Marguerite de Navarre

French poet and queen of Navarre (r. 1544-1549)

• Born: April 11, 1492
• Birthplace: Angoulême, France
• Died: December 21, 1549
• Place of death: Odos, Bigorre, France

Patron of Church reformers and poets, Marguerite helped introduce the new Humanism into French culture. She invented the idea of the salon, or learned courts, which were centers for discussing religion, literature, and politics. She was also a poet and writer and was the first society woman of learning what the eighteenth century would call a bluestocking.

Early Life

Marguerite de Navarre (mawr-gyew-reet deh naw-vawr), born Marguerite of Angoulěme to distinguish her from her grand-niece, Marguerite of Valois, who also married a king of Navarre, was the first child of the ambitious and dominating Louise of Savoy. Marguerite was two years older than her brother Francis (later king of France). Their mother reared the children to become queen and king, insisting that they both master the so-called new learning (essentially classical literature, the Bible, and Latin).

Tall and fiercely intelligent, Marguerite charmed by her wit rather than her beauty. Until she became a queen in her own right by virtue of her second marriage in 1527, her early life revolved around that of her Valois brother, the glorious King Francis I . She would later recollect their childhood and adolescence under the guise of a roman à clef, or a story whose characters are known only to readers who have the “key.”

In 1509, with her fifteen-year-old brother already betrothed to the ten-year-old princess of France, Marguerite was married by the scheming Louise to the duke of Alençon, a simple nobleman with a pious and unworldly mother. Marguerite took her books with her to Normandy and proceeded to set up at Alençon one of the earliest salons, in imitation of the society in which her mother had reared her and Francis. Her husband the duke left Marguerite to her cultivated guests, preferring his horses and hounds to the new learning. Illiterate himself, he was embarrassed to visit the royal court with a wife who knew how to discuss the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). There began Marguerite’s patronage of Clément Marot (1466?-1544) and other poets, and there she met the great Humanist scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples.

Lefèvre was the French counterpart of Desiderius Erasmus, the famous Dutch Humanist, and the teachings of both scholars attracted the intelligent noblewoman, who was still in her twenties. In this context, one must recall that Martin Luther did not begin the Reformation. The movement to reform the church (which was still the Christian church, with no distinction of Protestant or Catholic) had been underway for a generation by the time Luther nailed his theses to the church door in 1517. Among the various reform movements that ensued, Catholic reformers outnumbered Protestant by at least three to one. Like Erasmus, Lefèvre wanted to strip the institutional trappings from religious experience so that the believer might communicate more directly with Christ. In particular, these men hoped to “make everyone his or her own theologian,” as Erasmus wrote in his preface to the New Testament, which he edited in its original Greek. Educated Christians could pray to God and think for themselves, without the help of priests or doctors of theology. These Humanists expressed their hostility to theologians by insisting that the teachings of the great pagan moralists including Socrates, Plato, and Cicero were closer to the spirit of biblical Christianity than were the doctrines debated at the Sorbonne in Paris.

To Marguerite, living with an ignorant husband and his puritanical mother, the Humanist teaching came like the dawn of a new epoch. After ten years of marriage, she still had no children, and, knowing herself the intellectual and social equal of any aristocrat in France, she embraced Lefèvre’s cause as her life work. He put her in touch with the bishop of Meaux (near Paris), and with her letters in 1521 she began her thoughtful writing on religion and the Scriptures. Without ever condoning Luther’s radicalism, Marguerite lent her protection to a number of Catholic reformers and even to Luther’s follower John Calvin . This earned for Marguerite the hatred of the doctors at the Sorbonne, who were determined to root out “Lutheran heretics” and burn them at the stake. When the Sorbonne’s activists overstepped their authority and condemned one of Marguerite’s religious tracts, her brother the king was furious and banished their ringleader from the country.

Protecting and nourishing the new ideas and encouraging her brother to do likewise were perhaps Marguerite’s greatest historical accomplishments. In 1534, following the Affair of the Placards (when, overnight, all Paris was plastered with signs denouncing the Church’s main dogmas, such as the presence of Christ in the host), Francis was powerless to stop the mob reaction against Protestantism, and the Sorbonne hunted down Lefèvre. Marguerite sheltered the old man and was at his bedside when he died.

Life’s Work

The year 1525 was a critical one for Marguerite. She wrote her first serious poem, a discussion of the afterlife conducted in a dialogue with the imaginary spirit of her eight-year-old niece, who had just died. Her brother the king had led an army into Italy, where he was defeated and captured at the Battle of Pavia . Sent to Spain as the prisoner of his archrival Emperor Charles V, Francis languished in a cell until his sister came to Madrid to negotiate with the astonished emperor. Francis was eventually released after promising to cede all of Burgundy to Charles (a promise Francis never kept).

In the meantime, Marguerite’s husband, who had run away from the encounter at Pavia, died in disgrace. Charles immediately wrote to Louise (who was governing the country as regent for her imprisoned son) and asked for her daughter’s hand in marriage. Marguerite had dealt with the emperor and loathed him; she preferred the handsome Henri d’Albret, king of Navarre and eleven years her junior. They were married in January, 1527. Late in 1528, in her thirty-seventh year, Marguerite gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne d’Albret; later, she would have a son who lived only a few months, as well as twins who died at birth. Her only surviving child, Jeanne, would marry a Bourbon and become the mother of Henry IV , France’s most illustrious king between Louis IX and Louis XIV.

After the Affair of the Placards, Marguerite retired from Paris to her court at Nérac in Navarre (Gascony). There she hosted several evangelical Humanists; besides Lefèvre and Calvin, she patronized Maurice Scève, the poet, and her old friend Marot. From Paris, the church doctors complained that she was “accompanied by her Lutheran demons under the name of advisers.” It was probably her court at Nérac that served as William Shakespeare’s model for his brilliantly witty comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost (pr. c. 1594-1595).

