Personal Ties: Book I of Marguerite de Navarre’s Les Prisons

 

Sheri Wolfe Valentine

University of Kansas

 

    The manuscript of Les prisons, one of several long poems written by Marguerite de Navarre shortly before her death, was not uncovered by Abel Lefranc in the Bibliothèque nationale until 1896. The style used to descibe his discovery betrays the emotion he felt upon opening this treasure:

 

    Aucune main ne semble avoir feuilleté ces pages précieuses entre toutes, depuis le jour où Jeanne D’Albret enferma dans un coffret de fer, garni de solides serrures, le manuscrit qu’elle voulait, par un scrupule facile à comprendre, dérober à tous les regards indiscrets. La jeune reine laissa publier L’Heptaméron . . . mais elle garda toujours avec soin jaloux le recueil qu’elle considérait comme le testament littéraire de sa mère, celui qui renferma les Confessions de la plus aimable des femmes de la Renaissance. (Dernières poésies 3)

 

Though Marguerite’s poem begins as an allegory, not unlike that of the Lover in Roman de la rose, though its author disguises her voice in the masculine poetic tradition of Neoplatonism, it was nevertheless hidden away for 350 years. Perhaps despite the attempted disguise, the veil was too thin, the emotion too strong, the matter too intimate.

    Since study of the work began, the three books of the long poem have often been viewed as three successive steps up a mystical ladder of ascension. Interpreted as Marguerite’s attempt to reach for the Divine through a type of mystical transcendence into ecstacy, they are often analyzed in relation to their medieval and Evangelistic sources and explained in terms of other Neoplatonist poetry written at about the same period. Though this interpretation holds well for the second two books of this encyclopedic poem, I believe that there may be an additional force at work in Book I, one having to do with neither religion nor Neoplatonism, but rather with the social and personal realities of this intelligent, educated, and worldly woman.

    The primary difficulty in the analysis of Marguerite’s work has traditionally been judged to be the placing of her thought in one or the other vein of early Renaissance theology. Jules Gelernt has pointed out in a note in his study of L’Heptaméron that Lefranc is convinced that Marguerite is a Protestant, Jourda that she is a mystic quietist, and that Lucien Febvre seems “unable to come to a definite conclusion” (18). Though the pioneering work of Albert Hyma charting the developments of the movement called the “devotio moderna” has been largely overlooked by many of those attempting to “label” early Evangelistic currents, Paula Sommers has correctly identified many of its best-loved writers with Marguerite’s religious poetry.[1] Like one of the inspirers of the “devotio moderna,” Saint Paul, Marguerite indeed seeks moral value beyond the letter of the law in a redeeming, unifying Spirit. Like one of the crafters of the movement’s Platonist mysticism, Bernard of Clairvaux, she intuits a close affinity between divine love and the ideal of human conjugal love. In addition to these sources, brought to her at least in part by her confessor, Briçonnet, Marguerite read and knew well the lessons of the Ficinian Neoplatonists, both from Lyon and from Italy. Being a woman, however, one whose very nature is so tied by patristic definition to pleasure and to sin, her point of view in attempting to assimilate her own art of living, loving, and writing into the various systems emerging from medieval thought appears necessarily different from most others.

    Because of their skilled construction, the three books of Les prisons can indeed be interpreted (as Robert Cotrell has done) as the allegorical progress of the soul towards mystical union with the divine. The thematic unity of the work, in fact, lends itself to such a reading at the “highest,” most abstract level. Its “grammar” does indeed, especially in the last two Books, answer to those of Augustine and Bernard by exemplifying certain instances of loving response to “the Word,” as well as to heights of mystical silence.

    But we must also consider the possibility that, in the first Book of this passionate, tortured poem, there may be more at stake than the author’s religious preferences. What began as a Neoplatonist testimony to the power and aid of mystical ascension may have become for a moment a cry of pain at the memory of actual earthly loves. In an attempt to recognize this human cry within the work, let us, instead of seeking the “higher” meaning, the topos of the transcendence of the earthly prison, look rather for social, and thus more personal realities suggested by constraint. Let us for a moment, like Montaigne, refuse to transcend, so that we may understand the poet’s ultimate need to transcend.

