Queen of Navarre; author of the Heptameron, poetry, several collection of poems, and a play; literary patron; religious reform thinker and activist
Marguerite de Navarre, duchess of Alenjon and Berry and queen of Navarre, was born in Angouleme to Louise de Savoie and Charles d’Angouleme. Her brother Francis was born in 1494. Charles died in 1496, and his cousin Louis, the duke of Orleans, obtained guardianship of the children. Louise retained custody and provided a serious education for the children. Francis Demoulins, a humanist cleric and disciple of Erasmus and Lefevre d’Etaples, was their preceptor. Marguerite took from her mother and her teacher a spiritual disposition that marked her entire life. Louis became king of France in 1498 and, having no male heir, designated Francis as his heir presumptive in 1505. As the sister of the heir to the French crown, Marguerite was a valuable pawn in the brokerage of royal marriages. She was the subject of negotiations with HenryVII of England for his son, the future Henry VIII, and even for himself. However, on 2 December 1509, in a match arranged to settle a territorial dispute, Marguerite married Charles d’Alenjon. Louis XII died on 31 December 1514, and Francis became king of France on 1 January 1515. Francis quickly embarked on his first Italian campaign and won the Battle of Marignan in September. Marguerite and Louise traveled south to welcome the returning hero, stopping en route at Saint Maximin La Sainte Baume in Provence, a site revered as the burial place of Mary Magdalen. During this period Marguerite’s interest in religious reform was already evident. While in the south she visited several convents, supporting reform in the convent of Hyeres. Marguerite was soon recognized as an important member of her brother’s inner circle. People referred to Francis, Louise, and Marguerite as the royal “trinity.” In 1517 Francis gave her the duchy of Berry and made her a ducal peer, a highly unusual position for a woman. Letters fTom Italian and English ambassadors refer to her as an influential figure whose favor they courted. Marguerite remained a key figure in unofficial negotiations with English emissaries representing Henry
Marguerite de Navarre, queen of Navarre, author of the Heptameron, poet and playwright. Anonymous portrait. Musee Conde, Chantilly, France. (Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource)
VIII. Her name appears regularly in letters of Venetian ambassadors and papal nuncios. She also became known as a lover of letters and a patron of poets. Clement Marot, Bonaventure Des Periers, and Jean Bouchet were among the earliest writers to enjoy her protection.
It is uncertain when she began to write the religious poetry that established her own literary reputation. From 1521 to 1524 she corresponded with Guillaume Brifonnet, bishop of Meaux, disciple of Lefevre, and leader of a movement to reform the Catholic Church fTom within. In his letters Brifonnet asked her support for his group, called evangeliques, because the Gospels, or evangiles, were their model for reformed Christianity. He urged Marguerite toward a mystical quest for God. Marguerite wrote of her grief at the deaths of her sister-inlaw Queen Claude and Claude’s young daughter Charlotte in September 1524. One of Marguerite’s earliest poems, Dialogue in the Form of a Nocturnal Vision, reflects that experience and echoes Brifonnet’s counsel. During those years she composed a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, modeled on a work by Martin Luther. In the early 1520s the Parisian Faculty of Theology, known as the Sorbonne, had moved to prevent Luther’s influence from spreading in France and had accused the Meaux group of heresy. Marguerite worked to protect the evangelical reformers. In February 1525, Francis was defeated at the Battle of Pavia and taken prisoner to Madrid by CharlesV, the Hapsburg emperor. Marguerite’s public role in the court became more prominent when she traveled to Madrid and participated in the negotiations to obtain her brother’s release. Charles d’Alenfon had died in the aftermath of Pavia, and, soon after Francis was ransomed, Marguerite married Henri d’Albret, King of Navarre, in January 1527. She gave birth to their daughter, Jeanne, in November 1528. A son, Jean, was born in July 1530 but died the following Christmas.
In 1531 the first of Marguerite’s writings to be published, The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, was printed in Alenfon, to be reprinted in 1533 in Paris by Antoine Augereau. By then she had aroused the ire of the Parisian theologians, who tried to censure the Mirror before Francis intervened. She had invited Gerard Roussel, a staunch evangelical, to preach Lenten sermons at the Louvre, sermons that criticized Lenten fasting. In October students at the University of Paris presented a play that ridiculed Marguerite as a mad heretic. Rising tensions exploded in October 1534 when placards attacking the mass appeared throughout Paris and in other cities. Francis, alarmed by the audacity of the conspirators, allowed the Paris Parlement to unleash a severe crackdown, executing over a dozen perceived heretics, including Augereau. Many of the evangelical group fled. Marguerite harbored Marot and John Calvin briefly at her chateau in Nerac before they moved on to
Italy. Although supporting the reformers became more difficult after the Placards Affair, Marguerite remained committed to their cause. She provided a home at Nerac for Lefevre d’Etaples until his death in 1536, and that year she obtained a bishopric for Gerard Roussel at Oloron in the safety of her husband’s territories. Calvin wrote a letter fTom Geneva criticizing Roussel and by implication Marguerite, for compromising his beliefs by accepting the post. Calvin continued his attacks on those who stayed “among the papists” and obliquely targeted Marguerite and her circle, calling them “Nicodemites” in a 1544 treatise. In a 1545 treatise he excoriated the Spiritual Libertines, a group that Marguerite protected, and wrote a letter to her defending himself and exhorting her not to abandon the “Church of God.” Those years brought severe blows to the evangelical reformers. Several writers in Marguerite’s circle died: Clement Marot in exile in Turin in 1544;Bonaventure Des Periers, apparently by suicide, the same year. The CounterReformation Council of Trent opened in 1545. In April of that year, Francis authorized the massacre of the Waldensians in Provence; some three thousand people were killed. Guillaume Farel reported to Calvin that Marguerite wept bitterly when she heard the news and swore to make life miserable for the baron d’Oppede, the massacre’s leader. Perhaps as a result of those events, Rabelais dedicated his 1546 Third Book of Pantagruel to Marguerite.
