Marguerite de Navarre: Heptameron

Bonjour, Mesdames.

Here is some background to get you started on Marguerite. I will also post some Alan Smith notes on L'Heptaméron later today (we should give him royalties...) As you can see from the info below and no doubt from your reading, there are numerous opposing dynamics in L'Heptaméron, the most striking of which is the female-male conflict -- which is set up from the start with the composition of the dévisants (five women, five men).

These are great stories, IMHO. They portray the drama of human life in so many ways.

I look forward to our meeting tomorrow!

Holly

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Background

Michael Delahoyde
Washington State University

MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE
(1492-1549)
The French "discovered" the Italian Renaissance through travel and military invasions in the late 1400s, and the very accomplished Marguerite de Navarre is said to embody "the most complete expression of the French Renaissance." She was the daughter of Charles of Orleans; her younger brother became King Francis I in 1515, after a batch of unexpected deaths among closer heirs to the throne.
Marguerite received an education in Latin, Italian, Spanish, German, and later, Greek and Hebrew. At 17, she was politically married to a duke, a feudal lord culturally not her match. When her brother ascended to the throne, she became a major cultural influence: she had Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini work at the court of Francis I. This brother was taken prisoner during a war on Italian soil with Charles V of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor. And her husband died. So Marguerite went to Madrid and negotiated the Treaty of Madrid in 1526, and she assisted her sick brother. She also reformed monasteries and convents, and built hospitals.
In 1527 she became "Queen of Navarre" by marrying the much younger Henri d'Albret -- king in title only because of his lands. (In the Heptameron, Henri probably is represented by Hircan -- flashy, dashing, flighty, and intellectually disappointing.)
During the time of the Reformation movements, Marguerite was preoccupied with religious and ethical issues: like Erasmus, her philosophy was that of "Christian humanism," and she protected writers and thinkers accused or suspected of Protestant leanings, including Rabelais. She corresponded with Erasmus and Calvin. As with Rabelais, the conservative Paris university, the Sorbonne, disapproved of her.
HEPTAMERON: The idea of the framed narratives came from Boccaccio; she apparently intended a "deca"-meron, but the work remained incomplete, so it's a "hepta" (= 7). The 17 manuscripts and book editions of this work differ; and there are confusing issues of attribution. Did Marguerite serve primarily as a general editor?
The natural disaster frame is similar to Boccaccio's but this time involves floods; a bridge will take ten to twelve days to repair. Ten cultivated people are involved, but these have come together piecemeal because of bandits, etc. Here we set up afternoons of pastime activity in a meadow setting.
Parlemente (= Marguerite? similarly Neo-Platonic) is the wife of Hircan (Henri?). 
Lady Oisille (Marguerite's mother?) is a Humanist/evangelical authoritative female figure. 
Dagoucin is so intent upon the secrecy of his pure love that he will never even tell the lady.
All have read Boccaccio's Decameron (a translation was done at court under Marguerite's orders). The Heptameron plan is less literary and rhetorical than Boccaccio's: all must have witnessed the events of the tales here or have heard them from an authority, excluding people who were studied or men of letters. There's no real aesthetic self-consciousness here; the tales are related as factual, informative, and unadorned, usually with blunt openings.
Love serves as topic and theme: indulgence, spirituality, renunciation. It's mixed with social and religious themes, so often seems more decorous than Boccaccio. The social and ethical codes of married life are very present, and the battle of the sexes seems rather more dire here. Friars represent old corruption and misogyny, and the tales include apparent gossip about aristocratic peers.
The discussions after each story are often more intense than the stories (fabliaux and novella) themselves, concerning moral and social implications: so we have a combination of narratives and mini-treatises (in dialogue form), and a variety of voices or interpretations on the same material, all enclosed within the literature.

More background

About the Heptameron
"Appearing in print for the first time in 1558, the book that we now know as the Heptameron represents in microcosm the conflicts, tensions, and beliefs of early modern French society as viewed from one part of the court. The 'tales of the queen of Navarre,' as Brantôme called the work, present a forum where different elements of Renaissance and Reformation culture meet and, at times, collide. Often the encounters are ideological. The stories and discussions of the Heptameron depict confrontations based on, among other elements, gender. Contradictory suppositions about women emerge repeatedly from the stories and discussions as the devisants or fictional storytellers--five men and five women--delineate attitudes both feminist and misogynist. At the same time, similarly conflicting notions about men emerge to be debated. Whether echoing the late medieval querelle des femmes, the contemporary querelle des amyes, the evolving currents of Neoplatonism and Petrarchism, or the attitudes toward sexual roles put forth in Reformation polemics, deeply felt beliefs about gender inform and animate the Heptameron.
Ideological confrontations in the Heptameron often echo evangelical efforts at church reform. Here, conflicts among the storytellers are less oppositional, for even if some seem more fervent in their religious ardor than others and some more concerned with the corporal than with the spiritual, none of them advocated a theological postion opposed to that of the evangelical reformers. The stories the devisants tell are often cautionary tales conveying their hostility and dismay about the state of the Catholic church: decadent priests and monks, most often lubricious and venal; unfortunate Christians whose belief int he efficacy of good works leads to disaster and death. Both the stories and the discussions often center on differing attitudes toward sin and virtue, alienation and reconciliation, eros and caritas, pleasure and honor--alternatives that the storytellers and their characters present as conflictual states and values within which they must negotiate a tenable place in their fictional world. If some have found a haven of tranquility in the steadfast convictions of their evangelical faith, others are still playing out restless scenarios of unsatisfied desire. The climate of unrest, menace, and hostility that characterizes the prologue also portrays the world of the Heptameron in general, the physical world from which the storytellers flee and to which they wait to return, and their overall view of the human condition as well. The conflicts of the Reformation loom over the Heptameron as a prominent symptom of larger, related disruptions and new departures that marked mid-sixteenth-century Europe."
--from Critical Tales: New Studies of the Heptameron and Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993) edited by John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley