The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian

Renaissance Quarterly, Winter, 2002 by Mary B. McKinley

Carol Thysell, The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian

Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. viii 181 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-19-513845-7.

Readers of Marguerite de Navarre have long speculated about her religious convictions. Some literary historians have been determined to assign her definitively to an easily identifiable doctrine, usually Lutheranism or Calvinism. Carol Thysell, coming from a doctoral program in religious studies, offers here the most thoughtful and detailed evaluation to date. Thysell focuses in particular on the Heptameron and on the last years of Marguerite's life, the mid to late 1540s, a period of prolific activity that produced both that novella collection and several of her most important mystical poems. Thysell situates Marguerite's later writing in the context of the religious polemics of those years. She draws a clear picture of the conflicts among several groups of the Reformers, especially between Calvin and a group, known as the spiritual libertines, whom Marguerite had protected and whose leaders had found refuge at her chateau in Nerac. In early 1545, Calvin wrote a treatise "Against the Spiritual Libertines" in which he attacked that group. He later wrote a letter to Marguerite, insisting that he had meant no personal offense against her and renewing his attack against the evils he saw in the spiritual libertines' teachings. There is no record that Marguerite responded directly to Calvin, but, Thysell argues, her Heptameron is an allegoricized response and a veiled presentation of her own theological position. Thysell offers Michael Murrin's distinction between the poet (or allegorist) and the prophet, and proposes that, unlike Calvin the "prophet," whose doctrinal writings were forthright and uncompromising, Marguerite the "allegorist" chose fictional narrative as a vehicle for her theological vision. In a culture which generally refused to acknowledge women as theologians, fiction offered Marguerite, King Francis I's sister, who had already in the 1530s been attacked for the perceived heterodoxy of her poetry, a safer and more effective means of reaching and persuading her audience.

Thysell offers detailed comparisons of Calvin's and the spiritual libertines' views on crucial theological questions: fallen human nature, divine providence, human freedom, and the role of the will in salvation. In so doing, she offers one of the best concise overviews of the libertines to date, considering not only Calvin's reaction to them but also their affinities with the earlier "Heresy of the Free Spirit" and the Brethren of the Common Life. She shows how the libertine's spiritualism differs from that of Ficino and the Florentine neo-Platonists, another group whom Marguerite favored and whose writings were influential at the French court in the 1540s. Thysell highlights the word cuyder, a word whose meanings ranged from imagination to presumption, and argues that Marguerite's use of that word changed significantly after Calvin's treatise and ensuing letter. The Heptameron posits a pessimistic view of fallen humankind on its own and totally rejects self-determination. At the same time, the stories and di scussions show the regenerative power of divine love and offer a diversity of opinions on sensual pleasure and human love. Analyzing the general Prologue and the shorter prologues to each day's storytelling, Thysell sees the Heptameron frame story portraying the spiritual transformation of a providentially guided Christian community where the Holy Spirit grows in their midst day by day. That progression toward the liberating role of the Spirit reflects the passage from Paul to John in the devisants' morning scriptural readings. The discussions after each story show the community in moral deliberation, discerning between good and evil in the actions portrayed by the stories. Thysell offers a particularly insightful view of the ways in which the Heptameron criticizes and belies Calvins' notion of gendered virtue.

In promising a study of Marguerite de Navarre as theologian, Thysell's title is a little misleading. Looking mainly at the last years of Marguerite's life, she gives only brief attention to the earlier period, years when Marguerite's writings received harsh criticism from the University of Paris theologians and when, one could argue, she was already writing theology and using allegorical rhetoric. Guillaume Briconnet, Marguerite's spiritual advisor in the 1520s, the correspondence the two exchanged, and the vast body of mystical poetry she composed before turning to prose fiction are all but missing from this study. However, while the extensive analyses of Calvin's and the spiritual libertines' theological positions at times threaten to overwhelm rather than contextualize Marguerite's writings, they go far toward bringing her later work into much sharper focus. Thysell's argument that Calvin's "Against the Spiritual Libertines" played a provocative role in shaping the Heptameron is very convincing. While offe ring a detailed historical -- and theological -- context that will lead to more enlightened readings of the Heptameron, she also vindicates Marguerite de Navarre as theologian, showing that she was in the end neither Lutheran nor Calvinist nor spiritual libertine nor neo-Platonisr but an independent thinker with a theological vision of her own.