    Book I of Les prisons is signaled from the first line as a confession: “Je vous confesse, Amye tant aymée. . . .” As Cotrell points out, it boldly identifies both the person addressed and the one confessing (247). From the very beginning, however, we encounter a problem with this honesty, this protest of confession. We know that the author is a woman, a queen, and the wife (successively) of two noblemen; but we realize that, because a woman is being addressed as the Beloved (and because the term “Amy” is soon after applied to the narrator), that the narrator of the poem is male. What can Marguerite hope to accomplish by endowing the narrator of her “confessions” with a male identity?

    One answer, of course, lies in the very Neoplatonist system we are seeking to set aside. The doctrine of Ficino outlining the ascension of the soul to celestial love applies primarily to the male Lover. The female Beloved serves mainly as a catalyst, propelling her admirer to higher forms of beauty and goodness. Her soul may be elevated to a degree; but the Beloved is above all to feel flattered that she is the inspiration of her Lover’s greater good. (Plato himself, after all, so little values the female recep-tacle for the soul in the Timaeus that he considers being born female a punishment for a previous failed life.) To fit in with poetic and philosophical convention, then, Marguerite’s ascending soul would have to be that of a male.[2]

    In accordance with this tradition, the first Book’s description of earthly love appears at first glance to be a “conventional” prison of worldly love, not unlike those emblematized by Maurice Scève.[3] There are “tourmentz et liens” (5), “grilles, barreaux, chaines et pierres fortes” (12); darkness seems to be light; the natural sun appears to the Lover as a shadow because the Beloved has taken its place (7,42). In the carefully constructed metaphorical framework of the beginning of Book I, there is no other earthly pleasure for the young man, neither the hunt nor the games, nor creatures nor beauties of nature (23-24). He is bound up in a type of perverted pleasure in pain by his obsession with his Beloved: “En regardant ailleurs n’avoys povoir / D’appercevoir rien fors vostre visaige / Dont en mes yeulx empraincte estoit l’ymaige. . . . En desirant alonger mon martire. / Martire, quoy! mais mon tresgrand plaisir” (46-59). So far there is nothing out of the ordinary for a poem of the time. Even Antoine Héroët takes on the persona of his “Parfaicte Amye” for the purpose of making a Neoplatonist point. With both Héroët (proposing the woman partner’s view) and Scève (displaying more traditionally masculine clichés) there are frequent examples of voluntary self-torture as the accompaniment of ascension-inspiring earthly love (though unlike Ficino, they aspire mainly to become known for their writing). There is even a type of chant addressed to the prison that resembles a later sonnet of Louise Labbé: “O belle Tour, o Paradis plaisant / O clair palais du soleil luysant” (121-22).

    At this exact point in the poem something begins to change; like the sonnet, the poem does not lead us upward, but earthward. The hymn to the tower is a chanted prayer-like complaint that continues with a mocking of all other worldly pleasures (125-35). After carefully naming them, the hymn ends with a note of regret: “Mais tout plaisir que ça bas a donné / Pour ma prison doit etre abandonné” (135-36). The use of the passive voice and the “doit” of prescription take the force of enthusiasm out of this abandonment. Just three lines further, the first note of doubt and/or fear on the part of the Lover is introduced: “Je vous requiers aussy ne me changer / Pour recevoir prisonnier estranger, / Et que jamais vostre porte ne s’ouvre / Qui le dedans de mon repoz descouvre” (139-42). The Lover then projects his doubt outward, weeping on the bars to make them rust togehter and to implore them not ever to let him go.

    Within this declaration of love before an inanimate object comes the poet’s strangely personal assertion: “Je possedoys le seul bien que desire / Pour vivre heureux tout royaulme ou empire: / C’est sureté d’amour vraye et loyalle / Qui vault trop myeux que la gloire royalle: / Car estre grand et puyssant terrien / Sans estre aymé et aymer, ce n’est rien” (171-76). Only a person of Marguerite de Navarre’s stature could judge the truth of such an assertion. Consciously or not, the Queen has begun to insert herself into the allegory.

