In Our Time - Marguerite de Navarre

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Marguerite, Queen of Navarre (1492 – 1549), author of the Heptaméron, a major literary landmark in the French Renaissance. Published after her death, The Heptaméron features 72 short stories, many of which explore relations between the sexes. However, Marguerite’s life was more eventful than that of many writers. Born into the French nobility, she found herself the sister of the French king when her brother Francis I came to the throne in 1515. At a time of growing religious change, Marguerite was a leading exponent of reform in the Catholic Church and translated an early work of Martin Luther into French. As the Reformation progressed, she was not afraid to take risks to protect other reformers.With Sara Barker Associate Professor of Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for the Comparative History of Print at the University of LeedsEmily Butterworth Professor of Early Modern French at King’s College LondonAnd Emma Herdman Lecturer in French at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: Giovanni Boccaccio (trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn), The Decameron (Norton, 2013)Emily Butterworth, Marguerite de Navarre: A Critical Companion (Boydell &Brewer, 2022)Patricia Cholakian and Rouben Cholakian, Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2006)Gary Ferguson, Mirroring Belief: Marguerite de Navarre’s Devotional Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1992)Gary Ferguson and Mary B. McKinley (eds.), A Companion to Marguerite de Navarre (Brill, 2013)Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (John Wiley & Sons, 1987)R.J. Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (Fontana Press, 2008)R.J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge University Press, 2008)John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley (eds.), Critical Tales: New Studies of the ‘Heptaméron’ and Early Modern Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Paul Chilton), The Heptameron (Penguin, 2004)Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Rouben Cholakian and Mary Skemp), Selected Writings: A Bilingual Edition (University of Chicago Press, 2008) Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Hilda Dale), The Coach and The Triumph of the Lamb (Elm Press, 1999)Marguerite de Navarre (trans. Hilda Dale), The Prisons (Whiteknights, 1989)Marguerite de Navarre (ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani), L’Heptaméron (Libraririe générale française, 1999)Jonathan A. Reid, King’s Sister – Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) and her Evangelical Network (Brill, 2009)Paula Sommers, ‘The Mirror and its Reflections: Marguerite de Navarre’s Biblical Feminism’ (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 5, 1986)Kathleen Wellman, Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France (Yale University Press, 2013)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in the early 16th century,

Marguerite Queen of Navarre 1492 to 1549 was the author of the Heptamaran, one of the literary jewels of the French Renaissance. A prolific writer, she also dared to criticize a Catholic church, despite the fact she was the sister of Francis I, the Catholic King of France. As the Reformation gathered pace, Marguerite used her status to help those who, like her, wanted reform. With me to discuss Marguerite de Navarre are Emma Hurdman, lecturer in French at the University of St. Andrews,

Sarah Barker, Associate Professor of Early Modern History, and Director of the Centre for the Comparative History of Print at the University of Leeds, and Emily Butterworth, Professor of Early Modern French at King's College London. Emily Butterworth, she was born in 1492. Can you tell us something about her childhood? She was born to the Count of Angouloglem and Louise of Savoy, as you say in 1492, the year that Columbus landed in the Caribbean. Two years after her birth, her brother was born, Frances.

And her mother, Louise, was convinced from the moment of her. his birth that he was destined to be king. So a lot of her childhood revolved around the greatness of her brother and his destiny to become king. Louise, it's probably fair to say, wasn't as excited at the birth of her daughter, but nevertheless, Louise did support both of her children. She oversaw their upbringing and their education, and Marguerite shared her brother's education, which was quite an extraordinary circumstance for a woman at the time. So Marguerite was educated as a Renaissance princess in the new learning that was coming out of Italy.

