The Heptameron
Marguerite de Navarre’s collection of seventy-two tales, told by ten travellers stranded at an abbey in the Pyrenees, modelled on Boccaccio and left unfinished at her death in 1549. Sister of François I and a serious humanist and religious reformer, she used the frame to argue about love, marriage, hypocrisy and the treatment of women, with the storytellers disagreeing sharply after every tale.
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Nancy Goldstone
After she was widowed, Marguerite was strongly encouraged by her brother to marry a younger man for political purposes. This second marriage was not happy. Marguerite’s new husband, Henry II of Navarre, didn’t really want her. She was an intellectual who was interested in humanism, the Reformation and the Renaissance. He was much less educated, in addition to which he was also coarse and, frankly, brutish.
Interview · March 2012
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