During the final decade of her life, Marguerite wrote not only her most profound religious poems and dialogues but also five of her seven comedies, as well as the work for which she is best known, L’Heptaméron (1559; The Heptameron , 1597). At the same time, she realized that she was losing her power to protect the Humanist reformers from the Inquisition , which with her brother’s encouragement was then raging in Paris. Marguerite had always felt herself to be part of the intellectual avant-garde. Like Erasmus when Luther challenged him to choose between a corrupt establishment and anarchical reform, Marguerite was now caught between the conservative reaction known as the Counter-Reformation, on one side, and Calvin’s uncompromising Protestantism on the other. Still hopeful, Calvin had dedicated his explosive Christianae religionis institutio (1536; Institutes of the Christian Religion , 1561) to the king in 1540. Marguerite might have appreciated that gesture, but she must have been dismayed by Calvin’s attack on a fellow Humanist, François Rabelais, who in 1546 dedicated to Marguerite his Tiers Livre (Third Book , 1693), which ridiculed Calvinism. These fallings-out among her gifted protégés must have greatly discouraged the queen, who had found her guiding vision in their eager collaboration to harmonize the new learning with true religion.

Marguerite had also grown estranged from her adored brother. Perhaps she experienced some disillusionment when Francis broke his oath to Charles; however, she could not have expected Francis to give away Burgundy if he was to remain king of France. Francis not only ignored the birth of her daughter in 1528, but he also schemed in 1540 to marry Jeanne for his own advantage to a man she detested. Jeanne was a headstrong young woman who was later to win fame as a military leader, a woman able to campaign with her army while taking a day off to give birth to her son Henry. Francis had removed her from her mother’s care when she was two because he was afraid Marguerite would betroth her to Charles V’s son, Philip. Marguerite might have been expected to intercede for Jeanne when the king had her married against her will; instead, Marguerite chose to fall in with the king’s state policy, and she ordered her twelve-year-old daughter to be lashed until she submitted. Jeanne, who had to be forcibly carried to the altar, never forgave her mother. After Marguerite’s death, Jeanne came to admire her abilities and oversaw the publishing of The Heptameron, but she could never love her. (Fortunately for Jeanne, when her detested husband allied himself with Charles three years later, the king decided to annul her marriage. That left Jeanne free to marry the man of her choice, Anthony of Bourbon.)

Significance

From his fortieth year, King Francis, who had been perhaps the most notorious philanderer in Europe he easily outdid England’s Henry VIII was afflicted with syphilis. Partly to distract him from his constant pain, his estranged sister began the series of tales modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron: O, Prencipe Galeotto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620; literally “ten days”). She imagined five men and five women stranded at a spa in the Pyrenees and entertaining one another by telling a tale each day. Marguerite left The Heptameron unfinished after starting the eighth day hence the title, meaning seven days. Unlike Boccaccio, Marguerite who appears as one of the storytellers, Parlamente stipulates that all the tales are to be true narratives. Despite the stories’ factual appearance, however, Marguerite contrives to discuss the political and religious quarrels of her time under the veil of fable, just as Rabelais does. Scholars have only begun to discover The Heptameron’s complex art and its hidden meanings.

Francis’s death in 1547 devastated Marguerite. She lived two more years in a monastery in Poitou, completing her finest long poem, Les Prisons (1549). In this six-thousand-line Neoplatonic masterpiece, the queen of Navarre proceeds in her imagination from one prison to another as her soul looks for a way to escape from the dungeon of life. One of the “prisons” is the sun-flooded palace of love, where pleasures blind the soul and keep it from taking flight. The Renaissance Humanist in Marguerite had receded into the background, giving way to the medieval ascetic that had always lurked deep in her nature.

Marguerite de Navarre’s Major Works

1524

• Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne (pb. 1533)

1531

• Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, 1548)

1547

• Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses

1547

• Suyte des marguerites

1549

• Les Prisons

1559

• L’Heptaméron (The Heptameron, 1597)

Bibliography

Erasmus, Desiderius. The Paraclesis. In Christian Humanism and the Reformation, edited by John C. Olin. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Erasmus’s brilliant preface to his 1516 version of the New Testament distills the essence of Christian Humanism on the threshold of the Lutheran Reformation.

Lyons, John D., and Mary B. McKinley, eds. Critical Tales: New Studies of the “Heptameron” and Early Modern Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Anthology of essays interpreting The Heptameron as a series of commentaries on different aspects of Renaissance and Reformation culture. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Marguerite de Navarre. The Heptameron. Translated by P. A. Chilton. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1984. Contains a useful introduction, a key to the characters, and summaries of the seventy-two stories.

More, Thomas. Utopia. Edited by Edward Surtz. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964. This classic dialogue, with a prefatory letter from Guillaume Budé, the star of Francis I’s court, is an excellent example of the witty discussions sponsored by Marguerite in her salons.

Putnam, Samuel. Marguerite of Navarre. New York: Coward-McCann, 1935. The only modern biography in English, by a famous translator of Rabelais and Miguel de Cervantes.

Stephenson, Barbara. The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. Based on a reading of her correspondence, this study of Marguerite’s political career discusses the various direct and indirect ways in which she exercised power to benefit and protect her allies and relatives. Includes map, bibliographic references, and index.

Stone, Donald. France in the Sixteenth Century: A Medieval Society Transformed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969. An accessible overview of French society in Marguerite’s day.

Thysell, Carol. The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Original reading of The Heptameron, arguing that while it appears to be a secular work, it was actually written to further a surreptitious theological project. Includes bibliographic references and index.