    To further destroy the self-deluding serenity of the love prison, the next lines bring in the allegorical figure “Crainte.” Though fear is a component element of the degrees of love, from carnal to mystical union, in the thought of Saint Bernard and the “devotio moderna,” it is a self-evident element in any real human love relationship as well; since human love and marriage partners can only hope at best to live out the limits of their own mortality: “Ils seront cours / Ces grans plaisirs, et ne pourront durer / Quand la prison sera par le vieulx Temps / mise à neant, et tous ses passetemps” (182-86). Even though the idea of this finally causes the Lover’s heart to tremble, he notes that he has been duly reassured by the words of the Beloved: “Vostre parler de point ne me laisser, / En m’affermant que ma prison antique demourroit ferme . . .” (190-92).

    But now, by the direct intervention of the will of “Cestuy là qui seul est incongneu / Fors de luy seul” a Pauline-like change is about to take place. The Lover professes here that it is God himself who “pour me tirer hors de calamité, / Fist vostre cueur, pour mon bien, si muable / Qu’il proposa, non par voye amyable, / Me delivrer . . .” (206-09). The Lover is led to escape the bond of earthly love not because it is leading him by analogy to something higher, but rather because of some great pain caused him by the object of his love.

    Liberation comes nonetheless “peu à peu, par le temps qui la fist” (213) in the form of a crack in the wall of day-to-day-life. The poet wants to describe it, but hesitates, and, significantly, steps out of the allegory once again in order to decide whether to continue the narration:

 

Diray je icy, ou l’oseray je dire?

Mais le plaisir de faire ung lecteur rire

De ce qui est ma folie et ma honte,

Mais le desire, qui ma gloire surmonte,

De declairer la fin de ma fortune

Me contrainct dire à chascun et chascune

Le comble et fin de ma fole folie

Mon ignorance et ma melancholie. (215-22)

 

It can no longer be the Lover speaking, as he wished only to address the Beloved, who would already know the course of his folly and shame. In what would appear to be a spontaneous burst of sincerity, the poet, who has some degree of personal “gloire” to defend, is addressing readers beyond the scope of the allegory in order to explain to them an “ignorance” and a melancholy that seem likewise beyond the scope of this pattern of Neoplatonist poetry.

    After this rupture of hesitation the Lover returns to his rhetorical stance by noticing the initial crack in his prison wall. At first he takes it merely to be the work of Time, the only destructive element he has until now feared in his earthly love; but as the sun through the rupture has allowed him to perceive “un peu de cruaulté de ma prison” and as the next day there are more cracks, he begins to make pitiful attempts to patch up the tower. Trying to repair it “à l’endroit de la bressche, / Tant qu’il n’y peult passer ne dard ne flesche” (242-43)—perhaps to protect from Eros’s arrows from new and different sources—the Lover finally recognizes the futility of his pathetic patching and the deep troubling of his peace of mind: “O ma prison, qu’estes vous devenue, . . . O beauté enlaidie! O ma santé tournée en maladie!” (267-70). The ambiguity of these lines does not reveal whose beauty has been spoiled; but in the very next verses the figure of the opening of the Lover’s eyes reveals to him that his prison is the work of his own hands. The Beloved does not hold him, but rather his own labor, pain, and care: his own will to lead life within the framework of such constraints. Claiming firmly that even so he wants to stay in his construction, he protests (perhaps too strongly) that no other arrow will ever touch his heart, that death alone could force him to leave. Like Héroët’s Parfaicte Amye, he asserts his faithfulness in the face of any possible adversity, despite any warning he might receive (Parfaicte amye 12-23).

