infancy of Christ. She makes use only of those that do not
threaten her biblical and Christological focus—like the names of the Magi
and the fact that they were kings—or those that do not compromise the
dignity of her characters. We see here a new sense of what is appropriate
for a Christian, in line with a Christian humanist and evangelical sensibil-
ity. It seems likely that Marguerite was responding to a call that Lefèvre
d’Étaples addressed to those witnessing a performance of the scene of the
adoration of the Christ-child by the shepherds. Rather than the ridiculous
and gross observers he believed tradition had made of them, the leading
figure of French Evangelism urged that the shepherds be seen as believ-
ers inspired by the Holy Spirit.22 Yet in Marguerite’s case, in addition to
21 La Parthenice Mariane de Baptiste Mantuan, translated from the Parthenice Mariana
by Battista Spagnoli (1481) by Jacques de Mortière (Lyon, 1523), dedicated to Marguerite,
duchesse d’Alençon.
22 In the Hasenohr-Millet edition, see p. 524, n. 156.
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conveying an edifying moral, this sense of what is fitting derives equally

from her attention to the inner life based on the meditation of the words
of the Bible, an outlook she again shared with Lefèvre.
These dramaturgical and literary choices thus go along with an entirely
new aesthetic and spiritual vision. Instead of the picturesque and dra-
matic theater of the mystery play, with its three worlds (divine, terres-
trial, and infernal) that coexist independently of each other, Marguerite
foregrounds the way the characters inwardly accept or reject the advent
of salvation. Her focus is thus a history of personal salvation, whose sub-
jective dimensions are as important as its historical and collective dimen-
sions. These are also accounts of conversions, since Marguerite always
sees salvation as a progressive change which moves forward, fails, or suc-
ceeds in each individual case. In this sense, these plays are very theatrical
and based on a strong dramatic aesthetic. But each person perceives the
signs offered by the basic narrative of biblical events as a private, personal
call to be accepted or rejected. Marguerite gives us, then, a story of souls
which is played out in the subjective interaction between divine grace
and what moves each individual. The themes in question—especially the
connections between faith and love or the role of grace—are precisely
those that most occupied religious thinkers of the period, in the context
of the French evangelical movement or the crisis of the Protestant Refor-
mation. We will come shortly to the presence of Evangelism in Margue-
rite’s theater. For the moment, it is important not to forget that although
Marguerite is concerned with conveying a moral lesson, she does this by
using the stage not as an instrument of propaganda but as a means of
making visible the invisible (the action of grace), so that the audience
might contemplate the spiritual and eternal meaning of the incarnation,
in this sense becoming its very contemporaries.
Nativité
This play has three parts which take place starting late at night and end-
ing the next morning. The first two are based on the Gospel of Luke 2:1–20.
Joseph and Mary must leave for Bethlehem. Joseph recounts events while
Mary alone explains their meaning. Once they arrive in Bethlehem look-
ing for lodging, Joseph is turned away by three inn-keepers. Marguerite
invents this based on the single traditional inn-keeper found in Gréban’s
Passion. The three are moved respectively by greed, pride, and pleasure.23
23 This owes its inspiration to 1 John 2:15–16.

Joseph settles Mary in a shelter and leaves the stage to seek basic neces-
sities. In the other plays, too, Joseph represents the principle of material
needs, which must rightly be met, but for which Mary regularly reminds
us that the believer relies on God alone. Joseph is thus on the side of faith
understood in terms of the active life, Mary on the side of contempla-
tive life, according to the paradigm underlying the episode of Martha and
Mary in Luke 10:40–41 (and parallel passages). Furthermore, if Joseph is
fully engaged in the faith, he readily accepts instruction from his wife. At
the moment she gives birth to Jesus, Mary is alone under God’s watchful
care. The infant’s birth gives rise at once to thanksgiving, an abandonment
of self, an illumination, and a mystical ecstasy (vv. 183–203), answered
by a scene in paradise. Then angels descend to surround Mary and sing,
while she praises God in a lyrical monologue. Once beside her, the angels
evoke Christ’s future passion. Joseph returns and offers praise in his turn.
The next section brings the shepherds, as was traditional in paraliturgi-
cal Christmas dramas. Marguerite gives us six shepherds with symbolic
names, and here we have an important innovation: half are shepherd-
esses. They are called Sophon (Wise Man), Elpison (Hopeful One), Neph-
alle (Watchful One), Philétine (Loving One), Cristilla (Elect of Christ),
and Dorothée (Gift of God). These shepherds represent simple folk, ready
to receive grace. Individualized, they are so many figures of the fervent
hope of salvation, expressed according to the different spiritual modalities
(expectation, love, knowledge, etc.) revealed by their speeches. The angels
appear to them, tell them of the birth of the Savior, and the pastoral group
sets off toward the infant singing a carol. When they arrive, they enter the
stable and worship the Redeemer while praising his mother. Their ques-
tions draw attention to Christ’s humility. These scenes, in which Joseph
becomes the authorized interpreter of Scripture, underscore the typologi-
cal correspondences between the Old and New Testaments. Once they
have given gifts suitable to their station in life, the shepherds take their
leave. The last section of the play is Marguerite’s innovation, with only
one counterpart in an older tradition dating to the 13th century and found
in a single manuscript.24 The shepherds encounter Satan, who is at pains
to test the faith of these humble elect by means of the temptations of
earthly power and knowledge with respect to God, involving questions
that produce a real discussion of grace, evil, freedom, and the interpre-
tation of Scripture. Triumphant at the start of the scene, Satan leaves
24 In the Hasenohr-Millet edition, see p. 33, n. 1.

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defeated, filled with doubt about the future of his power. In conclusion,
God announces to humans (the audience) the victory of Jesus, “qui
vous fera jusques à moy saillir” (v. 1220), because he has chosen the self-
emptying of the incarnation (“rien en son tout”), and the angels proclaim
the victory of the sacrificial Lamb, inviting all to “faire feste.”
As in the following plays, there is no clash in tone here between pic-
turesque characters, in this case the shepherds, and the spiritual message,
between the historical account and the entertaining or supernatural ele-
ments. Marguerite’s taste for literary unity is revealed also in the arrange-
ment of the play’s scenes and its construction in three parts. She may
have acquired this from her knowledge of poetry and her contacts with
humanism, but it comes first and foremost from the fact that the unfold-
ing of events in the plays is presented only through its resonance with the
individual characters. This in turn depends on their sharing a deep under-
standing of the spiritual meaning of Scripture, read according to Chris-
tian practice and constantly paraphrased, and an immediate acceptance
of its significance for themselves and for the world. More than didacticism
(of which the shepherds in the medieval tradition were also capable) or
a broad range of situations, Marguerite seeks to show how different souls
are able to appropriate the message of the Scriptures as a whole, medi-
tated in faith and love, from the Song of Songs to the Pauline Epistles
and the Apocalypse. As for Satan, far from appearing in scenes of noisy
and rebellious devilry, he is presented as excluded, someone outside a
joy he wants no part of, who refuses to be “petit” and who argues against
the personal and humble appropriation of the Scriptures (“Pensez-vous
bien entendre l’Escriture?” v. 1094). His role is taken on in Rois and in
Innocents by the human figure of Herod, and what he represents will dis-
appear, from the stage if not from the world, in Désert. Trop and Prou
are, in the non-biblical play that bears their names, the mysterious and
pathetic equivalent.
Rois
Marguerite follows the text of Matthew 2 and, in line with medieval tra-
dition, the Magi coming from the East to worship the infant Jesus are
depicted as kings with equally traditional names: Balthasar, Melchior,
and Gaspard. In general, Marguerite does not follow Gréban’s Passion,
although she retains the motif of the Magi meeting up on the road before
they arrive in Jerusalem, without however, as in Gréban, the accounts they
give of their respective journeys. The play’s construction is independent
of the preceding episodes (the shepherds do not reappear) and it has its
own initial and final scenes set in paradise with accompanying songs. In
the first scene, set in paradise, God sends Philosophy, Tribulation, and
Inspiration separately, each to one of the kings, and Divine Intelligence
to all three. Other picturesque elements are omitted: Herod’s banquet,
pseudo-Jewish references, and the like. Marguerite focuses on the religious
message of the episode of the Magi-Kings (“Des autres roys l’exemple et
enseigneurs,” v. 1140) and to this end introduces the allegorical figures
mentioned. Her purpose is to underscore the meaning of the feast of the
Epiphany, for which this play was composed, and to declare the universal
nature of Christ’s kingship and of salvation.
From this perspective, the goal of the eastern kings becomes the search
for truth and salvation, a search already actively underway before the start
of their journey. Contrary to tradition, they do not see the guiding star
until after they have left home and are on their way. Their quest leads to
a conversion that Balthasar and Melchior understand the need for little by
little, and Gaspard, all at once. Moreover, divine light is transmitted from
God to the terrestrial and human world in a way both mediated and hier-
archically ordered, following a model with origins in Pseudo-Dionysius.
Tribulation, Philosophy, and Inspiration are celestial intermediaries of a
lower level, so many angels suited to the three beings they advise and
enlighten, whereas on a higher level, Divine Intelligence is united with
God and represents the ultimate intermediary required by all. At the out-
set, having already risen above earthly vanity, Balthasar seeks the true
meaning of existence. Guided by Philosophy, he reads books that lead him
to God and to Holy Scripture (vv. 200ff.). Melchior is a righteous man, who
nonetheless needs to be tested in order to put aside his pride, look within,
and experience joy following Tribulation (vv. 251ff.). Gaspard is the type of
the sudden convert who, without seeking it, finds faith thanks to Inspira-
tion. Simultaneously, he sees himself as a sinner and, his sins covered by
Love, is confident that he is among God’s elect (vv. 353ff.). His lyricism
clearly makes him the closest to the author. After these three decisive
events, the Magi see the star and each is given a suitable interpretation
of what it symbolizes. It is at this point that they meet each other and
Divine Intelligence, who, while the other three allegorical personifications
leave, offers them a detailed ordo prophetarum explaining biblical revela-
tion and its prophesies (vv. 625–788). Intelligence then sends them to the
Holy Land, leaving them alone with their servants to prepare their gifts for
Jesus. The three kings thus represent progress up the Ladder of Perfection,
according to the three steps described by Saint Bonaventure: purgatio,
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illuminatio, perfectio—here three simultaneous processes since the kings

travel in parallel until they meet. However, only Gaspard can enjoy per-
fect union with God. They then make their way to Herod, whom they
find talking with a servant in his palace in Jerusalem. The Jewish elders
(docteurs) incite Herod to kill the King-Christ. During the kings’ stay with
Herod (who considers them mad), the star disappears, a sign they should
leave Herod, who tries to make use of them to prevent the coming of
salvation. He is the symbol of the reprobate, as we learn in vv. 1416–20 at
the end of the play, but the audience and the kings already know that the
tyrant’s desperate enterprise will fail. The star reappears, guiding the kings
to the manger. They come to Bethlehem, finding the door to the stable
shut, but they see the infant from afar, then through the door, whereupon
Mary asks Joseph to let them in. Their worship of the infant and their gifts
to him correspond to the typology of the three men: Balthasar recognizes
in Jesus the all-powerful Creator, giving him gold, a symbol of royalty;
Melchior worships the Redeemer, High Priest and victim, offering him the
incense of sacrifice; Gaspard offers myrrh, used in the burial of the dead,
to God incarnate become man. Mary explains to them the significance of
this. After they leave, the Virgin gives thanks to God and the play, continu-
ing its movement of ascent, ends with a scene in paradise.
Innocents
The brief account in Matthew 2:11–18 tells of the massacre of male chil-
dren ordered by Herod in the hope of killing the new-born Messiah, whose
location the Magi, leaving secretly, did not reveal to him. As in the preced-
ing plays, Marguerite draws on the mystery tradition and Gréban, from
whom she takes several apocryphal details, such as the murder of Herod’s
son among the other children and the lament of his nursemaid. There
are also some textual borrowings from the liturgy (notably the readings
in the breviary for the office of the Holy Innocents). The departure of the
Holy Family and its arrival in the desert in Egypt are briefly mentioned
(vv. 191–210), without being represented.
The play starts with a scene in paradise, making a transition (by means
of the descent of guardian angels) to a scene with Mary and Joseph, who
are replaced (v. 201) by Herod and the human drama, in a play where there
is no real conversion or discussion. Instead we have lively and pathetic
action, with characters (blind executioners and unknowing victims) for
whom the real meaning of what they are doing or undergoing remains
entirely foreign. Herod and his two learned advisors discuss the question
of slaughtering children younger than two, then Herod talks to his lieuten-
ant. The massacre, performed by soldiers (“Tyrans”), takes place in four
successive scenes with four children and the plaints and lamentations of
their respective mothers, to which is added the murder of Herod’s son.
The lieutenant then reports to the king, who learns, among other things
from the nursemaid, that his own son has been slaughtered, but without
being moved by this for very long. Rachel appears and delivers a long
speech, divided into two distinct parts by its meter (a lyrical plaint then
a didactic exposition, vv. 651–892). Articulating a supra-temporal per-
spective, she explains the larger eschatological context and the spiritual
sense of the tragedy: the failure of Herod’s plot; the triumph over death of
the Innocents and of Christ. The play ends in heaven: God will bring the
Innocents into his peace on high, “comme je l’ai à tous croyants promis”
(v. 927); the angels respond and the play concludes with a song of praise
from the souls of the Innocents, sung to a well-known melody, that
becomes a Christmas carol (noël) (v. 1072). Assumed into heaven, the souls
of the Innocents are an example of God’s free election and the promise of
the election of all martyrs and believers to come.
The play thus prepares us for the action, lets us see it, and then offers
commentary in enunciative (Rachel, he), performative (God, I), and allo-
cutive (the Innocents in heaven, you) modes. This simple but effective
arrangement draws attention to the two successive realms, the earthly—
with the pathetic crescendo of the four murders, staged one after the
other, followed by that of Herod’s son—and the heavenly—where we see
the troubles of a world seemingly dominated by tyrants from the point of
view of faith. The tyrants here do not need to be accompanied by Satan
(as in Gréban) to reveal their diabolical character, nor does Herod need
to commit suicide on stage (again as in Gréban) to signify their ultimate
failure. Once more, Marguerite’s aim is to illuminate the account of the
biblical events, simplified and stylized, through meditation on a complex
array of biblical texts, some of liturgical origin, brought together in the
speeches of the positive characters, as in her other plays, in the form of
quotations (in French not Latin), paraphrases, and allusions.
Désert
Gréban situates Mary and Joseph’s time in Egypt—shown on the stage
merely as their departure followed by their return—during the massa-
cre of the Innocents; their return to Israel follows the last scene of the
consequences of the killings. The decision to devote a whole play to
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this episode, described only in Matthew 2:19–22, is an innovation on

Marguerite’s part. The Bible’s silence about what happened during their
time in the desert is “filled in” by the play’s 1400 lines. Marguerite evokes
the iconographical tradition of the “Flight into Egypt,” or “Rest on the
Flight into Egypt,” which shows the Holy Family solitary (“deserted”) in a
protective natural landscape.25 At the beginning of the play, Joseph alludes
to material reality when he speaks of his responsibility to provide for his
family’s needs; at the same time, he insists on the only thing that counts
from the point of view of faith, “la vie cachée sous la chair” (v. 53), the real
theme of this play. In the Bible, the desert is the symbolic site of divine
revelation, of perfection, and of contemplation, but also the site of temp-
tation. The theme (to speak of the interior “vie cachée” of faith), coincid-
ing with the setting, fosters lyricism in the absence of any outside events
other than Joseph’s domestic concerns and the apocryphal miraculous gift
of food and drink brought to the Holy Family by angels. Near the end of the
play (vv. 1193ff.), Joseph returns bringing food, which is no longer needed.
They are in a paradise on earth: “Ce désert est beau comme un paradis”
(v. 1234). Between Joseph’s departure and his return, the play focuses
entirely on interior events, even if these are presented dramatically. First,
there is a scene in paradise with God, Contemplation, Memory, and Con-
solation, ending with a song from the angels. Marguerite uses this tableau
to show how the coming of the Holy Spirit can occur for the faithful, just
as Jesus promised his disciples it would after his resurrection and ascen-
sion. Meditation on Holy Scripture is guided by Contemplation (expert
on the book of Nature; cf. above Philosophy accompanying Balthasar), by
Memory (charged with the Old Testament), and by Consolation (charged
with the New Testament). It awakens unceasingly in Mary that in which
all believers are invited to partake: the illumination of Divine Intelligence,
as Rois put it. As a result, the heart of the play (vv. 370–1014) takes on the
aspect of a song shared by Mary and the auxiliaries who bring enlighten-
ment: Contemplation/Mary, Memory/Mary, Consolation/Mary.
On the stage, Mary embodies the understanding of Holy Scripture, asso-
ciated, as in the monastic spiritual tradition, with the contemplative life.
The unifying theme of this meditation is the renewal of creation and the
25 See, for example, the part of Hans Memling’s triptych known as the “Flight into
Egypt,” now in the Louvre. Mary, standing in the foreground, holds and displays the infant,
while, in the background, just as in this play, Joseph picks fruit from a tree (of Paradise) to
feed his family. A road creates perspective and leads, in the background, toward the world
and history. This image is the closest to the play.
redemption of human nature. Its Christocentric vision constantly reveals

the spiritual truth veiled by the material exterior of things and by the
letter of Scripture. From this point of view, death is forever conquered,
sacred history is accomplished, the cross is triumphant. This paradise is
not won by the multiplication of works and by merit, but received by
those capable of being open to the new life of the Spirit. This play’s spiri-
tual language is the most metaphoric of the four, the most obviously filled
with images, the most inspired also by the Song of Songs and its concrete
poetics of spiritual meaning.
After the paradise scene and the dispatching of the three illuminating
Powers, we see Mary in prayer (v. 219), “en repos” with God. The angels
(six of them) approach her singing, and Mary is cast as a sort of leader
of their choir. Conversations with Contemplation, Memory, and Conso-
lation follow, then another exchange with the angels, Joseph’s return, a
dialogue between Jesus’s two parents, and the angel’s speech announcing
to Joseph that the time has come to go back to Israel. During the journey,
they meet “L’homme,” who tells them what is happening in Israel, where
danger remains as a result of the reign of Herod’s son. In this way, the
characters return to the flux of history, from which their stay in the des-
ert had to some extent detached them. In the evening, Joseph and Mary
stop to sleep a little, and the angel informs Joseph that he and his family
must go to Nazareth in Galilee. The play ends with commentaries on the
name Nazareth, which will be associated with that of Jesus, and God, in
paradise, develops this theme before the angels’ final song. Aside from
the actions on earth (essentially the activities and encounters of Joseph),
all the others are spiritual, rendered visible on the stage. This is no doubt
why in this play, unlike the others of the tetralogy, theatrical vocabulary is
used to indicate the interior truths of faith. Mary exclaims to the audience
about the “bow”—simultaneously the rainbow as biblical sign of the cov-
enant with God and the bow which Divine Love uses to shoot its arrows:
“De l’Eternel apprenez tous ce jeu” (v. 669), exactly as she does before
us on the stage. In verses 1003ff., she once again invites the audience to
imitate her in what she herself embodies on the stage (the generation in
oneself of the Divine Word):
Croyez, recevez,
Portez, concevez
Dieu par sa Parole;
Et sentez le en vous
Père, frère, espoux,
Qui joue son rôle.
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The theater here serves to demonstrate how the evangelical and mystical
spirituality, of which Marguerite is the spokesperson, is filled by the dyna-
mism of true life. After the dramatic action of Innocents and its division
between heaven and earth, Désert shows us how earthly life and heavenly
life can come together in a fertile and mysterious harmony.
Spiritual Themes in the Theater of Marguerite de Navarre
The themes that are made explicit in the biblical plays also appear in the
non-biblical ones, where they are considered from a different perspective
or sometimes present only as allusions. For this reason, a discussion of
these themes makes a good transition between the two groups of plays.
As with the queen’s other works, her theater contains ideas and images
from very diverse spiritual traditions, which she brings together without
contradiction since her aim is not to fit them into a precise dogmatic
theology. We should not be surprised, then, to find ideas from Pseudo-
Dionysius and Luther coexisting, to give but one example.26 Neverthe-
less, the historico-religious context of these themes and their formulation
sometimes gives them an acute, even polemical, relevance, so that evan-
gelical propaganda and the most contemplative ideas and attitudes are
bound up together.
Everything is based on the Bible and on Scripture alone, proclaimed
as the source of the one and only truth and, at the same time, as noted
above, an object of meditation according to complex patterns. On ques-
tions of faith, Marguerite’s theater recognizes no authority apart from
Scripture, even if the Scriptures are interpreted according to diverse tra-
ditions. Marguerite displays clearly her distrust of intellectual interpre-
tations and scholastic authorities who assert their own competence and
a monopoly over biblical interpretation: “Mais chacun a ou son parler
glosé, / Ou déprisé ou comme nul tenu” (Nativité, vv. 893–94). This theme
is polemicized, albeit allusively, in Malade and Inquisiteur. The crucial
26 The various spiritual sources for Marguerite’s theater can be found in the index
of names of the Hasenohr-Millet edition under Saint Bernard, Guillaume Briçonnet,
Raymond Jourdan, Lefèvre d’Étaples, Ludolphe le Chartreux, Martin Luther, Marguerite
Porete, Pseudo-Denys. See also Barbara Marczuk-Szwed, “Les motifs mystiques dans le
théâtre biblique de Marguerite de Navarre,” in Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1992: Actes
du Colloque international de Pau, 1992, ed. Nicole Cazauran and James Dauphiné (Mont-
de-Marsan, 1995), pp. 403–21.
role of the Bible does not prevent other books—“Livres de toute sorte
qui parlent du grand Dieu” (Rois, v. 373)—from appearing as preparatory
to its message, as can be seen in the case of Balthasar in Rois. But even
before these other books, Contemplation has Balthasar look carefully at
the “grand livre” of creation (Rois, vv. 142, 380ff.), since the soul must dis-
cover in God the principle of all existence, of which he is the source and
final point of return. To contemplate the world in its beauty and diversity
as divine creation and to meditate on Scripture are related since together
they reveal the harmony of the “three books” (Creation, Old and New Tes-
taments; Désert, v. 1291), whose source is the one Divine Logos. An authen-
tic reading of Scripture occurs in a spirit of charity—in accordance with
a tradition that can be traced back to Saint Augustine—and it seeks not
to feed debate but to enable the faithful to live the secret life of the Spirit.
To give up cuyder (see below) and to understand Scripture are one and
the same thing (Rois, vv. 51ff.; Trop Prou, vv. 497ff.). The third shepherd of
Nativité tells Satan, who questions the capacity of a humble person like
him to understand the Bible:
Nous en faisons humblement la lecture.
Maistre n’avons sinon sa charité,
Qui nous apprend toute la vérité;
Plus en sentons, moins en povons parler,
Car fort amour fait ce secret celer. (vv. 1095–99)
Negative theology, of Pseudo-Dionysian origin, becomes a herme-
neutic principle that distances Marguerite both from scholastic theology
and from the biblicism of the Protestant Reformation. Trop Prou strongly
affirms the impossibility of speaking of the lived experience of the Scrip-
tures (v. 514), and the shepherdess of Mont-de-Marsan poetically and
dramatically illustrates the same principle. This kind of personal reading,
indispensable for all, is nonetheless not individualistic, as is clear from the
use of the first person plural (nous) in the passage from Nativité quoted
above and, in Mont-de-Marsan, from the intermediary role of the Sage in
relation to the Mondaine and the Superstitieuse. In this process, the hum-
ble are themselves privileged intercessors, as can be seen from the social
status of the servant in Malade or the role of the children in Inquisiteur.
Marguerite’s originality seems to lie in combining the spiritual herme-
neutics of monasticism—with its affective and spiritual tradition of lectio
divina—with a democratization of its ideals. This is no longer the preserve
of orders of contemplatives (of, so to speak, professionals) but rather of
all humble folk seeking truth and love, which also justifies the translation
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of the Bible into the vernacular. In Rois, God sends Parfaite Intelligence
to offer of his “secrets cachés aux Ecritures / . . . à tous salutaires lectures”
(vv. 98ff.). The reading of the Bible by the humble (that is, “ignorant”
women, people with no academic training and no knowledge of Latin)
must be in a French translation, as is implied by the gift of a Bible by the
Sage to the two other women in Mont-de-Marsan (vv. 376, 544ff.). The
Bible also features more than once as a book on stage (Rois, vv. 628ff.). In
the context of the period, this translation could be that of Lefèvre d’Étaples
(1530) or some other French translation prepared according to Christian-
humanist principles. This is precisely what the inquisitor objects to: “Ce
savoir neuf, qui le nôtre surmonte,” that of learned men “Qui mieux que
moi ont l’Ecriture sainte” (Inquisiteur, vv. 5, 12) and who, in opposition
to the scholastics, declare their own enlightened knowledge of the Bible:
“Toujours leur faut alléguer l’Ecriture” (ibid., v. 14). The model of this kind
of translation is Marot’s Psalms, the source of the paraphrase of psalm 3,
which the children sing at length in Inquisiteur. They know the Bible by
heart, just like the liturgy of the Church, which equally inspires the biblical
plays and which furnishes the closing words of Trépas. Here, too, Margue-
rite’s religious culture consists in a democratization of monastic spiritual-
ity, stripped of its asceticism, in the context of a militant Evangelism.
The link between paradise and earth, both dramaturgically and spiri-
tually, is the Virgin Mary. She is the head of the choir of angels (Désert,
vv. 358ff.), rather than the intercessor for the people of God (of this there
is only one example in Désert, vv. 509ff.). Worthy of reverence because
of her divine maternity (Désert, vv. 296ff., 527ff.), she benefited from
the immaculate conception (Désert, vv. 119ff., 916ff.). Filled with God by
the Holy Spirit, she conceives the divine Word and so becomes, as the
Virgin-mystical soul, the model for all believers (Nativité, vv. 199ff., 1029ff.);
she embodies for Marguerite what one must be, rien, so that one can be
filled with the Tout that is God, a message conveyed also by the children
in Inquisiteur. This reality is accomplished for Mary in a mystical ecstasy
(Désert, v. 295), as it is for the shepherdess in Mont-de-Marsan, who is also
“ravie.” For Mary, union with God tends to become a constant state, as it
is for the shepherdess (Mont-de-Marsan, vv. 747ff.). The opposition of Tout
and Rien no doubt comes from Guillaume Briçonnet.27 The dichotomy
gives rise to antitheses that, by their metaphoric and constantly varied
27 Anne Armand notes its appearance in Briçonnet’s letter of 10 July 1521 (Le texte du
conflit).
profusion, mark the limits and the inadequacy of human language and
human reason, as Pseudo-Dionysius explained. This is why silence plays
so great a dramaturgical and thematic role in the queen’s theater. More
often than not it is the language of human love that offers the characters
a means to express their lives in God: because God is love, according to
the Gospel of John, but also because Marguerite does not shy away from
formulations suggesting courtly love or the love song (perfect love, the
lover, the friend, etc.) to designate life with God, guided by traditional
allegorical readings of the eroticism of the Song of Songs, and, in the case
of Mont-de-Marsan, echoing Marguerite Porete’s Miroir des âmes simples.
The vocabulary and the images make use of the most sensual aspects of
the lover’s experience (fire, kisses, pleasure, repose). This mystical lan-
guage is of a piece with the optimism of the salvation theology and the
moral theology of Marguerite’s theater. What leads to God is the beauty
of the world, not human misery; original sin is a happy fault (felix culpa:
Désert, v. 652), as a result of which we have received the abundance and
the happiness of grace; faith is essentially pleasure, joy, song, and laughter,
even in the midst of trials.
Mary, the humble servant of the Magnificat,28 is the key figure among
the humble folk who fill Marguerite’s plays as privileged recipients of
divine grace. Three aspects of their humility are highlighted, both dra-
matically and thematically, through its association with the “idiot,” that is,
someone simple and ignorant; childhood; and the fool for God. Women,
for example, shepherds, or the servant in Malade embody, by virtue of
their sex or their social status, the first of these. Except in Rois, these “idi-
ots” all appear as outsiders, those whom learned men or the proud seek
to marginalize. Marguerite often stresses this opposition in social terms,
even if, in the case of Peu and Moins, the “work” that these humble folk
do is also a symbol of the trials they undergo, which mark them as among
the elect (Trop Prou, vv. 253–66). The Superstitieuse in Mont-de-Marsan
is valorized mostly by her admission of her ignorance, her “idiotie” (vv.
546–54, cf. v. 879). Childhood (cf. above, Jesus “le Petit”) is a second dis-
tinctive trait, which largely corresponds to the first. God calls his angels
“children” (Nativité, v. 293) and Marguerite’s children are those who call
God “Father.” Alongside the children of Inquisiteur, we may also place the
“fols” of Trop Prou, whose behavior, if not their age, is childlike (laughter
[cf. Désert, v. 1535], playing games, and so on), and the shepherdess
28 For a discussion of Mary in the biblical plays, see the Marczuk edition, pp. 51–57.
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of Mont-de-Marsan, whose language at times approaches inarticulate

babble. Childhood implies an absence of concern for oneself or the future
(cf. Quatre femmes), the lack of spiritual qualms, and indifference to the
world and its false values. It allows play, laughter, and song, along with
pleasure. This folly is ultimately that of “fools for God,”29 which overturns
the criteria of those who think themselves wise, beginning with Herod,
and who are wordly fools. These carnal types accuse the spiritual ones of
madness or sorcery. The opposition between the two groups, those of the
spirit and those of the flesh, highlights the dynamic process of conver-
sion—a central religious theme, as we have noted, for example in the case
of the Magi-Kings. The shepherds of Nativité sing of their own conversion
from the old Adam to the new (vv. 676ff.). What most often character-
izes conversion is its “sudden” nature—a frequent term, for example, in
Malade or Inquisiteur—which emphasizes the unforeseeable and over-
whelming nature of grace, as do the words saut/saillir. The impossibility
of self-conversion is the dramatic subject of Trop Prou; Mont-de-Marsan
combines the two problematics (conversion and the impossibility of self-
conversion). In Trépas, exceptionally, Marguerite stages her own conver-
sion from despair to hope.
Conversion is required to escape from cuyder: man’s sinful confidence
in himself, a source of illusion and pride. Sin is justified by God, who hides
it in his grace, and the faithful, although justified, are still sinners, even
if Marguerite does not stress this Lutheran theme. Sin can only affect the
mortal body, not the regenerate heart, a heterodox position from any per-
spective (Nativité, vv. 1136–55; cf. Mont-de-Marsan).30 Marguerite assimi-
lates sin to cuyder (Nativité, vv. 1144ff.), which does not accept that God
alone has being, “estre” (Innocents, v. 1056). The opposite of sin is faith,
understood as an absolute trust in the Word of God and the assurance
of salvation (Lutheran themes). Marguerite speaks of faith using the ter-
minology current in evangelical circles (“ferme foy,” “vive foy”), so as to
stress, along with the unshakable certitude of faith, its link to a new life
in love. The idea of merit deriving from good works is rejected (Nativité,
29 See the article by Barbara Marczuk, “‘Vrayement voicy de plaisans fous’: La folie dans
le théâtre de Marguerite de Navarre,” in Quêtes personnelles et actualités contemporaines
dans le théâtre de Marguerite de Navarre, ed. Olga Anna Duhl, Renaissance and Reforma-
tion/Renaissance et Réforme 26.4 (2002), 33–49.
30 In her edition, Marczuk notes the ideas that Marguerite shares with the libertins
spirituels (pp. 42–44). Only this last one seems incontestably heterodox. The others might
arise from a free interpretation of the Bible, without doctrinal implications, from tradition,
or from evangelical notions in general circulation.
vv. 172ff.; Rois, vv. 759ff.; Inquisiteur, vv. 431ff.; Mont-de-Marsan); grace is
a pure gift of God resulting from divine election (a recurrent theme in
the biblical plays), founded on predestination, as is mentioned in passing
(Rois, vv. 1417–20). These last themes, along with the question of granting
all the faithful access to the Scriptures, concern matters that were actively
debated around Marguerite from the early 1520s, and some of the non-
biblical plays also do not shy away from discussing them.
The Non-Biblical Plays
Le Malade
Malade, whose script seems to have been revived for a performance in
1558, was written as a parable of current events. It belongs to a series of
evangelical or Protestant plays, in which the gospel cures a disease of
the Christian faith.31 La Farce des théologastres (between 1526 and 1528),
perhaps written by Louis de Berquin, no doubt suggested the idea to
Marguerite. Here, however, there are no personifications such as Berquin
used (his work includes Foi, Malade, and Texte as characters). Rather, the
characters are types, the sick man, his wife, a servant, and a doctor, which
gives the play the air of a symbolic farce. Its literal meaning, amusing even
if it elicits smiles rather than belly-laughs, leads the reader to a symbolic
interpretation. Of all Marguerite’s theater, only this play is written entirely
in eight-line strophes of eight-syllable verses, which also contributes to a
relatively farcical and simple atmosphere. The author draws on the bib-
lical status of physical illness as potentially indicative of a state of sin,
thereby rooting evangelical propaganda concretely in the human condi-
tion.32 Scholars believe the play was probably written during a period of
intense religious hope, perhaps even in 1535 after the affaire des placards.
There is no allusion in the play which would tie it to an exact date, how-
ever, and the image of faith as medicine is also found in the Miroir de
l’âme pécheresse (1531) and the biblical plays.33
31 See Jelle Koopmans, “L’allégorie théâtrale au début du XVIe siècle: le cas des pièces
‘profanes’ de Marguerite de Navarre,” in Quêtes personnelles et actualités contemporaines,
pp. 65–89 (pp. 80ff.).
32 On disease and medicine in this play, see Colette H. Winn, “Témoignage de l’actua-
lité médicale du temps: Le Mallade de Marguerite de Navarre (c. 1535),” in Quêtes person-
nelles et actualités contemporaines, pp. 91–111.
33 Nativité, vv. 850ff.; Rois, vv. 338 and 1251ff.; cf., by contrast (disease and an implicit
absence of faith), Quatre femmes, vv. 1259ff. and 424ff. The medical metaphor occurs also
in Trop Prou.
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The text of 438 lines is simple. A man, feeling ill, sends his wife to fetch
the doctor. During her absence, their servant criticizes those who look to
the saints or to false doctors and, in a dialogue that becomes a kind of
spiritual catechism, she tells the patient to turn to God alone. The sick
man takes this message to heart and, feeling himself cured, decides to rest.
The doctor, as he makes his way to the house, declares that he alone can
treat the sick. He awakens the patient, who once again feels ill. The doctor
prescribes bleeding, which frightens the sick man; his wife suggests folk
remedies. While the doctor is writing the prescription, the servant once
again instructs her master. Returning to collect his fee and finding the
sick man cured, the doctor accuses the other three of having had recourse
to illegitimate means, to old-wives’ cures, spells, or the invocation of a
saint. The servant, laughing, explains what she has done, but the doctor
and the wife fail to understand. Without denying that a miracle is pos-
sible, the doctor declares it unlikely. After his departure, the sick man
himself explains the lesson to be drawn from the events: the need to put
aside all human opinion in favor of faith in God alone. The doctor, whose
financial interests are involved, convinced of his own superiority as a man
and as an expert, is satirized, but without malice. The wife, a prisoner of
her own superstitions and her respect for authority, still takes care of her
husband with affection. The servant, the socially humble character, tri-
umphs, as her laughter suggests, but this is the laugh of faith and charity,
not of vengeance. Her words edify and cure; they are a form of evangelical
propaganda which assumes the air of a meditative sermon. The respective
limits of popular medicine (religious practices tending toward supersti-
tion) and learned medicine (scholastic learning) are pointed out. Only the
gospel brings life and the simplicity of ignorance predisposes to faith. In
the process of religious conversion (that of the sick man), which the play
illustrates, “l’assurée foi” consists in confessing one’s sins to God (without
need for the intervention of any hierarchy, here represented by the doc-
tor) in order to receive the Good News of forgiveness freely given. In this
way, Marguerite declares her position in relation to contemporary debates,
started by the Protestant Reformation, on the question of the nature of
penitence or repentance. This is represented, through the sinner’s experi-
ence of his diseased condition, as a conversion produced by grace, and
which consists in receiving divine mercy by means of faith—confidence
placed in God alone and attested to by biblical revelation. Malade is the
play whose religious content is closest to Lutheran Evangelism, but it also
develops other themes dear to the author: the opposition between God-
All and Nothingness, and the aspiration to an entirely spiritual life lived
in charity. Marguerite in any case represents on stage the blindness of

traditional authorities and, more broadly, of human reason in the face of
the liberating power of the gospel, revealed here by a woman in a series
of lively scenes well organized as dramatic action.
L’Inquisiteur
Inquisiteur, which belongs to the same historical context of religious
hope, contains precise allusions that must have been clear for its con-
temporary audience. Noël Béda has been suggested as the model for
the inquisitor, but others might also be considered. The play alludes to
a climate of terror directed against Evangelicals while still foreseeing a
positive outcome, which would date it to 1535–36. This time, the satire
of the Church establishment is sharp, but the confrontation between the
inquisitor and the children (six plus “le petit enfant”) once again leads
to a conversion to the gospel, here unexpected since that of the inquisi-
tor’s servant is supplemented by that of the inquisitor himself. Childhood
stands for faith, in line with the gospel text of Matthew 19:14—“Suffer little
children . . . to come unto me”—and the conversion of the servant and his
master stands for birth into a new life, as described in John 3:3—“Except
a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”34 The children
are counterbalanced by the inquisitor who is also a complex type, synthe-
sizing several literary or biblical figures: the hypocritical monk, rather like
Faux-Semblant in the Roman de la Rose, Saint Paul as a persecuting rabbi
suddenly converted to the Christian faith, and Nicodemus, the learned
Pharisee who in the Gospel of John visits Jesus at night and is called by
him to an experience of rebirth in the Spirit of God. The servant, the first
to be converted, resembles the servant in Malade by virtue of his humble
social status. He also acts as an intermediary between his master and the
children. The nature of those who represent the gospel, children at play,
prevents any religious analysis coming from them (except in vv. 435–70);
most of the content is therefore allusively metaphoric, in a script which is
itself a kind of parable, as was the preceding play.
Marguerite couches the play text of 671 lines in poetry made enigmatic
by allusions to current events, puns, and the misunderstandings that pep-
per the dialogues between the inquisitor and the children. The object of
the conversion concerns the connection between faith and Holy Scripture,
34 Quotations from the Bible are from the Authorized King James Version.
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but above all how to live one’s relationship to God in a state of confi-
dence and spiritual abandon, represented by the children. At the start
of the play, the inquisitor bemoans the current state of affairs, the crisis
affecting the authority of his institution and the growing prestige of the
“new learning,” that is, contemporary biblical and Christian humanism.
His only response to these adversaries is repression. He decides to take
his mind off things by going outside and asks his servant (whom he often
beats) to bring his shoes and gloves to prepare himself for the cold. The
valet points to the children playing outdoors who show no sign of feel-
ing the cold. Some of the children have names that seem to allude to
Clément Marot (Clérot) and perhaps Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (Jacquot).
The inquisitor reproaches the children who, he says, would do better
to study than to play. The children defend their choice of activity with
assurance, using words which allude to Marguerite’s spiritual gospel. This
marks the start of an inquisitorial interrogation (“Mon enfant, qui est votre
père?”), in the course of which the inquisitor, growing ever more threat-
ening, fails to understand the evangelical meaning of the answers he is
given. Finally, the children sing psalm 3 in Marot’s translation. This song
brings about the transformation of the servant, who chooses faith, joy,
and laughter. A conversation between the servant and his master reverses
their roles: the inquisitor allows the servant to catechize him, before turn-
ing back to the children who make fun of him. At this point, he appeals
to the “Petit enfant,” the seventh of the group, who, when questioned,
replies in baby language: God is “Papa,” in him we find “Dodo” (sleepy
time). The other children join in and finish the lesson in Marguerite’s cat-
echism. The inquisitor is converted and his words take on a lyrical quality,
in an exchange with the other characters that ends in a song sung by all:
the Canticle of Simeon (Luke 2:29–32) in the French translation of Bon-
aventure des Périers. The play concludes with all leaving together for the
house of union and charity, and an allusion to partaking in the Eucharist,
an issue that at that moment divided the various branches of Christen-
dom (Old Believers, Lutherans, Reformed). An experience of song is thus
at the root of the transformation of hearts, and we hear in this play the
hopes Marguerite placed in the efficacy of Marot’s ongoing adaptation of
the Psalter. Song transposes the children’s pleasure and play into a bibli-
cal and spiritual language. Its power is contagious and inspiring (as Plato
claims of inspired poetry); it is an image of faith which asks no more than
to receive from God, without having earned it, the happiness of new life.
In this way, Inquisiteur combines commentary on current events (repres-
sion and the French Evangelicals’ flight abroad), a complex spirituality
built of evangelical theology (from both Paul and John), and Franciscan-
ism (simplicity and the spirit of childhood) to create a parable of the
human condition using social hierarchy and age differences.
Trop Prou Peu Moins

This is the most enigmatic of Marguerite’s plays. A variety of historical
interpretations have been proposed for its allusions, but these are nei-
ther consistent with themselves nor with all the elements of the contexts
evoked. For this reason, the play can only be very loosely dated to before
1547. The characters in this play of 925 lines, written mostly in octosyl-
labic verse, consist of four personifications whose names are drawn from a
particular part of speech, i.e., adverbs: Trop (Too Much), Prou (A Lot), Peu
(A Little), and Moins (Less). This technique is found in the dramatic genres
of the morality play and the sottie; in this case, they must be understood
in relation to the fundamental referent of Marguerite’s work, Tout and its
opposite Rien (evoked in vv. 309–10), requiring us to read the play as a reli-
gious allegory. Peu and Moins are on the side of the “Petit” (Christ) at once
socially (they belong to the rustic world of shepherds) and spiritually: they
are in fact “fools for Christ.” This does not rule out a political reading.
Ostrich eggs (v. 390) have been associated by scholars with Austria and
Charles V. He and Pope Paul III would thus be the menacing figures repre-
sented in part by Trop and Prou.35 But Trop himself suggests that the eggs
are insignificant (vv. 393ff.). Given their taste for power, Trop and Prou
certainly represent a form of religion that threatens Marguerite’s spiritual
Evangelism. What they symbolize is greater than the repressive power of
the inquisition, however, and should rather be identified with the “wis-
dom of the world.” As for Peu and Moins, their apparent folly and their
constant laughter reveal their roots in the sottie, itself close to the moral-
ity by virtue of their common use of allegory. The play’s action forms a
figurative structure which is used to symbolize a certain state of the world
and of humanity in a critical and mocking way. It uses puns, gestures, and
practical jokes, whose victims will finally be Trop and Prou. The essential
physical attributes of the characters are for Peu and Moins, horns, and for
Trop and Prou, ears, suggesting links to the carnival celebrations between
Christmas and New Year (the Feast of the Ass, the triumph of children),
35 Olga Anna Duhl adopts this interpretation in the light of a letter the queen wrote in
1542. See “La polémique religieuse dans le théâtre de Marguerite de Navarre,” in Le Théâtre
polémique français, 1450–1550, pp. 190–210 (p. 201).
314 olivier millet
as well as to the sottie, whose sots wore hats with ears as markers of their
folly and their impunity. Trop and Prou also wear horns, which they claim
increases their status. In contrast, the horns of Peu and Moins indicate
above all, as in the Bible, strength of faith, here tied to hope and charity,
as well as the crown of thorns worn by Christ during his passion. Each of
these paired characters is differentiated (Trop and Prou, Peu and Moins
are individualized), which makes the confrontations between the pairs
more nuanced and lively.
Trop and Prou begin the play by presenting themselves to the audience
by means of a series of riddles. They recognize each other and meet the
remaining two, who have similarly recognized each other and presented
themselves to the audience. Trop and Prou show disdain and threaten
the second pair of characters. They unkindly point out their horns (which
might also be taken as a sign of cuckoldry), without understanding the
terms in which Peu and Moins praise them. This attribute signifies a mys-
tery that only laughter can express. Peu and Moins reply to the mockery
and point out that Trop and Prou have ears. A debate ensues over what
separates them in terms of these attributes, and events evolve from this.
Trop and Prou express a desire to know that encounters an obstacle in
Peu’s and Moins’s inability to articulate the source of their joy. Trop and
Prou admit that they are sad not to be able to hide their ears. Invited to
put on appropriate horns and to relinquish the cares of this world and
their concern for appearances, they turn down this radical solution as
well as a second proposition they find too painful to consider: putting
the horns of Peu and Moins into their ears. This gives rise to some lively
action. Incapable of this death to self, Trop and Prou leave Peu and Moins
and are abandoned to their sadness. This is contrasted with the contem-
plative and carefree life of Peu and Moins. Like Inquisiteur, the play thus
presents an evangelical theme, here from Matthew 22:14: “many [prou]
are called, but few [peu] are chosen.” Trop and Prou are not merely rep-
resentatives of a failing ecclesiastical institution or of humanity closed to
the spiritual meaning of the Scriptures, they are also the protagonists of
a situation in which Peu and Moins have been unable either to convince
or to help them. Here there is no explicit preaching, as in Malade; nor,
as in Inquisiteur, is faith made contagious by song (Peu and Moins claim
to sing but their song is not heard). This is a non-polemical satire which
turns into a meditation. The next play also proposes a reflection without
a definitive answer, but in a quite different mode.
Quatre femmes
This 746 line play is surrounded in the 1547 Marguerites by poems which
are in part its source. The “Epîtres des quatre Dames et des quatre Gen-
tilshommes” lay out in turn the “cases” of eight lovers with analogies to
those in Quatre femmes (the play retains only the ladies’ cases) and which
prefigure several tales in the Heptaméron. The long poem La Coche (1541)
also presents four women and as many love “cases,” for which Marguerite
herself acts as judge. Quatre femmes similarly uses this structure of inves-
tigating parallel and to some extent competing “cases,” integrating it into
the context of a carnival mummery which ends with a court ball. To this
it adds a complex character, the Vieille, who is joined toward the end of
the play by a Vieillard. Turned into a performance leading to a dance, the
reflections on the problems of love thus find their solution in the celebra-
tion of which they become a part. The four women, two maidens and
two married women, each represent a particular social and sentimental
condition, whose differences give rise to a discussion. The two maidens,
who have life and love ahead of them, disagree on the question of whether
one should love. The first one rejects love in the name of liberty,36 the
second defends it in the name of life and the heart. Next the two mar-
ried women appear. Their discussion seeks to determine which of them is
more unhappy: the first, unfairly distrusted and ill treated by her husband
because she has an honorable serviteur, or the second, who is jealous of
an unfaithful husband. The two pairs of women meet and are respectively
astonished by the sadness and the joy of the other pair. This leads to the
third discussion: who is right, those who are happy or those who are dis-
tressed? At this point, the Vieille appears, whose role it is to resolve the
three discussions underway. She is a complex literary character. Given
her hundred years of age, she has in part known the experiences that
concern the four women and she represents the past and life-experience.
With the Vieillard, she also derives from carnival culture, which differen-
tiates her sharply from the four women who are all young and belong to
courtly circles. In carnival rituals, Lent was often depicted by the hideous
characters of a Vieille and a Vieux, who must be chased away before the
renewal of the year could be celebrated. In fact, in this play, the advice of
36 See the article by Brenda Dunn-Lardeau, “La place de la Comédie des quatre femmes
de Marguerite de Navarre (1542) dans le discours sur le célibat volontaire comme modèle
de félicité d’Aristote à Gabrielle Suchon,” in Quêtes personnelles et actualités contemporai-
nes, pp. 113–39.
316 olivier millet
the Vieille seems less and less trustworthy and is rejected by the young
women. Finally, the Vieille has roots too in the second part of the Roman
de la Rose, where, prefigured by a personification of old age in the first
part, there is a character called la Vieille who is also old and repulsive.
Whereas she pretends to be an experienced centenarian, she is in fact
an old crone. Claiming to advise Bel-Accueil on amorous matters, she
preaches a cynical doctrine: “Toutes pour tous, et tous pour toutes.”37 Like
the character in this play, she too prophesies the future. It is clear that
the advice of the Vieille in Quatre femmes cannot be accepted by the four
courtly ladies: she suggests that they be unfaithful to their husbands and
give up their illusions of freedom or of love. So the ladies do not change
their respective positions. Each, with her various hopes or expectations,
represents an open wager on the future forasmuch as—and this is the
first conclusion—God alone knows what the future holds (vv. 702–15).
The three discussions, then, remain unresolved, no doubt because any
answer would bear the mark of too much confidence or too much despair.
Next the Vieillard appears, seemingly desirous of acting as an interme-
diary between the young women and the Vieille. Four men also appear
suddenly (doubtless unmarried young men), who make fun of the Vieil-
lard in conversation with the young women and taunt him by inviting
him to take part in the ball about to begin. The Vieillard and the Vieille
accept the challenge and everyone dances. In terms of the performance,
one can imagine, among other possible scenarios for the mummery, that
the Vieille and the Vieillard take off their masks at this point and prove
by their willing participation in the ball that what they represented has
been eradicated. The ball is, in any case, the point at which all theoreti-
cal discussions end, finding a practical answer which favors a joyous and
elegant affirmation of life. Along with Parfaits amants, Quatre femmes is
Marguerite’s only non-biblical play whose theme is not conversion to the
true faith. Rather it is based on discussions of love, even if these are seen
in the light of faith in God. Here, her dramaturgy meets courtly life and
a strain of literary culture38 and suggests a discrete resistance to the idea
that happiness can be fully achieved through human love, thus preparing
the way for the open, realistic investigations of the Heptaméron.
37 These words are quoted in the discussion following the ninth nouvelle of the
Heptaméron.
38 On the play’s lyricism, see Brenda Dunn-Lardeau, “L’expression lyrique de la passion
dans la Comédie des quatre femmes (1542) de Marguerite de Navarre,” Bibliothèque d’Huma-
nisme et Renaissance 46 (1998), 25–45.
Comédie sur le trespas du Roy

The death of her brother in March 1547 deeply distressed Marguerite, who
expressed her anguish in several poems, one of which is included in this
short play of 550 lines. She did so as well in La Navire, whose primary
theme is the overcoming of grief. If there was ever a performance of this
play, clearly it was not in a worldly, celebratory setting, even if Trépas
figures Marguerite’s return to everyday life and her personal embrace of a
degree of consolation that signifies an acceptance of life. Directed toward
the new king, Henri II, in whose good-will Marguerite was forced to place
her hopes, this is also a Christian play reflecting on the legitimacy of
mourning (vv. 329ff.) and on the prospect of the afterlife. The queen chose
to express her feelings in an autobiographical and allegorical dramatic
pastoral, allowing the theater to objectify her inner life. Moreover, there
are no doubt allusions to precise historical and personal circumstances
that now escape us. In keeping with a long tradition, the shepherds are
maskers representing real people around the shepherdess Amarissime
(Most Bitter), who stands for the sister of the dead king, here called Pan,
as in one of Marot’s eclogues.
Amarissime retires to a deserted spot to give herself over fully to her
grief; she declares her renunciation of music, all the while singing of her
despair. Her friend Securus (Without Care or He Who Dispels Care), in
whom we can recognize Marguerite’s husband Henri d’Albret, equally
saddened, appears and overhears her. He tries to console her, inviting
her to follow him home to the Béarn. They sing together and a second
shepherd, Agapy (Beloved), who can be identified as Henri II, arrives on
a lower part of the stage and hears the voice of Amarissime. He sends
her a bird, which he then follows in order to join her, while Amarissime
and Securus continue their song. In this play, then, singing is at once a
means of expressing private feelings and a medium that reestablishes a
relationship with others. They recognize the voice of Agapy, also singing.
Securus greets him in their pastoral mountainscape on the upper level.
Before they meet, Agapy and Amarissime are each concerned about the
effect his or her grief will have on the other but, once together, neither can
keep tears from flowing. All three join their voices in song. A new char-
acter appears, Paraclèsis, a feminized form of Paraclete, the Holy Spirit
or Comforter of the Gospel of John, sent by “le grand pasteur,” God. After
the support offered by reason and tenderness (Securus), then by friend-
ship and sympathy (Agapy), comes that of faith. The message is clear: Pan
is happy in the Elysian Fields and wants those left behind to rejoice. The
318 olivier millet
other characters agree to this and Amarissime moves apart to exult in her
own transformation, which, through the forgetting of herself and charity,
unites her with her brother who has entered into eternal life. Paraclèsis
blesses them, emphasizing that faith which is total confidence. The final
song, exceptionally in Marguerite’s theater, is a biblico-liturgical passage
in Latin, Job 2:10 and 1:21, taken from the first nocturn of the first Sunday
of September, expressing acceptance of divine providence. The funereal
connotations of the citation fade before the strength of thanksgiving. The
liturgy, which Marguerite likely followed after the death of her brother
in the solitude of the priory of Tusson, marks the conclusion of a pasto-
ral that combines the usual topics (like the simple life of shepherds), the
use of alternating song (characteristic of the bucolic), and the reestab-
lishing of communion with the voices of others. We also hear echoes of
Marguerite’s evangelical faith, as in the expression “foy vive” (v. 150).
There is no question of praying for the deceased, but rather of receiving
by faith a promise which frees the faithful from any anguish concerning
the afterlife.
Mont-de-Marsan
This 1015 line play is known by the name of the place where it was per-
formed in 1548 on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, a day of transi-
tion between carnival and Lent. The first part of the play brings together
the Mondaine and the Superstitieuse, who personify two opposed vices
that were connected in a meaningful way at that point in the year. Lack
of religious conviction and superstition were two extremes traditionally
opposed to religion’s moral virtue, the golden mean. The Mondaine is
attached to amorous and worldly adventures (associated with the jours
gras), whereas the Superstitieuse identifies with the mortifications of
Lent. Beyond the context suggested by the calendar, these two opposites
are not merely abstract personifications; their confrontation should be
understood in the light of contemporary Evangelism. The Superstitieuse
embodies the legalistic religion of works—mortifications, the cult of the
saints, etc., considered shameful by Erasmian Christian humanism—and
the idea of merit, which Protestant Evangelism denounced as an illu-
sion and a source of pride. In the event, each of the women comes to a
better understanding of her identity and is converted to a higher truth,
represented by a third character, the Sage, who joins the conversation
subsequently and embodies the balance of reason. The Sage is in part
the mouthpiece for the author’s Evangelism, based on personal, direct
knowledge of the Bible in the vernacular—of which, after having enlight-

ened the other two and freed them from their respective errors, the Sage
presents them with a copy on stage. Marguerite goes beyond the antith-
esis between lack of religious conviction and superstition as well as the
idea of religion as moral virtue; she identifies religion with faith, seen here
as a theological virtue, founded on reason but also, with hope and charity,
on powers beyond those of human reason. Faith justifies the believer and
is manifest in joy and active charity. In this way, Marguerite stages a posi-
tion shared by Erasmian humanists and all shades of Evangelicals, includ-
ing Protestants: a respect for the body subordinated to the soul; resistance
to all forms of asceticism whereby one might claim to accomplish one’s
salvation; a redeeming faith which precedes works and directs them; an
interiorized and reasonable Christian life based on the Bible. The Super-
stitieuse was certainly lacking in joy or love. However, even in her pride,
she declares herself humble, as a woman and an untutored person, when
she is told to read the Scriptures on her own. This makes her sympathetic.
The Mondaine, obsessed by bodily pleasures, is by that very fact closer
to God, because of the inclinations toward love and joy by which she is
moved. In the first part of the play, Marguerite thus succeeds in rendering
complex and nuanced the oppositions she dramatizes by means of these
characters, who sometimes sing. The optimism of the script recalls that of
Malade and Inquisiteur.
However, a fourth woman comes on stage singing (v. 573). She is a
shepherdess, the Ravie de Dieu. This loving creature seems to embody
the ideal of love and joy recommended earlier by the Sage. But there is
nothing reasonable in this shepherdess and her ability to communicate is
limited to spontaneous outpourings of her interior life. The Sage decides
immediately that she must be mad (v. 586). From a literary perspective,
the shepherdess sings of a pure and disinterested love in a courtly register;
in conformity with the bucolic tradition, she uses simple language, the
language of popular song marked by repeated refrains and tunes familiar
to the audience. She deals with the other characters only by singing, a
common technique in farce. Singing indicates that the shepherdess’s iden-
tity is inseparable from her intense interior life, she embodies what the
Sage preached earlier: faith as a loving relationship between the believer
and God, who is never directly named. Reason and love, which were con-
nected in the Sage’s discourse, are dissociated here and only love remains
for the shepherdess. Since the Sage (the only character who never sings)
is incapable of recognizing the true identity of the shepherdess as a fool
for Christ, the audience is put in the position of asking, retrospectively, if
320 olivier millet
the Sage really lives what she preaches. On the other hand, the shepherd-
ess’s songs are readily interpreted by Marguerite’s audience, familiar with
spiritual contrafacta of profane love songs and with the mystical tradition
that makes human love a parable of divine love—as Inquisiteur and Trop
Prou merely suggested, and Désert illustrated.
The remainder of the play consists of disconnected dialogues, misun-
derstandings, and unsuccessful attempts at explanation. Even when the
shepherdess stops singing and starts to speak (vv. 714–882), the others
cannot understand the meaning of her words. They are again a celebra-
tion of love, sufficient unto itself. Must this be identified, as has been
suggested, with the spirituality of the Spiritual Libertines condemned by
Calvin?39 It is possible but far from certain. Dramatically, the Ravie de
Dieu marks the gulf separating human faculties and the reasonable exer-
cise of virtue, on the one hand, and the absolute authenticity of mystical
life, which is unknowable, on the other. The play of incomprehension,
repeated from Trop Prou, isolates and glorifies the shepherdess to the very
end. When the other women have left, placing themselves in God’s hands,
the ecstasy of the shepherdess becomes the focus, expressed in a mysteri-
ous lyricism which imitates the invisible coming of such a state of grace.
The play thus moves from wrong living and wrong belief to enlightened
evangelical faith and, finally, to the symbolic representation of the spir-
itual plane. The story might go on, but that would be off-stage (no one
is found irremediably guilty). In contrast to the biblical plays, spiritual
life here can only speak on the stage as a solitary song that paradoxically
becomes the source of dramatic tension and ends in silence.
Parfaits amants
This comedy, a very short play of 186 lines, connected to a real event,
was composed when Marguerite’s daughter and her husband, Antoine de
Bourbon, came to Navarre in 1549. It has elements in common with the
romantic, casuistic, and folkloric characteristics of Quatre femmes, which
the author uses here to reflect on love in a courtly context. In a bucolic
setting, a woman has been searching for a thousand years for a perfect
lover to whom she might give a crown of flowers, putting an end to her
interminable wandering. This quest brings about a discussion, like that of
Quatre femmes, which develops based on implicit comparisons between
the various people the woman meets in turn. First there are three maidens
39 See Saulnier, ed., Théâtre profane, pp. 246–66.

who ask for the crown. She refuses to give it to them because love must
be tested in various ways to be perfect. The first maiden knows nothing
of the torment of absence when her lover is far from her; the second has
not experienced the absence of her beloved; the third, who does not have
these failings, refuses to imagine that her beloved might love someone
else; if he did, she would leave him for another. The woman then sees a
man who says that his beloved is worthy of the crown, and the latter in
return says the former is the only worthy recipient. The man, called Mars,
was doubtless played by a member of the high aristocracy. The woman
does not know to which of the two she should give her gift, since each
of the lovers refuses to accept it for him- or herself. It would seem that
she then turns to the judges of the Court of Love, no doubt the princely
couple seated in the audience. They (perhaps Jeanne and Antoine) are
charged with deciding between these two perfect lovers, very likely on
the occasion of their engagement or their marriage. An evangelical choice
of words makes itself felt in the final benediction: God “de lui seul vous
donne la connaissance.” In this way, real love is marked by the discrete
imprint of the author’s religious spirituality.
* * *
The non-biblical plays are close to the biblical ones, sharing particular
thematic accents. For example, the Virgin Mary sheds light on the shep-
herdess of Mont-de-Marsan as an ecstatic, but also, in contrast, as a soli-
tary figure who will not be understood. We have seen as well that five
of the seven plays are structured around a story of conversion. On the
other hand, there is a progression in the religious message of the non-
biblical theater, from the successful evangelical propaganda of Malade,
Inquisiteur, and in part in Mont-de-Marsan, to the failures of spiritual
communion in the gospel in Trop Prou and the end of Mont-de-Marsan.
This last play represents the religious culmination of Marguerite’s theater.
It combines dialogues leading to conversion, as in Malade and Inquisiteur,
and the encounters lacking any decisive interaction found in Trop Prou.
The shepherdess, who belongs to the bucolic world of human love, as in
Trépas and Parfaits amants, is an avatar of Mary, of the children of Inquisi-
teur, and of Peu and Moins. Inversely, in the plays intended as courtly
entertainment—Quatre femmes and Parfaits amants—human love, even
perfect human love, needs to be enlightened by evangelical faith to reach
its fullest expression. All this prefigures, in a different register and accord-
ing to the conventions of a different literary genre, the themes, situations,
and discussions of the Heptaméron.
The Heptaméron: Word, Spirit, World
The Heptaméron, Marguerite de Navarre’s best-known and most widely

read work today, was not published during the author’s lifetime and
remained unfinished at her death in 1549. This may leave the modern
reader with a sense of irresolution, but it also encourages an engaged yet
open-minded approach, that, as we shall see, is appropriate for this rich
and complex dialogic text. Historically the plurivocality and secular mate-
rial of the prose short-story collection encouraged the perception that it
stood in opposition to Marguerite’s poetic and theatrical compositions,
with a few exceptions more uniquely spiritual or mystical in nature.1 For
the most part, critics now agree on the profoundly religious character of
the Heptaméron.2 At the same time, differences remain between the prose
work and those in verse, especially in terms of genre and literary form and
expression, as well as choice and treatment of subject matter.
1 In Amour sacré, amour profane: Autour de “l’Heptaméron” (Paris, 1944; 1971; 1996),
Lucien Febvre argued for the coherence of Marguerite’s corpus, noting the presence of “les
leçons de sa foi dans des récits profanes” (p. 330). Nevertheless, there remained for Febvre
an “incompatibilité psychologique et morale” between the storytellers’ “exercices de piété
et la teneur des nouvelles”; even worse, the fictional narrators “traitent avec légèreté—
tout au moins avec une apparente légèreté—des manquements à notre morale qui nous
paraissent graves et répréhensibles” (p. 358). Philippe de Lajarte’s illuminating structuralist
analyses also posited a separation in Marguerite’s œuvre between a “sacred,” logocentric
discourse and a “secular,” nominalist, empirical one; see “L’Heptaméron et la naissance
du récit moderne: Essai de lecture épistémologique d’un discours narratif,” Littérature 17
(1975), 31–42 (pp. 34–37), and “Le Prologue de l’Heptaméron et le processus de production
de l’œuvre,” in La Nouvelle française à la Renaissance, ed. Lionello Sozzi (Geneva and Paris,
1981), pp. 397–423 (pp. 409–17).
2 See, for example, two distinguished contributions to Critical Tales: New Studies of the
Heptameron and Early Modern Culture, ed. John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley (Philadel-
phia, 1993): Robert D. Cottrell, “Inmost Cravings: The Logic of Desire in the Heptameron,”
pp. 3–24, and Edwin M. Duval, “ ‘Et puis, quelles nouvelles?’: The Project of Marguerite’s
Unfinished Decameron,” pp. 241–62. More generally, see the work of scholars such as Paula
Sommers, Gérard Defaux, Jan Miernowski, and the authors of the present essay. Carol
Thysell, The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian (Oxford, 2000),
reads the Heptaméron in relation to the ideas of the Spiritual Libertines, as denounced
by Jean Calvin, and Florentine neo-Platonism. Nicolas Le Cadet examines evangelical
prose fiction as a category in L’Évangélisme fictionnel: Les Livres rabelaisiens, le Cymbalum
Mundi, L’Heptaméron (1532–1552) (Paris, 2010).
Genesis
Given the circumstances of the Heptaméron’s composition and first publi-

cation, it is impossible to establish a single definitive text. The work comes
down to us in 19 manuscript copies, nine of which give the whole text, i.e.,
break off after the second nouvelle of the eighth day. Some of the remain-
ing partial manuscripts, notably Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 1513,
offer precious insights into the early stages of the work’s composition and
the evolution of Marguerite’s creative project. Of the first two printed edi-
tions, neither is satisfactory: that of Pierre Boaistuau, published anony-
mously in 1558 as Histoire des amans fortunez, is particularly mangled, but
even that of Claude Gruget in 1559, which gives the author’s name and
first uses the title L’Heptaméron, censures many passages, in particular
relating to religious issues.3 As a result, all but one of the available modern
editions are based on one or another of the complete manuscripts.4
The principal model for the Heptaméron, acknowledged in the prologue,
was the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75). Marguerite may have
known it in an edition in Italian. The work also existed in a French trans-
lation from the early 15th century by Laurent de Premierfait, which she
could have read in her youth since a copy was among the manuscripts
in the library of her paternal grandfather, Jean d’Orléans, at the castle of
Cognac.5 In 1485, the Parisian printer Antoine Vérard published a volume
said to be the translation by Premierfait but in reality representing a loose
rewriting of the text, including, notably, the addition of moral lessons at
3 On the extant manuscripts, the early printed editions, and the evolution of the project
of the nouvelle collection, see Sylvie Lefèvre, “L’Heptaméron: codices et indices,” in Autour
du roman: Études présentées à Nicole Cazauran (Paris, 1990), pp. 69–94; Nicole Cazauran,
“Sur l’élaboration de L’Heptaméron,” in Variétés pour Marguerite de Navarre, 1978–2004:
Autour de “L’Heptaméron” (Paris, 2005), pp. 143–68; Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron,
ed. Renja Salminen (Geneva, 1999), pp. xi–lxxxii; Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron,
ed. Nicole Cazauran and Sylvie Lefèvre (Paris, 2000), pp. 49–51 and 604–10.
4 Since the 19th-century edition of Le Roux de Lincy, most editions have been based on
BnF, fr. 1512, including those of Michel François (Paris, 1967), Simone de Reyff (Paris, 1982),
and Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani (Paris, 1999). Yves Le Hir (Grenoble, 1967) follows BnF,
fr. 1524; Salminen (ed. cit.) gives the text of BnF, fr. 2155. Cazauran and Lefèvre (ed. cit.)
publish the 1559 Gruget edition, but supplemented and corrected from Berlin, Staatsbib-
liothek, Hamilton 425 and other sources. This necessitates a system of typographical signs
to indicate originally excised and added material. For some of Gruget’s suppressions, see
below, “Posterity and Religious Polemic.” The edition of reference throughout this essay
will be that of Mathieu-Castellani, following the most commonly reproduced manuscript.
5 See Gustave Dupont-Ferrier, “Jean d’Orléans, comte d’Angoulême, d’après sa biblio-
thèque (1467),” in Mélanges d’histoire du moyen âge, ed. Achille Luchaire (Université de
Paris, Bibliothèque de la Faculté des Lettres) 3 (Paris, 1897), pp. 39–92, no 17 (p. 59).
the heptaméron: word, spirit, world 325
the end of each tale. This “version moralisée et mutilée” was issued eight
times up to 1541.6 Finally, probably in the early 1530s, Marguerite com-
missioned a new translation from Antoine Le Maçon. Dedicated to her,
this was completed and published in 1545.7 Marguerite certainly admired
Boccaccio, but it is clear, as we shall see below, that her attitude to her
model was not without ambivalence.
We do not know the exact date at which Marguerite began writing
short stories but the project of gathering 100 tales seems initially to have
been a collaborative one envisaged by Marguerite and other members of
the French royal court, including the dauphin, the future Henri II. The
prologue of the Heptaméron describes this royal enterprise, said to have
been left unrealized due to personal and state affairs.8 Evidence points to
the historical veracity of this scenario. Marguerite spent the entire year of
1545 with the court of her brother, François I, in the Loire valley. Initially,
she would have been one of ten people telling ten stories each, only later
deciding to pursue herself the composition of 100 tales, recounted and
discussed by ten fictional characters based loosely on historical members
of her circle.9 The setting for the new collection’s frame story would not
be France, however, but Marguerite’s own kingdom of Navarre: initially
the spa town of Cauterets, which she herself visited a number of times,
notably in September 1546; subsequently the nearby abbey of Premon-
stratensian canons, Notre-Dame-de-Serrance (modern-day Sarrance),
a noted pilgrimage place on the road to Santiago de Compostela.10
6 The expression is Nora Viet’s, “Caméron, Décaméron, Heptaméron: la genèse de l’Hep-

taméron au miroir des traductions françaises de Boccace,” Seizième Siècle 8 (2012), 287–302
(p. 290). See also Mireille Huchon, “Définition et description: le projet de l’Heptaméron
entre le Caméron et le Décaméron,” in Les Visages et les voix de Marguerite de Navarre:
Actes du Colloque international sur Marguerite de Navarre (Duke University), 10–11 avril 1992,
ed. Marcel Tetel (Paris, 1995), pp. 51–65.
7 Le Decameron de Messire Jehan Bocace, trans. Antoine Le Maçon (Paris, Estienne
Roffet).
8 L’Heptaméron, ed. Mathieu-Castellani, pp. 89–90.
9 See Salminen, ed. cit., pp. xxxiv–xlix, and Cazauran, “Sur l’élaboration.” Salminen
reviews the hypotheses of critics who propose earlier dates (ed. cit., pp. xli–xlii). BnF, fr.
1513 gives 28 tales, of which the first ten appear to be those that Marguerite herself would
have told. On the possible historical models for the Heptaméron’s storytellers (devisants
in French), see Salminen, ed. cit., pp. 672–73. It must be stressed, however, that all the
storytellers are fictional creations, so that none of them and all of them in some sense can
be seen as representing the author.
10 According to Salminen, Marguerite visited Cauterets in September 1546 and May 1549
(ed. cit., p. 671). Rosanna Gorris Camos refers to additional visits in 1541, 1547, and perhaps
1548; see “ ‘Ses montz trez [sic] haultz haulsent notre desir’: Marguerite de Navarre, Pele-
tier du Mans poètes de la montagne,” in Nature et paysages: L’Émergence d’une nouvelle
Prologue
Marguerite reveals explicitly in the prologue that her model text is

Boccaccio’s Decameron. The prologue also suggests, however, that the
relationship between the two works is complex and ambiguous. The
Renaissance practice of imitating literary models was by its nature an
ambivalent process, involving some degree of rivalry and antagonism as
well as admiration and deference; it was a process of emulation—a striv-
ing to equal, but also to surpass: to outdo, to update, or to revise.11 This
attitude, which characterized the relationship of Renaissance writers to
Greek and Latin literature, was also typical of French writers toward Ital-
ian literary productions, since Italy was the place recognized as having
been the first to produce its own great “classical” works in the vernacular.
In the case of the Heptaméron and the Decameron, the imitative/emula-
tive relationship is played out in a way that is particularly complex, sug-
gesting both Marguerite’s admiration and her desire to differentiate her
work from her model. In addition, Marguerite likely knew Boccaccio’s
text in different forms: after 1545, in Le Maçon’s translation, all or parts
of which she might also have read earlier in manuscript; before the mid-
1540s, in the original Italian and/or in the translation of Premierfait and
the moralized rewriting published by Vérard.12
In the Heptaméron’s prologue the storytellers refer explicitly to the new
Le Maçon translation. This is said to have excited the enthusiasm of the
French court to such a degree that various members of the royal fam-
ily decided to assemble their own collection of stories, but to do so with
an important difference, that is, “de n’escripre nulle nouvelle qui ne soit
veritable histoire” (p. 90). The dauphin had insisted on the exclusion of
“ceulx qui avoient estudié et estoient gens de lettres . . . de paour que la
beaulté de la rethoricque feit tort en quelque partye à la verité de l’his-
toire” (ibid.). It is this “truthful” French project that the Heptaméron’s
subjectivité à la Renaissance, Actes des journées d’étude organisées par l’École nationale
des chartes (26 mars 2004 et 15 avril 2005), ed. Dominique de Courcelles with Jean-Pierre
Bat (Paris, 2006), pp. 151–77 (p. 158).
11 See the now classic study of Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and
Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London, 1982). See also Terence Cave,
The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979) and the
more recent contribution of JoAnn DellaNeva, Unlikely Exemplars: Reading and Imitating
Beyond the Italian Canon in French Renaissance Poetry (Newark, Del., 2009).
12 Mireille Huchon first suggested that Marguerite’s nouvelle project probably devel-
oped in dialogue with both Vérard’s Cent nouvelles and a more accurate version of the
Decameron (“Définition,” p. 60); cf. Viet, “Caméron.”
storytellers adopt at the suggestion of Parlamente. It is the case that many

of the stories told by the devisants are based on historical events. Never-
theless, this must not lead us to underestimate the literary and fictional
nature of Marguerite’s work. Not only the dialogues are invented by the
author, but the nouvelles themselves are crafted into pieces of short nar-
rative prose. At times, indeed, Marguerite has recourse to earlier, even
traditional, fictional material, that, after adding a sprinkling of names of
people and places, she passes off as an account of recent events.13 The
claim of truthfulness is a topos of the French nouvelle collection that must
be understood as being deployed self-consciously; at the same time, the
Heptaméron certainly does set out to deal with issues of truth—social,
moral, and religious.14 In this light, the prologue ends on a deliciously
ironical and playful note, one that raises again and leaves open the ques-
tion of (plain French) truth and (Boccaccian) rhetoric, when the meadow
in which the storytellers assemble is described by the frame-narrator as
“si beau et plaisant qu’il avoit besoin d’un Bocace pour le depaindre à la
verité; mais vous [vous] contenterez que jamais n’en feut veu ung plus
beau” (p. 92, our italics).
In addition to these explicit intertextual engagements, numerous echoes
between Marguerite’s and Boccaccio’s frame stories set in play a complex
series of similarities and differences between the two works that can be
read as indicative of differences in authorial intention.15 The Decameron’s
13 Among critics who emphasize the documentary quality of the nouvelles, see, notably,
Gabriel-A. Pérouse, Nouvelles françaises du XVIe siècle: Images de la vie du temps (Geneva,
1977). See also Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers
in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1987) for archival precedents. More recently, crit-
ics have also sought to highlight the fictive aspects of the nouvelles and so to balance
depiction of historical reality with imaginary creation: see the introduction and conclusion
to Critical Tales, ed. Lyons and McKinley; see also Gary Ferguson and David LaGuardia,
eds., Narrative Worlds: Essays on the Nouvelle in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century France
(Tempe, Ariz., 2005), where the contributions of the two editors examine, respectively,
the transformation of a historical event into a story in nouvelle 12 (pp. 97–122) and the
reworking of material from the medieval traditions of the fabliau and the exemplum in
nouvelle 6 (pp. 139–58).
14 On the question of “truth claims” in the nouvelle collections, see Emily Thompson,
“ ‘Une merveilleuse espece d’animal’: Fable and Verisimilitude in Bonaventure des Périers’s
Nouvelles récréations et joyeux devis,” in Narrative Worlds, ed. Ferguson and LaGuardia,
pp. 17–33.
15 On the prologue, see in particular: Yves Delègue, “Autour de deux prologues:
l’Heptaméron est-il un anti-Boccace?,” Travaux de linguistique et de littérature 4.2 (1966),
23–37; Claude-Gilbert Dubois, “Fonds mythique et jeu des sens dans le ‘Prologue’ de l’Hep-
taméron,” in Études seiziémistes offertes à Monsieur le Professeur V. L. Saulnier par plusieurs
de ses anciens doctorants (Geneva, 1980), pp. 151–68; Elizabeth C. Wright, “Marguerite Reads
Giovanni: Gender and Narration in the Heptaméron and the Decameron,” Renaissance
prologue famously describes the effects of the Black Death that descended
on the city of Florence in 1348, decimating the population and throwing
social life into chaos. The horrific suffering brought by the plague, it is
suggested, results from divine anger, since it was “per operazion de’ corpi
superiori o per le nostre inique opere da giusta ira di Dio a nostra correzi-
one mandata sopra i mortali.”16 The Decameron’s narrators meet initially
in a church (Santa Maria Novella), before fleeing to the safety of a coun-
try villa, where, when not telling stories, they pass their time in feasting,
dancing, and singing love songs. In the Heptaméron, the narrative impetus
comes also from an extreme natural phenomenon, but a flood rather than
a plague. Heavy rain in September—the month of Marguerite’s own visit
to Cauterets in 1546 and in which she situates the prologue—is not an
unexpected climatic occurrence. Flooding is a regular part of the natural
order, albeit a menacing one that threatens those whom it takes by sur-
prise. The frame-narrator stresses the ways in which divine providence
works to rescue the ten aristocratic storytellers from this initial danger
and subsequent ones—including attacks by bandits and wild animals—
in order to bring them together to safety, even if Longarine’s husband is
killed and they collectively suffer the loss of most or all of their servants
and animals.17 The action thus takes the narrators from a spa town, where
they were seeking relief from physical ailments in the curative proper-
ties of water, through a torrential downpour, to a monastery which offers
them refuge. The devisants are all grateful for their deliverance and begin
each day by listening to expositions of Holy Scripture and later attending
and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 15 (1991), 21–36; Paula Sommers, “Marguerite de

Navarre’s Heptaméron: The Case for the Cornice,” The French Review 57 (1984), 786–93;
Nicole Cazauran, “L’Heptaméron face au Décaméron,” in Variétés, pp. 175–212; Glyn Norton,
“Narrative Function in the Heptaméron Frame Story,ˮ in La Nouvelle française, ed. Sozzi,
pp. 435–47; Gorris Camos, “ ‘Ses montz. . . .’ ”
16 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan, 1985), p. 12: “through the
operation of the heavenly bodies or of our own iniquitous doings, . . . sent down upon man-
kind for our correction by the just wrath of God,” trans. John Payne, rev. and annotated
Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1982), 1:8.
17 The eight storytellers gathered initially at the abbey of Saint-Savin, on receiving news
of Oisille and Simontault, praise God, who, “en se contentant des serviteurs, avoit saulvé
les maistres et maistresses” (p. 84); cf. the remarks of Ennasuite (p. 86). The elitist perspec-
tive betrayed here by the aristocratic devisants has frequently been noted. For a discus-
sion of the representation of divine providence in the prologue, see Thysell, The Pleasure,
pp. 68–78. Thysell’s analysis is mistaken, however, in seeing the assembled storytellers as a
socially mixed group, in which servants are given equal voice with masters (pp. 93–94 and
96). The serviteurs among the devisants are not domestic servants but gentlemen devoted
to a particular lady.
Mass and vespers. Unlike their Florentine forebears, they give themselves
to the singing not of love songs but of psalms and canticles. Whereas the
narrative in the Decameron moves from sacred to secular, then, the Hep-
taméron sets up an inverse movement from secular to sacred—from a
locus dedicated to the health of the body to a place intended to promote
health of the soul.
Mountains and water are natural phenomena that also carry strong
symbolic associations, particularly in a biblical framework. Mountains
are often places of retreat, of contemplation, of epiphany or theophany.18
Water and flood recall primarily the story of Noah (Gen. 6:5–9:17)—a
story of God’s just judgment but also his mercy toward his creation, to
which the frame-narrator alludes overtly: “sur le temps de ce retour vin-
drent les pluyes si merveilleuses et si grandes, qu’il sembloit que Dieu eut
oblyé la promesse qu’il avoit faicte à Noé de ne destruire plus le monde
par eaue” (pp. 77–78).19 As we shall discuss further below, the question of
judgment—that of God and that of humans, of oneself and of others—is
a central issue that recurs throughout the Heptaméron. In a typological or
allegorical frame, the reader is directed toward the idea of the individual’s
incorporation into the Church through the waters of baptism and of Christ
bringing the elect with him through the waters of death to salvation.
The first devisant we meet is Oisille, the oldest and most devout of the
group, as she decides to make her way to Notre-Dame-de-Serrance: “Non
qu’elle fust si supersticieuse qu’elle pensast que la glorieuse Vierge laissast
la dextre de son filz où elle est assise pour venir demorer en terre deserte,
mais seullement pour envye de veoir le devot lieu dont elle avoit tant oy
parler” (p. 79). The frame-narrator’s words are revealing here. There is no
questioning of the belief that the Virgin Mary is in heaven, seated at her
Son’s right hand, no questioning, that is, of the Catholic doctrine of the
Assumption. Nor is there any doubting of the religious character of the
site. What would seem to make the place holy, however, is the outpouring
of faith and piety on the part of the innumerable pilgrims who visit—
pilgrims like the old monk who returns every year for the church’s major
celebration on 8 September, the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, and
who helps Simontault find his way to safety there (pp. 83–84). The legend
18 See Gorris Camos, “ ‘Ses montz. . . .’ ”

19 On the thematics of memory and forgetting in the Heptaméron and other works by
Marguerite, see Nicolas Russell, Transformations of Memory and Forgetting in Sixteenth-
Century France: Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne (Newark,
Del., 2011).
attached to the shrine, however, told how a shepherd and a man fishing
for trout discovered a statue of the Virgin Mary in one of the springs of
the gave Béarnais (gave de Pau) by following a bull that went regularly
to kneel before it in homage. When the statue was taken by the bishop
to the cathedral in Oloron, it miraculously returned to the place it had
been found, after which a chapel was built there to house it.20 If this story
might suggest that the Virgin had chosen to establish a special presence in
Serrance, then Oisille would seem to consider it a mere superstition. The
description of her motivation in heading toward the abbey carries a sting
in its tail, moreover, since we learn that Oisille is also certain that if any
means of escape from danger exists, monks can be relied upon to find it.
This humorous but pointed jibe at the self-interest of those in religious
orders prefigures another major theme of the Heptaméron: its anticleri-
calism (see below). Likewise, while the monastic community offers the
devisants a welcome shelter, it does not constitute a spiritual utopia: its
abbot is described as avaricious and dissembling, and the monks are not
models of devotion.21
When the prospect of waiting for ten days as the bridge is rebuilt casts
a fear of ennui on the stranded travelers, Bible reading and prayerfully
attending Mass each morning are Oisille’s suggestions for how the group
might pass its time “joyfully” (pp. 87–88). As Hircan points out, however,
they are not all sufficiently “mortified” (that is, dead to self and to sin)
to make this their sole activity and he suggests a more carnal exercise.22
His wife Parlamente, catching his innuendo, replies: “mais laissons là les
passetemps où deux seulement peuvent avoir part et parlons de celluy
qui doibt estre commun à tous” (p. 89). They therefore decide to give
their afternoons to the collective project of telling and discussing stories.
At the same time, the company accepts Oisille’s suggestion and gathers
early each morning in her room to hear her read and expound a passage
from the Bible. While the frame story of the Heptaméron thus echoes the
20 See <http://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/ehm/Sarrance/180563>, viewed on 12 July

2012.
21 In light of the long clerical tradition of using exempla in preaching, John D. Lyons
points out the significance of the inversion operated in the Heptaméron whereby lay peo-
ple recount exemplary tales, frequently involving the misdeeds of clerics, while some of
the monks listen surreptitiously; see Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern
France and Italy (Princeton, 1989), pp. 106–07. The abbot and monks of the Benedictine
abbey of Saint-Savin are described briefly but in generally positive terms.
22 The preferred reading is “nous ne sommes encores sy mortifiez,” ed. Salminen, p. 10;
cf. ed. Cazauran and Lefèvre, p. 64.
Decameron, the moral situation of the French work is very different from
that of its Italian model. From the outset, the Heptaméron reflects clearly
the author’s religious and more particularly evangelical convictions, which
subsequently inform both the stories themselves and the discussions of
the devisants.
An Evangelical Community
The travelers stranded in the flood-ravaged mountains of the Pyrenees

come together to form a community. Marguerite’s word in the prologue
for that newly formed group is assemblée (p. 92). As Edwin Duval has
remarked, this is the meaning of the Greek word ekklesia in the New Tes-
tament, the word that became église in French.23 Marguerite created ten
characters who reflect the diversity in the aristocratic society she knew,
men and women who bring different personalities to the group. In their
stories and discussions, they debate issues central to the Reformation: the
role of faith and good works; the effects of sin and the paths to recon-
ciliation with God; the folly of human presumption; religious rituals that
might become superstitions; the perils of austerity; and, perhaps most
compellingly, the place of love, human and divine, in the world and in
the scheme of salvation. Although they disagree about many aspects of
their society’s norms, no one challenges a broadly evangelical position on
theological issues. When they need to find a way to live together through
their interlude at Serrance, they turn first to the widow Oisille, rather than
to one of the monks hosting them. Oisille represents a more active and
joyful version of the ideal of the Christian widow described by Saint Paul
(1 Tim. 5:3–10) and elaborated by contemporary humanists such as Juan
Luis Vives.24 If the group adopts Parlamente’s suggestion to tell stories in
the afternoon, they also follow Oisille’s counsel and go to hear her scrip-
tural reading and commentary in the morning. Lefèvre d’Étaples and the
group at Meaux regarded the biblical examples of Christ’s first followers
23 Duval, “ ‘Et puis, quelles nouvelles?’ ”

24 In “Feminine Authority in the Heptameron: A Reading of Oysille,” Modern Lan-
guage Studies 13.2 (1983), 52–59, Paula Sommers points out that Oisille is “a woman who
combines in an unusually positive synthesis traits which were regarded as negative in
the satiric literature of the ‘querelle des femmes’—age, femininity and authority” (p. 52).
Sommers adds: “Oysille has left the cloistered environment judged suitable for the widow
and ventures into the world. She also enjoys the pageant of life around her and combines
deep piety with a sense of humor” (p. 55).
as a model for Church reform. The ten devisants might recall the early dis-
ciples in the New Testament Epistles and Acts of the Apostles, the books
they read together.
The modern reader may well miss the radical nature of this situation.
First, for the Catholic Church, the function of explicating and teaching
Holy Scripture was reserved strictly to clerics. Here it is assumed not only
by a layperson, but by a woman, who, by virtue of her sex, would have been
excluded from the clergy and from university studies. Saint Paul famously
forbade women to speak in church or to teach men (1 Cor. 14:34–35; 1 Tim.
2:11–12); Marguerite does not seem to have considered this a prohibition
against women teaching in other places. None of the devisants expresses
any hesitation in accepting Oisille’s spiritual guidance. Second, the reader
is never told which version of the Bible Oisille uses for her commentaries,
but it might be supposed to be a French version, like that published by
Lefèvre d’Étaples (New Testament, 1523; Old Testament, 1528; Complete
Bible, 1530).25 The Catholic Church, whose official Bible was the Latin Vul-
gate, had never been enthusiastic about vernacular translations, which
put the sacred texts into the hands of any literate person. As reform move-
ments proliferated in the 16th century, Catholic authorities became more
and more hostile to vernacular Bibles. Even when such translations were
based on the Vulgate, as was the case with Lefèvre’s, preparing, printing,
selling, or owning one, could leave an individual open to suspicion of
heresy. In this way, the religious activities of the Heptaméron’s devisants
clearly reflect their evangelical sympathies. The Word of God is funda-
mental, as many who wanted to reform the Catholic Church insisted, but
Oisille’s biblical lessons are always followed by attending Mass, the central
Catholic liturgical rite, believed to effect the transubstantiation of bread
and wine into the body and blood of Christ, a doctrine Calvin and other
reformers rejected.26 The devisants might become so involved in the bib-
lical lesson that they risk being late for the liturgy, but when one of the
25 Nicole Cazauran examines the biblical quotations and paraphrases in the Heptam-
éron to show that these echo both Lefèvre’s French Bible and the Latin text of the Vul-
gate, which Marguerite would have heard throughout her life in the context of the liturgy.
Occasional phrases even figure in Latin. See “Le langage ‘biblien’ des devisants de L’Hep-
taméron,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 70 (2008), 281–99. On the devisants’
appeals to Scripture, see idem, “Les citations bibliques dans l’Heptaméron,” in Variétés,
pp. 379–91.
26 See B. A. Gerrish’s entry “Eucharist” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation,
ed. Hans Hillerbrand, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1995), 2:71–81. The Catholic Mass was the target of
the inflammatory placards posted widely in France on the night of 18 October 1534. See
the introduction to this volume.
religious calls them, they emerge from their “contemplation” and hear
Mass “bien devotement” (p. 299).
The Bonds of Sin—Clerics, Cordeliers, “Cuyder”
The current state of the Church is in fact a central issue in the Hepta-
méron, which dwells insistently on the abusive behavior of the clergy.27
This subject might be considered apt material for short stories and had
fed a long tradition of satirical anticlerical writing throughout the Middle
Ages. Nonetheless, its treatment in the Heptaméron is notable in several
respects. Here, as in other areas, Marguerite avoids absolute generaliza-
tions. Not all of the tales’ priests and religious are wicked; nevertheless, the
vast majority of them are, and the topic concerns no less than 24—fully
one third—of the 72 stories. If we look at the first ten stories composed
by the queen—those that she herself would apparently have told as part
of the French court’s unrealized project of imitating the Decameron—half
of them are anticlerical in nature and represent some of the most violent
in the collection (nouvelles 23, 22, 31, 33, and 34). In their discussions, the
devisants are also severe in their indictment of the clergy and in particular
of cordeliers or Franciscan friars.
Satire of clerical abuses not only formed part of a long tradition of anti-
clerical writing within the Catholic Church, it was also a major theme
within Reformed and Protestant attacks against Rome. How does Margue-
rite fit into this picture? We shall return shortly to the particular moral
failings of which the clergy is accused; first, however, it is important to
note that the principal charge brought against certain representatives of
the Catholic Church is that the doctrine they expound is false. One of
the most vivid examples of this is offered by nouvelle 23, which tells of a
woman raped by a cordelier. If the latter acts out of lust, the erroneous
theology preached by members of his order is presented by the narrator
Oisille as the direct cause of the tragic outcome. The woman takes her
own life and inadvertently provokes the death of her baby in her igno-
rance of God’s forgiveness, given freely to sinners, and having learned only
27 In relation to the issues discussed in this section, see the following articles by Gary
Ferguson: “Mal vivre, mal croire: l’anticléricalisme de l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de
Navarre,” Seizième Siècle 6 (2010), 151–63; “All in Knots: Teaching the Heptameron with
Les Prisons,” in Approaches to Teaching Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, ed. Colette
H. Winn (New York, 2007), pp. 135–40; “Péchés capitaux et ‘vices italiens’: l’avarice et ses
complices dans l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,” Seizième Siècle 4 (2008), 73–87.
“la confiance des bonnes œuvres, la satisfaction des péchez par austerité
de vie, jeusnes et disciplines” (p. 348). Such a works-centered teaching,
for Oisille, is nothing less than a theology of despair and death. A second
example is found in the discussion following nouvelle 55. The topic here
is the practice of making a bequest to a religious foundation, and in par-
ticular to Franciscans who promise to secure admittance into heaven for
those who leave them money in their will. Such claims are qualified by the
devisants as outright deceptions since they suggest that God himself might
be bought. Hircan concludes: “Je vous declare que je ne pense poinct qu’il
y ayt au monde plus grands mensonges que les leurs” (p. 578). It is not in
and of itself the practice of making a donation to the friars that is at issue
here; it is the idea that such a “good work,” irrespective of other factors,
might be sufficient to secure a person’s salvation.
It is no doubt to move beyond a simple criticism of clerical morals that
the Heptaméron’s stories frequently concern priests and religious who ini-
tially seem to lead a life of exemplary piety; it is these apparently virtu-
ous men who subsequently commit the most heinous of crimes. Nouvelle
22 describes the case of the prieur de Saint-Martin, who, after living aus-
terely up to the age of 50 and being known for his reforming zeal, becomes
the pitiless persecutor of a nun who refuses to acquiesce to his sexual
demands (cf. nouvelles 56 and 72). In each case, however, the Heptaméron
stresses that the individuals in question are considered devout because of
the pious deeds they are seen to perform. These works of piety, the reader
is repeatedly shown, can turn out to be deceptive. It is necessary for the
Christian to live well, and against the friars in tale 5 who try to rape a
ferrywoman, the villagers recall the New Testament dictum that a tree
is known by its fruits (p. 130; cf. Matt. 12:33, Luke 6:43–44). This does not
mean, however, that holiness lies in the performance of works. Those who
put their trust in their own efforts rather than in God’s mercy will, sooner
or later, fall; for all humans are weak and sinful and stand in constant
need of grace. This is the truth that, for Marguerite and her devisants, the
teaching of many clerics serves to obscure.
In the 16th century, many moderate reforming Catholics, following
the lead of Erasmus, decried the disordered life of the clergy, since it
lead the faithful into doctrinal error.28 This was the position of Bishop
28 See Thierry Wanegffelen, Une difficile fidélité: Catholiques malgré le concile en France,
XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1999), pp. 40–41.
Guillaume Briçonnet, who, writing to the queen in December 1521,

described the shortcomings of the Church’s pastors as follows:
L’Eglise est de present aride et sèche comme le torrent en la grand challeur
australe. La challeur d’avarice, ambicion et voluptueuse vie a deseché son
eaue de vie, doctrine et exemplarité. . . . Ung chacun serche son prouffict et
honneur. Il n’est plus question de celuy de Dieu.29
The position expressed in the Heptaméron is more radical than this.
While there is no denial of the value of the religious life or of the role
of priests and of the sacraments, the problem, for Marguerite, seems to
be the inverse of that described by Briçonnet: it is the wrong doctrine of
many priests and religious that leads them—and frequently those in their
charge—into sin. Their lives are not holy, even if for a time they might
appear to be so, because they are founded on a faith that is false.
Why, then, does the Heptaméron direct its satire so forcefully against the
cordeliers? Marguerite and her brother had been involved in the reform of
this order, one of the most numerous and active in France.30 In 1521, for
example, François I had forced all Franciscan convents to join the order’s
Observant branch. Since the cordeliers did not live an enclosed contem-
plative life but exercised an active ministry, often in an urban setting, they
mixed with the population in ways that might place them in situations
of perceived or real temptation, demanding a level of self-control not all
of them possessed. The principal reason that the Heptaméron focuses its
anticlerical satire on the cordeliers, however, seems to be rather of an
imaginary or symbolic nature. In order to explore this thesis, we turn to a
consideration of the particular sins imputed to the clergy in general.
It is perhaps not surprising that these are first and foremost of a sexual
character (cf. nouvelles 1, 5, 22, 23, 29, 31, 33, 41, 46, 48, 60, 61, and 72).
Clerics are also frequently accused of avarice (nouvelles 44, 55, 56, and 65).
This pair of vices is accompanied by a third failing, that is not so much a
part of traditional satire, and that consists in a prideful self-sufficiency, a
tendency to believe that one is better than others or to trust in one’s own
merits. This is the sin that both results from and feeds a theology and
a devotional life founded on the performance of works that Marguerite

1:85.
30 On the historical context of religious life in 16th-century France, see Jean-Marie Le
Gall, Les Moines au temps des Réformes, France (1480–1560) (Seyssel, 2001).
considers pernicious. Thus the ageing prieur de Saint-Martin, referred to

earlier,
s’estimant luy-mesme le bien public de toute religion, desira de conserver sa
santé mieulx qu’il n’avoit accoustumé. Et, combien que sa reigle portast de
jamais ne manger chair, il s’en dispensa luy-mesmes, ce qu’il ne faisoit à nul
autre, disant que sur luy estoit tout le faiz de la religion. (p. 327)
In nouvelle 48, Ennasuite recounts the tale of a Franciscan who takes the
place of a husband in the bed of his new bride. In introducing her story,
the narrator describes the friars as “ceulx qui nous appellent mondains
et qui s’estiment estre quelque chose saincte et plus digne que nous”
(p. 529); she concludes: “Ne vous esbahissez poinct . . . si telles gens sepa-
rez de nostre commune façon de vivre font des choses que les advan-
turiers auroient honte de faire. Mais esmerveillez-vous qu’ilz ne font pis
quant Dieu retire sa main d’eulx, car l’abit est si loing de faire le moyne,
que bien souvent par orgueil il le deffaict” (p. 532). Pride—what Margue-
rite in her poems calls cuyder—is thus the deadliest clerical sin, the root
of the theology of self-sufficiency that the cordeliers transmit to those who
will listen to them—like the wife in nouvelle 23 or like the foolish women,
described later by Parlamente, whom the friars dupe into giving them
money and into trusting in their own works and those of their spiritual
guides (p. 511).31
This trio of vices—avarice, lust, and pride—is highly significant. First
of all, we can see that it represents the exact antithesis of the three reli-
gious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience (this last quality intended
to teach humility and combat pride). Second, not only are the cordeliers
in the Heptaméron characterized by a life in direct opposition to their
31 Many critics have commented on the importance of cuyder in the Heptaméron. As

Thysell notes, however, it never figures as a noun, as in Marguerite’s poetry, but only as a
verb. Thysell sees in this a desire on the queen’s part to distance herself from the concept
associated with the term that Calvin had attributed to the Spiritual Libertines (The Plea-
sure, pp. 48–57). The problem is that Marguerite does not avoid the noun in contemporary
poems, such as Les Prisons, so that its absence in nominal form from the Heptaméron must
have other explanations, for example, related to the different genres of the works. The
suggestion that the cordeliers collectively might represent the libertins spirituels is also
unconvincing (ibid., p. 54). Le Gall proposes that one of the reasons Marguerite might have
focused her attack on the Franciscans is that they were in reality one of the most reformed
orders at the time and this could encourage a feeling of superiority and complacency on
their part (Les Moines, pp. 547–87). To the extent that this was the case, Marguerite would
certainly have recognized that reform, like all things, might have its dangers. On the other
hand, she herself promoted monastic reform and the cordeliers in the Heptaméron can
hardly be said in general to be portrayed as particularly zealous.
rule, the members of this order advertise visibly the vows they have
taken through the three symbolic knots tied in their distinctive rope belt
(from which their common name in French derives). This consideration
explains in no small part their ubiquity in the Heptaméron, in which a
number of stories that concern the value of human works and sin and
its forgiveness are structured around plays on the semes corde/(dé)lier.
Story 23, for example, is told by Oisille to expose “l’ypocrisye de ceulx qui
s’estiment plus religieux que les autres” (p. 341). The woman who takes
her life after being tricked into sleeping with the cordelier does so in her
ignorance of God’s “misericorde” by strangling herself with a “corde de son
lict” (p. 348). Nouvelle 41, discussed further below, associates in striking
fashion the lust of a Franciscan and the penance he imposes on a young
woman as a condition for the forgiveness of her sins when he requires her
to “porter ma corde sur vostre chair toute nue” (p. 484). The girl agrees
until the cordelier insists that he must tie the cord himself. Finally called
to account, he is sent back to his convent “pieds et mains lyez” (p. 485;
cf. nouvelle 56, p. 584). Such exploitation of the thematics of cords/ropes
and knots was not without literary precedent and we find examples of
similar word play—with both positive and negative meanings—in the
work of the 13th-century poet Rutebeuf.32 In the Heptaméron, however,
it is particularly developed.
The Heptaméron’s cordeliers are thus bound by sins that are the very
antithesis of the vows by which they profess to live. At the same time, like
the Pharisees in the gospels, they consider themselves holier than others,
for whom “they tie up (Vulgate: alligant) heavy burdens, hard to bear.”33
Their theology of works is a theology of cuyder, of despair and death.
There is one positive example that confirms the negative picture painted
thus far. The two lovers of nouvelle 19, forbidden from marrying, turn their
thwarted desire to spiritual advantage by becoming Franciscans. The man
states specifically, however, that he knows that the religious state is not
inherently superior to any other; he merely seeks leisure to reflect upon
God’s goodness and mercy (p. 280). He composes a chanson spirituelle,
32 In “Li Diz de Freire Denize le Cordelier,” a woman berates a friar: “Qui vos pendroit
a votre corde / Qui est en tant de leuz noee / Il auroit fait bone jornee,” vv. 246–48, in
Rutebeuf, Œuvres complètes, ed. and trans. Michel Zink (Paris, 2001), p. 434. In “Li Diz
des Cordeliers,” similar semes are activated in eulogy, but might easily be turned to irony
(ibid., p. 52).
33 Matt. 23:4. Quotations from the Bible are taken from the New Revised Standard
Version.
addressed to his beloved, in which he celebrates leaving behind “les biens /