She had access to an extensive library in Cognac, and Cognac was a centre for intellectual and artistic endeavour. For the time, the education that she was given, and that he prances too, but more common for a boy. I mean, even so, Edgar was extraordinary. North point one percent of people got it. Can you briskly tell us what she was educated in? They would have read the classics,

so Plato, Aristotle. They would have read the Italian humanists, including Dante. They would have been exposed to other European writers such as Chaucer. They would have read Boccacho and Italian poets. French poets, French chroniclers. It was a well-rounded humanist education. Very rare and exceptionally rare for a woman. Sarah, Sarah Barker, in 1517, Luther dropped a bomb in Europe,

and that was the nailing to the door of Wittenberg of the protestations against the corruptions of the Catholic Church, which changed Europe probably more than any single instance for many years. to come. What kind of doubts about the Catholic Church could people like Marguerite have had? It's really interesting to think about Marguerite growing up in this period. Obviously, Luther is the name we associate with religious change, starting religious change in this period. And he is incredibly important to that story. But he's not the only person who is concerned about the Catholic Church. And there had been a number of people in France who had been one.

worried about a number of different things to do with the Catholic Church. A lot of people were concerned about the activities, particularly the clergy, how the clergy affect their day-to-day lives. Are they resident where they should be resident? Are they living up to the vows they've taken if they're monks and so on? And it's, I think, particularly important for France, because France is actually seen as one of the most Christian parts. Erasmus called it the most purest, the purest Christian. He did, he did, right at the time when Luther is starting to gear up. And it's got this tradition, I suppose, of having been not touched by heresy.

In the recent past, France has been remarkably towing the line as far as the Catholic Church goes. it's I think particularly valuable for the monarchs at the time because France is quite a patchwork country, quite a disparate country, it's quite hard to rule. And one of the things that everybody has in common is religion. And then when you start to see people criticising that, that stores up a lot of problems for the future. Before these thesis, these 95 thesis,

are nailed to the door we told at Wittenberg, what sort of doubts could someone like Marguerite, who assume, has a certain independent, of mine from all this reading. What could she have expressed openly about the Catholic Church? I think Marguerite is in quite a difficult position, as we've seen. She's incredibly educated. She would be aware of a lot of the trends that are going on in terms of things like going back to the sources, going back to the original versions as much as possible that's coming out of humanistic learning. At the time, we have plays and farces being produced, which are,

sometimes quite spricely critical of the Catholic Church. But it's particularly in the late 1510s and the early 1520s, it's still all up for grabs. And the word evangelical is quite useful here, and Marguerite's association with indeed protection of them. Can you tell the essence what that's all about? The evangelicals are sometimes the shorthand is that they're sort of proto-protestants. I don't think that's entirely fair to them.

As the words suggest, they're very interested in the Gospels, the teachings of the Gospels. They are very much agreeing with this idea that you should be going to the Bible as a source of authority, which is, of course, a Protestant interest. But it's not necessarily going as far as perhaps some of the Protestant groups are going. Marguerite has been described as being part of the emotional heart of the evangelical movement, which I think is quite a useful way. way of thinking of her. Was it dangerous for her to do this? Did she get away with it because of her brother and a position of court? At this early time, I think it's still a bit in flux. Certainly later on, it becomes more and more dangerous and people around Marguerite are executed or forced into exile.

But in the early 1520s, nobody's still entirely sure where this is going. But certainly it's risky. When we're thinking about somebody like Marguerite, I think she just genuinely wants the Catholic Church to be doing very well and sees problems that need fixing. Can you describe what sort of evangelical she was? How close did she sail to Catholicism and how close did she sail to Protestantism? Did she bob about in the middle? Yes, I think that's quite a useful way of thinking about it. There are some areas where she seems very close to Protestant ideas. You had a Protestant curiosity, we're told. Yeah, Protestant curious. And certainly certainly.

of the people who she associates with do become Protestants, but equally some of them stay well within the confines of the Catholic Church. She's certainly criticised on both sides for not going far enough to distance herself from the others. Thank you very much. Emma Herdman. She's a power in the land, but she's also a writer, and one of the first women writers and very widely celebrated will come to that. Is it interesting to you that one of the early things she did was to translate a short work by Luther. Yes, it's very striking that Marguerite's early works are devotional works

and that is highly unusual in a lay woman. She has no right, according to the church, to be writing such things. Does that mean she's exceptionally devoted person? I think she was an exceptionally devout person but that still

doesn't entitle her to write about her thoughts and one of the things that we see in a lot of her writing is women taking on the role almost of preachers or at least of spiritual leaders of small groups. As for her translating Luther, Luther had written a commentary on the Lord's Prayer, a sort of expanded version of it in which he reflects on the meaning of it. And that had been...