    It remains nonetheless clear to the Lover that someone is attempting to remove him from his prison tower. At the height of his feverish worry, unable to sleep, he finds it engulfed in flames; not those of his love-fire, but from a more powerful source that consumes both wood and stone. In the fashion of Roman de la rose, Amour appears to encourage the Lover to die bravely inside his prison. But just at this moment he sees his Beloved “jecter joyeusement, / Par la fenestre . . . brandons / Dessus ma teste” (350-52). The sight of the Beloved rejoicing at the burning of the tower at first reduces the Lover, too, to cinders, to a type of suicide, “car contre vous ne me vouloys deffendre” (354). At this crucial point, however, we finally discover something about the Beloved that was until now only implied: she is cruel and deceitful, with “extrème finesse.” Reflecting on this “cueur faux, qui dissimulant blesse” (357) the Lover finally decides to jump to safety instead of committing suicide. The result of this escape is the insight that the strange fire and the betrayal of the Beloved have done him a favor: “Car en laissant tenebres, le soleil / Que tant et tant, tant avoys refuzé / Me vint monstrer que j’estoys abusé” (3-66). With this leap of disillusionment he finally begins to see the true nature of his prison.

    At this juncture in the work the poet could well have come in with the moral of her example, briefly described the duplicity the light of the sun exposed in the Beloved, and pointed the reader towards the higher plane in Book II. The “lesson” would have been worthy and unified (though already somewhat original), and the allegory still whole. And this is what she begins to do until about line 390: “Premierement me fist veoir clairement / Vous seulle, Amye, aymant trop doublement,” etc. But at the point where one would anticipate a winding down of the first Book, the Queen of Navarre begins to wind up for what can only be called a bitter denouncement, in ascending order, of earthly love, of the earthly institution of marriage, but most especially of the Beloved (in the singular and in the plural) of her own personal life.

    In a movement that would suggest that suddenly the controlled metaphor of the beginning of the poem has, by design or not, gone out of control, the poet starts to describe the Amye in the cold light of the moon. Instead of a typical description of idolatrous earthly love, however, we find the beginnings of a tirade the poet cannot seem to stop until she has exhausted all the bitterness she has so carefully carried through the long, dignified verses of her life. Though we might look to Jourda and others for biographical precisions of sources of this bile, the poem itself contains evidence enough of bitterness long held back, at last allowed expression.

    The movement begins, then, with a type of secret moonlight look at the activities of the Beloved: “. . . contre ma coustume, / j’entray au lieu et grand et spacieux / où je vous viz, m’Amye, de mes yeux, / Des vostres faire, à moy non, mais ailleurs, / Les tours que j’ay de vous tenuz meilleurs” (390-94). The Lover has stayed around after his escape, he says, to reflect on his past pleasures, only to see them being enjoyed, to his surprise, by others. Of these new “prisons” comes a strangely sigh-filled wish: “Dieu vueille enfin qu’elle vous soit meilleure / Que la premiere, et que nul oeil n’en pleure!” (403-04). This allusion to the clandestine discovery of a mate’s unfaithfulness has no self-evident place in the scheme of the allegory, as the Lover has already escaped, but appears rather an involuntary lament.

    Stepping backward for a moment from the person of the Beloved to the ties that held them, the Lover asks the sun, who has allowed the moon to show him the cold truth about his Beloved’s character, to help him once again, so that from now on only light will enter the prison and “non plus moy” (410). The sun obligingly shines its light into the prison from every angle to reveal to him that his soul had been blinded by a “fol plaisir, hors du sens desreglée” (416). What the Lover had taken for paradise was in fact a “si meschante ordure, où je ne voy que ruyne et laidure” (419-20), a “layde et salle prison” filled with a “doulce poyson” (425-26).

    Because of the repeated references to the Tower’s foundations (“fundementz”) and to buildings (“parfaict edifice”) in general, we are to understand that this is a marriage and not simply a platonic and courtly love that is being condemned. It is, as Lucien Febvre has so well described (310-21), the whole institution of marriage as it exists in her lifetime that the poet deplores:

 

Les fundementz de ferme sureté

Ont trop duré, par leur grand dureté

Mais à la fin, sur le sablon assis,

N’ont peu durer, bien qu’ilz fussent massifz,

Car le sablon mouvant les desmolit,

Et l’eau en fin les amolit. (427-32)

 

The faith that she invested in this edifice of sand as a source of happiness is not only misplaced, but there is reason to believe that the entire structure is unsound:

 

Je ne devoys donc pas edifier

Sur ce où nul ne se doit confier.