Qui sont liens,” “la gloire”/“orgueil,” and “la concupiscence” (p. 285).
The denunciation of vices that are the very opposite of the qualities
embodied by religious vows is neither a recent nor an isolated element
in Marguerite’s thought—and ultimately it concerns not only cordeliers
and clerics but all men and women. Briçonnet had repeatedly evoked
the same trio of sins, as in his lament, quoted above, over the dryness
of the Church due to “[l]a challeur d’avarice, ambicion et voluptueuse
vie.”34 In retreat at the priory of Tusson following the death of her brother,
Marguerite meditated on the same three sins in writing Les Prisons, a
poem in which corde(s) and lien(s) are also among the most recurrent
figures of the allegory.35
We began our discussion of clerical cuyder with nouvelle 23 and the
lethal works-centered theology of the cordeliers that causes the death of a
noblewoman and her child. The stories of the third day build up inexora-
bly to this bleak tale. After nouvelle 21, Simontault asserts that “pour faire
conclusion du cueur de l’homme et de la femme, le meilleur des deux
n’en vault riens” (p. 325). Next follows the story of the prieur de Saint-
Martin. This is alleged initially by Geburon as an example of the fact that
an individual goes astray as soon as he begins to attribute any goodness to
himself (pp. 325–26). In conclusion, Geburon will draw the moral that is
fundamental to Marguerite’s thought, one based on the teaching of Saint
Paul (1 Cor. 1:27–29): “Dieu par les choses foybles confond les fortes, et,
par les inutilles aux oeilz des hommes, la gloire de ceulx qui cuydent estre
quelque chose et ne sont rien” (pp. 339–40).
The same message of humility lies also at the heart of the Heptaméron’s
portrayal of women’s relationships with the clergy. Again Marguerite avoids
absolute generalizations, recognizing the diversity of human behavior. In
this way it is given to the male devisant Simontault (not without personal
polemical motivation) to tell the very first tale, concerning a wife who
has simultaneous extraconjugal liaisons with a bishop and a young man,
the first for reasons of profit (avarice), the second for her pleasure (lust)
(p. 94). Nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases it is women who are
the primary victims of abusive clerics—either because they are most sus-
ceptible to giving credence to their teaching, to falling into a reliance on
34 For another example involving “luxure,” “avarice,” and “orgueil,” see Correspondance,
2:270.
35 Marguerite de Navarre, Les Prisons, ed. Simone Glasson (Geneva, 1978), pp. 75–77,
80–81, 113–14, 125–26, 136, 150, 187–88.
good works and in particular to making them gifts of money, or because

they are the object of clerical sexual predation. On the other hand, it is
sometimes women who are able to effect the most successful resistance
to unscrupulous priests and religious. One example is the crafty widow in
tale 55; there is also the ferrywoman of nouvelle 5, who escapes from the
clutches of two Franciscans determined to rape her. The woman tricks
them by pretending to agree to satisfy each of them in turn, only to leave
both stranded in the middle of the river on different islands. When we con-
sider that the boat is a traditional metaphor for the Church, the ejection
of the two friars takes on a particularly trenchant symbolic significance.
In a number of nouvelles, Marguerite portrays herself as a fictional char-
acter coming to the aid of another woman. This is the case in nouvelle 22,
where she helps the nun Marie Héroët and punishes the prieur de Saint-
Martin, in whom up to that point she had had complete confidence. In
this way, she shows herself learning the lesson that appearances can be
deceptive, that all creatures are fallible, and that we must put our trust in
the Creator alone (pp. 338–39). Finally, at the end of story 72, Marguerite
makes an appearance in order to succor a young nun in distress after hav-
ing let herself be seduced by a male religious and become pregnant. It is
the duchess of Alençon who takes the steps necessary to have the nun
reintegrated into her community and the brother removed. She also con-
vinces the nun to abandon the idea of an unnecessary pilgrimage to Rome
to confess her sin to the pope in person.36
In other tales, too, women exercise what can only be termed a religious
ministry, paralleling that of Oisille in the frame story. Nouvelle 67 shows a
woman accompanying her husband on the expedition of Captain Roberval
to Canada in 1542. When her spouse is condemned to death for treason,
she pleads successfully for them both to be abandoned on an uninhabited
island. The woman, “qui avoit toute consolation en Dieu, porta pour sa
saulve garde, norriture et consolation, le Nouveau Testament, lequel elle
lisoit incessamment” (p. 646). Her husband dies, “n’aiant service ne conso-
lation que de sa femme, laquelle le servoit de medecin et de confesseur;
en sorte qu’il passa joieusement de ce desert en la celeste patrie” (ibid.).
This is clearly a case of necessity, but everything in the story points to the
efficacy of this faithful wife’s ministry to her husband, which is the subject
36 On Marguerite’s appearances as a character, see Mary B. McKinley, “Scriptural Spec-

ulum: What Can We See in the Heptaméron’s Mirror?,” in Women’s Writing in the French
Renaissance, Proceedings of the Fifth Cambridge French Renaissance Colloquium, 7–9 July
1997, ed. Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), pp. 63–73.
of the devisants’ subsequent discussion. Once rescued, the woman returns

to France and spends the rest of her life teaching young girls to read and
write, “n’aiant desir que d’exhorter ung chascun à l’amour et confiance de
Nostre Seigneur” (p. 647). Like nouvelles 5 and 22, the story is presented—
untypically in this case and with a distinct irony by the male narrator
Simontault (p. 644)—as an example of virtue in the “weaker” sex (p. 648).
When Oisille, referring to Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 3:6,
reminds the company that neither women nor men deserve great praise,
“car l’ung et l’autre, par son cueur et son vouloir ne faict rien que planter,
et Dieu seul donne l’accroissement,” Saffredent expands the reference in
order to retort provocatively that the apostle wrote that Apollo planted and
he watered, but that no women are said to have played any role in God’s
work (p. 648). Saffredent’s remark may in part be intended humorously,
but it is also an example of the disqualifying argument often made against
women exercising a clerical ministry (the absence of positive Scriptural
precedent). Is it a coincidence that Saffredent quotes mistakenly, confus-
ing the roles of Paul and Apollo? In any case, Parlamente unambiguously
qualifies Saffredent’s use of the Bible as following the partial—in both
senses of the term—practice of wicked men and reminds him that in
other places Paul recommends himself to the women who have worked
with him for the spread of the gospel. Women are given a religious role in
the Heptaméron, a role that allows them to serve as conduits of grace and
instruments of the divine will. Like men, they may do so to the extent that
they avoid cuyder and let God work his purposes in them:
For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is
stronger than human strength. . . . God chose what is foolish in the world to
shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;
God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to
reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence
of God. (1 Cor. 1:25–29)
Women in the Nouvelles: Responding to the Querelles
“Au jeu nous sommes tous esgaulx” announces Hircan at the end of the
prologue as the storytelling is about to begin (p. 92). However, if the
devisants are equal as storytellers, their tales and comments present a
world where social power structures belie any suggestion of equality. The
Heptaméron offers, with few exceptions, stories about women or about
relations between women and men. Almost all of the discussions open
with an explicit address to women: “Voyla mes dames . . .”37 While many

nouvelles examine women as objects of erotic desire, very few portray
women as desiring subjects, and when they do it is almost inevitably in
an unfavorable light.38 Telling a wide variety of love stories, Marguerite
often calls attention to the vulnerable position of women in her society
even as she portrays some women in positions of power. The Heptaméron
presents women both good and evil, clever and naive. It would be an error
to project onto Marguerite and her writings the label of feminist in the
modern sense of the term; nonetheless, she does portray many forms of
injustice against women and their reactions to them. While the Hepta-
méron offers an examination of contemporary society, the prevalence of
strife between the sexes also points to its place in the long tradition of
philosophical and literary debates known as the querelle des femmes.39
During Marguerite’s lifetime, the querelle evolved. The popularity of
Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier with its idealized portrait of the ducal
court of Urbino had inspired reflections on the French court.40 Early in
the 1540s, several French writers composed works praising or commenting
37 Cathleen Bauschatz has argued that women were the primary audience intended
by Marguerite, “ ‘Voylà, mes dames . . .’: Inscribed Women Listeners and Readers in the
Heptameron,” in Critical Tales, ed. Lyons and McKinley, pp. 104–22.
38 For example: Jambicque in story 43; the duchess in story 70; the dame de Pamplune
in story 35; the wife, eventually, in story 15 (see below). On Jambicque, see Hope Glidden,
“Gender, Essence, and the Feminine (Heptameron 43),” in Critical Tales, ed. Lyons and
McKinley, pp. 25–40.
39 Ian Maclean’s The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasti-
cism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, Eng., 1980) offers an
excellent introduction to the theories arising in medical, legal, political, and theological
writings that fed those debates. Constance Jordan analyzes the abundant production of
16th-century works praising or defaming women in Renaissance Feminisms: Literary Texts
and Political Models (Ithaca, NY, 1990). See also Joan Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and
the ‘Querelle des Femmes,’ ” Signs 8.1 (1982), 4–28. On the Heptaméron in this context,
see Émile Telle, L’Œuvre de Marguerite d’Angoulême, reine de Navarre, et la Querelle des
Femmes (Toulouse, 1937; Geneva, 1969); Deborah N. Losse, “Distortion as a Means of Reas-
sessment: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron and the ‘Querelle des Femmes,’ ” Journal
of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 3 (1982), 75–84; and Gisèle
Mathieu-Castellani, “ ‘La guerre des sexes’ et la cause des femmes dans L’Heptaméron,”
in “L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre (II), ed. Chantal Liaroutzos (Cahiers textuel )
29 (Paris, 2006), pp. 87–101.
40 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton, ed.
Daniel Javitch (New York, 2002). Published in 1528, describing the court of Urbino in 1506
and likely composed at that time, Castiglione’s dialogues circulated in France in Italian
well before they were translated into French in 1537. See Peter Burke, The Fortunes of
the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park, Penna.,
1996), pp. 58–59, 63–64, 75–76.
on the ideal court lady: four works, Bertrand de La Borderie’s L’Amye

de court, Antoine Héroët’s La Parfaicte Amye, Charles Fontaine’s La
Contr’amye de court, and Paul Angier’s L’expérience de l’amye de court con-
tre la contre amye, offered different portraits of the lady and the elaborate
rules governing love. Together they constitute a new debate, known as
the querelle des amyes.41 Héroët—whose sister Marie appears in nouvelle
22—reflected in particular the new interest in Ficino’s interpretation of
Plato’s theories of love. Scholars have argued that in two of her plays,
Comédie des Quatre Femmes and Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan, Margue-
rite entered the dialogue of the querelle des amyes.42 Rabelais provided a
caricature of misogynist discourse in the words of the doctor Rondibilis
in the Tiers Livre (1546), a book he dedicated to Marguerite as she was
composing her novella collection.43 Scholars have cautioned readers to
keep in mind the rhetorical character of these works and the possibility
of paradox and irony in them. Following the model of the medieval débat,
they present a strong, even extreme, position for or against women that
may or may not represent their authors’ personal beliefs.44
Immediately in introducing the first story Simontault launches the
debate by declaring: “Je mectray peine de faire ung recueil de tous les
mauvais tours que les femmes ont faict aux pauvres homes, et si ne diray
rien que pure verité” (p. 94). The wife of Sainct-Aignan lives up to his
promise. Introduced as “plus belle que vertueuse” and “ceste malheureuse
femme” (ibid.), her character remains consistent to the end. One might
argue that Sainct-Aignan surpasses his wife in treachery, because he plots
with a conjurer to have her killed along with his victim’s father and the
duchess of Alençon (Marguerite). Nevertheless, the moral that Simontault
offers as he concludes his tale condemns only women: “regardez quel mal
41 The works of the querelle des amyes were published together as Opuscules d’amour
par Heroet, La Borderie, et autres divins poëtes (Lyon, 1547); see <http://iris.lib.virginia.edu/
rmds/gordon/gordonimages/Gordon1547_O68>; reprint intro. Michael A. Screech (New
York, 1970). For individual works, see Antoine Héroët, “La Parfaicte Amye,” in Œuvres
poétiques, ed. F. Gohin (Paris, 1909); Bertrand de La Borderie, L’Amie de court (1542),
ed. Danielle Trudeau (Paris, 1997).
42 Danielle Trudeau places those works in context in her edition of L’Amie de court.
Trudeau follows but rectifies certain details in V. L. Saulnier’s edition of Marguerite de
Navarre, Théâtre profane (Paris, 1978 [1946]). See also Michael A. Screech, “An Interpre-
tation of the Querelle des Amyes,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 21 (1959),
103–30.
43 François Rabelais, Tiers Livre, ch. 32, Œuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris,
1994), p. 453.
44 See Floyd Gray, Gender, Rhetoric and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing
(Cambridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 6–32.
il vient d’une meschante femme et combien de maulx se feirent pour le

peché de ceste cy. Vous trouverez que depuis que Eve feit pecher Adan,
toutes les femmes ont prins possession de tormenter, tuer et danner les
hommes” (p. 102). With that biblical reference to Genesis 3, Simontault
follows a long tradition of theologians who judged Eve responsible for
Adam’s sin and thus for the Fall and its consequences.45 By putting in
her first story an argument that had been used for centuries to support
misogynist claims, Marguerite announces at the outset that her book will
enter that debate.
Declaring that she will counter Simontault’s view, Oisille offers an
example of impeccable virtue with the story of the mulekeeper’s wife,
who dies defending herself against the attack of a brutal rapist. Oisille
portrays the woman as a “martire de chasteté” (p. 107) and tells her story
as a saint’s life. The Heptaméron’s opening stories thus present the two
opposing extremes of the querelle des femmes. The stories that follow in
day 1, however, depict a broad range of moral or immoral behavior, and
they raise questions about the decisions faced by both women and men.
They feature women of different social classes, from a queen and a prin-
cess to a ferrywoman. Some are told in a somber tone, while others are
delivered with humor. If those first ten stories portray “the war between
the sexes,”46 they also serve to refute the notion at the heart of the querelle
des femmes—that women are either wholly good or wholly evil.
Marriage
The early and mid-16th century produced a remarkable number of works

focusing on marriage. Erasmus wrote several dialogues on the subject in
his Colloquies, as well as Encomium matrimonii (In Praise of Marriage, 1518)
and Christiani matrimonii institutio (The Institution of Christian Marriage,
1526). The Christian ideal he described did not however correspond to the
condition of marriage as many people experienced it. Published in 1546,
Rabelais’s Tiers Livre portrays comically Panurge’s conflict between desire
and fear as he considers taking a wife. Meanwhile Protestant reformers
45 Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the
Christian West (New York, 1989) and Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York,
1989).
46 Gérard Defaux, “Marguerite de Navarre et la guerre des sexes: Heptaméron, première
Journée,ˮ French Forum 24.2 (1999), 133–61; Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, La Quenouille et la
lyre (Paris, 1998), pp. 80–98, and idem, “ ‘La guerre des sexes.’ ˮ
argued against the rule of clerical celibacy and proposed new ideals for
couples entering into matrimony, no longer deemed a sacrament. On the
Catholic side, the Council of Trent (1545–63) issued a decree in its final
year, upholding traditional doctrine, while introducing much stricter reg-
ulations governing the way marriage was celebrated.47
As a woman in the royal family, Marguerite experienced personally the
ways in which political considerations and parental interests determined
the choice of a woman’s husband.48 She portrays sympathetically Poline
(story 19), who is prevented from marrying the man she loves by the mar-
quise in whose household she lives. Floride (story 10) loves the son of the
Infant Fortuné, but the king orders her to marry the duke of Cardona. Such
stories show the pain caused by conventions that gave parents authority
over their children’s marriages, but Marguerite’s criticism remains tacit.
Her treatment of marriage in the Heptaméron reflects and contributes to
discussions that proliferated in the 16th century and shows above all the
complexities and resulting tensions inherent in the institution. Margue-
rite was not the first to sympathize with women caught in marriage nego-
tiations controlled by men. In the 12th century, Marie de France in her
Lais depicted with sympathy mal-mariées, young women married to men
many years older than they, men, often jealous and cruel, who were able to
choose a young, beautiful bride because of their wealth and power.49 The
Heptaméron offers several such stories. Nouvelle 25 presents an amorous
exploit of François I, thinly disguised as “un bien grand prince” (p. 366),
who seduces the young wife of a Parisian lawyer and enjoys an ongoing
adulterous relationship with her. The narrator introduces the story with
a description of the lawyer that draws on the traditional features of the
47 Reinier Leushuis provides a detailed context for and analysis of writings about mar-
riage in the mid-16th century in Le Mariage et l’“amitié courtoise” dans le dialogue et le récit
bref de la Renaissance (Florence, 2003); see esp. pp. 207–70 on the Heptaméron. See also
Jean Céard, “Le Mariage dans l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,” in Le Mariage au
temps de la Renaissance, ed. Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies (Paris, 1993), pp. 195–210; Edward
Benson, “Marriage Ancestral and Conjugal in the Heptaméron,” Journal of Medieval and
Renaissance Studies 9.2 (1979), 261–75; Cathleen Bauschatz, “Rabelais and Marguerite de
Navarre on Sixteenth-Century Views of Clandestine Marriage,” Sixteenth Century Journal
34.2 (2003), 395–408. Still very valuable is Michael A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage:
Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy (London, 1958).
48 See the introduction to this volume. On the political context of Marguerite’s marria-
ges, see Laurent Ripart, “Les mariages de Marguerite,” in Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1992:
Actes du Colloque international de Pau, 1992, ed. Nicole Cazauran and James Dauphiné
(Mont-de-Marsan, 1995), pp. 59–83.
49 Kasimierz Kupisz, “La mal-mariée et l’Heptaméron,” Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literac-
kich 21 (1978), 23–40.
mal-mariée’s husband. While he is neither cruel nor jealous, he is rich and

no longer physically attractive. Esteemed in his profession and a widower
from a first union that produced no children, he hopes for better success
in marrying a second time and chooses an 18-year-old girl with a beautiful
face and body. The second marriage produces no more children than the
first, a fact that suggests his impotence. Like its medieval predecessors in
the mal-mariée tradition, story 25 uses an opening emphasis on the unat-
tractive husband as a rhetorical strategy to elicit the reader’s sympathy
for the young lovers and indulgence toward their adultery.50 A number of
other stories treat adultery with humor. In nouvelle 3, the king of Naples’s
seduction of a young wife leads that woman’s husband to avenge himself
by seducing the queen. Saffredent tells the story with a light touch calcu-
lated to produce laughter. Ennasuite obliges as, no doubt, do most of the
story’s readers.
Other tales of adultery are not so forgiving in their depiction of unfaith-
ful wives. In story 32, Bernage, an emissary of the French king traveling
in Germany, seeks a night’s lodging in a castle where he witnesses the
punishment the host inflicts on his adulterous wife. Her head shaved, a
sign commonly imposed on women accused of adultery, she must drink
from the skull of her lover, whom the husband murdered, and contem-
plate his bones, which have been placed in her bedroom. Rather than
plead for the husband’s compassion because of his wife’s suffering,
Bernage appeals to his host’s desire to perpetuate his lineage through heirs
that the repentant wife could bear. After some reflection, the German
nobleman sees the wisdom in Bernage’s words, takes pity on his wife, and
eventually receives from her “beaucoup de beaulx enfans” (p. 426). Oisille
ends her story by reminding the women in the group that without God’s
help, “il n’y a aucun d’entre nous qui ne puisse faire pis.” Parlamente says,
“Je trouve . . . ceste puniton autant raisonnable qu’il est possible” (p. 427).
The other women have different views about whether or not death would
have been a more fitting punishment. They soon hear another tale where
death is the solution chosen by the husband. In story 36, the Président de
Grenoble poisons with premeditation and impunity his young wife, who,
“voyant que son mary estoit viel” (p. 450), had taken a lover. Ennasuite
makes her positon clear: “Je ne veulx pas . . . par cela, louer la conscience du
Président, mais, oy bien, monstrer la legierté d’une femme.” The murdered
50 On story 25’s moral ambiguities, see Mary B. McKinley, “Narrative Complexities in
the Heptameron,” in Approaches to Teaching, ed. Winn, pp. 81–85.
wife serves as a warning to other women, and Ennasuite concludes: “Et les
hommes et les femmes sont commungs aux vices et vertuz.” Parlamente
observes: “ceste pauvre femme-là porta la peyne que plusieurs meritoient.
Et croy que le mary, puisqu’il s’en vouloit venger, se gouverna avecq une
merveilleuse prudence et sapience” (p. 453). Longarine criticizes the Prési-
dent for “sa grande malice . . . et longue et cruelle vengeance,” proof that
he acted without any concern for God or conscience. The men justify the
Président’s actions, however. Hircan asks: “Et que eussiez-vous doncq
voulu qu’il eust faict . . . pour se venger de la plus grande injure que la
femme peut faire à l’homme?” Geburon observes that the Président was
thinking of his family’s reputation, and Saffredent notes with pleasure
about crimes committed in the heat of passion that “les theologiens esti-
ment ces pechez-là facilles à pardonner” (p. 454).51
Simply by following nouvelle 36, stories 37 and 38 show the sharp con-
trast when the adulterer is the husband. In 37 a wife whose husband
becomes bored with their marriage waits on him patiently each time he
returns from his trysts. When, after a year of her forbearance, he continues
to leave their bed each night, she follows him to the room of one of her
chambermaids and sets the bed on fire. The husband, chastened as she
berates him, agrees to dismiss the chambermaid and to torment his wife
no longer. Longarine tells a similar story in 38, but here the wife restores
her husband to good health each time he returns from several days of
debauchery with a woman who farms their land. She eventually goes to
the woman’s filthy shack and, “sans collere” (p. 463), has the room cleaned
and orders a new bed and sheets. Her Griselda-like patience has the desired
effect.52 Seeing his wife’s kindness, the husband is filled with remorse and
ends his visits to the woman. Both stories close with the narrator’s assur-
ance that the husband’s repentance was permanent. Dagoucin concludes:
“Et depuis ceste heure-là, vesquirent ensemble en si grande amytié, que
mesmes les fautes passées, par le bien qui en estoit advenu, leur estoit
51 Quoting Jean Papon, Trias Judiciel du second notaire (Lyon, 1575), Natalie Davis notes
that “one of the two cases where homicide was ‘excusable’ in the sixteenth century was ‘to
avenge the adultery of a wife or daughter, because of the intolerable anguish [‘desplaisir’]
to him offended,’ ” Fiction in the Archives, p. 95.
52 A story of a wife’s patience in the face of her husband’s infidelity recalls Boccaccio’s
Griselda, the paragon of patience in the final story of the Decameron. However, story 38
closely follows one of Erasmus’s Colloquies, “Marriage” (1523) and a story in Pierre de Les-
nauderie’s, La Louenge de Mariaige et Recueil des hystoires des bonnes, vertueuses et illustres
femmes (1523), “De la femme du Seigneur de Darembon,” reproduced in Émile Telle, “Une
autre source de la nouvelle 38 de l’Heptaméron,” Romanic Review 25 (1934), 375–78.
augmentation de contentement” (pp. 459–60). It is hard not to read that

rosy image as ironic, for it contradicts a striking remark that he made at
the beginning of his tale, after describing the couple’s initially happy mar-
riage: “la félicité, à laquelle succede tousjours son contraire, commencea à
se diminuer” (p. 457). That pessimistic observation could serve to describe
most of the marriages in the Heptaméron as well as the human condition
in general as many of the stories portray it.
Stories 37 and 38 show different ways in which a wife can react to her
husband’s infidelity. Story 15, the third longest in the collection, illustrates
how a husband’s neglect can change his wife’s character. Here the king,
François I, promotes the marriage of one of his favorite courtiers, a man of
little wealth, to a beautiful but still very young woman, “si riche, que ung
grand seigneur s’en fust bien contenté” (p. 240). The husband neglects his
bride in favor of another woman and, because he now controls his wife’s
fortune, deprives her financially as well as emotionally. As her beauty
blossoms over the next few years, her love for her husband grows, but he
continues to ignore her and she falls into a deep melancholy. A prince
takes pity on her and engages her in conversations. Longarine explains
her response: “Et combien qu’elle eust tousjours desir de conserver son
honneur, si prenoit-elle grand plaisir de parler à luy et de se veoir aymée
et estimée; chose dont quasi elle estoit affamée” (p. 242). Their friendship
develops honorably, but the king, learning of it, expresses his displeasure,
and the prince, “qui aymoit trop mieulx la bonne grace du Roy que toutes
les dames du monde” (p. 243), explains to her that he must stop seeing
her. Her husband, aware of the prince’s affections, shows more interest
in her, but now it is she who avoids him, “desirant luy rendre partye des
ennuictz qu’elle avoit euz pour estre de luy peu aymée” (p. 244). Little by
little, the narrator traces a dramatic change in the wife’s behavior. She
initiates a friendship with another attractive young man at court and,
when her husband tells her that he will kill her “sans pitié ni compassion”
(p. 245) if he finds her talking to that man, she turns to still another. The
marriage spirals into a succession of jealous scenes, threats of murder,
and extravagant deceits. The wife’s character evolves from that of an inno-
cent and loving young bride to that of a woman who moves from lover to
lover, following what some have seen as the male model of infidelity.53
53 See Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, La Conversation conteuse: Les nouvelles de Marguerite

de Navarre (Paris, 1992), pp. 175–88. Patricia Francis Cholakian, “Heroic Infidelity: Novella 15,”
in Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre’s “Heptaméron,”
The attitude of the narrator, Longarine, toward the wife is initially sym-
pathetic. Even as the woman’s behavior becomes more and more reckless,
putting her at risk of provoking her husband’s fury, Longarine speaks with
concern rather than condemnation, including details that encourage the
reader to adopt the same point of view, like the old woman servant who
fears for her mistress’s life (p. 251). At the end of the story, Longarine offers
a lesson to launch the discussion: “Voylà, mes dames, que sans espargner
nostre sexe, je veulx bien monstrer aux maris que souvent les femmes
de grand cueur sont plustost vaincues de l’ire de la vengeance, que de la
douleur de l’amour; à quoy ceste-ci sceut long temps resister, mais à la fin
fut vaincue du desespoir” (p. 255). Longarine thus begins by suggesting
that women are driven to be unfaithful out of revenge arising from despair
caused by their husbands. However, the voice of a universal moral lesson,
a lesson echoing the Letter of Paul to the Romans, 12:21 and admitting
no individual exceptions, immediately takes over as she adds: “Ce que
ne doibt estre nulle femme de bien; pource que, en quelque sorte que
ce soit, ne sçauroit trouver excuse à mal faire. Car de tant plus les occa-
sions en sont données grandes, de tant plus se doyvent monstrer vertueu-
ses à resister et vaincre le mal en bien, et non pas rendre mal pour mal”
(pp. 255–56). Moving from sympathetic narrator of one woman’s plight
in marriage to the role of moral commentator as the discussion begins,
Longarine’s voice backs away from the wife’s quandary and establishes
an affective distance that admits no pleading of circumstantial excuses,
no exceptions to the rule.
While the Heptaméron shows many women unhappy in marriage, two
of the best-known stories portray women deprived of marriage. Rolan-
dine (story 21) and her aunt (story 40) suffer from the neglect and cru-
elty of the same man, Count Jossebelin, Rolandine’s father and her aunt’s
brother, who fails in his familial obligation to arrange suitable marriages
for the two women. Parlamente, who tells both stories, blames the failure
on the count’s avarice, implying that he was unwilling to provide them
with dowries. She also states that an excessive love for his sister prevented
him from accepting any of the good offers of marriage made for her. Both
women eventually find a man of lower social status whom they love and
marry in secret. When the count discovers his sister’s marriage, he has her
husband killed before her eyes and imprisons her in a tower. There she
ed. Dora E. Polachek (Amherst, 1993), pp. 62–76, sees the story as Marguerite’s answer to
Boccaccio’s Griselda.
establishes her independence by devoting herself to God and refusing to

leave her “hermitage” (p. 473). The same tower later becomes Rolandine’s
prison after her marriage is revealed and her husband flees the kingdom.
The detail of the clandestine marriages, one of many similarities that link
the two stories, reflects the intense debates in juridical and theological
circles about the role of parental or familial consent.54 Although in telling
the tales of Rolandine and her aunt, Parlamente shows sympathy for the
two women and emphasizes the cruelty of Count Jossebelin in preventing
them from enjoying married life, she opens the discussion following story
40 with unequivocal support of rules requiring parental consent: “Je prie
à Dieu, mesdames, que cest exemple vous soit si profitable, que nul de
vous ayt envie de soy marier, pour son plaisir, sans le consentement de
ceulx à qui on doibt porter obeissance” (p. 474). The difference between
Parlamente’s voice in the story and in the ensuing conversation creates a
discordant tension in the narrative, one that recalls Longarine’s change of
perspective in story 15, as well as conflicting positions in other tales and
their discussions. Edward Benson argues that, in Marguerite’s lifetime, an
ideal of marriage based on mutual attraction and affection grew to trou-
ble the traditional aristocratic model of marriage arranged by parents to
protect and perpetuate family property.55 Marguerite gives voice to both
visions of marriage in the Heptaméron and allows them to coexist in con-
flict just as they did in 16th-century society. Toward the end of the discus-
sion, Parlamente makes an attempt at compromise: “Il me semble . . . que
les personnes qui se submectent à la volonté de Dieu ne regardent ny à
la gloire, ny à l’avarice, ny à la volupté, mais par une amour vertueuse
et du consentement des parens, desirent de vivre en l’estat de mariage,
comme Dieu et Nature l’ordonnent” (p. 478). Those idealistic words can-
not silence the institutional authoritative voice that dominates the discus-
sion; likewise, the alternative voice protesting in the stories, to which we
will return, remains on the printed page and in the reader’s memory.
Another example of the tension between sympathetic narrative voice
and strict affective distance is offered by nouvelle 60, in which a Paris-
ian man is abandoned by his wife who runs away with a cantor. The
husband, deceived by her ruse, believes that she is dead and remarries,
choosing this time a beautiful and faithful young woman who bears him
54 See Bauschatz, “Rabelais and Marguerite”; Benson, “Marriage”; Leushuis, Le Mariage,

pp. 217–26.
55 Benson, “Marriage.”
several children. After 14 years, the truth that the wife is still alive and
living with the cantor is revealed. The happily “married” couple is devas-
tated by the news. The narrator suggests that they might have chosen to
conceal the truth and continue their life together, “mais l’Eglise y voulut
mectre ordre” (p. 608). The Church forces the couple to separate, the can-
tor to dismiss “sa layde amye,” and the husband to resume living with his
legal wife. Within the story, the narrator, Geburon, shows clear sympa-
thy for the couple whose happy, innocent life is disrupted by the reap-
pearance of the renegade, albeit legal, wife. His affective identification
with those characters is in sharp contrast with the abrupt and unfeeling
intrusion of the Church as it moves in to “mectre ordre,” an intervention
that Geburon never questions. He concludes by placing responsibility on
the husband, who, he opines, could have prevented the entire disaster
by keeping a closer watch on his wife from the beginning. Here the ten-
sion between sympathy for the individuals and objective recognition of
the Church’s authority is present within the story itself. After Geburon’s
concluding comment, the brief discussion veers toward women who are
drawn to becoming the concubines of clerics.56 The reader is left to reflect
on the dissonance between marriage as it is legislated and marriage as it
is lived.
Women Silenced, Women Speaking Out
Christian tradition from its beginnings imposed silence on women. If elo-

quence was a quality greatly admired in men, silence was the correspond-
ing virtue demanded of women. The Heptaméron offers memorable scenes
of silenced women: the wife of the German nobleman in story 32, who
speaks humbly only after her husband gives Bernage permission to engage
her in conversation; the princess in story 4, whose dame d’honneur coun-
sels her to remain silent instead of accusing publicly the man who broke
into her bedroom and attempted to rape her. However, women also speak
eloquently in the Heptaméron, beginning with the dame d’honneur, who
describes persuasively the social mores that would cast doubt on the prin-
cess’s chastity if she were to speak out (pp. 123–25). In this case the lady
uses rhetorical skills to explain and uphold “la loi du non-parler” to the
56 Stories 60 and 61 are strikingly similar. See André Tournon, “Doubles et hybrides
dans l’Heptaméron,” in Études sur “L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre, Colloque de
Nice, ed. Christine Martineau-Génieys (Nice, 1996), pp. 7–19.
princess.57 However, Marguerite also presents many examples of strong-

willed women who break the law of silence and speak out eloquently to
defend themselves against men who abuse their authority. The young girl
in nouvelle 41 making her Christmas Eve confession is distressed by the
priest’s insistence that she allow him to attach the cord of his Franciscan
habit around her naked waist as penance. In spite of her initial timidity
and tears, she rejects the priest’s advances in a clearly constructed state-
ment that distinguishes between religious doctrine and the confessor’s
abuse of it. She calls on the authority of the Church that the priest has
misappropriated and refuses to be coerced, even though she knows he
will refuse her absolution. The girl speaks with a strong voice that allows
no ambiguity; her words belie her youth and show an impressive sang
froid that is almost implausible in the circumstances. Although her con-
science remains troubled from fear that she has acted disobediently, she
succeeds in defending herself by speaking. The young girl’s story ends in
her victory over the confessor and her escape from his efforts to control
her. Unlike the princess in story 4, she incriminates her aggressor when
she tells her mother about his strange penance, and the countess who has
invited the Franciscan to her house has him punished.58
Several other stories feature much longer, eloquent speeches by women
protesting injustices that they have long tolerated but will no longer suf-
fer in silence. When Rolandine’s clandestine marriage is discovered, the
queen sends for her and publicly excoriates her for bringing disgrace upon
her family. Rolandine reacts to the attack with equanimity, responding
in a powerful speech of over 70 lines. Her sentences flow without hesita-
tion as she challenges the royal and parental authority that has failed her
and insists that, given that failure, she has offended neither God nor her
conscience by marrying according to her own will. Unable to counter this
argument rationally, the queen can only continue to berate her not only
for her marriage but now for her transgressive act of speech: “vous par-
lez audatieusement, sans en avoir la larme à l’œil” (p. 317).59 Undeterred,
57 Colette H. Winn, “La Loi du non-parler dans l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,”