A translation into French? He'd written it in German. It had been translated into Latin because that was the way that Luther's works were largely circulated in France. There wasn't that much German spoken in France at the time. And then in the 1520s, many people were involved with translating Luther's Latin works into French for wider circulation. Luther had been excommunicated in 1521, so this was not a neutral thing to be doing. Nonetheless, the works were circulating secretly and people were still reading him. Is this indication of someone who was an early writer, and why did you choose translation at that stage?

In a way, there are so few female writers at the time that it's hard to compare her to anyone else. But it is certainly true that women have traditionally found translation an easy way into writing because it's seen as less presumptuous. You're presenting somebody else's ideas, somebody else's works, not your own. That applies if the person you're translating is a recognised authority and is not in any sense questionable. it's less apparent if that person is Luther who is popular in France but increasingly coming under question the Sorbonne had banned him

after he'd been excommunicated. She did this translation. Did it circulate in any way at all? Was it just for the court or for her friends? What happened to it? It's hard to answer that question. It was never published and there are four manuscripts of it which date from the later 16th century.

So it must have circulated to some degree. She wasn't the only person involved with translating Luther, and there were other versions of this particular text that were published and that did circulate, which may have been one of the reasons why her text was not published. Thank you. Emily, we're stepping out of the chronological order for a moment, but can we turn to the Heptamaran and tell us what it is?

The Heptamarin is Marguerite's masterpiece, or seen as Margaret's masterpiece now. It is a collection of 72 short stories that are told by a group of 10 aristocrats, five men, five women, who are stranded in a monastery in the Pyrenees after catastrophic floods and being chased by bears and murder and sword fights and various other calamities. It's very explicitly modelled on Boccaccio's de Cameron, which is a very similar setup. Boccaccio's de Cameron is told by a group of. of 10 people who have escaped the plague in 14th century Florence.

It seems that Marguerite's Heptammerin was unfinished at her death. Most scholars agreed that it was her design to write 100 stories. And you give us a flavour of what some of the stories were like? Yes, they are all quite idiosyncratic. So I think I'll tell you about the first story, which is told by a male storyteller called Simontu. and he very explicitly says that he's telling it to have revenge on a lady. So Simontal is the courtly servant of another storyteller, Parliament,

and he tells this first story in revenge for her bad treatment of him. And he says he's going to use it to prove that women have been deceiving men ever since Eve made Adam sin. And it is a story that is set in Alonsohn, at the time when, when Marguerite is Duchess, and Marguerite appears in the story as a figure of authority and of justice. It is the story of a beautiful young woman who is married,

but she also has two lovers. She has a bishop for advancement. Profi is the word that Simonto uses, and she has a handsome young nobleman for pleasure, pleasure. When the young nobleman finds out that he has a rival, he breaks off with her, she becomes terrified that he will ruin her reputation and she persuades her husband to kill him. And all sorts of melodramatic events follow from that.

Many people feature in the narrative, including Henry VIII of England and a sorcerer. And it ends with the husband and the magician condemned to force him. labour, while the wife seemingly gets off quite lightly to continue her wicked life. Is this collection of stories, does it come out of one class? Does it all to do with Arashocrats in each one of them? Is it to do with an extension of the gossip of the court? In some senses, Marguerite is a terrific snob. So in the prologue to the Heptameron, the five men and five women whom Emily talked about,

they are saved from this terrible flood and the bears and etc. But their servants all die and the animals all die. But that's all right. We don't have to worry about that because God has preserved this sort of very elite group. But on the other hand, the tales in the Heptamaran are much less snobbish. And so you'll get mirror tales told where a noble lady will do something extremely virtuous. And then in the next tale, it'll be somebody from a much lower social class who will do something even more virtuous, even more admirable.