In 1540 negotiations were under way to marry Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, to the duke of Cleves, a move calculated to strengthen Francis’s alliance with the German Protestant Schmalkald princes against Emperor Charles V. Henri d’Albret opposed that union; he hoped to regain his kingdom of Spanish Navarre by marrying his daughter to Charles V’s son. Marguerite was caught in the conflict between her brother and her husband, while her daughter, a willful twelve-year-old, vigorously resisted the marriage. Marguerite supported the union, and the wedding took place in June 1541. However, citing Jeanne’s tender age, she delayed sending her daughter to live with Cleves, and eventually, following a breakdown of Francis’s alliance with Cleves, the marriage was annulled. In October 1548 Jeanne d’Albret married Antoine de Bourbon, a disappointing marriage in Marguerite’s eyes. She could not have known that the couple’s son, Henri de Navarre, would become the king of France in 1589.
Marguerite maintained connections with many women, including Renee de France, duchess of Ferrara. She exchanged letters with Vittoria Colonna, Italian humanist and advocate of reform. Marie Dentiere addressed an Epistle to her from Geneva in 1539. It was probably a copy of the Mirror of the Sinful Soul given by Marguerite to Anne Boleyn that Elizabeth I, then twelve years old, used to translate the work into English in 1544.
Marguerite was a prolific writer. She composed an impressive body of religious poetry, although she did not publish a collection until 1547, when The Pearls of the Pearl of Princesses appeared. It included The Triumph of the Lamb, Spiritual Songs, The Coach, and a cycle of nativity plays as well as the earlier Mirror. In 1545, Antoine le Majon dedicated to her his translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron, a work she had commissioned. Her own collection of one hundred stories, which acknowledges that model, remained unfinished at her death. An unauthorized version, Stories of Fortunate Lovers, appeared in 1558. Seventy-two tales with a prologue and frame story were published in 1559 with the title Heptameron. That work is remarkable for its narrative complexity as well as its portraits of contemporary society. During those later years she also completed major poetic works, all conveying her intense mysticism: The Prisons, The Ship, and The Mirror of Jesus Christ Crucified, as well as the Comedy of Mont de Marsan and other plays.
Francis died on 31 March 1547, leaving his sister in a long period of mourning. His son and successor, Henri II, showed animosity toward his aunt and her mission to reform the church. In the summer of 1548, Marguerite traveled fTom Navarre to Lyon to join Henri’s court and accompanied him and the new queen, Catherine de Medicis, on their royal entry into that city. Marguerite returned to Pau at the end of the year and spent time there and at Cauterets in the spring with her daughter. For the last six months of her life she was in relative solitude in Odos, where she died on 21 December 1549.
Mary McKinley
See also Albret, Jeanne d’; Colonna, Vittoria; Literary Culture and Women; Religious Reform and Women; Renata di Francia.
Bibliography
Primary Works
Marguerite de Navarre. Heptameron. Edited by Renja Salminen. Geneva: Droz, 1999.
Marguerite de Navarre. The Heptameron. Translated by Paul Chilton. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984.
Marguerite de Navarre. lucres completes, sous la direction de Nicole Cazauran. Paris: Champion, 2001.
Secondary Works
Cazauran, Nicole, and James Dauphine, eds. Marguerite de Navarre, 1492—1992.Actes du colloque internationale de Pau (1992). Mont-de-Marsan, France: InterUniversitaires, 1995.
Cottrell, Robert D. The Grammar of Silence:A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986.
Ferguson, Gary. Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992.
Jourda, Pierre. Marguerite d’Angouleme, . . . Etude Biographique et Litteraire. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1930.
Lyons, John, and Mary McKinley, eds. Critical Tales: New Studies of the Heptameron and Early Modern Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
Reid, Jonathan A. King’s Sister, Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492—1549) and Her Evangelical Network. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
Sommers, Paula. Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiritual Ascent. Geneva: Droz, 1989.
Thysell, Carol. The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
World History
