Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance

Church History, Dec, 2006 by Larissa Juliet Taylor

Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance. By Patricia F. Cholakian and Rouben C. Cholakian. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xxxiv 413 pp. $40.00 cloth.

As Rouben Cholakian points out in the preface, no up-to-date English biography exists of one of the most important figures of the French Renaissance, Marguerite de Navarre. Barbara Stephenson's 2004 The Power and Patronage of Maguerite de Navarre (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate) is a study of Marguerite's patronage based on a close reading of her letters, but it is not a biography. As a historian of late medieval and Renaissance France, I was very excited as I began to read Mother of the Renaissance. Unfortunately, at least for historians, there are some major problems with this work.

Following upon Patricia Cholakian's earlier work, the book frames Marguerite's life around a reading of her Heptameron as autobiography. While we can gain insights about a person from his or her writing, it is something else to present it as fact. The authors argue that Marguerite is the protagonist of the fourth and tenth novellas and believe that the courtier Bonnivet at least attempted rape (as did Amadour in novella ten). This is speculative in the extreme, as we can see throughout the book in the authors' repeated use of words such as "we are inclined to believe," "may well have been," "it seems to us," and so forth. Scholars must necessarily make conjectures based on evidence, but the degree to which the authors do so here is troublesome, especially when their evidence comes from Marguerite's literary creations. Could we assume, for example, that Boccaccio's Decameron, which was one of the inspirations for the Heptameron, is also autobiographical? From the latter's "stories of sexual aggression [that] appear obsessively," the authors draw a conclusion they state as fact: "Although she writes that her attacker got nothing from her but scratches and blows, the assault left an indelible mark on her psyche ... [that] was undeniably a major factor in her search for spiritual enlightenment" (61).

Although the authors' expertise in literary studies cannot be denied, there are also serious problems of historical understanding--or at least presentation--regarding the French Church in the 1520s-40s. They regularly refer to the "superstitions" of the medieval Church, a word that historians have learned to use with caution. Similarly, they repeatedly talk about the "dishonesty and hypocrisy of the church" (69), stating at one point that Marguerite was "jaded by the cant that had long passed for Christian teaching" (70). The Cholakians also mention the "corrupt Franciscans" and the "order's reputation for superstition and debauchery" (148). Such comments, which appear throughout the book, demonstrate a lack of knowledge of recent scholarship on the French Catholic Church in the fifteenth century. More disturbing is that such characterizations and generalizations are presented as fact; had the authors specified that these were Marguerite's beliefs, there would be no problem. Interestingly, given the evidence provided here, the Marguerite of the 1530s does appear to have gone over to the reformed position, even though later she seems to have become more conservative in her religious beliefs. It is preposterous, however, to suggest that if she had not "enjoyed the king's protection, it is probable that [she] would have been burned as well [as other reformers after the Affair of the Placards]" (175). While Marguerite was a frequent target of the Paris Faculty of Theology, there would have been no precedent for burning a member of the royal family. Later in England, Lady Jane Grey was put to death by Mary I and Mary Queen of Scots was executed by Elizabeth--for treason. Royalty was not burnt at the stake, especially for heresy.

Notwithstanding these many significant problems, the biography of Marguerite is beautifully written, eminently readable, and informative. For English-language readers, this book provides one of the few opportunities to understand Marguerite, her relationship to her brother Francis and her two husbands, and the estranged relationship with her daughter, Jeanne d'Albret, who would later become the Calvinist Queen of Navarre.

The strongest arguments of the book concern the role of writing in Marguerite's life. Tracing her writing career to letters exchanged with and inspiration from the reform-minded Bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briconnet, the authors suggest that writing increasingly became the means by which she expressed her deepest beliefs--not only about religion, but also about relations between the sexes. In La Coche [The Coach] Marguerite has one of the women say: "An unfaithful husband is better than a dead one, ... and at least she doesn't have to worry about him coming home pregnant. But the second woman would do well to follow the same advice she gave to the first: What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" (229). The Cholakians argue that "Marguerite used her wiles"--indeed, her writing--"to challenge a system unfavorable to marriageable woman" (247). By the time Marguerite died in 1549, she had made her mark on the religious, intellectual, and literary world of her time.