So she's open to truth and greatness and God being found in the presence of the socially humble, but she finds humility very important for salvation. But at the same time, there's a clear privileging of this very select group of storytellers in their ideal circumstances. How does this fit into the print culture of the time? This is a really exciting time, I would say, for the print culture in Europe, but especially in France. So it's the period when print has been bedding in as technology, as a business, as a way of communicating.

I think it's important to note that initially the Heptamaran doesn't go into print in Marguerite's lifetime. It's being circulated in manuscript. And that's really important to mention that it's not that print comes along and everybody stops reading manuscript works. the two technologies, communication technologies, work hand in hand and side by side. But some of Marguerite's other works are being printed. So some of her poetry is being printed, which is really sort of fitting in with just the wide variety of material that's finding its way into print in the 1520s, 1530s,

everything from things you might expect like religious works, but increasingly we're starting to see very early news communications coming through, lots of poetry, lots of literature of the kind that Marguerite is drawing on and reflecting on when she's writing things. Emily, could you tell us something about how these stories relate to the world that she's living in? The stories are all set in very precise locations. They're kind of set up with the place, the town that they're happening in. They range over all of.

France and go into Italy and Germany and Spain as well. One of the remarkable things about the Heptamarin is, and the one that sets it apart from its Italian model, the Dick-hammerin, is that the storytellers vow to tell true stories, stories that are drawn from their experience or other people's experience that are close to them. So these stories are put in front of the reader as examples of something that has happened, sometimes as examples to follow, but not necessarily because the big innovation of the Heptammeron on the Dick Amarin

is the very extended discussions that come after every story. They're sometimes longer than the stories themselves, and modern scholars, I think, are very interested in these, sometimes more interested in the discussions between the storytellers than they are in the stories. Can you give us an example of one or two of those? After that first story that I talked about, there is actually quite a brief discussion. It's not very typical.

Most of the discussions are a lot longer. But there's a brief discussion about women's perfidy and the biblical foundations of women's deceitfulness. And then Simontel, who has just told the story, tries to influence the rest of the storytelling and asks the next storyteller to, to tell another very similar story. But he asks Wazil, who is the older figure of spiritual authority. Again, very interestingly, that that spiritual authority is invested in a woman in the Heptamaran frame narrative. Wazil takes on the telling of the second story,

but she very explicitly decides to tell a story to belie the story that has just been told. so she searches her memory for a story of female virtue in order to counter the story that Simonto has just told. There's quite a bit of anti-women in these stories, I'm told. Violence, the ideas of violence and so on. Do you want to address that? That is quite a remarkable feature of the heptamerine, I think, particularly for modern readers.

There is an insistence on sexual violence that crops up in all sorts of stories. How is that expressed to sexual violence? The stories are of seduction, seduction that fades into rape and actual rape. The stories that are told show men and women rather at odds with each other, sometimes unable to communicate with each other, wanting different things. In the discussions after the stories, there is a lot of debate about how women's honour and men's honour are completely. incompatible, for example, so men want to conquer and women are required to resist. So the set up, the relationship between men and women in the heptammerin is really antagonistic

in the stories, because it's quite interesting in the discussions that that antagonism is rather more playful, and the men and women do manage to talk to each other, and they do manage to communicate. And so the discussions kind of weave around and weave together these stories of antagonism and sexual violence in a way that offers a different kind of model for the relationship between men and women. Is there any evidence of reaction to this? Do we know who read it and what they did when they read it and how they reacted to it? There isn't much record of reactions in the 16th century, although it was a bestseller when it did finally go into print after Marguerite's death, it was one of the best-selling books in the second half of the 16th century.

I think there were some very interesting reactions from the 17th century when people start to read it and to wonder at its very odd mixture of quite complicated, quite sophisticated Christian theology and these bawdy stories that we were just talking about. and many people in the 17th century don't believe Marguerite wrote it. They don't believe that a queen could have written these kind of stories. Do you think she could? Yes, I do think she could. I think she did.

And in fact, she was, people often imagine or speculate that it was in fact a Huguenot that is a French Protestant who wrote these stories because they are so highly critical of the Catholic Church or more specifically the mendicant friars known as the Franciscans. Let's get back to her a bit more about her life now. She has her brother to protect her, but she protects him in a way as well. What developed from that was also various tensions

between the two of them. What were they? Marguerite and Francis, as Emily said earlier, Francis had been brought up as the hope and the son in this family. He becomes king, he is all-powerful. He is the embodiment of the Renaissance prince in many ways. He does unfortunately manage to get himself taken prisoner after the...

After a catastrophic defeat, which is not really what you want to happen. Not from a glorious king. If you're trying to be a brilliant king. And he spends time as a consequence of that in Madrid, in jail at the mercies of Charles. 5th and Marguerite goes to intervene on his behalf. Do you want to come in? When she gets there, she finds that Francis is extremely ill, and the first thing she does is actually nurse him back to health,

but he's on the point of taking the last rights, and people were convinced that he was going to die. Her negotiations with Charles don't go terribly well, because all of the things that the French demand, he refuses, but what she does at least achieve is not agreeing to, the sort of treaty that he had been going to offer. So at the end of 1525, she returns to France, leaving Francis in prison, and hasn't actually negotiated his release. But she has brought him back to health.

She's saved France from a very dangerous treaty, and he is released early in 1526. In exchange for his two sons, two of his three sons, who stay in prison in Madrid on his behalf. Hostages? Yeah. That's going to build, move on his part or her part. Which of them engineered that? Francis. And yes, it's not entirely clear how much he intended to keep the promises he made to Charles when he left his sons as his hostages.

How long did they stay as hostages? They were there for four years. A long time. I think they didn't suffer too badly, apart from the fact that they hadn't got their freedom. In some senses, it was quite normal for royal children to be educated away from home. They did have a good education, but not the one that anyone would have intended. for them. To pick up on something that we were talking about her relationship with Francis,

in the 1520 she's being very trusted here. But as it goes into the 1530s, circumstances within France mean that even though this is a relationship where Marguerite is seen to carry quite a lot of weight and is respected, going back to what we were talking about earlier with her association with evangelicals, That becomes very problematic for her and for Francis because they are starting to be seen as getting too radical, too public challenging authority. And Marguerite is sort of caught up in all of that,

and that causes problems there. What sort of problems? Well, in 1534, things really come to a head when a series of posters or placards are printed, probably in Switzerland and smuggled into France, and posted up in a number of key places in Paris, in endures, tour, blois. Even supposedly, there's a rumour that one makes it onto the door of the King's Bed Chamber, which is quite something given that these are posters which completely denigrate the Catholic Mass.

And you're in the memory of the wording? Horrible abuse, I think, is in the title. What's horrible abuse? Of the papal mass. the Eucharist should be seen as where you are remembering what goes on rather than the actual transubstantiation. So far more radically Protestant than things that we've seen before. And this is just too far.

This is too far for the Sorbonne who got mentioned before. It's too far for Francis. And a lot of people who Marguerite had been quite close to and in previous instances she's been able to protect people, this is a turning point. There are people who have to go into exile. A number of key people are executed as well. And so that's one of the tensions that's there between them.

So how does she come through it? She's married at this point to her second husband. She'd been widowed in 1525. So she's married now to the king of Navarre. And that's very handy because Navar is a separate kingdom. so she withdraws from court for a while and stays in Navarre. That also leads to a sort of tension with her brother because whereas Francis is trying to make arrangements with Charles

to bring about some sort of peace, the King of Navarre has lost half of his kingdom to the Spanish and wants it back. So there are several occasions where Francis is negotiating in one direction and Henry the King of Navarre is negotiating in the other and it's not clear whose side Marguerite is on at that point. Is that because she's very clever at ambivalence? She's very clever at ambivalence, certainly.

She's a good diplomat and she is very flattering to whomever she needs to be flattering to. And we see this in many of the stories in the Heptamer. And Emily, I think you have examples of that. There's one story actually about Francis himself in the Heptamer. Keptamarin, who shows himself to be this kind of consummate monarch in his handling of a potential threat. This is a possibly paid mercenary who has come in from Germany to kill him, and Francis manages to manoeuvre around this German count and to force him to leave the court without any blood being spilled. This is presented by the storyteller as this consummate bit of kingship and diplomacy.

I think the Heptamerin itself could be seen as a work that is in the tradition of the education of the prince. There's a number of stories that seem to be addressing Francis as the best way to be a king, the right way to be a king. The first story I talked about actually, that very first story set in Alonsohn's has all sorts of quite surprising details about French justice in comparison with English justice, which doesn't come out of the comparison very well. So the heptamerin itself, I think, could be read as a political intervention, a sort of oblique message to Francis or indeed to his successor, Henry II. in how to be a good king. Can I ask anyone if you want to pick this up? Was she being regarded as a political figure where she's gone to Madrid,

she's made these stories, she's intervened here there. How is she regarded? Is she just still the little wife who writes or is she a political force in the land? No, she's absolutely a political force in her own right. And I think from the start of her brother's reign, She's his right-hand woman.

Frances's first wife is quite absent from the court. She's almost constantly pregnant. So Claude doesn't feature very much in French court life. And Marguerite sort of takes her place. And she does emerge from the accounts as an excellent diplomat and an excellent accomplished ambassador. She corresponds with all sorts of very important people in Europe, including more than one pope, very controversial figures, John Calvin, Martin Luther,

Victoria Colonna in Italy. She is by Francis's side at the field of cloth of gold, when Cardinal Woolsey makes his fiel de l'iance, or basically his kind of adopted daughter. And the English ambassadors reports are full of admiration for Marguerite and how she is, is the way to get to France's, or she is the way to get things done. She is the person who is able to negotiate, make things happen. I wondered if I could think about the other side of your question, the wife who writes or the sister who writes. In some senses, she isn't that at all during her lifetime. You're right that she is, she does something extraordinary in 1531, which is to publish a work of hers in, well, she publishes it anonymously in 1531, and then it comes out

in her own name two years later. And that's the first time that a French woman has appeared in print in her lifetime. So it's an extraordinary thing to do. But actually, there are only three texts by Marguerite that are published in her lifetime. The first is that first one, the mirror of the sinful soul. The second is a very short fable about nymphs. and satires. And the third is in 1547, two years before she dies. And it's a collection of her religious works and then of her more secular works, letters and poems. So she's really not known primarily as a writer during her lifetime. The Heptamaran isn't published until 10 years after she has died. Do you want to take that up, her reputation? I think one of the things that

I've been really thinking about is she's often seems to be caught between different roles or different places. So she is writing a lot, but it's not necessarily very public writing or published printed writing. She is being caught between her husband and her brother and that royal women of this period know that they're going to be used as bargaining pieces at crucial points of diplomacy. And that's very much true for Marguerite's daughter. The problem is that there are two kings who want to use her as a bargaining piece. Marguerite's husband, Henry of Navarre, who has plans to marry his daughter off to,

as part of his strategy to regain his territory of Spanish Navarre, but also Marguerite's brother, Francis, king of France, feels that he should be able to marry his niece off as he sees fit, and at this point that should be to strengthen his alliance with German Protestants, and so he wants her to marry the Duke of Cleves. And Marguerite finds herself very much caught in the middle of this and having to sort of, she tries to put it off for quite some time. But eventually her brother wins out.

He is the king of France. He is more powerful than the king of Navarre. And so it is his wishes that win out. And Jan is sent to, it's agreed that she will marry. the Duke of Cleves. Agreed by everybody except her, by the sign of it. Everybody except her. At which point, this extraordinary

account written by Jeanne, purportedly at the time of the marriage, denouncing her marriage, refusing to accept it, and stating in no uncertain terms that if she is married

to William of Cleaves, it is against her will and against her desire and so implicitly an invalid marriage. So she goes to the church and she gets carried down the aisle. All that's accurate, is it? And plonked and plonked on the steps of the altar or if they did have steps for the altars in those days, and married.