Romance Quarterly 33.2 (1986), 157–68. Deborah N. Losse analyzes the “extrafictional
authorial voice” of Marguerite in “Authorial and Narrative Voice in the Heptaméron,”
Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 23, n.s. 11 (1987), 223–42.
58 The story is one of several analyzed by Mary B. McKinley, “Telling Secrets: Sacramen-
tal Confession and Narrative Authority in the Heptameron,” in Critical Tales, ed. Lyons and
McKinley, pp. 146–71.
59 As John Lyons remarks, “Rolandine’s crime is clearly a crime of speech,” “The Hep-
taméron and the Foundation of Critical Narrative,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986), 150–63
Rolandine defends her right to marry and to speak publicly in her own
defense, acknowledging only God as her judge and rejecting the law of
silence imposed on women. Presented as a spontaneous expression of her
righteous indignation, her speech is a masterpiece of rhetoric. It does not
bring her freedom nor does it persuade the queen to accept her clandes-
tine marriage. However, it introduces her testimony into the record when
Parlamente recounts it in direct discourse while telling her story.
In an equally striking example of a woman breaking with apparent
spontaneity into a rhetorically polished speech, the neglected wife in
nouvelle 15 accuses her husband of being the cause of her errant behavior.
After his threats to kill her have no effect, he sends for her and she fears he
is about to act on his promise. Whereas in the past when accused by him,
she had dissolved terrified into tears, this time, “elle qui avoit desja passé
les premières apprehensions de la mort, reprint cueur, se deliberant, avant
que morir, de ne luy celler la verité” (pp. 247–48). She reminds him of her
initial love for him and tells him how much his coldness made her suffer.
She traces her attraction to the men who pursued her to her despair over
his preferring his mistress to her: “Et vous, monsieur, qui estes seul la cause
de mon malheur, vouldriez-vous prendre vengeance d’une œuvre, dont si
long temps a, vous m’avez donné exemple, sinon que la vostre estoit sans
honneur et conscience” (p. 249). The sudden eruption of the wife’s elo-
quent speech—Renja Salminen calls it “un discours oratoire fulgurant”
(ed. cit., p. 705)—surprises the reader as much as it does the husband:
“Le mary, oyant ces propos pleins de verité, dictz d’un si beau visage, avecq
une grace tant asseurée et audatieuse, qu’elle ne monstroit ne craindre
ne meriter nulle pugnition, se trouva tant surprins d’estonnement, qu’il
ne sceut que luy respondre, sinon que l’honneur d’un homme et d’une
femme n’estoient pas semblables” (pp. 250–51). His succinct reply offers as
self-evident the different codes of honor to which men and women were
held. That double standard, taken for granted by the characters in many
of the stories, is nevertheless questioned and held up for judgment implic-
itly by the story and explicitly by the wife’s accusation. As in the case of
Rolandine, the woman’s words leave the person to whom they are
(p. 153); developed in Exemplum, ch. 2, pp. 72–117. For another approach to Rolandine’s
story, see Carla Freccero, “Rewriting the Rhetoric of Desire in the Heptameron,” in Con-
tending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature
of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. Marie-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky
(Detroit, 1991), pp. 298–312.
addressed unmoved. But they register a complaint that remains in the

memory of the Heptaméron’s readers.60 In defiance of her society’s gen-
dered access to the right to speak, Marguerite allows a number of female
characters to deliver eloquent orations. Through their words, she expresses
women’s anger against the unjust authorities, parental, royal and ecclesi-
astical, that controlled so many aspects of their lives.
Violence Against Women
Beginning in the prologue, violence besets the characters in the Heptam-

éron. Men as well as women are assaulted in the tales, inaugurated under
the sign of violence. The young Du Mesnil in nouvelle 1 meets his death
with no warning when the murderer hired by Sainct-Aignan attacks him
in a stairwell with a sword. A sword wielded by the bestial servant in story
2 leaves the mulekeeper’s wife to die from its 25 wounds. Although other
stories bring relief from these scenes of bloodshed, violence recurs. Story
31 portrays a particularly depraved Franciscan who cuts the throats of
three servants in order to kidnap the wife in a family near his convent.
Women are most often the victims of violence, usually at the hands of
men. In story 51, the duke of Urbino seeks to punish a young woman in
his wife’s service who has acted as a go-between for his son and the object
of his affections. The duchess helps the young woman seek refuge from
the duke’s anger in a convent. The duke gives his word that he wishes her
no harm, but when she returns he has her arrested and “le plus tost qu’il
peut, et, sans forme de justice, obliant Dieu et l’honneur de sa maison,
feit cruellement pendre ceste pauvre demoiselle” (p. 553). As in tale 21,
women may behave cruelly toward other women over whose lives they
exercise some form of control, but physical violence toward women is
inflicted only by men.
Rape and attempted rape are a frequent form of violence against
women in the Heptaméron. Three of the first five stories involve scenes
of sexual aggression by men on unwilling women, and day 1 closes with
the long saga of Amadour and Floride in which Amadour’s performance
60 In Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, the theologian Hippothadée tells Panurge how to treat a
spouse in order to avoid being cuckolded: “vous de vostre cousté l’entretiendrez en amitié
conjugale, continuerez en preud’homie, luy monstrerez bon exemple, vivrez pudicque-
ment, chastement, vertueusement en vostre mesnage, comme voulez qu’elle de son cousté
vive” (ed. Huchon, p. 447). Neither Panurge nor the husband in story 15 is willing to heed
such counsel.
as a perfect courtly lover disintegrates when he tries to rape his beloved.61

The modern French word for rape, viol, never appears in the Heptaméron.
Marguerite uses only the expression prendre par force.62 At least one 16th-
century reader, Pierre de Brantôme, claimed to have been informed that
the princess assaulted by her host in tale 4 was Marguerite de Navarre
herself. That testimony led Patricia Cholakian to argue that the experi-
ence of fighting off an attempted rape and being unable to accuse her
aggressor was the traumatic experience that led Marguerite to write about
rape in the Heptaméron.63 The first instance of this, in story 2, presents a
brutal scene where the servant who kills and rapes the mulekeeper’s wife
is described as “plus bestial que les bestes avecq lesquelles il avoit esté
longtemps” (p. 105). The story moves the women who hear it to tears and
compassion as well as to admiration, as Oisille exhorts them to humility
before the dead woman’s example.64
Story 45 tells in a much lighter tone the tale of a servant girl who is
sexually assaulted by her master, a tapestry maker. He is encouraged by
his wife, who thinks he is disciplining the girl. The story reflects a popu-
lar tradition by which on the feast of the Holy Innocents, 28 December,
people punished the lazy by waking them in their beds and beating or
spanking them (bailler les Innocents). The Feast of the Holy Innocents,
commemorating the male children killed by King Herod (Matt. 2:16–18),
was one of several feasts associated with the Feast of Fools, a carnival-like
61 Floyd Gray underscores the irony in portraying Amadour as a perfect courtier in

Gender, Rhetoric and Print Culture, pp. 47–61. See also Carla Freccero “Rape’s Disfiguring
Figures: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, Day 1:10,” in Rape and Representation, ed.
Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York, 1991), pp. 227–47. Timothy Hampton
emphasizes the political and territorial stakes motivating the story, “On the Border: Geog-
raphy, Gender, and Narrative Form in the Heptaméron,” Modern Language Quarterly 57.4
(1996), 517–44.
62 Kathryn Gravdal has traced the development of rape scenes, the words used to name
them, and the way they were “aestheticized” in Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medi-
eval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia, 1991).
63 Patricia Francis Cholakian, Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de
Navarre (Carbondale, 1991). With Rouben C. Cholakian, she continued to develop that
argument in Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance (New York, 2006). See also
Nancy Virtue, “Telling the Story of Rape in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron,” Romance
Quarterly 44.2 (1997), 67–79.
64 Mary McKinley has argued that Marguerite fashions the tale as a saint’s life, follow-
ing the literary conventions of medieval hagiographers, and that she portrays the dying
woman as a mystic in ecstasy; see “Agony, Ecstasy, and the Mulekeeper’s Wife: A Reading
of Heptaméron 2,” in A French Forum: Mélanges de littérature française offerts à Raymond
C. et Virginia A. La Charité, ed. Gérard Defaux and Jerry Nash (Paris, 2000), pp. 129–42. Cf.
Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, pp. 21–41.
time after Christmas when religious traditions and authorities were paro-
died. Clément Marot’s epigram “Du jour des Innocents,” like story 45, con-
veys the erotic nature of the prank. Simontault tells the story in that spirit,
lingering on the details of the husband buying fine switches (verges in
French, a euphemism for penis) and soaking them in brine to make them
more effective. His wife remains downstairs while the husband carries the
switches up to the servant girl’s bed “et là, luy bailla les Innocents d’autre
façon qu’il n’avoit dict à sa femme” (p. 515). The girl screams out as the
husband attacks her, but the wife suspects nothing, thinking he is beat-
ing her. When the girl later complains to her mistress, the wife answers
that her husband did what she had asked him to do. The girl, thinking
that her virtuous mistress approved of the husband’s routine, decides there
must be no harm in it and allows her master “to give her the Innocents”
often. The story ends with a comic scene of mistaken identity, following
which the husband once again succeeds in deceiving his wife and avoids
having his affair with the servant girl discovered. In the ensuing discus-
sion, Parlamente is not amused; she calls the husband “merveilleusement
mauvais” (p. 518) for deceiving both his wife and the servant girl. However,
Hircan maintains the comic tone that Simontault established. Nouvelle 45
belongs to a different narrative tradition from the other stories depicting
rape discussed so far. Its ribald timbre recalls medieval fabliaux, stories
that laugh at the foibles of the lower classes. Such scenes offer a complai-
sant image of sexual violence, allowing the writer and reader to minimize
the injustice always inherent in rape. In story 45, the naive servant girl’s
eventual acceptance of her master’s lustful demands makes her appear to
be less of a victim and dulls the memory of her initial screams. Parlamente
does not join in the laughter at the girl’s treatment, but neither does she
prevent Hircan and Simontault from enjoying the story and admiring
the husband.
“Courtly” Love, “Italian” Vices: Erotic and Biblical Intertexts
If the Heptaméron offers little evidence that marriage holds enduring

happiness, it also shows that the social codes governing extramarital rela-
tions are not the same for men as for women (see above). Male characters
and devisants readily pursue amorous liaisons by seduction or by force.
Women find themselves in a double bind. On the one hand, husbands,
fathers, and male relatives expect them to be faithful wives; on the other
hand, serviteurs or male admirers seek indulgence from their mistress,
frequently in the form of physical gratification. These tensions can be

observed among the devisants themselves, some of whom are linked by
marriage or relationships of amorous service. The first day, for exam-
ple, sees an exchange between Parlamente and her husband Hircan in
which the former admits she is well aware of her spouse’s infidelities.
For his part, Hircan concedes that his wife’s infidelity would not anger
him as long as he remained ignorant of it (pp. 136–37 and 139). That is an
important proviso, difficult to fulfill in the long term and one to which
men are generally not subject in relation to their wives. The form of the
short story undoubtedly favors plots based on some kind of crisis that
is either tragic or comic in nature. Nonetheless, within the nouvelles
the absence of happy lovers is striking. Rather, many tales seem to evoke
the codes of the courtly love tradition only to expose their inherent
contradictions and impossibilities. What might be termed the “courtly
plot” is thus undone in the Heptaméron, as the work comments on social
realities and engages with a potent literary tradition.65 Two major nou-
velles, placed strategically at the end of the first and the seventh days,
serve as illustration.
Tale 10 seems to have been the one that Marguerite herself would have
told as her final contribution on the last day of storytelling projected
by the French court.66 The unraveling of the courtly plot is here at its
clearest, as the relationship between Amadour, the serviteur of Floride, a
woman of higher rank, evolves into a close romantic friendship that sub-
sequently turns to bitterness and violence as each character fails to fulfill
the expectations of the other. Intertextual allusions point unmistakably
to the tradition of the chivalric romance: notably, the male protagonist’s
name recalls that of the eponymous hero of the highly successful novel
Amadis de Gaule, published in French translation from the Spanish origi-
nal in 24 volumes beginning in 1540. Spain is also the setting for nouvelle 10.
Finally, after the death of her husband, for whom she felt no love, and
that of Amadour, whom, despite everything, she could not help but love,
Floride “s’en alla randre religieuse au monastere de Jesus prenant pour
mary et amy Celuy qui l’avoit delivrée d’une amour si vehemente que celle
65 See Gary Ferguson, “Désagrégations: Des ‘mauvais déboires’ de l’amour à l’h/Histoire

au féminin,” in “L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre (II), ed. Liaroutzos, pp. 45–57.
66 In BnF, fr. 1513, the story of Floride and Amadour already figures as number 10. The
story thus kept the same numerical place in the collection’s final form but apparently
shifted from an intended inclusion on the final day to the final story of the first day.
d’Amadour, et d’un ennuy si grand que de la compagnye d’un tel mari”

(p. 195).
This flight from the world, involving a transference of affection from
other human beings to God, the true husband, friend, and lover, is seen
frequently in the Heptaméron. As noted earlier, it happens in nouvelle 19,
as the two thwarted lovers sublimate their frustrated desire by becoming
Franciscans. It happens, most strikingly, at the end of nouvelle 70, Margue-
rite’s retelling of the story of the châteleine de Vergi—not for the duch-
ess, who is the cause of the death of the lovers, but for her victims, the
châteleine and her serviteur, and the duke. The story’s placement at the
end of the seventh day is redolent with symbolism in a Judeo-Christian
perspective. The metaphysical reflection developed in the nouvelle will
be discussed below. It is enough to note here its unique status in the col-
lection since, in retelling a story that goes back to the 13th century, it is
the only one presented as a deliberate exception to the devisants’ rule of
recounting only events that they have seen with their own eyes or heard
tell of by a trustworthy witness and of excluding the art of “gens de lettres.”
Among all the available courtly literature to which Marguerite might have
turned, she cannot by chance have chosen one of the darkest and most
tragic tales, one that allows the narrator Oisille to present the women with
the following lesson: “Il me semble que vous debvez tirer exemple de cecy,
pour vous garder de mectre vostre affection aux hommes, car, quelque
honneste ou vertueuse qu’elle soyt, elle a tousjours à la fin quelque mau-
vays desboire” (p. 681). Oisille’s words echo but expand psalm 146:3[/145:2–
3]—“Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no
help”67—and she goes on to refer to Saint Paul to include married people
in the moral drawn from the tragic end of the lovers. The courtly intertext
is thus held up to the Bible in a conclusion that is soberingly pessimistic,
but nonetheless characteristic of the tales of the Heptaméron. At the end
of nouvelle 19, Parlamente claims that “jamais homme n’aymera parfaicte-
ment Dieu, qu’il n’ait parfaictement aymé quelque creature en ce monde”
(p. 289). At one and the same time, she is drawing on neo-Platonic ideas
and echoing the First Letter of Saint John 4:20: “those who do not love a
brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have
not seen.”68 The tense of the second verb in Parlamente’s formulation
67 Oisille quotes the same psalm verses in introducing nouvelle 51.

68 Later in the discussion, Simontault quotes the same passage from 1 John (p. 292).
It is also quoted by Saffredent following story 36 in an attempt to argue for the incon-
sequence of sins committed under the effect of erotic passion. He is reproved by Oisille
is significant, however. Saint Paul’s present (“do not love”) becomes a

past (“n’ait . . . aymé”). The working out of the progression from human
to divine love in the tales is fraught with difficulty and often takes place
through disillusionment, renunciation, or loss.
The courtly tradition is evoked in another tale placed at the close of a
day, day 5, the intended center of the work.69 In nouvelle 50, the outcome
is also fatal, involving the death of the couple, but the story is told in comic
vein, a genial parody involving a rather hapless man who falls victim to
lovesickness.70 The intertext here is not only the “courtly plot,” however;
it is also Boccaccio’s Decameron, whose 50th tale concerns the sodomite
Pietro di Vinciolo.71 This subject might seem far removed from that of
Heptaméron 50. Nevertheless, Marguerite’s tale is set in Italy (Cremona)
and its protagonist’s name, Jehan Pietre, is particularly suggestive since it
signifies mediocre, wretched, false or counterfeit, but is also a rather mali-
cious resolution into French of the Italian Pietro.72 The following story,
nouvelle 51, discussed earlier, is also set in Italy and concerns the cruelty of
the duke of Urbino. In what constitutes something of an echo of the triad
of vices attributed to clerics (see above), Longarine claims that cruelty is
one of three vices typical of Italians.73 The second, which is said to explain
the duke’s opposition to his son marrying below his rank, is his avarice.
The third vice is alluded to by Hircan, who claims that Italians “font leur
Dieu des choses qui sont contre nature” (p. 555). No speaker takes up this
idea initially, but after the discussion of avarice, Parlamente embarks on a
long paraphrase of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans 1:18–32, stating that
sainct Pol n’avoit poinct oblyé les vices des Italiens, et de tous ceulx qui
cuydent passer et surmonter les aultres en honneur, prudence et raison
(p. 455). On nouvelle 19, and in particular on the necessity of the “eye of faith,” see Jan
Miernowski, “L’intentionnalité dans l’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,” Bibliothèque
d’Humanisme et Renaissance 63 (2001), 201–25 (pp. 207–13).
69 In BnF, fr. 1513, story 50 is the last of the 28 tales recorded, which include the totality
of the nouvelles for days 3 and 4 and four of those for day 5. The placement of this story at
the end of day 5 is thus the result of a subsequent deliberate decision.
70 See Gary Ferguson, “Pedestrian Chivalry: Novella 50 and the Unsaddling of Courtly
Tradition in the Heptaméron,” in Heroic Virtue, ed. Polachek, pp. 118–31.
71 On this novella, its adaptation of Apuleius and its translation into French by Pre-
mierfait and Le Maçon, see Gary Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance:
Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Aldershot, Eng. and Burlington, Vt., 2008), ch. 1. Vérard’s
Cent nouvelles expunge completely the subject of sodomy from the story.
72 There is some minor variation in the form of the name. Gruget gives “Jean Pietre,”
cf. ed. Cazauran and Lefèvre. Salminen ed. gives “Jehan Petri.”
73 On “Italian vices” in the Heptaméron, see Ferguson, “Péchés capitaux.”
humaine, en laquelle ilz se fondent si fort, qu’ilz ne rendent poinct à Dieu la

gloire qui luy appartient: parquoy, le Tout Puissant, jaloux de son honneur,
rend plus insensez que les bestes enragées ceulx qui ont cuydé avoir plus de
sens que tous les aultres hommes, leur faisant monstrer par œuvres contre
nature qu’ilz sont en sens reprouvez. (pp. 555–56)
At this point Parlamente is interrupted by Longarine, who exclaims that
this is the third vice she had in mind. The allusion is discreet but clear: the
three vices of the Italians are cruelty, avarice, and sodomy.
As will be discussed below, the Letter to the Romans is the object of
the devisants’ reading and of Oisille’s commentary each morning during
their first five days at Serrance. Particularly striking is the fact that this
is not the first time this precise passage from Romans has been quoted
in the Heptaméron. Two days earlier, after tale 34, it had been cited by
Oisille herself; this doubling of such a long and detailed paraphrase of a
biblical passage appears unique within the work and draws our attention.
At stake in the earlier conversation is the nature of true wisdom and what
passions need to be overcome in order to attain it, a question discussed
initially in relation to the teachings of the philosophers of antiquity. Par-
lamente insists that “il est impossible que la victoire de nous-mesmes se
face par nous-mesmes, sans ung merveilleux orgueil qui est le vice que
chacun doibt le plus craindre” (p. 439). Oisille then quotes the passage
from Romans that associates “unnatural” sexual practices and the philo-
sophical hubris of the ancients (pp. 439–40). The question that had ini-
tially launched the devisants’ discussion, however, concerns laughter: “Et
qu’est-ce à dire,” Oisille had asked, “que nous sommes plus enclins à rire
d’une follye, que d’une chose sagement faicte? – Pour ce,” replies Hircan,
“qu’elle nous est plus agreable, d’autant qu’elle est plus semblable à nos-
tre nature, qui de soy n’est jamais saige” (p. 438). The exchange between
Oisille and Hircan here echoes directly the words of Dioneo in the Deca-
meron, who, in the translation of Le Maçon, introduces novella 50 (v, 10)
as follows: “Je ne scay si je doiz dire que ce soit vice accidental, et par la
mauvaistié des complexions, qui est survenue entre les mortelz, ou bien
si c’est peché en nature, de rire tousjours plustost des mauvaises choses,
que des bonnes œuvres.”74
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church characterized the prac-
tice of sodomy as a “sin against nature.” Is it a coincidence, then, that
in the introduction to Decameron v, 10, the reader is presented with the
74 Le Decameron, p. 139r.

possibility that certain vices are inherent in human nature? Dioneo’s

vision of humor, that he applies to the wife’s conduct in the tale, but that
is just as applicable to that of Pietro, inevitably serves to relativize things:
in the end, what is and is not of or against nature? In the Heptaméron,
the erotic passion of a man attracted to youths, a passion that had found
a place at the center of the Decameron, appears only discreetly and the
character of the sodomite disappears. Nonetheless, the subject of sodomy
is not entirely suppressed but rather displaced, since it returns in the dis-
cussion following the very next story, at the beginning of day 6, associ-
ated in an unholy trinity with avarice and cruelty. The discussion of the
tale takes place in the light of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, rather
than that of the nature of laughter, which does however appear after nou-
velle 34, again in conjunction with the Letter to the Romans. Once more,
the Heptaméron holds up the (wayward) erotic intertext to the Text of
the Bible.
Judgment
If the Bible has a unique authority in the Heptaméron and is referred to

and quoted by all of the devisants, this may be more or less appositely, sin-
cerely, or seriously. Nor does citing a passage of Scripture preclude debate
over its meaning and application or render any less acute the complex
moral and ethical situations depicted. From several points of view, and
not merely as a result of its incompletion, the Heptaméron is an open-
ended work. In particular, recent critics have stressed its plurivocality and
inconclusiveness,75 the ways in which it creates “zones d’ombre,” multi-
plying indications of missing information in relation both to the storytell-
ers and to characters in the tales.76 The je of the authorial narrator, who
appears in the second sentence of the prologue, subsequently hands over
the recounting of the stories to the characters of the frame story. The nou-
velles themselves are related to the genre of the exemplum, designed to
75 See, for example, Lajarte, “L’Heptaméron” and “Le Prologue” or Michel Jeanneret,
“Modular Narrative and the Crisis of Interpretation,” in Critical Tales, ed. Lyons and
McKinley, pp. 85–103. The same volume also contains an essay by Lajarte that stresses the
presence in the Heptaméron of a univocal authorial voice: “The Voice of the Narrators in
Marguerite de Navarre’s Tales,” pp. 172–87.
76 See André Tournon, “ ‘Ignorant les premieres causes’: jeux d’énigmes dans L’Hepta-
méron de Marguerite de Navarre,” in “L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre: Actes de la
Journée d’Étude Marguerite de Navarre, 19 octobre 1991, ed. Simone Perrier (Cahiers textuel)
10 (Paris, 1992), pp. 73–92.
convey a moral teaching, but here the moral to be drawn is almost always
the subject of debate, if not disagreement, without the opinion of the nar-
rator or of any other speaker necessarily enjoying a particular privilege.
The cumulative pedagogy of the tales is thus a negative one, offering, in
the words of John Lyons, “a complex lesson of humility” in which “the
knowledge of our sinful nature is the goal of exemplary discourse.”77 At the
same time, however, and as a corollary, the Heptaméron constantly calls
for the exercise of judgment, soliciting effectively, through its narrative
procedures, the reader’s active participation in discerning moral cases and
in drawing conclusions for his or her own life. In her storytellers, Margue-
rite portrays a range of attitudes and opinions that reflect those current
around her. By the same token, she also anticipates a range of readers with
different views and potential responses, some of whom might be drawn
into the work precisely by the way it allows a place to people with whom
they might identify and does not depict only the devout and the idealistic.
At the same time, as will by now be clear, the religious and moral frame-
work for judgment set up in the Heptaméron is a distinctly Christian one
and from this point of view, not all the opinions expressed by the story-
tellers or their protagonists are equally sound; some are polemical and
contentions, others more or less immoral—even if they are not subject
to authorial censure.78
Nouvelle 4, for example, referred to above, portrays a gentleman who,
while not presented as intentionally evil, is wrong in thinking that, given
the right circumstances, he will be able to overcome the resistance of a
princess whom he serves. Having failed in his attempt to force a sexual
encounter, the gentleman returns to his room and expresses regret for his
actions as he contemplates his scratched and bleeding face in a mirror. In
a story recounted by a female devisant, Ennasuite, it is hard not to see in
this reflective repentance a moral discourse addressed to men inclined to
impose their sexual demands on women. When Hircan reacts by accus-
ing the story’s male protagonist of a lack of courage and affirming that he
should have taken the lady by force, killing her maidservant if necessary,
it is difficult, on the contrary, to imagine that this prescription is being
presented as a positive model. Hircan merely represents a particular male
77 Lyons, Exemplum, pp. 106 and 113. Even the bad conduct of the clerics and religious
in the tales can serve this “good” of illustrating human weakness and wickedness.
78 Judgment passed through the legal system of justice, a process in which Marguerite
herself and her closest relatives were often involved, is also a topic explored in the Hepta-
méron, being foregrounded, for example, in the very first nouvelle.
attitude that, as Oisille points out, would not stop at murder in order to
satisfy sexual desire. If any (male) reader should find—or in the past might
have found—Hircan sympathetic or justified at this point, it is impossible
not to recognize that such a position is based on an imposition of male
desire through aggression. Women do not always occupy the moral high
ground, however, being accused of and sometimes demonstrating, pride,
hypocrisy, or dissimulation, characteristics that perhaps point to their
general social subordination to men and need to act indirectly in order to
exercise influence or power. The reader is called upon to see all this and
to draw his or her conclusions.
At the same time, the Heptaméron also works to show that it is fre-
quently difficult, if not impossible, to judge definitively between individu-
als. Nouvelle 10, as we have seen, also exposes the latent violence that may
undergird the plot of courtly service and seduction. Nonetheless, despite
the assault that Amadour finally directs against Floride, readers may find
reasons—as do the heroine herself and several of the devisants—to retain
some degree of sympathy with him.79 And even the narrator Parlamente
does not present her female protagonist as a perfect model of conduct
for women to emulate (cf. pp. 196–98). Even if they exercise good will,
then, readers may arrive at differing conclusions, since absolute right and
absolute wrong often do not lie uniquely on one side or the other. In the
face of the morally complex situations it depicts, the Heptaméron offers
examples of the exercise of judgment, both well founded and biased,
prejudiced, or misguided, but it also reveals the limits of that to which
judgment can legitimately pretend. Exercising good judgment must involve
the knowledge of when to suspend judgment; the aim is frequently not to
convict one person as opposed to another, but to gauge the complexity
and morally mixed character of human situations.
This conclusion pertains in circumstances raising not only moral issues
but also more specifically religious ones. Story 65, for example, concerns
an old woman who, in a dimly lit chapel, mistakes a sleeping soldier for a
statue.80 Seeking to fix in place a votive candle, she drips molten wax onto
the soldier’s forehead, causing him to jump to his feet and the woman
79 For a reading attentive to the position of Amadour in patriarchal society, see David
LaGuardia, “The Voice of the Patriarch in the Heptaméron i:10,” Neophilologus 81 (1997),
501–13.
80 On this nouvelle and the question of motivations or intentions, see Miernowski,
“L’intentionnalité,” and idem, Signes dissimilaires: La quête des noms divins dans la poésie
française de la Renaissance (Geneva, 1997), pp. 63–89. Cf. Tournon, “ ‘Ignorant. . . .’ ”
to believe she has witnessed a miracle. The discussion of the devisants

