Marguerite de Navarre

The impulse to read “fiction” as autobiography is powerful. Fiction certainly tells us a great deal about the past. At the very least, it reveals the possible thought experiments in a given historical context. And “history” is often a sort of fiction—facts are built on unreliable memory, incomplete information, and subjective interpretation. These slippages figure throughout this new biography of Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549). The sister of François I and the queen of Navarre, Marguerite was at the center of politics in early Renaissance France. She was an active supporter of religious reform (although she never broke with the Catholic Church). She was also well educated. The author of plays, poems, religious meditations, and scores of extant letters, Marguerite's name is attached most famously to The Heptameron, a collection of stories modeled on Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron. With its extended conversations among the speakers between the tales, The Heptameron has long been suspected of revealing much about individuals and events in Renaissance France. Patricia F. Cholakian and Rouben C. Cholakian have organized their biography around the premise that Marguerite, as author of The Heptameron, was revealing her experiences and reactions through its tales. While the one-to-one readings of The Heptameron as autobiography are problematic, the reconstruction of Marguerite's world through the collection of her writings provides an accessible and unsettling picture of the gender politics of early modernity.

Art · Art history · Biography · Context (archaeology) · Interpretation (philosophy) · Literature · Modernity · Poetry · Politics · French Literature and Criticism · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Renaissance Literature and Culture