And supposedly carried down the aisle by one of Marguerite's great rivals at court as a way of doing him down by making he. He has to be the one who has to carry this truculent teenager. down the aisle to this marriage that a few years later she is decrying in no uncertain terms. Where does that figure in Marguerite's biography? I think it's tricky because it's one of these real points of crisis in the relationship with her brother and because she seems to capitulate to his, well, she puts Franz Sova Navarre at the crucial point. There is some speculation that Marguerite was somehow involved in this extraordinary statement by Jan.

But there's no real evidence for that. And yeah, as Sarah says, it's just so tricky to unpick these dynastic loyalties and whether Marguerite thought it was more expedient to go with her brother than with her husband. As Sarah says, he did have more power than Henry. but it does seem clear that Jeanne thought herself very much the victim. Did the mother and daughter get together again? Well, it doesn't seem to have been a very close relationship, but that's not at all unusual in the period, especially for royal families.

Jan didn't spend much time at home with Marguerite. Marguerite didn't spend much time in Navarre, actually. For a lot of her marriage, she was still following the French court around the chateau of the Loire. she does go to Navarre from time to time and she retreats to Navarre and uses it as a base and a kind of muster station.

But Jan and Marguerite don't spend very much time together. Jan is married more happily, seemingly, for a second time. And she and her new husband also feature in the Heptameron maybe as a sort of, I don't know, compensatory vignette about how it all came out okay in the end. Very short story, quite funny. Towards the end of Marguerite's life, Jeanne and her new husband go to stay,

and we think that it's around then that Marguerite writes one of her last pieces, which is a play called The Perfect Lovers, and it's clearly designed around this happily married couple, which is her daughter and second son-in-law. We're coming to the end now. We can't ask each of you what your assessment of Marguerite is now. How is she assessed now?

You're all dashing to be at the life. So, Emma. She appears on so many university curricula as a wonderful introduction to 16th century French writing because her stories are accessible, they're exciting, they're surprising. She never quite says what you think she's going to say. She's thoughtful.

She touches on subjects that's still interesting. us today because they're universal, the relationships between men and women, what you do in the face of corruption, how you get yourself out of a difficult situation, there's humor, there's entertainment in it, so she's still a highly, highly readable writer and a woman who had an extraordinarily privileged position in French society, but who therefore reflects that society very widely in her work. And as I understand it, much portrayed as well? Yes, she was satirised during her lifetime,

but she was also, there are some beautiful portraits of her. There's a wonderful one with a little dog and one with a parrot. Why does a parrot come in? I suppose, because if you're a noble, wealthy woman in the 16th century, you would show that an exotic bird is the sign of your culture, your richness. What about Elizabeth the first translating some of her work? Elizabeth did this at the tender age of 11. She translated the mirror of the sinful soul.

She called it the glass of the sinful soul into English. So it's written in French verse, and Elizabeth translates it into English prose and gives it to her stepmother, Catherine Parr, as a New Year's Day present. But she did give translations to other members of the royal family translations into and out of French, Italian and Latin and English as presents. So it's a schoolgirl exercise in some ways, but it's also striking that Elizabeth does this in 1544.

It's published four years later. 1544 is 10 years, 11 years after the Sorbonne temporarily banned the mirror of the sinful soul. And then when Francis said, did you really mean to ban my sister's book? they thought about it and decided that they didn't and that it was a mistake. And their defence was, most of us haven't even read it. So we certainly didn't find it heretical. Emily, where are you on all this?

I think the heptamarin is seen as a masterpiece of the French Renaissance and possibly the European Renaissance. What is extraordinary about it, I think, is that absolutely, as Emma says, it still tackles these issues that are still extremely alive today. like the relationship between men and women, like the nature of love, like how we pass news and understand information and interpret stories that we hear. But it's also interesting because it from time to time just reveals the strangeness and the weirdness of the 16th century.