focuses on the question of the value of acts of piety and of credulity, the
men being particularly critical of the old woman. Saffredent’s appeal to
Scripture, in order to argue the necessity of being not only as simple as a
dove but also as crafty as a serpent (Matt. 10:16), is nonetheless unconvinc-
ing and smacks of point-scoring as grounds for an attack against a general-
ized “sottise des femmes” (p. 639). Likewise, Hircan asserts misogynously
that “il fault tousjours que les femmes facent mal” (ibid.). For Oisille, on the
contrary, who suggests that the old woman may be like the poor widow in
the Gospel of Saint Luke 21:2–4, “[p]eut estre que ceste bonne femme avoit
plus d’amour à Dieu, que ceulx qui donnent les grandz torches.” Tousjours /
Peut estre: the polemical intention of the men to discredit all women con-
trasts with Oisille’s more charitable maintenance of doubt. Objectively
her position is more Christian and more humane. The devisants are at
one in condemning superstition and commending true acts of charity, the
problem lies in knowing the motivations, the intentions of an individual.
In this case, do the old woman’s actions reveal a blind and superstitious
belief in the efficacy of ritual practices such as lighting a candle or do they
express a sincere love of and trust in God? It is hard to read the heart of
another, and so, as Oisille reminds the company, “ne fault juger que soy-
mesmes” (p. 640).
In this way, the Heptaméron calls upon the reader to reflect on the
situations described in the stories and to evaluate the arguments of the
devisants, yet at the same time it shows that it is precisely in judging one’s
neighbor that one must frequently suspend judgment. The reader is no
more able than are the devisants to decide one way or another concerning
the old woman in nouvelle 65. At the same time, this does not mean that
superstition and charity become interchangeable in the moral and reli-
gious spheres, or that no lesson can be drawn. Rather, the complex play
of narration and discussion serves to recall the Christian teaching that
every human being will be judged by God and to encourage the reader to
reflect on his or her own life and actions. The evangelical message that
is conveyed—here and throughout the Heptaméron—is that the value of
acts of piety, like that of all “good works,” lies not in the acts themselves
but in the disposition of heart and mind with which they are performed.
From their limited perspective, the lacunae and the open-endedness
of the Heptaméron reveal, humans can seldom be sure of knowing the
“whole story.” It is this same principle that Geburon recalls in the very
middle of the collection, at the end of day 5, when Oisille expresses her
fear that they may run out of material for their tales. Stories, affirms
Geburon, reflect the goodness of the good and the wickedness of the
wicked, which fill the world with actions. If it is true that “il n’y a rien
nouveau soubz le soleil” (p. 548; cf. Ecclesiastes 1:10), it is no less true that
human beings, “ignorans les premieres causes,” are excluded from God’s
private council. The Christian, therefore, must exercise judgment, seek to
discern good and evil, remaining all the while conscious that no human
being can do so infallibly. At the same time, there are religious principles
on which it is possible to rely: humanity is fallen and in need of grace;
God will have mercy on those who place their faith in him; good works
may be a necessary expression of love for God and for neighbor, but all
virtue comes from God so that human beings must never trust in their
own deeds.
Ending: Word, Spirit, World
Far from standing in opposition to the rest of Marguerite’s work, the Hep-
taméron expresses a theological and spiritual vision in harmony with that
developed in her poems and plays. It is the case that the Heptaméron
largely eschews the first-person discourse that conveys an individual spir-
itual experience, based on a process of purgation or ascesis and move-
ment towards a sentiment of rapture and union with the divine. As we
have seen, however, the framed story collection points to the same “pris-
ons” from which the Christian must escape; likewise, from the outside or
in the third-person, it depicts certain individuals who undergo an experi-
ence of communion with God. The devisants themselves collectively share
a period of devotional fervor as, on the morning of the eighth day, Oisille
teaches with such inspiration that “il sembloit que le Sainct Esperit, plain
d’amour et de doulceur, parlast par sa bouche. Et, tous enflambez de ce
feu, s’en allerent oyr la grand messe” (p. 686). In the stories, however, a
sense of oneness with God usually occurs not in prayer but at the moment
of death, presented as a moment of amorous consummation. This is the
case with the two lovers turned Franciscans in story 19, who, according to
the narrator, lived such devout lives
que l’on ne doibt doubter que Celluy duquel la fin de la loy est charité, ne
leur dist, à la fin de leur vie, comme à la Magdelaine, que leurs pechez leur
estoient pardonnez, veu qu’ilz avoient beaucoup aymé, et qu’il ne les reti-
rast en paix ou lieu où la recompense passe tous les merites des hommes.
(p. 289)
It is also the case, for Parlamente, with Floride, who, having lived a long
life as a Carmelite nun and given her love wholly to God, “luy rendit son
ame en telle joye, que l’espouse a d’aller veoir son espoux” (p. 195). Simi-
larly, the raped muleteer’s wife in tale 2 “avecq un visaige joyeulx, les oeilz
eslevez au ciel, rendit . . . son ame à son Createur” (p. 106).
Like Marguerite’s other religious works, the Heptaméron also empha-
sizes the absolute nothingness of all human beings before the all-being
of the Creator, the vanity, therefore, of all human works, the fallibility
of all human thinking, and the emptiness of human language. The final
story of the seventh day in particular develops a profound meditation on
this last topic, as human words are given, accepted, or broken in the con-
text of promises between spouses, lovers, and lord and vassal. Throughout
nouvelle 70, Scriptural allusions point to the lability and unreliability of
words, radically subjected to the Word of God, as the tale moves inexo-
rably toward its conclusion, toward the silence of death, anticipated by
the silence of prayer, toward such justice as is possible in this world, in
expectation of the pronouncement of divine judgment—the Sentence
that, from a Christian perspective, awaits everyone and that will conclude
the (hi)story of the created world in time.81
Until then, human life continues in all its multiplicity; individuals,
fallen but offered the possibility of ultimate redemption, are shown in the
Heptaméron pursuing their pilgrimage, some moving closer to God, others
turning away from him. And in this respect, it seems fitting that the work
was not completed, that it ends rather than concludes, breaking off shortly
after the seventh day. How Marguerite might have drawn her collection
of stories to closure we cannot know. Some critics discern a projected
trajectory of spiritual progress on the part of the devisants. It is extremely
improbable, however, that Marguerite intended to send her storytellers
back into the world, transformed into committed messengers of the gos-
pel, all of them as “mortified” as Oisille. Such idealism would be at odds
with the Heptaméron’s spiritual anthropology. It is true, as we have noted,
that the devisants come to share moments of greater religious intensity,
but the translation of devotional fervor into spiritual progress and amend-
ment of life is not automatic; it is a long and arduous project. The later
days, moreover, are not marked by any diminution of the expression of
conflicting points of view. We can imagine the devisants leaving, then, the
81 On nouvelle 70 and the meditation on language, see Miernowski, Signes dissimilaires,
and Gary Ferguson, “Paroles d’hommes, de femmes et de Dieu: Langage, genre et trans-
cendance dans la Nouvelle 70,” in Lire L’Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre, ed. Domi-
nique Bertrand (Clermont-Ferrand, 2005), pp. 197–210. See also Nancy Virtue, “Le Sainct
Esperit . . . parlast par sa bouche: Marguerite de Navarre’s Evangelical Revision of the Chas-
telaine de Vergi,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997), 811–24.
same people they were when they arrived, but no doubt happy to have
spent time together and richer for their experience of exchanging stories
and opinions, for having prayed, read the Bible, and taken communion
together. Perhaps they would leave with new insights and aspirations—as
Marguerite no doubt hoped would also be the case for her reader. But for
devisants and implied ideal reader alike, the parting challenge would be
that of putting good intentions into practice in daily life.
The biblical texts on which the storytellers meditate point to a similar
conclusion. The reading of Romans during the first five days gives way to
that of the First Letter of Saint John on the sixth day, the beginning of the
Acts of the Apostles on the seventh day, with a return to Saint John on
day 8, projected to be continued for the remainder of the stay (cf. pp. 549,
611, and 685–86). This division between the Letter to the Romans and the
First Letter of John, punctuated by the opening chapters of Acts, is sug-
gestive in a number of ways. First, the seventh day (irrespective of what
day of the week it might be) is marked within the temporal economy of
the Heptaméron as a Sabbath. This Day of the Lord is also a Day of the
Spirit, both by virtue of the story of Pentecost that opens the Acts of the
Apostles—and which is also the story of the beginning of the Christian
Church—and by virtue of the votive Mass of the Holy Spirit that the
devisants attend with the canons (p. 611).82 Second, while Romans covers
many topics, it treats notably of the pre-Christian era—the value of both
ancient pagan philosophy (cf. above) and of the Jewish Law, for Chris-
tians the Old Covenant—and of salvation through faith in the sacrifice
of Christ, the New Adam. When Oisille moves subsequently to 1 John, she
does so because this Letter “n’est plaine que d’amour” (p. 549). In his First
Letter, the evangelist does indeed describe God as love, reminding the
early Christian community that God loved them while they were still sin-
ners and that they must therefore return his love and also show love to
one another. Here again, then, the Heptaméron points to the challenge for
the Christian of living in the present in a fallen, imperfect world, but one
into which God has sent his Word, that is his Son, and his Spirit, offer-
ing, through grace, the gifts of faith and charity, living, that is, between
Redemption and Judgment, in humble trust in God’s mercy and in joyful
hope of the life of the world to come.
82 See Miernowski, Signes dissimilaires.

Posterity and Religious Polemic
In the decades following Marguerite’s death and the publication of the

Heptaméron, her book was mined by its readers. As her stories migrated,
they were often reworked and appropriated by writers of different confes-
sional stripes for their own ends. We know little about what happened
to the work in the years between her death and the appearance of the
editions of Boaistuau in 1558 and Gruget in 1559. Before those printed ver-
sions appeared, various manuscripts were circulating. Matteo Bandello
(1485–1561), a Dominican whom the vagaries of history led from Lom-
bardy to a bishopric in Agen, a city in French Navarre, wrote over 200
novellas in Italian, at least nine of which are very similar to stories in the
Heptaméron.83 Some of Bandello’s tales were translated during his lifetime
by the same Boaistuau. He gave the French collection the title Histoires
tragiques, and a new narrative genre was born.84 Soon thereafter, another
writer from the southwest, François de Belleforest, took over the Histoires
tragiques and added many tales.
Bandello’s story 24 in Part II of his collection corresponds in its basic
plot to nouvelle 23 in the Heptaméron, the story of the Franciscan who
replaces the husband of a woman in their bed soon after she has given
birth, leading to her suicide and the deaths of her infant and husband.
Bandello’s version is much longer, however, and his emphasis is differ-
ent from Marguerite’s. Oisille gives above all a moral lesson. She devotes
a good portion of her story to the friar’s corrupt character, showing his
deceit and hypocrisy through direct discourse and by her comments.
She follows the mother’s anguished thoughts leading to her suicide and
shows how they are misguided theologically. Finally, her story is framed
by remarks that warn against putting too much trust in Franciscans: she
opens with the husband’s naive and undiscriminating devotion to Saint
Francis, such that “il luy sembloit que tous ceulx qui portoient son habit
83 After debates about whose stories came first, Bandello’s or Marguerite’s, there is now
general agreement that Bandello heard or read an early version of Marguerite’s stories. For
a comparison of the two tales discussed below, see Marie-François Piéjus, “Marguerite de
Navarre et Bandello: une même histoire tragique, deux leçons, deux poétiques,ˮ in Du Pô à
la Garonne: Recherches sur les échanges culturels entre l’Italie et la France à la Renaissance,
ed. Jean Cubelier de Beynac and Michel Simonin (Agen, 1990), pp. 209–30, and K. H. Hart-
ley, Bandello and the Heptaméron (Melbourne, 1960).
84 Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires tragiques, ed. Richard A. Carr (Paris, 1977). See Hervé
Campagne, “Marguerite de Navarre and the Invention of the Histoire Tragique,” in
Approaches to Teaching, ed. Winn, pp. 91–96.
devoient estre semblables au bon sainct” (p. 342); she ends by telling the
women to beware “de tels pelerins” (p. 351). Bandello, the friar and bishop,
also portrays the Franciscan’s evil deeds, but he attenuates the anticlerical
criticism by cautioning readers not to assume that the friar represents all
the members of his order. He also presents him with a degree of sympathy
as the victim of Love and attributes his lubricity to the devil. Bandello’s
friar thus comes closer to being a tragic figure than a villain.
If Bandello mitigated the anticlerical satire of Heptaméron 23, the great
Hellenist and lexicographer Henri Estienne (1531–98), an unequivocal sup-
porter of the Reformation, intensified it. Estienne published his Apologie
pour Hérodote in Geneva in 1566, a work that had grown well beyond its
original design of introducing Lorenzo Valla’s translation of Herodotus to
become a virulent attack on the Roman Catholic Church. In Part I, chap-
ter 18, “Des homicides de nostre temps,” Estienne refers to women who
have committed suicide after being raped or dishonored through trickery;
it is here that he introduces Marguerite’s story 23:
Aussi lisons-nous és narrations de la roine de Navarre derniere defuncte,
la piteuse mort d’une demoiselle, qui se pendit et estrangla pour le grand
despit et regret qu’elle avoit de ce qu’un cordelier avoit usé d’elle comme
de sa femme, sans que elle pensast estre couchee pres autre que son mari:
laquelle histoire sera recitee plus au long ci-apres, où nous traiterons des
paillardises des gens d’eglise.85
In Part I, chapter 21, “De la lubricité et paillardise des gens d’église,”
Estienne excoriates the practice of priests taking concubines. He adds:
“Mais ne se contentans de leurs concubines ou putains, ils ont aussi par
subtil moyens abusé des femmes honnestes. Pour exemple dequoy est
racontée par la feu roine de Navarre une histoire fort memorable et fort
tragicque, dont j’ay deliberé de faire le récit . . .” (p. 535). If Estienne retells
the Heptaméron’s story 23 fairly faithfully, by introducing it in a chap-
ter about the lustfulness of clerics, he uses it to support his anti-Catholic
stance in the Apologie. In all the stories that he adapts from the Hep-
taméron, Estienne takes the prologue at its word and presents them not
as fiction but as fact, as veritables histoires.
Nouvelle 67, the tale of the woman abandoned with her husband on
an island in the Saint Lawrence by Roberval during his 1542 expedition,
85 Henri Estienne, Traité Preparatif à l’Apologie pour Hérodote, ed. Bénédicte Boudou,
2 vols. (Geneva, 2007), p. 503.
also enjoyed several reincarnations. In Marguerite’s version, the plot is

stark and the characters remain anonymous as their tale conveys a moral
lesson. Simontault emphasizes the woman’s unwavering faith in God, a
trust rewarded by her eventual rescue and return to France. She becomes
an evangelical exemplum of God’s providence and mercy. Belleforest, in
1570, and André Thevet, in 1575 and again in 1586–88, wrote much longer
accounts of the episode, making the woman the sister of Roberval. Thevet
named her Marguerite and claimed to have received the tale from the
woman herself. In relation to the Heptaméron’s version, Belleforest and
Thevet, both Catholics, add many exotic details to the story and dilute
the evangelical message.86
A dynamic of confessional appropriation or inflection affected even
some versions of the Heptaméron itself. The text’s first editors Boaistuau
and Gruget introduced many modifications, the latter in particular alter-
ing or eliminating passages that might be considered sensitive from a
Catholic perspective. Among many other changes, for example, Gruget
omits from the prologue Oisille’s comments concerning superstitious
beliefs about the Virgin Mary, as well as the hypocrisy of the abbot of Ser-
rance; the long condemnation of the false teaching of the Franciscans in
nouvelle 23 is also suppressed.87 The opposite can be observed in a manu-
script of the Heptaméron held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York,
MS 242, apparently produced after the Gruget edition, perhaps as late as
1570. The 1560s saw the beginning of the Wars of Religion in France, and
Pierpont Morgan 242 injects into the Heptaméron the strident timber of
those years, systematically escalating its anticlerical tone. In story 31 of the
friar who murdered three servants and abducted the wife, instead of the
word cordelier, the scribe wrote “ce dyable de Cordellier” and “ce paillard
Cordellier.” After killing the servants, the friar returns to the unsuspecting
wife “eschauffé et en son habit de meschanceté,” an added description
86 See Michel Bideaux, Roberval, la damoiselle et le gentilhomme: les Robinsons de

Terre-Neuve (Paris, 2009). Bideaux has edited and analyzed the 16th-century versions of
the legend. Noting that no archival documentation exists to authenticate the historical
basis of the tale, he concludes: “Ces texts dialoguent entre eux; ils n’ont pas de comptes
(ni de contes) à rendre à la réalité” (p. 111). See also Frank Lestringant, “La Demoiselle dans
l’île: Prolégomènes à une lecture de la Nouvelle 67,” in Lire L’Heptaméron, ed. Bertrand,
pp. 183–96, and Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in
Early Modern England and France (Chicago, 2003), pp. 225–64.
87 See ed. Cazauran and Lefèvre, pp. 56, 61, and 291.
that appears in none of the earlier manuscripts or editions.88 The pun on

the word “habit,” meaning both religious habit and “habitudes, instincts . . .
coutumes, mœurs,” is particularly caustic.89
Coda: Return to Cauterets
When Marguerite visited Cauterets for the last time in May 1549, only
months before her death, the collection of stories she was writing and
had set in and around the town must have been very much in her mind.
During her stay, she also composed an Ascension Day meditation in the
form of a verse epistle addressed to her son-in-law.90 For the Christian,
Jesus’s ascension represents the promise of rising also to heaven, the hope
of the future divinization of human nature, after, however, the completion
of the time allotted by God to the present created order. As she contem-
plated her physical surroundings, Marguerite responded imaginatively
and emotionally to the landscape of this part of her kingdom, reading it
in a way inflected by her reading of the Psalms. The great heights of the
mountain peaks and the thunderous force of the waters of the gave de
Pau inspired in her admiration of the created world and of the power of
the divine Creator who holds all things in his hand, governing them and
maintaining them in being. The depths of the turbulent river also recalled,
for her, humanity’s sinfulness, “la laydeur / De nostre enfer et de nos-
tre péché / Qui tient le cueur si tres bas attaché.” Unless, then, the Crea-
tor reform our hearts by his same all-powerful hand, no hope remains:
“À ceste main [n]ous fault tousjours tyrer / En ferme foy que de sa crea-
ture / Aura pitié, cognoissant sa nature.”91 Marguerite moves next, how-
ever, to a number of physical, worldly, and personal concerns. The baths,
with their healing waters, are also a sign of God’s goodness. The queen
expresses her desire to see her son-in-law soon. Her daughter’s love for
him, she claims, is so strong that even the waters can bring her no relief
88 Nicole Cazauran gives many examples of changes to the Heptaméron in the manu-
script, “Post-scriptum à propos d’un manuscrit: New York, Pierpont Morgan Library 242,”
in Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1992, ed. Cazauran and Dauphiné, pp. 483–90.
89 Algirdas Julien Greimas and Teresa Mary Keane, Dictionnaire du moyen français
(Paris, 1992), p. 341.
90 “Ses montz tres haultz haulsent notre desir,” also referred to as “Épître de Caute-
rets.” Marguerite’s daughter Jeanne d’Albret had been married to Antoine de Bourbon in
October 1548.
91 Quoted from Gorris Camos, “ ‘Ses montz . . .,’ ” p. 176, with a correction from BnF,
fr. 883, fol. 31r.
from the suffering caused by his absence. Marguerite hopes their hearts
may ever be joined in mutual love, that their union will bear fruit in the
form of a child, that she, before her death, may know the joy—in the
event unrealized—of being a grandmother.92 This is Marguerite’s Cau-
terets, the world of the Heptaméron.
92 Jeanne and Antoine’s son, the future Henri IV of France, was born only in 1553.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. Primary Works
Modern Editions of Works by Marguerite de Navarre

Œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole Cazauran (Paris, 2001–).
v. 1. Pater Noster et Petit Œuvre dévot, ed. Sabine Lardon (Paris, 2001).
v. 3. Le Triomphe de l’Agneau, ed. Simone de Reyff (Paris, 2001).
v. 4. Théâtre, ed. Geneviève Hasenohr and Olivier Millet (Paris, 2002).
v. 5. L’Histoire des Satyres, et nymphes de Dyane, Les quatre dames et les quatre gen-
tilzhommes, La Coche, ed. Simone de Reyff (Paris, 2012).
v. 8. Chrétiens et mondains, poèmes épars, ed. Richard Cooper (Paris, 2007).
v. 9. La Complainte pour un detenu prisonnier et Les Chansons spirituelles, ed. Michèle
Clément (Paris, 2001).
Œuvres. Comédies. La Nativité de Jésus-Christ. L’Adoration des trois Roys. Les Innocents.
Comédie du désert. Comédie sur le trespas du Roy. Comédie jouée au Mont de Marsan,
ed. F. E. Schneegans (Strasbourg, 1924).
Chansons spirituelles, ed. Georges Dottin (Geneva, 1971).
La Coche, ed. Robert Marichal (Paris and Geneva, 1971).
Les Comédies bibliques, ed. Barbara Marczuk, with Beata Skrzeszewska and Piotr Tylus
(Geneva, 2000).
Les Dernières Poésies, ed. Abel Lefranc (Paris, 1896).
Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, ed. Renja Salminen (Helsinki, 1985).
L’Heptaméron des nouvelles, ed. Nicole Cazauran and Sylvie Lefèvre (Paris, 2000).
L’Heptaméron, ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani (Paris, 1999).
Heptaméron, ed. Renja Salminen (Geneva, 1999).
Heptaméron, ed. Simone de Reyff (Paris, 1982).
L’Heptaméron, ed. Michel François (Paris, 1943; 1967; 1991).
L’Heptaméron des nouvelles de très-haute et très-illustre princesse Marguerite d’Angoulême,
reine de Navarre, ed. Antoine Le Roux de Lincy and Anatole de Montaiglon, 4 vols.
(Paris, 1880; Geneva, 1969).
Lettres de Marguerite d’Angoulême, sœur de François Ier, reine de Navarre, ed. F. Génin
(Paris, 1841).
Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, texte de l’édition de 1547, ed. Félix Frank,
4 vols. (Paris, 1873; Geneva, 1970).
Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié, ed. Lucia Fontanella (Alessandria, 1984).
Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, ed. Renja Salminen (Helsinki, 1979).
Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, ed. Joseph Allaire (Munich, 1972).
La Navire ou Consolation du roi François Ier à sa sœur Marguerite, ed. Robert Marichal
(Paris, 1956).
Nouvelles, ed. Yves Le Hir (Grenoble, 1967).
Nouvelles lettres de la reine de Navarre, adressées au roi François Ier, son frère, ed. F. Génin
(Paris, 1842).
Oraison à Nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ, ed. Renja Salminen (Helsinki, 1981).
Les Prisons, ed. Simone Glasson (Geneva, 1978).
Théâtre profane, ed. V. L. Saulnier (Paris, 1946; Geneva and Paris, 1963; 1978).
374 bibliography
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Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius. Declamation on the Preeminence of the Female Sex, trans. and
ed. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Chicago, 1996).
Augustine of Hippo (Saint). Confessions, ed. and trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991).
Beaulieu, Eustorg de. Chrestienne Resiouyssance (s.l., 1546).
Boaistuau, Pierre. Histoires tragiques, ed. Richard A. Carr (Paris, 1977).
Boccaccio, Giovanni. Concerning Famous Women, trans. and introduction by Guido Gua-
rino (New Brunswick, N.J., 1963).
——. Le Decameron de Messire Jehan Bocace, trans. Antoine Le Maçon (Paris, 1545).
Brantôme, Pierre de, Recueil des dames, ed. Étienne Vaucheret (Paris, 1991).
Briçonnet, Guillaume, and Marguerite d’Angoulême, Correspondance (1521–1524), ed.
Calvin, Jean. Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and
E. Reuss, 59 vols. (Corpus Reformatorum) 29–87 (Braunschweig, 1863–1900).
——. Letters of John Calvin, ed. Jules Bonnet, trans. David Constable, 4 vols. (New York,
1858; 1972).
——. Three French Treatises, ed. Francis Higman (London, 1970).
Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton, ed. Daniel
Javitch (New York, 2002).
Le combat chrestien (Alençon, 1529/34).
Dentière, Marie. Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin,
ed. and trans. Mary B. McKinley (Chicago, 2004).
Du Bellay, Joachim. La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, ed. Jean-Charles
Monferran (Geneva, 2001).
Erasmus, Desiderius. The Colloquies of Erasmus, ed. and trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chi-
cago, 1965).
Ficino, Marsilio. Commentaire sur Le Banquet de Platon, De l’amour, Commentarium in
Convivium Platonis, De amore, ed. and trans. Pierre Laurens (Paris, 2002).
——. Théologie platonicienne de l’immortalité des âmes, ed. and trans. Raymond Marcel,
3 vols. (Paris, 1964–70).
Malingre, Matthieu. Chansons nouvelles demonstrantz plusieurs erreurs et faulsetez [Neu-
châtel, 1530–40].
——. Moralité de la maladie de chrestienté (s.l., 1533).
Marot, Clément. Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990–93).
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey and
Verdun L. Saulnier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1978).
Petrarch (Petrarca), Francesco. Prose, ed. G. Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, E. Carrara, and E. Bianchi
(Milan, 1955).
——. Rime, Trionfi, e poesie latine, ed. Francesco Neri (Milan, 1951).
——. Petrarch’s “Secretum” with Introduction, Notes, and Critical Anthology, ed. Davy Carozza
and H. James Shey (New York, 1989).
——. The Triumphs of Petrarch, trans. Ernest Hatch Wilkins (Chicago, 1962).
Rabelais, François. Œuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris, 1994).
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Vigneulles, Philippe de. Cent nouvelles nouvelles, ed. Charles H. Livingston (Geneva, 1972).
II. Secondary Works
Collections of Articles on Marguerite de Navarre

Approaches to Teaching Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, ed. Colette H. Winn (New
York, 2007).
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Cazauran, Nicole. Variétés pour Marguerite de Navarre, 1978–2004: Autour de “L’Heptamé-

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Critical Tales: New Studies of the Heptameron and Early Modern Culture, ed. John D. Lyons
and Mary B. McKinley (Philadelphia, 1993).
Études sur “L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre, Colloque de Nice, ed. Christine
Martineau-Génieys (Nice, 1996).
“L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre: Actes de la Journée d’Étude Marguerite de
Navarre, 19 octobre 1991, ed. Simone Perrier (Cahiers textuel) 10 (Paris, 1992).
“L’Heptaméron” de Marguerite de Navarre (II), ed. Chantal Liaroutzos (Cahiers textuel)
29 (Paris, 2006).
Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre’s “Heptaméron,” ed. Dora
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Navarre, ed. Régine Reynolds-Cornell (Birmingham, Ala., 1995).
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2005).
Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1992: Actes du Colloque international de Pau, 1992, ed. Nicole
Cazauran and James Dauphiné (Mont-de-Marsan, 1995; Paris, 2006).
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ed. Olga Anna Duhl, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 26.4 (2002).
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Ahmed, Ehsan. “Marguerite de Navarre’s Chansons spirituelles and the Poet’s Passion,”
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Arrathoon, Leigh A. “The ‘Compte en viel langaige’ behind Heptaméron, LXX,” Romance
Philology 30.1 (1976), 192–99.
Atance, F. R. “Les Comédies profanes de Marguerite de Navarre: Aspects de la satire reli-
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289–313.
Baker, Mary J. “Aspects of the Psychology of Love in the Heptaméron,” Sixteenth Century
Journal 19 (1988), 81–87.
——. “Friendship Revisited: Heptaméron Tales 10, 21, 15, and 70,” Romance Quarterly 48.1
(2001), 3–14.
——. “The Role of the Moral Lesson in Heptaméron 30,” French Studies 31 (1977), 18–25.
——. “The Role of the Reader in the Heptaméron,” French Studies 43.3 (1989), 271–78.
Balsamo, Jean. “Le Décaméron à la cour de François Ier,” Revue de littérature française et
comparée 7 (1996), 231–39.
Barthe, Pascale. “Of Mirrors and Silence: Mysticism in Heptameron 24,” in Approaches to
Teaching Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, pp. 128–34.
Bauschatz, Cathleen M. “Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre on Sixteenth-Century Views
of Clandestine Marriage,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34.2 (2003), 395–408.
——. “ ‘Voylà, mes dames . . .’: Inscribed Women Listeners and Readers in the Heptam-
eron,” in Critical Tales, pp. 104–22.
Béné, Charles. “Tradition et nouveauté dans la poésie de Marguerite de Navarre,” Acta
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Benson, Edward. “Marriage Ancestral and Conjugal in the Heptaméron,” Journal of Medi-
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——. “Le langage ‘biblien’ des devisants de L’Heptaméron,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et
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index
The Abbot and the Learned Woman Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 150, 182, 188,
(Erasmus), 83 213, 216, 256, 305
L’Adolescence clémentine (Clément Marot), Confessions, 214, 228n52
52, 140–41, 243, 244 De Doctrina Christiana, 215, 223
Adrian VI (pope), 69 and Plato, 235
Ahmed, Ehsan, 262n56, 268n68 and Petrarch, 187–89, 193, 206
Alençon, 48, 49, 76, 78 on human language, 180
Allaire, Joseph L., 120 on intellectual faith, 183
Allendy, René, 132n52 on remembering God, 208
Almenèches (abbey), 77, 78 on the soul as mirror, 111, 114
alms, 75, 77–78, 82, 85, 220, 334, 338–39 auto-censorship, 32, 52
Amadis de Gaule, 356 avarice, 221, 335, 336, 338, 348, 358–59,
Amadour (character in Heptaméron), 360
353–54, 356, 362 L’Avision Christine (Christine de Pizan),
L’Amye de court (Bertrand de La Borderie), 169
342
De Amore (Marsilio Ficino), 89, 92, 97, 98, Babylonian Captivity of the Church
101, 107 (Luther), 232
Amyot, Jacques, 87 Bachelor of Arts degree, 222n24
Aneau, Barthélemy, 241 Badet, Arnaud de, 48, 86
Angier, Paul, 342 Baduel, Claude, 48
Anne Boleyn (Queen of England), 7, 42 Balsamo, Jean, 14n41
Anne de Bretagne, 2 Bandello, Matteo, 367–68
Anne, Saint, 33 Bans, Jean de, 77
Annebault, Claude d’, 47 baptism, 21, 26, 53n69, 56, 62, 329
Annonciades, Order of, 76 Barral, Vincent, 82n80, 87n92, n93
anticlericalism, 330, 333–34, 335, 368 Baurmeister, Ursula, 167n11
Antoine de Bourbon (Antoine of Navarre, Bauschatz, Cathleen, 341n37, 344n47,
King of Navarre), 16, 283, 320, 321, 349n54
370–71 Béarn, 16, 48, 317
Apologie pour Hérodote (Henri Estienne), Beaulieu, Eustorg de, 248, 275
368 Bectoz, Claude de, Sister Scolastique,
Arande, Michel d’, 6, 34, 35, 37, 39, 64 82–83
Argentan, 75, 77 Béda, Noël, 311
Ariès, Philippe, 230 Bedouelle, Guy, 3n7, 154n120, 226n27
Arles, 2–3 Belhomer (Fontevrist priory), 77
Armagnac, Georges d’, 66, 68–69, 78, 86 Belleforest, François de, 367, 369
Armand, Anne, 293n20, 306n27 Béné, Charles, 113n13
Arnold, Matthieu, 80n77 Benson, Edward, 344n47, 349
Arredondo, Soledad, 65 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 150
Arthur Tudor (Prince of Wales), 2 Bernstein, Laurence F., 243n18
Art poétique (Peletier du Mans), 241 Berquin, Louis de, 36, 48, 49, 53, 232
ascent of soul imagery, 20, 93, 95, 99, 106. Berry, Duchy of, 4, 48, 76
See also spiritual ascent imagery Berthoud, Gabrielle, 9n23, 119
Attaignant, Pierre, 243 Bertolani, Maria Cecilia, 196n66
Audisio, Gabriel, 10n26 Bertot, Claude, 81n78
Augereau, Antoine, 7, 9, 50, 51, 115n22, Bertrand, Cardinal, 87
116–18, 128, 132n53, 133, 156, 157 Bèze, Théodore de, 13, 18, 59
388 index
biblical plays. See also Désert; Innocents; on corporeality, 224, 257