And there are some issues that feel quite alien to us today as well. There's a lot of the heptamerin is concerned with salvation, actually. very explicit theological discussion, which the women join in as well as the men. And so the Hephamron offers this really perfect kind of introduction to 16th century culture, 16th century French culture, with ways that we can get in, but also ways that resist our reading.

Finally? For me, she's one of these really fascinating people who are caught up in this absolutely. absolutely seismic change in terms of the Reformation. Well, the Reformation and the Reformation, isn't she? Absolutely. She's experiencing the culture, but also people don't know in the 1520s and 1530s how this is all going to pan out. And, you know, there are attempts to try and bring the Catholics and Protestants together for well beyond into the 1540s. And how difficult it was for everybody

to try and find their. very personal way through these massive religious questions which have a bearing on your eternal soul. She's one of those, the most vivid examples we have of people trying to work that out and live that in a spiritual way, a devotional way, but also in a very practical way because of the life that she lives. And also there's the edges which we haven't brought into play. Protestants think the Catholics are destined for hell

and the Catholics think the Protestants are destined for hell and they describe hell very vividly both of them. Absolutely, absolutely. The stakes couldn't be higher. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks Emma Hurdman, Emily Butterworth and Sarah Barker and our, in our time, studio engineer Emma Hath. Next week, the work of the 19th century American writer Edgar Allan Poe,

sometimes beautiful and enchanting, sometimes gruesome and gory. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have said that you didn't get time to say? I don't think we really had time to talk about how funny she is. The Heptamarin is hilarious in parts. And it's difficult to get a sense of what Marguerite was actually like

from the various documentary evidence that we have. It's quite loaded, some of it, it's quite partial, some of it. But she does emerge as an incredibly witty, charming, interesting companion from Ambassador's Reports, from kind of glowing chronicles in the last half of the 16th century. I think she would have been a fun person to hang out with. Well, there you go. I mean, for me, she's very interesting as this figure at the point where it's going to go either way and her

You mean it's going to go a Catholic or Protestants? Yeah and and the sort of the ramifications of the decisions that are made or not made in the 1520s and 1530s just go on to divide French society

for ages and it's her daughter goes on to have this really significant career as a Protestantly and then it's Marguerite's grandson who is the one who kind of manages to end the wars of religion. So I think just thinking about the legacy of the family is always really interesting to me. And she's such an interesting kind of pivotal figure, isn't she? Or at least she exists in this time where, as you say, no one really knew what was going to happen.

And her reputation in centuries after has tended to be rather more, sectarian, dare I say. So Catholic historians will say she's really a Catholic. Protestant historians will say she's really a Protestant. But in the 1520s, those categories of identity didn't exist in the same way that they do now. Did she die, as it were, as a Catholic or a Protestant? Oh, Catholic. She never became a Protestant.

She stayed a Catholic to the end. And in many ways, she was a very devout, very Orthodox Catholic. So she absolutely believed in monastic. She founded and supported a number of monasteries. Monasteries or non-rus? Both convents and monasteries. She was working for reform of those monasteries, but she absolutely believed in the principle of monasticism.

She was one of the people who really hoped that the Catholic church itself could be reformed. But then there's a point where that becomes very difficult to articulate without it seeming far more radical. And some of those reformations are what we would now think of as highly Protestant manoeuvres. So the whole idea of translating the Bible into the vernacular enables the individual sinner to engage directly with God without going via the institution of the church. And she's very supportive of those sorts of maneuvers. We know that she had a copy of the first French translation of the Bible, the first French translation of the Bible. Bible. So we know that she was protecting the people who were working on these sorts of projects

and that she favoured them. But it was a pre-schismatic mode to try and reform the church from within without fragmenting it and breaking it. Translating it into the vernacular swept across Europe, didn't it? And often in many different versions. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I enjoyed it. And this is Tara Flynn. We host a podcast you might like for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds called Now You're Asking. Each week we take real listeners questions about life, love, lingerie, cats, dogs, dentists, pockets, or the lack of, anything really.

And apply our worldly wisdom in a way which we hope will help. But also hopefully, entertain. Join us why don't you? Search up Now You're asking on BBC Sounds. Tankin'ew.