Nativité; Rois correspondence with Marguerite, 5, 21,
characters in, 293–94 90–91, 121, 125, 141, 161–62, 164, 166–67,
conversion in, 296 249–50
dating of, 288 on death, 5, 134, 162, 167, 230, 257–58
dramaturgy, 295–96 differences with Marguerite, 253, 255
evangelical sympathies in, 296 on divine election, 251–52
faith as medicine in, 309 on grace, 250–52, 253, 257
manuscripts of, 287 on human language, 180, 226, 229, 267
meditative method in, 284 influence on Marguerite, 60, 90–91, 121,
mystery-play tradition and, 286, 294 123, 134, 151, 153, 158, 161–62, 166–67,
publication of, 286–87 170, 179, 180, 183, 212, 228, 251, 255,
redemption in, 284, 295 260–61
relation with non-biblical plays, 284–85, influence of Marguerite on, 249–50
304–09, 321 issuing edicts against heresy, 36
salvation in, 295 on cognition, 255–56
sources of inspiration, 288 on marriage, 267
stage arrangements, 289–90 Meaux Group, 4, 35, 86
tetralogy of plays, 294 mystical marriage theme, 5, 178
Virgin Mary in, 284, 295, 306 on Nothingness and All, 96, 306
Bideaux, Michel, 369n86 on salvation, 251–52
Blois, 73, 83 sources of inspiration, 153
Blum, Claude, 151n107 as spiritual guide and mentor, 19, 115,
Boaistuau, Pierre, 324, 367, 369 162, 167, 183, 189, 251
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 14, 324, 325, 326, 327, on spiritual harmony, 91, 249–51, 256
346n52, 358. See also Decameron theology of, 60, 67, 91, 99, 121, 167, 183,
Boccassini, D., 10n26 251
body as prison of soul, 20, 89, 94–99, 134, use of imagery/metaphors, 24, 92–93,
162, 167, 170, 174, 176, 230–31 96, 97, 134, 141, 213, 219, 224, 225, 229,
Boethius, 93, 173n31, 228 249
Bonaventure, Saint, 127, 142, 150, 182, 234, on vices, 220, 338
299 Le Brief Recueil de la substance et principal
Bonnard, Fourier, 79n73 fondement de la doctrine evangelique,
Book of the Courtier (Baldassare 118
Castiglione), 220–21, 341 Brown, Howard Mayer, 248n30
Bordier, Jean (abbot), 79 Bucer, Martin, 31n8, 40, 41n36, 58, 75, 86
Bordier, Jean-Pierre, 113n16, 114n18 Bujanda, J. M. de, 65n14, 66
Bouchet, Jean, 124, 156n125 Burchard, Franz, 43n42
Boudeville, Guyon, 145, 149 Burke, Peter, 220n21, 341n40
Bouhier, Président, 144 Bussy, De (composer, 16th century),
Boulenger, Jacques, 75n65 249n32
Boulogne, 44
Bourbon, Cardinal de, 79 Cabantous, Marius, 62
Bourbon, Nicolas, 48, 52 Caen, 75, 77, 81
Bourbon, Renée de, 77 Caillau, Gilles, 62, 142
Bourges, 37, 48, 78, 87 Calvin, Jean, 43, 58, 61, 119, 156n125, 242,
Bourrilly, V.-L., 43n43 251, 332
Bovelles, Charles de, 261 on Eucharist, 55
Boysonné, Jean, 48 Institutes of Christian Religion, 86, 253
Brady, Jr., Thomas A., 30n5, 44n48 Marguerite protecting, 9, 25, 48
Brantôme, Pierre de, 66, 67, 77, 282, 354 on Marguerite’s role in reform, 7–8, 10
Brenz, Johannes, 52n68, 54n71, 56n80, 58 on Nicodemism, 12, 13, 18, 57, 61
Briçonnet, Guillaume religious disagreement with Marguerite,
on clergy, 34, 335 10, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 25, 59, 285
index 389
on Spiritual Libertines, 12–13, 15, 25, 59, divine election in, 255
320, 336n31 Eucharist in, 253–54
on vive foy, 183 François I in, 244–45, 259–60, 262,
Campagne, Hervé, 367n84 268–69
Candaux, Jean-Daniel, 242n12 grace in, 251, 253, 261, 263, 276
Canossa, Luigi, 77 Heptaméron and, 247
Canzoniere (Petrarch), 217, 218 manuscripts of, 238–39, 240, 259, 263
Caracciolo, Antonio, 19, 48, 79, 86 Marot’s influence on, 243–44, 248
Mirouer de vraye religion, 19, 79, 81, 82 Nothingness and All in, 261, 264, 266
Carley, James P., 121n37 opposition between Law and Faith in,
carnival, 283, 284, 285, 313, 315, 318, 354 255
Caroli, Pierre, 34, 36, 37 “Pensées” preceding, 238, 239, 259
Carpi (nuncio), 72 pride in, 267
Carruthers, Mary, 208n74, 209n75 publication of, 238, 244, 268
Castiglione, Baldassare, 220–21, 341 reception of, 247
Catherine de Médicis (Queen of France), relationship to music, 237, 241–43, 246,
14, 16, 26, 175 247, 249
Catholic Reformation, 25 ritual dimensions in, 274–78
Catholicism, adherence to, 11, 16, 18, 25, 26, rondeau preceding, 238, 239, 259, 261,
59, 60, 62–63, 65, 66–73, 84, 86, 253 269
Cauterets, 16, 325, 328, 370 screaming in, 272–74
Cave, Terence, 326n11 Scripture in, 259, 270, 271, 274, 276
Cavey, Robert, 81 sources of inspiration, 243–44, 251
Cazauran, Nicole, 143n81, 146n95, 163n3, spirituality in, 248, 249–65, 270, 276
177n42, 324n3, n4, 325n9, 328n15, 330n22, structure of, 246, 248–49
332n25, 358n72, 369n87, 370n88 chant, 265–74
Céard, Jean, 14n38, 344n47 Chappuys, Claude, 220
Celestines, 62, 76 charity, 147, 150, 154–56, 258, 259, 305, 310.
censure, 32, 63 See also foy vive
avoiding, 51, 118, 119, 151, 172 in Chansons spirituelles, 253, 276
of Marguerite’s work, 50, 64–66 in Dialogue, 178, 181
Cerquiglini, Jacqueline, 186, 187n57 in Heptaméron, 333–34, 337, 363, 366
Chabot de Brion, Philippe, 42, 43, 47 in La Navire, 186
Champier, Symphorien, 100n22 in plays, 308–09, 311, 312, 314, 318, 319
chanson (genre), 237, 238–42, 245–47. See in Les Prisons, 216
also chant rejection of salvation through works,
relation between music and, 237, 23–25, 53, 155, 182–83, 233, 251–53,
241–43, 246, 247, 249 308–09, 333–34
chanson spirituelle (genre), 274–75 Charles d’Alençon, 2, 6, 19, 33, 229, 230,
Chansons nouvelles demonstrantz plusieurs 260
erreurs et faulsetez (Matthieu Malingre), Charles d’Angoulême, 1, 90
275 Charles d’Orléans, 43, 44, 47
Chansons spirituelles, 15, 17, 19, 20, 141, 171, Charles IX (King of France), 26, 87
172 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor, Charles I
ascent in, 259, 261, 264 of Spain), 6, 11, 23, 29, 40, 42, 44, 65,
charity in, 253, 276 70–72, 313
condemnation of, 65–66 Charles VIII (King of France), 1, 167
conversion in, 261, 276 Charlotte de Valois, 5–6, 95–96, 115–16
corporeality in, 257 death, 162, 166, 167
cross motif in, 141 in Dialogue, 162, 164–65, 169–71, 179, 180,
dating of, 237, 238, 242 181–83, 187, 190–91
on death as supreme good, 258, 259–60, Chastellain, Georges, 174
262–63, 265, 269 Chelius, Ulrich, 40
dialogism in, 163, 247, 263–64, 271 Chezal-Benoît (abbey), 76, 78
390 index
Cholakian, Patricia F., 1n1, 11n28, 347n53, Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius), 228
354 Contarini, Cardinal, 66
Cholakian, Rouben C., 1n1, 11n28, 354n63 Contemplation sur Agnus Dei, 141
Christine de Pizan, 169 contrafactum (genre), 248–49, 275
Claude de France (Queen of France), 2, 3, La Contr’amye (Charles Fontaine), 342
5, 162 Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des
Clément, Michèle, 171n22, 237n1, 239, 244, Libertins (Calvin), 12
246n27, 251n36, 273n79 conversion, 20, 21, 80, 188
Clement VII (pope), 68, 69, 76 in Chansons spirituelles, 261, 276
clergy. See also anticlericalism of François I, 45–46
clerical abuse, 333–34, 335, 336–37, in Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié, 137
338–39, 358 in Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, 231
role and conduct of, 120, 332 in plays, 296, 299, 300, 308, 310, 311–12,
Cleves-Jülich, Duke of, 10–11, 42–44, 68 321
La Coche, 50, 163, 282, 315 in Les Prisons, 214–16, 218, 227, 228, 230,
Cœurdevey, Annie, 242, 244n21 234
Cognac, 1, 2, 123, 324 Cooper, Richard, 4n10, 16n48, 24n59, 29n1,
Colette, Saint, 73 45n53, 73n52, 115n20, 141n73, 178n43,
Colin, Jacques, 78, 87 263n60
Collett, Barry, 84n88 Cop, Nicolas, 8, 41, 48, 49
Colloquies (Erasmus), 83, 84, 343 Coq à l’âne à Lyon (Clément Marot), 12
Colloquy of Poissy, 26 cordeliers (Franciscan friars), 333–38, 351,
Comédie de Mont-de-Marsan. See 367, 369
Mont-de-Marsan Cornilliat, François, 242n13
Comédie des quatre femmes. See Quatre Cortese, Gregorio, 82
femmes cosmic mind (mens mundana), 101, 102
comédie (genre), 282–83 cosmic soul (spiritus mundanus), 101, 102
Comédie sur le trespas du Roy, 15, 19, 171, Cottrell, Robert D., 21n53, 111, 113n14,
263n58, 285, 306, 317–18 125–27, 128n49, 131, 133, 137, 138n67,
chant in, 277 148, 167n12, 168, 177, 178n43, n44, 179,
conversion in, 308 180, 212n5, 213n7, n8, n10, 215n11, 217n14,
François I in, 50, 282, 317 229n35, 234–35, 267, 323n2
manuscript of, 282 Council of Trent, 25, 26, 44, 71, 344
performance of, 283 Counter Reformation, 25
publication of, 281–82, 287 court, 115n23, 341–42
sources of inspiration, 318 celebrations at, 283, 284, 290, 315
stage arrangements, 290, 291 court poets, 4, 48, 175, 243
structure of, 318 courtly love 217, 307, 320, 321, 354,
Virgin Mary in, 321 355–58, 362
Commentarii initiatorii in quatuor intrigues and conflicts at, 10
evangelia (Lefèvre d’Étaples), 226 manuscripts and performances at,
Complainte pour un detenu prisonnier, 49, 50, 246, 282, 285, 286, 289, 290, 315, 321
238, 244 in Les Prisons, 217, 220–21, 235
La Concorde des deux langages ( Jean promotion of reform to, 4, 16, 29, 30, 32,
Lemaire de Belges), 168 34–47, 48, 49, 58, 86
condemnation of works by Marguerite, 50, role and influence at, 4, 18, 50, 69, 70,
64–66, 116–17. See also censure 86, 90
confession, 52, 54–55, 57, 58, 114, 129, 232, royal involvement in Heptaméron, 14–15,
276 50, 325, 326, 333
in Heptaméron, 337, 351 Cox, Virginia, 170n19
in Les Prisons, 212, 214, 216, 231–34 Crestienne Resiouyssance (Eustorg de
Confessions (Saint Augustine), 208, 214 Beaulieu), 248
conservatives, 36–37, 51 Crétin, Guillaume, 174
consolatio, 173–74, 184 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 132n54, 174n35
index 391
cuyder, 305, 308, 336, 337, 338. See also Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, 5, 17,
pride 19, 20, 63, 115, 128, 159, 165–66
ascent in, 168, 178, 179–80, 184, 185, 193
Da Ceva, Bonifazio, 73 Briçonnet’s influence on, 170, 178, 179,
Dagens, Jean, 114n19, 228 180
Dagoucin (storyteller in Heptaméron), 346 carnal vs. spiritual in, 164, 165, 169, 179,
Dandino (nuncio), 71 193, 199
Dangu, Nicolas, 71 charity in, 178, 181
Dante, 168, 169, 173n31, 195, 214, 215, 216, Charlotte de Valois in, 162, 164, 169–71,
221 179, 180, 181–83, 187, 190–91
Dassonville, Michel, 212n5 death in, 134, 151, 152, 191
Davis, Natalie Zemon, 327n13, 346n51 dialogism in, 21, 161, 162–63, 166, 169–71,
death 176–77, 186–87, 189–92, 193
as act of love, 262–63, 265, 270, 279 dream state in, 169
Briçonnet on, 5, 134, 162, 167, 230, foy vive in, 154, 183
257–58 grace in, 176, 181, 182
freedom after, 162, 167, 170, 176 inner dialogue in, 187, 189–90
meditation on, 187–89, 191, 206, 208–09 manuscript of, 166
as supreme good, 258, 259–60, 262–63, memory in, 193–94, 204
265, 269 mourning in, 163, 193
in works, 19–21, 114, 132, 134–35, 151, 152, mystical marriage theme in, 178–79
159, 174, 191, 229–31, 233, 260 narrative structure, 164–65
Decameron (Giovanni Boccaccio), 14, 21 Petrarch’s influence on, 164, 166–68, 173,
as model for Heptaméron, 324–25, 326, 187–89, 194–96
327–29, 330–31, 333, 346n52, 348n53, 358, prison motif in, 134
359–60 publication of, 165–66
Defaux, Gérard, 9n23, 223, 256n49, 272n77, resemblance with La Navire, 162, 163,
323n2, 343n46 176, 178
Deffense et illustration de la langue rondeaux preceding text, 166, 189–90
françoyse ( Joachim Du Bellay), 241 salvation in, 183
Delègue, Yves, 327n15 self-examination in, 191–92
DellaNeva, JoAnn, 326n11 sources of inspiration, 161–62, 164, 166,
Delorme, Ferdinand, 76n67 167–69, 182, 187–89
Denis the Carthusian, 119 spirituality in, 178–83
Denisot, Nicolas, 89, 109–10 terza rima in, 162
Dentière, Marie, 11–12 theology of, 120, 178, 181
Déploration de Florimond Robertet visionary framework of, 162, 168–69,
(Clément Marot), 134, 137n64, 151, 177 175–76, 193–94
déploration (genre), 176, 177 Diet of Augsburg, 40
Les Derniers Œuvres (manuscript), 144 Diet of Speyer, 40
Des Périers, Bonaventure, 10, 83, 281 Discord estant en l’homme par la
Deschamps, Eustache, 242 contrariete de l’esperit et de la chair, 63,
Désert, 285, 288, 294, 301–04, 320 115, 121, 166, 221
characters in, 298 Discours de la Court (Claude Chappuys),
dating and performance, 284 220
stage arrangements, 292 Divina nomina, or Divine Names
structure of, 302–03 (Pseudo-Dionysius), 121, 153
Devant l’ymaige du crucifix, 141 Divine Comedy (Dante), 168, 169, 173n31,
dialogism, 21–22, 161, 162–63, 281. 195, 214, 215, 221
dialogue, inner, 187, 189–90, 192 divine election, 251–52, 255
Dialogue de Dieu et de l’Homme, 239, 247, Dobbins, Frank, 243n17
263 De Doctrina Christiana (Saint Augustine),
Dialogue de Regulus et de Lucia, 239, 247, 215, 223
263 Dolet, Étienne, 52
392 index
Doré, Pierre, 55 on monastic life, 82, 334

Dottin, Georges, 237n1, 239, 243n18, 244n21, The Soldier and the Carthusian, 84
245, 246, 248, 249n32 Esguillon d’amour divin, 150
Douglas, Richard M., 70n39 Essay (abbey), 78, 80–81
dream narratives, 167, 169, 175, 187, 194, Estienne, Henri, 368
195, 196, 197, 198, 205, 243 Étampes, Mme d’, 42, 43, 45n52, 50
Driart, Pierre, 76n69 Eucharist, 22–23, 269
Droz, Eugénie, 53n68 devotion to, 55–56, 62, 87
Du Bellay, Guillaume, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, and confessional division, 63–64, 120,
47, 48 253
Du Bellay, Jean, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45n52, in works, 233, 253–54
47, 48, 78, 82, 87 evangelical communities, 48–49
Du Bellay, Joachim, 240n7, 241, 242 evangelical printers, 51–52, 115–19
Du Bois, Simon, 6n14, 7, 51, 96, 115, 120n37, evangelical publications, 118–19
121, 259, 278 evangelical reform. See reform
condemnation of works printed by, 118 evangelical writers
Du Chastel, Pierre, 66, 71, 172–73, 212 linguistic code, 151
Du Mans, Peletier, 241, 266 network of, 85, 87
Du Pont, Gratien, 245, 246n25 persecution of, 52, 85
Dubois, Claude-Gilbert, 327n15 support to, 30, 51, 52
Dudon, Father, 60 suspected of heresy, 86–87
Duhl, Olga Anna, 313n35 Evangelicals, 118. See also French
Dunn-Lardeau, Brenda, 122–23, 315n36, Evangelicals; German Evangelicals;
316n38 Swiss Evangelicals
Dupont-Ferrier, Gustave, 324n5 doctrines, 22–25, 31
Duprat, Antoine (chancellor), 35, 36, 47 linguistic complicity of, 151
Durosoir, Georgie, 243n17, n18 Evangelism
Duval, Edwin M., 226n29, 241, 242n11, 266, in works, 296, 331–33
267, 276, 323n2, 331 Excuse de Jehan Calvin, à Messieurs les
Nicodémites (Calvin), 12–13
Ebreo, Leone, 100n22 L’expérience de l’amye de court contre la
Echard, Jacques, 142n79 contre amye (Paul Angier), 342
education extreme unction, or last rites, 16, 62, 142,
of Marguerite, 1–2, 90 233n44
of nuns, 82–83 “eye of faith,” 24–25, 255–56
of women, 83
Egasse Du Boulay, César, 64n11 La Fable du Faux Cuyder, 63, 145n91
Eire, Carlos M. N., 12n34 Fabri, Pierre, 133n56, 245n22
Éléonore of Austria (Queen of France), 84, Fabrists, 34, 35, 36, 37
124, 175 Faculty of Theology, Paris. See Sorbonne
Elizabeth I (Queen of England), 7, 43, 60, faith. See also foy confiance; foy vive
120 and charity, or works, 23–25, 119, 154–57,
Ennasuite (storyteller in Heptaméron), 336, 181–83
345–46, 361 justification by, 53, 119, 120, 149, 178,
Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre (Marie 181–82
Dentière), 11–12 law vs., 255
“Epistre du despourveu” (Clément practical approach to, 22, 27
Marot), 5 salvation by, 31, 81
L’Epistre chrestienne tresutile, 118 theme in works, 20
Erasmus, Desiderius, 33, 81, 91, 181, 319 Familiere exposition (Gérard Roussel), 19,
The Abbot and the Learned Woman, 22–23, 53, 56
83 Farel, Guillaume, 4, 7, 10, 11, 25
condemnation of work, 66 Farge, James K., 4n8, 32n9, 64n12, 65n13,
on marriage, 343 81n78
index 393
Farnese, Cardinal, 68, 69, 70 heresy proceedings by, 8–10, 39, 47, 65,
Farnese, Horace, 69 72
Farnese, Vittoria, 69 in La Navire, 15, 97, 141, 162, 165, 174, 176,
Faucher, Denis, 82, 83, 87 183–86, 201–07, 317
Febvre, Lucien, 59, 60, 61, 67, 74, 266n65, in Les Prisons, 171
323n1 love affairs, 230, 344
Ferguson, Gary, 22n54, 23, 52n66, 83n86, military campaigns, 2, 6, 34, 36, 43–45,
121–22, 138n67, 139n68, 141n76, 148, 150, 166
154n117, n118, 157n128, 178n43, 181n47, 182, monastic reform, 335
183n51, 185n55, 232n40, 233, 249n33, 253, in Mont-de-Marsan, 282
323n2, 327n13, 333n27, 356n65, 358n70, promotion of reform to, 29, 32, 34–47,
n71, n73, 365n81 49, 58, 86
Ferguson, Margaret W., 86n86 Frank, Félix, 15n43, 120, 287
Festugière, J., 101 Freccero, Carla, 352n59, 354n61
Ficino, Marsilio, 89, 91–92, 96, 132, 255–56, French Evangelicals, 18, 25, 31, 53, 118
342 Frotté, Jean de, 75n66, 76n68
Commentary on Symposium, De amore, funeral tributes to Marguerite, 109–10
89, 91, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 107
Platonica theologia de immortalitate Garfinkel, Harold, 151n104
animorum, 95, 97 Garnier, or Garnier-Mathez, Isabelle, 7n20,
Fillon, Artus, 66, 74, 77 20, 23n56, n58, 25, 119n31, 120n36, 133n57,
Finotti, Fabio, 195–96 136n63, 151n104, n105, 153n113, 155n123,
Flaminio, Marco Antonio, 275 156n125, n126, n127, 183n51, n52
Floride (character in Heptaméron), 344, Garrault, Christophe, 78
353, 356, 362, 364 Gautier de Coinci, 248
Folengo, Jean-Baptiste, 87 Gaveran, Marie, 75
Fontaine, Charles, 342 Geburon (storyteller in Heptaméron), 338,
Fontana, Bartolommeo, 68n24, 70n35, 76 346, 350, 363–64
Fontanella, Lucia, 17n50, 112n12, 143–44, Geiger, Ulrich, 44n50
145n89, 146 Gentil, Étienne, 73
Fontevrault, Order of, 77, 83, 84n87, 228n34 Gerbel, Nicolas, 40n30
Ford, Philip, 20 German Evangelicals, 30, 41
Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 114 German Protestants, 31, 40, 42
foy confiance, 153, 183, 185, 233 alliance with France, 42–43
foy vive, 23, 45, 131, 154–57, 183, 184, 308 proposed alliance with England, 43
Fragonard, Marie-Madeleine, 31n5, 55n76 Gerrish, B. A., 332n26
Franciscan Order, 333–38, 367–68 Gerson, Jean, 150, 271n73
François, Michel, 100n23, 324n4 Gherardini, Brunero, 140n69
François I (King of France), 1–6, 11, 23, 76, Giacone, Franco, 6, 161n1
325 Girard, Jean, 114, 118
building projects, 219–20 Giunti, Filippo, 100n22
captivity in Spain, 6, 37–39, 46, 118 The Glasse of the Synnefull Soule (trans.
in Chansons spirituelles, 15, 20, 238, Elizabeth I), 7, 120
244–45, 259–60, 262, 268–69 Glasson, Simone, 16n49, 33n13, 171n24,
in Comédie sur le trespas du Roy, 15, 211n1, 219n18, 227n31, 228n33, 255n47,
282, 317 338n35
death, 15–16, 19, 45, 65, 76, 166, 172–73, Glidden, Hope, 341n38
175, 212, 244, 262–63 Golden Legend ( Jacobus de Voragine), 123
domestic policy, 47 good works. See charity
education, 1–2, 90 Gorris Camos, Rosanna, 325n10, 328n15,
exchanging poetry with Marguerite, 329n18, 370n91
38–39, 45–47 grace, 18, 31, 45, 60, 67, 91, 100, 105, 119, 122,
foreign policy, 39–45, 70–71 129, 131, 157, 165, 208, 259, 260, 296
in Heptaméron, 344, 347 Briçonnet on, 250–52, 253, 257
394 index
in Chansons spirituelles, 251, 253, 261, Decameron as model for, 14, 324–25,
263, 276 326, 327–29, 330–31, 333, 346n52,
in Dialogue, 176, 181, 182 348n53, 358, 359–60
in Heptaméron, 334, 340, 364 dialogism in, 21, 294, 323
in Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, 129, 131, evangelical sympathies in, 25, 30, 63,
148, 149, 154 331–33
in La Navire, 177, 185–86, 192, 209, 210 “eye of faith” in, 255
in plays, 296, 297, 307, 308, 309, 320 flooding in, 328
in Les Prisons, 215, 223, 227, 228, 233 forgiveness in, 337
Gravdal, Kathryn, 354n62 grace in, 334, 340, 364
Gray, Floyd, 342n44, 354n61 “Italian” vices, 358–59
Gréban, Arnoul, 294, 296, 298, 300, 301 judgment in, 329, 360–64
Greene, Thomas M., 326n11 love in, 89, 100–07
Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 370n89 lust in, 100–01, 103, 336
Groslot, Jacques, 48 manuscripts of, 265, 324, 367, 369
Grossoles, Érard de, 66 marriage in, 343–50
Grouselle, Christian, 6n14, 161n1 on monastic life, 3, 73, 84
Gruget, Claude, 324, 358n72, 367, 369 Nothingness and All in, 365
Guarnieri, Romana, 228n34 open-endedness of, 323, 360, 365
Guibert, Jean, 48 position of women in, 100, 331–32,
340–43, 350–53
Haag, E. and E., 59 pride in, 335, 336, 337, 338
Habert, François, 156n125 prologue, 270, 325, 326–31
Hampton, Timothy, 354n61 publication of, 324, 367
Hasenohr, Geneviève, 171n26, 263n58, relation with other works, 247, 315, 316,
281n1, 283n7, 8, n9, 287, 288, 295n22, 321, 323, 364
297n24, 304n26 religious character of, 323, 364
Haute-Bruyère (Fontevrist priory), 77 royal involvement in, 14–15, 50, 325,
Hector of Troy, 72 326, 333
Heller, Henry, 4n8, 5n13, 29n2, 62, 67n21, Scripture in, 328, 332, 360, 363
91n5, 115n23, 161n2, 178n43, 213n9, 249n34, setting, 77, 325
335n29 sexual violence in, 333, 339, 353–55
Hémardinquer, J. J., 31n7 sin/vices in, 337, 358–359
Henri II d’Albret (King of Navarre), 7, 10, sodomy in, 359–60
15, 16, 317 sources of inspiration, 324, 326, 342,
Henri II (King of France), 14, 16, 17, 26, 29, 346n52, 348, 356, 357–58, 360, 366
50, 109, 175, 317, 325 storytellers in, 265, 325, 326–27, 329–32,
Henri IV (King of France, King of Navarre), 356–57, 360–64, 365–66
16, 371n92 truthfulness in, 327
Henry VII (King of England), 2, 29 Virgin Mary in, 329–30, 369
Henry VIII (King of England), 2, 4, 18, 39, Heptaméron (1559, ed. Claude Gruget), 324,
42, 43, 44–45, 68, 120n37 358n72, 367, 369
break with Rome, 39, 72, 86 heresy measures, 8–10, 18, 25, 31, 36, 39, 48
Heptaméron, 14–15, 17, 30 Héroët, Antoine, 217, 342
adultery in, 344–47, 355–56 Hesse, Landgrave of, 41, 43
anticlericalism in, 83, 330, 333–34, 335 Heudé, Jacqueline, 77
avarice in, 336, 358 Heyden, Sebald, 115, 116
charity in, 337, 363, 366 Higman, Francis M., 6n14, 7n20, 9n23, n25,
clerical abuse in, 333–34, 336–37, 15n43, 64n11, 119n30, 154n118
338–39, 358 Hircan (storyteller in Heptaméron), 100,
confession in, 337, 351 330, 346, 356, 358, 359, 361–62, 363
courtly love in, 356–58 Histoire des amans fortunez (1558
dating of, 323, 325 Heptaméron, ed. Pierre Boaistuau), 324,
death in, 21 367, 369
index 395
Histoires tragiques (Matteo Bandello), dating of, 311

367–68 Eucharist in, 312
Hoffmann, George, 266n65 evangelical sympathies in, 311, 314, 321
Hohenlohe, Sigismund von, 37, 40 manuscripts of, 287
Holban, Marie, 124, 130n50 publication of, 288
Holy Innocents, Feast of, 284, 300, sources of inspiration, 306, 311, 312
354–55 stage arrangements, 291
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 263 structure of, 311
Huchon, Mireille, 14n39, 325n6, 326n12 Institutes of Christian Religion (Calvin),
Hughes, Philip Edgcumbe, 3n7 86, 253
Hugues, Jacques, 81n78 The Institution of Christian Marriage
Huizinga, Johan, 173n34 (Erasmus), 343
Hurault, Robert, 90 Issoudun (abbey), 78
“Hymne triumphal” (Pierre de Ronsard),
89, 107 Jacobus de Voragine, 123
Jacquart, Jean, 77n71
Iakounina, Irina, 235 Jean d’Angoulême, or d’Orléans, 2, 324
idolatry, 59, 218 Jean (son of Marguerite), 7
illuminatio, 127, 128, 180, 234, 300 Jeanne III d’Albret (Queen of Navarre), 7,
imagery 16, 65, 85, 109, 283, 320, 321
ascent of soul, 20, 93, 95, 99, 106 conversion to Calvinism, 16n47
body as prison of soul, 94–99, 134, 162, marriage, 10–11, 17, 42–44, 68, 321,
167, 170, 174, 176, 230–31 370–71
cords/ropes, 217, 337–38 Jeanne de France, 76
developed by Briçonnet, 92–94 Jeanneret, Michel, 360n75
fire, 179, 184, 216–17, 218, 225, 229, 265 John, Saint, 215, 220, 221, 223, 235n49,
flooding, 21, 107, 179, 328, 329, 331 296n23, 307, 311, 313, 317, 357, 366
light, 91, 95, 97, 173, 225, 228, 234, 235, Joly de Choin, Jean, 71
257, 264, 299 Jonsson, Einar Mar, 111n8, 113n14
mountains, 264, 329, 331 Jordan, Constance, 341n39
prison, 134, 212, 349, 364. See also Les Jourda, Pierre, 1n1, 2n2, n3, 3n4, 5n12, 6n14,
Prisons 7n20, 11n28, n30, 14n38, 15n43, n44, 29n2,
ship as soul, 93, 97–98, 172 30n4, 37n20, 38n24, 39n28, 41n32, n34,
spiritual ascent, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 43n46, 44n49, 49n61, 50n63, 60, 61, 62,
128 69, 73, 74n57, n58, n60, n62, 76, 77, 78,
sun, 173, 217, 225 81, 84, 85, 90n4, 116n25, 120, 125n46, 161n1,
Imitatio Christi, 140, 252 166n6, n7, n8, 167n12, 168n15, 169n18,
In Praise of Marriage (Erasmus), 343 172n27, 173n31, 212, 230, 244, 286n12
Indexes of prohibited books, 65 jours gras, 284, 285, 318
L’Initiatoire instruction, 19, 52 judgment, 134–35, 329, 360–64
Innocents, 294, 300–01 justification, 52n66, 53, 253
characters in, 298 by faith, 119, 120, 149, 178, 181, 182, 183
dating and performance, 284
interaction with audience in, 289–90 Kastner, Leon, 168n14
mystery tradition and, 300 Keane, Teresa Mary, 370n89
sources of inspiration, 301 Kelly, Joan, 341n39
stage arrangements, 291 Kemp, William, 115n22, 117n26
structure of, 300 Keyser, Martin de, 51
L’Inquisiteur, 21, 276, 285, 306, 311–13, 319, Knecht, Robert J., 1n1, 6n17, 9n23, 10n26,
320 11n30, 15n44, 42n38, 47n58
allusions in, 311 Koopmans, Jelle, 309n31
characters in, 307, 311 Krawczyk, Dariusz, 266n64
childhood in, 307, 311 Kupisz, Kasimierz, 344n49
conversion in, 308, 311–12, 321 Kushner, Eva, 163n4, 170n19, 187
396 index
La Borderie, Bertrand de, 342 De Libertate christiana (Luther), 121

La Fons, Jean Lucas de, 72 linguistic complicity of Evangelicals, 137,
La Haye, Jean de, or Symon Silvius, 15, 89, 151
90n2, 92, 97, 98, 100n22, 101, 102, 103 Livre de vraye et parfaicte oraison, 156
La Jaille, Marie de, 77 Livre du chemin de long estude (Christine
La Rochefoucauld, Mme de, 142 de Pizan), 169
Lacanian psychoanalysis, 126–27 Loches, Nicolas Barthelemy de, 141
Laffitte, Marie-Pierre, 167n11 Longarine (storyteller in Heptaméron), 328,
LaGuardia, David, 327n13, 362n79 346, 348, 358, 359
Lajarte, Philippe de, 323n1, 360n75 Lorraine, Cardinal de, 87
Lancerio (wine-steward of pope), 66 Losse, Deborah N., 341n39, 351n57
Lardon, Sabine, 6n15, 141n72 Louis XII (King of France), 1, 2, 90
Lassus, Roland de, 249n32 Louise de Savoie, 1, 2, 3, 4, 33, 90
Laura (beloved of Petrarch), 167, 168, anti-heresy measures, 36
194–99, 201, 202, 218 attitude toward reform, 32, 35, 36
Le Cadet, Nicolas, 266n64, 323n2 death of, 7, 19, 69, 230, 260
Le Gall, Jean-Marie, 3n5, 18, 19, 25, 33n12, regency of, 6, 166
67n21, 73n53, n54, 80n77, 81, 82n79, 83, love
335n30, 336n31 courtly, 217, 307, 320, 321, 354, 356–58,
Le Hir, Yves, 324n4 362
Le Maçon, Antoine, 14, 325, 326, 358n71 earthly, 84, 102, 103, 186, 190, 194, 201, 216
Le Prince (Claude Nourry), 118 Ficino on, 90, 91–92, 98, 101–03, 107, 342
Le Roux de Lincy, Antoine, 211, 324n4 heavenly, 93, 101, 102, 103
Lebègue, Raymond, 141n70, 143n80, 146n96 neo-Platonic, 84, 89, 90, 100–07
Lecointe, Jean, 159n131, 177, 185, 192 in Les Prisons, 235
Lecoq, Anne-Marie, 5n10 Lubac, Henri de, 123n44
Lefèvre, Sylvie, 324n3, n4, 330n22, 358n72, Ludolph the Carthusian, 150, 304n26
369n87 Luigi, Pier, 69
Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, 2, 100n22, 252, Luther, Martin, 50, 58, 63, 91, 119, 181, 182,
295–96, 306, 331 220, 304
career, 33, 39 condemnation of, 4, 32, 232n42
on charity, 23 on confession, 232–33
Commentarii initiatorii in quatuor correspondence with, 43
evangelia, 226 Kurtz begreiff und ordenung aller
on confession, 232 vorgeschrieben, 6
De Maria Magdalena et triduo Christi De Libertate christiana, 121
disceptatio, 3 on monasticism, 80, 83
influence on works, 153, 228, 251, opposing Pseudo-Dionysius, 67
295–96, 312 theologia crucis, 140
Meaux group, 4, 34, 73 translation of New Testament, 36
protection of, 6–7, 25, 36, 37 translations sent to Marguerite, 40
reform program of, 35 De votis monasticis, 80
sources of inspiration, 58, 153 Lutheranism, 61, 85
teaching Marguerite, 90, 123 Lyon, 76
translation of Bible, 36, 37, 51, 118, Lyons, John D., 256n49, 327n13, 330n21,
155n121, 306, 332 351n59, 361
Lefranc, Abel, 60, 61, 62, 64, 75n65, 84n87,
85, 90, 171, 172, 211, 212n4, n5, 239n4, 244 McKinley, Mary B., 11n29, 14n40, 54n73,
Lemaire de Belges, Jean, 168, 174 226n29, 327n13, 339n36, 345n50, 351n58,
Léonard, Émile, 62 354n64
Lérins (abbey), 73, 82, 84 Maclean, Ian, 341n39
Leushuis, Reinier, 20, 21, 187n58, 344n47, Macrin, Salmon, 87
349n54 mal-mariées, 344–45
Levy, Kenneth Jay, 243n18 Le Malade, 21, 286, 309–11, 319
index 397
characters in, 307 L’Adolescence clémentine, 52, 140–41,

conversion in, 308, 310, 321 243, 244
dating of, 309 Coq à l’âne à Lyon, 12
evangelical sympathies in, 321 Déploration de Florimond Robertet, 134,
faith as medicine in, 309 137, 154n117, 176, 177
manuscripts of, 287 “Du jour des Innocents,” 355
preaching in, 310, 314 “Epistre du despourveu,” 5
publication of, 288 influence on works, 243–44, 248,
stage arrangements, 290 288–89, 312
structure of, 285, 309 Le Temple de Cupido, 226
Malingre, Matthieu, 66, 274–75 on Marguerite, 5, 12
manuscripts protection of, 9, 12, 48, 49
of Chansons spirituelles, 238–39, 240, sources of inspiration, 295
263 use of chant, 241–43, 262, 266
of Comédie sur le trespas du Roy, 282, Marot, Jean, 4
287 Marquets, Anne de, 275
of Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, marriage
166 adultery, 130, 344–47, 355–56
of Heptaméron, 324, 367, 369 clandestine, 106n28, 348–49, 351
of L’Inquisiteur, 287 in Heptaméron, 343–50
of Le Malade, 287 mal-mariées, 344–45
of La Navire, 171, 172, 287 of Marguerite, 2, 7, 33, 75, 166
of Le Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié, mystical marriage theme, 5, 129–32, 178,
143–46 179, 190, 267, 356–58, 364–65
of Les Prisons, 211, 287 marriage arrangements
of Mont-de-Marsan, 287 for Jeanne d’Albret, 10–11, 42–44, 68
of Parfaits amants, 287 for Marguerite, 2, 7, 75
of Quatre Femmes, 287 Martineau, or Martineau-Génieys,
Marczuk, or Marczuk-Szwed, Barbara, Christine, 5n13, 6n14, 29n2, 67n21, 89–90,
123, 128n48, 219n17, 287, 288n18, 293n19, 91n5, 99, 100, 115n23, 161n1, n2, 169n17,
304n26, 307n28, 308n29, n30 174, 175, 176n39, 213n9, 249n34, 335n29
Marguerite de France, 14, 15n42, 109, 142, Mary Magdalene, 3, 33, 123
144, 175 Massaut, Jean-Pierre, 3n7
Marguerite de Lorraine, 3, 19, 33, 75, Masurier, Martial, 36
229–30, 260 Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle, 77n70, 324n4,
Marguerite de Navarre 325n8, 341n39, 343n46, 347n53
childhood, 1–2 Meaux Group, 4, 19, 25, 34, 48, 73, 251. See
death, 16, 89, 109, 142, 143, 159, 367 also “Navarrian network”
education, 1–2, 90 evangelization of laity, 35–36
marriages, 2, 7, 33, 75, 166 Marguerite protecting, 6, 36, 39
Marguerite de Valois, 275 Meerhoff, Kees, 132n55
Marguerite d’Oingt, 114 Mégret, Jacques, 145n91
Marguerites de la Marguerite des Meigret, Aimé, 37, 48
princesses, 15, 50, 63, 118, 120, 147, 166, Melanchthon, André, 48
172, 237, 238, 239, 243, 259, 268, 282, Melanchthon, Philipp, 39, 41, 43, 48, 58
286–87, 315 Mellinghoff-Bourgerie, Viviane, 77n72,
examined by Spanish Inquisition, 65 249n34
preface to, 50–51 memento mori theme, 174, 176, 188–89, 193,
Maria, Gabriel, 75, 76 206, 207, 209, 230
Marichal, Robert, 98n19, 141n76, 144, memory
145n87, n89, 163, 169n17, 172, 173n30, n31, in works, 164, 192–210
n32, n33, 174, 175, 176n39, 184 Menchi, Silvana Seidel, 66
Marie de France, 344 Mesme, Jacques de, 71
Marot, Clément, 12, 116, 220, 281, 283 Meung, Jean de, 228
398 index
Michault, Pierre, 174 Oraison à Dieu, 128, 131, 133–37

Michel, Jean, 48 publication of, 7, 17, 60, 119, 120–21
Miernowski, Jan, 20, 23n57, 24, 226n28, purgatio and illuminatio in, 128
323n2, 358n68, 362n80, 365n81, 366n82 reception of, 110, 113, 120–27
Miles, Margaret, 343n45 Saint Paul in, 119, 136
Millet, Olivier, 21, 171n26, 243n16, 263n58, Scripture in, 114, 115, 121, 125, 127, 158
281n1, 283n7, n8, n9, 288, 295n22, 297n24, second-person plural in, 135–36
304n26 silence in, 125, 135
Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié, 16–17, 20, 63, sinful soul in, 113, 122–23, 129–30, 135,
110, 112–13, 137–59 149
biblical quotations in, 121, 149 sources of inspiration, 121, 123–24, 151
charity in, 23 structure of, 50, 124–28, 129, 130–33
Christ on cross in, 113, 137–38, 140–41, sun motif in, 225
149, 159 symbolism in, 147–48
compared to Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, theology of, 120, 151
147–59 title of, 119
composition of, 142 voir in, 111–12
conversion in, 137 Miroir des simples âmes. See Le Miroir des
death in, 114, 152, 159 âmes simples et anéanties
foy vive in, 157 Miroir des vierges (Marguerite d’Oingt), 114
manuscripts, 143–46 miroir (genre), 111, 113–14
mirror motif in, 111, 112, 137, 138–39 Le Miroir des âmes simples et anéanties
publication of, 142, 143 (Marguerite Porete), 114, 228, 229, 307
reception of, 121, 146–47 Mirouer de la croix. See Miroir de
redemption in, 139, 149 Jésus-Christ crucifié
Saint Paul in, 149 Mirouer des Pécheurs, 114
Scripture in, 147, 150, 158 Le Mirouer de vraye religion (Antonio
sources of inspiration, 150, 153 Caracciolo), 19, 79, 81, 82
structure of, 138 Le Mirouer d’or de l’ame pecheresse
style, 150 tresutile et profitable, 119
symbolism in, 147–48 mirror motif
theology of, 148, 151 in Oraison funebre de l’incomparable
Virgin Mary in, 153 Marguerite, 109
Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, 68, 96, 109–37, Saint Augustine on, 111
147–59 in works, 109–13, 137
biblical quotations in, 114, 121 Miserere, 125
censure of, 50, 63, 64–65, 117 Molinet, Jean, 174
compared to Miroir de Jésus-Christ monastic communities
crucifié, 147–59 corruption in, 3
conversion in, 231 Luther and, 80
death in, 20, 132, 134–35, 151, 152, 231 monastic life, 76, 80, 81, 82–83
Dieu seul in, 153–54 commitment to, 83–84
evangelical sympathies in, 113, 118, 119, monastic reform
158, 159 chronology, 74
faith as medicine in, 309 evangelical reform and, 83–84
first-person expression in, 110, 122, 126 role in, 18, 33, 34, 73–85, 335
forgiveness in, 130 monastic vows, 75, 80–81, 84, 337
foy vive in, 131, 154–57 monasticism, 60, 83–84. See also clergy
grace in, 129, 131, 148, 149, 154 Monferran, Jean-Charles, 241n9
judgment in, 120, 134–35, 149 Mont-de-Marsan, 16, 274, 318–20, 342
Lacanian categories applied to, 126–27 characters in, 272, 282, 306, 307, 308,
light imagery in, 97 318, 319
mirror motif in, 111, 131 conversion in, 21, 308
numerological structure, 128–37 dialogism in, 320, 342
index 399
evangelical sympathies in, 318–19, 321 carnal vs. spiritual in, 164, 165, 184,
manuscripts of, 287 192–93, 200–01, 206–07
performance of, 283, 285, 318 charity in, 186
religious dispute in, 285 consolatio and, 173–74, 176, 184, 202
singing in, 319 cross motif in, 141
sources of inspiration, 273, 307 dialogism in, 21, 161, 162–63, 176–78, 186,
stage arrangements, 292 192–93
structure of, 318 doctrinal issues in, 178, 183, 185
vices in, 318 dream narrative in, 175
Montaiglon, Anatole de, 211 foy vive in, 184
Monter, William E., 9, 47n58 François I in, 97, 162, 165, 176, 183, 184,
Montmorency, Anne de, 37, 41, 42, 47, 67, 185, 192–93, 201–07, 282, 317
78, 84 free will in, 185
Moore, W. G., 6, 61 grace in, 177, 185–86, 192, 209, 210
Morel, Jean de, 143n80 inner dialogue in, 189, 192
Moron, Daniel, 87 manuscript, 144, 171, 172, 287
mortality, 187–89. See also memento mori memento mori in, 174, 176, 193, 206, 207,
theme 209
Mortière, Jacques de, 295n21 memory in, 164, 192–93, 200, 202–10
mortification, writing as, 133 mourning in, 15, 20, 163
Moulins (or Desmoulins/Du Moulin) de narrative structure, 165
Rochefort, François de, 1–2, 3, 33, 90 Petrarch’s influence on, 164, 173, 192,
mountains motif, 329, 370 194–96, 206
Mourant, Joseph, 208n74 planctus and, 173–74, 184
mourning. See also death; Dialogue en publication of, 171, 172
forme de vision nocturne; La Navire resemblance with Dialogue, 162, 163,
of François I, 172 176, 178
in works, 20, 162, 163 self-examination in, 192
mummeries, 283, 284, 315 sources of inspiration, 164, 173n31
Murphy, Stephen, 89 spirituality in, 178, 180, 183–86
music for chansons, 237, 241–43, 246, 247, terza rima in, 162, 173, 200, 202
249 visionary framework, 162, 175–76
Mystère des Actes des Apôtres, 288 negative theology, 125, 129, 305
mystery plays, 294–96 neo-Platonic imagery, 94–100
neo-Platonic love, 84, 89, 90, 100–07
La Nativité, 276, 288, 294, 296–98, 305 neo-Platonic macrocosm, 101–02
characters in, 297–98 Nérac, 76, 78
conversion in, 308 Nicholas of Cusa, 91, 153, 225, 228, 261
dating and performance of, 283–84 Nicholas of Lyra, 123n44
interaction with audience, 289 Nicodemism, 12, 13, 57, 61, 311
mystery-play tradition and, 294 Nîmes, 48
sources of inspiration, 296 non-biblical plays, 284–85. See also
stage arrangements, 292 Comédie sur le trespas du Roy;
structure of, 296–97 L’Inquisiteur; Le Malade;
nativity plays, 294–95 Mont-de-Marsan; Parfaits amants;
Navarre, 10–11, 15, 16, 19, 42, 325 Quatre femmes; Trop Prou Peu Moins
Collège de, 7 dating of, 287–89
“Navarrian Network,” 85–87, 118–20, 131, manuscripts of, 287
244, 259. See also Meaux Group multiplication and differentiation of
theological and linguistic strategy, 151 characters, 293–94
works by, 120, 136, 151 publication of, 287
La Navire, 17, 19, 50 relation with biblical plays, 284–85,
body/soul dichotomy in, 176 304–09, 321
Briçonnet’s influence on, 184 stage arrangements, 290–92
400 index
Norton, Glyn, 328n15 stage arrangements, 292

Nothingness and All, 96, 261, 264, 266, 306, structure of, 320
310, 313, 365 Paris, Gaston, 172
Notre-Dame-de-Cléry, 84 Parlamente (storyteller in Heptaméron),
Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, 84 100, 330, 331, 336, 340, 348–49, 356, 357,
Notre-Dame-de-Liesse, 84 358–59, 364
Notre-Dame-de-Serrance, 77, 325, 329 passion plays, 294–95. See also Gréban,
Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines, 84 Arnoul
Nuptiis, Pierre de, 48 Pater Noster, 50, 156n124
Pau, 16, 142
Observant Franciscans, 73, 335 Paul, Saint, 61, 221
ode (genre), 240–41 on death, 230
Oecolampadius, 36 Epistle to the Galatians, 215, 222, 224
Oisille (storyteller in Heptaméron), 329–30, Epistle to the Romans, 348, 358, 360, 366
331, 332, 334, 335, 340, 343, 345, 354, 357, First Epistle to the Corinthians, 226, 230,
359, 362, 363, 364, 366, 367, 369 340
Olivétan, Pierre-Robert, 288 First Epistle to the Thessalonians, 251
Olivier, François, 43n42, 48 in Heptaméron, 357, 358
Olivier, Pierre, 122, 142, 146, 147, 148–50 in L’Inquisiteur, 311
Omont, Henri, 150n103 in Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, 112, 119
Oppède, Jean Meynier, baron d’, 10, 87 as source of inspiration, 136, 158, 213
Oraison à Dieu, 128, 131, 133–37 on women, 332
death in, 134–35, 152 Paul III (pope), 11, 29, 60, 66, 68, 70, 313
Saint Paul in, 136 Pavia, Battle of, 34, 69, 230
second person plural in, 135–36 Peace of Ardres, 44
soul in, 135 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 208n74
Oraison à Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, 63, Pellegrini, Carlo, 161n1
115, 137, 141, 287 Pellicier, Guillaume, 71
Oraison funebre de l’incomparable Pendergrass, Jan N., 83n83, n84, n85
Marguerite, royne de Navarre (Charles Pensées pieuses (Marguerite de Lorraine),
de Sainte-Marthe), 109 75
L’Oraison de Jesus Christ (pub. Simon Du perfectio, 127, 180, 234, 300
Bois), 118 Pérouse, Gabriel-A., 327n13
Oria, Yon, 99 Perrenoud-Wörner, Judith, 262n57
Orléans, 48 persecution of reformers, 8–10, 18, 25, 32,
Ory, Matthieu, 64 36, 41, 47, 48, 50, 57, 85, 86
Petit, Guillaume, 35, 64
Pagels, Elaine, 343n45 Petit œuvre dévot et contemplatif, 141, 158,
Paget, William, 43n47 163
Pantin, Isabelle, 7n20, 20, 23n56, n58, 25, Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 191, 218
143n81, 146n95, 265, 266n63 Canzoniere, 217
papacy, relations with, 11, 29, 39, 43–44, 60, on pride, 188, 189
66–73, 80, 86, 313 and Saint Augustine, 187–89, 193, 206
Papillon, Antoine, 80 Secretum, 164, 187, 189, 192, 206
Papon, Jean, 346n51 Triumphus Mortis, 164, 167–68, 169, 173,
La Parfaicte Amye (Antoine Héroët), 217, 194–99
342 Phaedo (Plato), 89, 93n9, 94
Parfaits amants, 283, 285, 320–21 Phaedrus (Plato), 103, 230
characters in, 320–21 Philander, Guillaume, 211, 219n19
conversion in, 316 Philippe de Luxembourg, 77
dating and performance of, 320 Le Philosophe de Court (Philibert de
love in, 321 Vienne), 220
manuscripts of, 287 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 153
index 401
Pidoux, Pierre, 242n12 Poor Clares (convents), 76–77

Piéjus, Marie-François, 367n83 pope. See papacy
pilgrimages, 3, 84–85 Porete, Marguerite, 114, 228–29, 307
placards, affaire des, 8–9, 14, 41, 49, 51, 62, Porrer, Sheila M., 3n6, n7
72, 118, 309 Potter, David L., 42n38
planctus, 173–74, 184 Poulet, Georges, 234n47
Plato, 230 Poyet, Guillaume, 47, 48
on love, 235, 342 Premierfait, Laurent de, 324, 326, 358n71
Phaedo, 89, 93n9, 94 pride, 188, 189, 216, 220, 221, 222, 223, 267,
Phaedrus, 103, 230 296, 308, 318, 319, 335, 336, 337, 338. See
Republic, 96 also cuyder
as source of inspiration, 213 in Chansons spirituelles, 267
Symposium, 91, 99, 101, 102 in Heptaméron, 335, 336, 337, 338
Platonica theologia de immortalitate of learning, 82
animorum (Marsilio Ficino), 95–97 Petrarch on, 188, 189
plays, 163, 171, 274. See also biblical plays; in plays, 296–97, 299, 308, 318, 319
non-biblical plays in Les Prisons, 216, 220, 221, 222, 223,
actors, 283, 286 235n49
authority of Scripture in, 304 printers, evangelical. See evangelical
carnal vs. spiritual in, 308 printers
characters in, 293–94 prison motif, 134, 212, 349, 364. See also Les
charity in, 308–09, 311, 312, 314, 318, 319 Prisons
childhood in, 307–08 Les Prisons, 17, 140, 144
conversion in, 296, 299, 300, 308, 310, ascent in, 234
311–12, 321 attribution of, 211
dating of, 287–88 biblical exegesis in, 224–26
dramatic dialogism in, 294 Briçonnet’s influence on, 212, 213
dramatic genres, 285–86 charity in, 216
dramaturgy, 289–94 confession in, 212, 214, 216 231–34
grace in, 296, 297, 307, 308, 309, 320 conversion in, 20, 214–16, 218, 227, 228,
humility in, 307 234
interaction with audience, 289 corruption in, 220
love in, 307 courtiers in, 217, 220–21, 235
manuscripts, 286 dating of, 15, 16, 212
morality and, 286 death in, 19, 229–30, 231, 233, 260
music and song in, 281 “eye of faith” in, 255
pride in, 296–97, 299, 308, 318, 319 fire in, 225
Scripture in, 297, 298, 299, 302–03, François I in, 171
304–05, 311, 314, 319 good vs. bad theologians in, 53–54
silence in, 307 grace in, 215, 223, 227, 228, 233
similarities with other works, 281–82, idolatry in, 218
304 interpretation of, 234–35
sin in, 308 knowledge in, 222–24, 265
sources of inspiration, 294, 304, 305 language in, 229
spiritual themes, 304–09 love in, 235
stage arrangements, 289–92 lust in, 219, 222–24, 265
Virgin Mary in, 284, 290, 292, 295, manuscripts of, 211, 287
296–97, 300, 301, 302–03, 306, 321 narcissism in, 218
Pléiade poetry, 110, 242, 266, 285 passion in, 216–18, 226, 235
Pocque, Antoine, 13 pride in, 216, 220, 221, 222, 223, 235n49
Polachek, Dora E., 235n50 prison motif in, 212, 213, 216, 217, 221,
Poline (character in Heptaméron), 103–05, 223, 224, 230–31, 234, 265
344 publication of, 211
402 index
revelation in, 226–29 political developments as opportunity

Scripture in, 53, 224, 228, 232 for, 39–45
self-examination in, 232 protection of leaders of, 6, 25
sources of inspiration, 213, 214, 217, 223, support for evangelical, 7, 9, 11
226, 228, 229, 230 reform campaigns
spiritual enlightenment in, 212, 214 domestic reform, 48–49
structure of, 212–13, 216–18 publishing, 49–58
sun motif in, 217, 225 toward court, 4, 16, 29, 30, 32, 34–47, 48,
wisdom in, 221–22, 225 49, 58, 86
protection Reformed Church, 4, 11, 16, 48, 50, 62
of members of own household, 49 reformers
of reformers, 6, 9, 11, 25, 36–37, 48–49, criticism of Marguerite, 11–14
86 persecution of in France, 8–10, 18, 25, 32,
protégés, 52 36, 41, 47, 50, 57, 85, 86
placed in positions of influence, 48–49, protection of, 6, 9, 11, 25, 36–37, 48–49,
68–69, 79 86
publications of evangelical works by, 51 Reid, Jonathan A., 1n1, 4n8, n10, 5n12, 6n17,
Protestants, 30, 31, 50, 53. See also German 7n19, 11n28, 12n32, n34, 18, 19, 23n55,
Protestants 24n60, n61, n63, 25, 29n2, 30n4, 32n10,
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 26, 67, 33n12, 34n14, 35n15, n16, n17, n18, 36,
75, 91, 98, 99, 101, 121, 124, 125, 153, 226, 37n19, 38n21, 39, 41n33, n34, n37, 42n40,
228, 299, 304, 305, 307 43n47, 48n60, 51n64, 52n65, n67, 55n74,
purgatio, 127–28, 299 n75, 56n78, 57n81, 74n56, 85–86, 118,
purgatory, 60, 120 232n41, 233n43, n45, 244, 251n38
relics, 3, 84–85
Les quatorze miroirs pour consoler la Renaudet, Augustin, 73
créature en Dieu, 114 Renée de France, 49
Quatre femmes, 50, 282, 315–16, 320, 342 Republic (Plato), 96
characters in, 315–16 Reuchlin, Johannes, 33
conversion in, 316 Rey, Alain, 113n15
court ball in, 315, 316 Reyff, Simone de, 324n4
dating of, 288 rhyme schemes, 162, 163, 167–68, 173, 196,
interaction with audience, 290–91 198–99, 200–02
love in, 315, 316, 321 Rigolot, François, 3n6
manuscripts of, 287 Ripart, Laurent, 2n3, 11n30, 66n19, 344n48
meaning of, 285 Ritter, Raymond, 142
performance of, 283 Rochette, Louis de, 48, 86
publication of, 287 Roelker, Nancy, 16n47
stage arrangements, 290–91 Rohan, Pierre de, 1
structure of, 315 Rois, 288, 294, 298–300, 306
querelle des femmes, 340–43 characters in, 298, 299, 307
querelle des amyes, 342 contemplation in, 305
Quétif, Jacques, 142n79 dating and performance, 284
Quintin, Thierry, 13 Ladder of Perfection in, 299–300
sources of inspiration, 298, 299
Rabelais, François, 15, 52, 60, 83, 87, 220, stage arrangements, 291–92
342, 343, 353n60 structure of, 298–99
dedication of Tiers Livre to Marguerite, Rolandine (character in Heptaméron),
13–14, 15 106–07, 348–49, 351–52
Raemond, Florimond de, 142, 282 Roma, Jean de, 49
rape in the Heptaméron, 333, 339, 350–51, Le Roman de la Rose ( Jean de Meung), 217,
353–55 228, 311, 316
reform. See also Evangelicals Ronsard, Pierre de, 89, 107
monastic, 18, 33, 34, 73–84, 335 Roserot de Melin, Joseph, 79n74
index 403
Roussel, Bernard, 116n24 Schmalkald League, 39, 40, 42, 44

Roussel, Gérard, 7, 12, 24, 25, 34, 39, 49, Schmidt, Charles, 53n69
66, 71 Schneegans, F., 287
adherence to Catholicism, 4, 12, 48, 68 Schutte, Ann Jacobson, 71n45
on confession, 55, 232 Sckommodau, Hans, 161n1, 163n3, 180
Familiere exposition, 19, 22–23, 53, 56 Screech, Michael A., 342n41, n42, 344n47
on persecution, 57 Scripture
preaching evangelical doctrine, 8, 41 in Chansons spirituelles, 259, 270, 271,
protection of, 6, 37 274, 276
on sacraments, 22–23, 55–56 in Heptaméron, 328, 332, 360, 363
sources of inspiration, 58 interpretation of 90, 123, 124, 180
teaching laity, 36 in Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié, 147,
Ruelle, Jean, 238n3 150, 158
Russell, Nicolas, 205n71, 208, 209, 329n19 in Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, 114, 115,
Rutebeuf, 337 121, 125, 127, 158
in plays, 297, 298, 299, 302–03, 304–05,
sacraments, 26, 27, 31, 38, 55–56, 60, 62, 311, 314, 319
67, 232, 335, 344. See also baptism; as sole source of doctrine, 31, 53, 80, 82,
confession; Eucharist; extreme unction; 304–05
marriage translated into vernacular, 26, 33, 87, 332
Sadolet, Paul, 66, 67 women teaching 332
Sadoleto, Jacopo, 60, 66, 70 Sébillet, Thomas, 240–41
Saffredent (storyteller in Heptaméron), Sébiville, Pierre de, 37, 48
240, 357n68, 363 Second Order of Saint Francis. See Poor
Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, 10 Clares
Saint-Gelais, Mellin de, 168, 242 Seconde Rhétorique, 242
Saint-Maurice, Senlis (abbey), 74 Secretum (Petrarch), 164, 187, 192, 206
Saint-Honorat-de-Tarascon (abbey), 82, 83 Selve, Jean de, 38n22
Saint-Martin-de-Séez (abbey), 77, 78 Senlis, 74
Saint-Maximin, 3 Sermisy, Claudin de, 244, 246
Saint-Savin (abbey), 77, 328n17, 330n21 Seymour, Anne, Margaret, Jane, 109
Saint-Victor, Paris (abbey) 76, 79 Silly (abbey), 81
Saint-Vincent-du-Mans (abbey), 78 Silvius, Symon. See La Haye, Jean de
La Sainte-Baume, 3, 84 Simontault (storyteller in Heptaméron),
Sainte-Marthe, Charles de, 31n7, 52, 87, 338, 340, 342–43, 369
109 Skenazi, Cynthia, 20, 121, 220n20
saints Skrzeszewska, Beata, 288n18
attachment to communion of, 3, 78, 85 Sleidan, Johann, 42n41, 44n50
intercession of, 120 sodomy in the Heptaméron, 358–60
Salminen, Renja, 96n15, 111n9, 113n14, The Soldier and the Carthusian (Erasmus),
117n26, 120, 121, 125n47, 137n65, 141n74, 84
161n1, 166n6, n8, n10, 167, 168n16, 173n32, Le Soliloque François ( Jean Lucas de La
179n45, 181n47, n48, 255n47, 269n69, Fons), 72
270n70, 272n78, 324n3, n4, 325n9, n10, Solomon, Bernard, 15
330n22, 352, 358n72 Sommers, Paula, 30n3, 120n33, 127–28,
Santa Giustina of Padua, Congregation 163n3, 167n12, 180, 185n56, 234–35, 323n2,
of, 84 328n15, 331n24
Sarrance, 325. See also Somnium scipionis (Cicero), 169
Notre-Dame-de-Serrance. Sorbonne, 81, 118, 181, 151
Saulnier, V. L., 13n35, 15n45, 16, 72n51, censorship by, 50, 51, 64–65
74n61, 83n82, 171n21, 178n43, 234n47, condemnation of Luther, 4, 32, 67
282n2, 284, 287, 320n39, 342n42 prosecution of heretics, 6, 8, 25
Saxony, Elector of, 40, 42, 43 soul
Scève, Maurice, 15, 214 ascent of, 93, 99
404 index
body as prison of, 134 20, 89, 94–99, 134, Tiers Livre (François Rabelais), 13, 14, 342,
162, 167, 170, 174, 176, 230–31 343, 353n60
preexistence and heavenly origin of, 93 Toledo, 76
relation with body, 91, 94–99 Toulouse, 48
relation with God, 91, 92 Tournes, Jean de, 15, 118, 214, 238, 286
sinful, 113, 122–23, 129–30, 135 Tournon, André, 350n56, 360n76
Spagnoli, Battista, 295 Tournon, Cardinal de, 47, 66, 86
speculum (genre), 113–14, 119 Tours, 78
Speculum peccatoris, 114 Traicté du Souverain Bien (pub. Simon Du
spiritual ascent imagery, 102, 103, 104, 105, Bois), 121, 136, 152n109, 259
107, 128, 168, 178, 179–80, 184, 185, 193, Treaty of Crépy, 44
234, 259, 261, 264 Treaty of Madrid, 6
Spiritual Libertines, 13, 16, 25, 59, 320, La Trinité, Caen (abbey), 77, 81
336n31 Le Triomphe de l’Agneau, 15, 110n6, 287
Stephenson, Barbara, 4n9 De Triplici Via (Saint Bonaventure), 127
Stimulus amoris, 150n102 Les Triumphes de la Noble Dame et l’art de
storytellers honnestement aymer ( Jean Bouchet),
in Decameron, 328 124
in Heptaméron, 265, 325, 326–27, Triumphus Mortis (Petrarch), 164, 167–68,
329–32, 356–57, 360–64, 365–66 169, 173, 194–98, 202
Strolh, Henri, 62 Trop Prou Peu Moins, 281n1, 284, 286, 305,
Sturm, Johann, 40, 41n36, 42n41, 44n50 307, 309, 313–14, 320, 321
Sturm-Maddox, Sara, 196n66 characters in, 293, 313
Sussanée, Hubert, 31n7 conversion in, 308
Sutherland, N. M., 47n58 dating of, 287, 288
Suyte des Marguerites, 172, 287 egalitarianism in, 289
Swiss Evangelicals, 18, 25 evangelical sympathies in, 314
Symposium (Plato), 91, 99, 101, 102 interaction with audience in, 289
Szabari, Antonia, 274n80 morality and, 286
publication of, 287
Tallon, Alain, 71n47 stage arrangements, 292
Tarrête, Alexandre, 177n42 structure of, 285, 313
Telle, Émile, 341n39, 346n52 Trudeau, Danielle, 342n42
Temple d’Honneur et de vertus ( Jean Tucco-Chala, Pierre, 62n10
Lemaire de Belges), 168 Turks, 72
Le Temple de Cupido (Clément Marot), Tusson (Fontevrist priory), 15–16, 76, 77,
226 173, 212, 283, 318, 338
Tentler, Thomas N., 232n42, 233n45 Tylus, Piotr, 288n18
terza rima rhyme scheme, 163
in Dialogue, 162, 163, 167–68, 196, 198–99 Valla, Lorenzo, 368
in La Coche, 163 Vance, Jacob, 91
in La Navire, 162, 163, 173, 200–02 Vecce, Carlo, 195n64, 196n69
in Petit Œuvre, 163 Veissière, Michel, 5n13, 29n2, 67n21, 91n5,
Teske, Roland, 208n74 115n23, 161n2, 178n43, 213n9, 249n34,
Testart, Robinet, 2 335n29
Thaumas de La Thaumassière, Gaspard, Venard, Marc, 67n22, 81, 83n81
74n59 Vérard, Antoine, 324, 326, 358n71
theologians Vergerio, Pier, 66, 71, 86
good vs. bad “doctors,” 53–54 vernacular Bibles, 332
Thevet, André, 369 La Victoire, Senlis (abbey), 74
Thibault, G., 243n18 Vieille, the (character in Quatre femmes),
Thomas, Ruth, 171n23, 221n22, 287n13 315–16
Thompson, Emily, 327n14 Vienne, Philibert de, 220
Thysell, Carol, 251n38, 323n2, 328n17, 336n31 Viet, Nora, 325n6, 326n12
index 405
Vignes, Jean, 115n20, 242n13, 266n66 Waldensians, 10, 49, 87

Vincent of Beauvais, 113n17 Walker, D. P., 94n11
Vingle, Pierre de, 51 Wanegffelen, Thierry, 62, 63–64, 253,
Virgin Mary, 36, 218, 275 334n28
cult of, 18, 60, 64 Winn, Colette H., 21n53, 163n4, 176n40,
devotion to, 84, 86, 87 309n32, 351n57
Marguerite de Lorraine on, 75 Winn, Mary Beth, 2n2
in plays, 284, 290, 291, 292, 294, 295, women
296–97, 300, 301, 302–03, 306, 307, 321 education of, 83
and Saint Anne, 33 in Heptaméron, 340–43
in works, 153, 329–30, 369 sexual violence against, 353–55
Virtue, Nancy, 354n63, 365n81 silenced, 350
Visagier, Jean, 83, 87 speaking out, 350–53
Vita Christi (Ludolph the Carthusian), 150 teaching Holy Scripture, 332
Vives, Juan Luis, 331 works (good works). See charity
Vose, Heather M., 35n17 Wright, Elizabeth C., 327n15
De votis monasticis (Luther), 80
vows, 3 Zwingli, Huldrych, 55
monastic/religious, 75, 80–81, 84, 336,
337, 338

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What is the book about based on the descriptions given?

What is the book about based on the descriptions given?

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What publishing details are provided about the book?

A Companion to Marguerite de Navarre

Brill’s Companions to the

A series of handbooks and reference works

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bcct

Cover illustration: Portrait of Marguerite de Navarre, Heures de la reine Catherine de Médicis,

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013931779

Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Notes on Contributors .................................................................................... vii

Marguerite de Navarre and Evangelical Reform .................................... 29

Marguerite de Navarre: The Reasons for Remaining Catholic .......... 59

Neo-Platonic Themes of Ascent in Marguerite de Navarre ................ 89

Opening and Closing Reflections: The Miroir de l’âme pécheresse

Speaking with the Dead: Spirituality, Mourning, and Memory

Les Prisons’ Poetics of Conversion .............................................................. 211

Chansons Spirituelles—Songs for a “Delightful Transformation” ...... 237

Staging the Spiritual: The Biblical and Non-Biblical Plays ................. 281

The Heptaméron: Word, Spirit, World ....................................................... 323

Gary Ferguson is the Elias Ahuja Professor of French at the University

Philip Ford, PhD (1977), University of Cambridge, is Professor of French

Isabelle Garnier is maître de conférences in Renaissance Literature

Jean-Marie Le Gall, Professor of History and currently Head of the

Reinier Leushuis (PhD Princeton University, 2000) is Associate Professor

Mary B. McKinley is the Douglas Huntly Gordon Professor of French at

Jan Miernowski is Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-

Olivier Millet is Professor of French Literature at the Université Paris–

Isabelle Pantin is Professor of Literature at the École Normale Supérieure

Jonathan A. Reid is an Associate Professor of History at East Carolina

Cynthia Skenazi is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at

Gary Ferguson and Mary B. McKinley

1 The standard biography of Marguerite remains Pierre Jourda, Marguerite d’Angoulême,

cleric, disciple of Erasmus and Lefèvre d’Étaples, to be her son’s precep-

of Hyères, efforts that were meeting with strong resistance. In response

4 Jourda, Marguerite, 1:48, 55–57.

Sometime around 1520, Lefèvre became the unofficial leader of a group

It is not clear exactly when Marguerite began to write the religious

207–32; Anne-Marie Lecoq, François Ier imaginaire: symbolique et politique à l’aube de la

by Farel. In letters to Farel in Strasbourg, written in 1526 after his return

nomment spirituelz, a work he understood had offended her because she

We have no record of Rabelais’s having met Marguerite.38 Like her, he had

left Tusson for Béarn in the summer, stopping at Mont-de-Marsan, Nérac,

46 Théâtre profane, pp. 246–66.

50 Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié, ed. Lucia Fontanella (Alessandria, 1984).

however, death functions as a fundamental metaphor within the Christian

54 Considering Marguerite’s poetry as devotional writing—a genre understood as vari-

of Christ himself recorded in the gospels; to do otherwise, for Roussel,

C’est qu’unyssant la chrestienté toute

to be a Catholic and to share some of these ideas—to not consider

Car par eulx [François I and Charles V] [Dieu] veult

I. Marguerite: Actor and Author in the Reformation

Throughout her career as a prominent member of court, Marguerite kept

1 Marguerite de Navarre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Nicole Cazauran, vol. 8, Chrétiens et

3 Paula Sommers, Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiri-

established Church, Evangelicals held that Scripture is the sole source of

II. Actor in the Reformation