Puis regardant ceste grosse muraille

Que j’estimoys de grand pierre de taille,

Je n’y viz rien, sinon boue et crachat,

Et que trompé je fuz en tel achapt,

Quand je donnay, pour telle serivtude,

Ma liberté. . . . (427-40)

 

Like all noblewomen of her time, Marguerite de Navarre, and in turn her only child, Jeanne d’Albret, were traded like pawns in the course of maneuvers by royal families in order to secure the political positions of their houses. Following dutifully along one of the only two courses of virtuous conduct open to noblewomen, Marguerite accepted marriage as a vocation at the age of 17. Though Jourda gives ample proof of the general unhappiness of her first marriage to Charles d’Alençon, it is her second unhappy marriage to Henri d’Albret that she records in her first letter to Briçonnet (Febvre 101-02, 106). But even without this information we can see that the poem itself leaves little doubt about the unsuitability of this type of marriage as a foundation for happiness.

    This denouncing of an entire social institution, “ceste grosse muraille,” seems fleetingly to change the poet’s tone, which sinks into a gentler melancholy:

O gros lyens, doulx regardz traversans,

Qui dans mon cueur fustes si transpersans,

Que doulcement, lyé myeulx que de corde,

Soubz vostre trop faincte misericorde,

La conduysiez là où il vous complaisoit. (461-65)

 

Despite the customary metaphors of the “regards traversans” that pierce the captive heart, after this complaint it becomes difficult to speak of any continuation of the allegory in Book I at all; though the poet does, towards the end of the poem, twice more evoke the name of “Amye” (547, 577). The one speaking here has taken the point of view of a woman; in the 16th century only a woman would need to put all her hopes in marriage as her “foundation,” her main purpose in life. A man would have no reason to feel so completely constrained by the lack of respect of a mate. The “gros lyens” of the preceding lines take on special significance for a woman of Marguerite’s time if they are considered in both the aspect of “linking” and that of “binding.” As Lucien Febvre’s analysis of the problems of marriage in this period explains, (313), though it was the linking that a woman and her family sought in such a contract, it was the bondage described in the end of Book I that a woman often found.

    As the poem continues, even the melancholy lines of regret (“O gros lyens, doulx regardz traversans”) finally collapse into the bitterness of disappointment. After the poet muses (and it is the poet and no longer really the escaped Lover speaking) about the days when “ne povoys avoir myeux / Que de myrer en vous mesme mes yeux,” the poem immediately explodes into 150 verses of some of the most bile-filled curses one can imagine coming from a woman of Marguerite’s age and station: “Or n’estes plus que chanvre et ferasse./ Maudit soyez, et toute vostre race, / Car longtemps m’avez humilié!” (471-74).

    The tone continues to be personal. There is love in the poet’s voice as well as deep anger:

 

Las! ceste chayne en grant plaisir forgée

Fut tous les jours par nous deux alongée

Par vous rompue, et par la menterie

Qu’avez mellée en ceste batterie,

Qui le metal rendoit tant imparfaict

Que en fin falloit qu’il fust par vous deffaict. (487-92)

 

There are, in addition, hints of reproaches we can only, perhaps uncomfortably, imagine. Though the image of the chain of the relationship is compatible with the prison allegory, speaking at such length about it once the “prisoner” has already been freed, calls into question just what kind of “batterie” is meant. As we shall see in a moment, this metaphor is sustained nearly to the end of the poem. There are, certainly, similar metaphors of torture and suffering to be found in Scève’s Délie, but not similar solutions to the suffering:

 

O pesant faix, chaynes laides et rudes,

Ne pensez plus par vos faulces etudes

De m’arrester! Car vous ne valez pas

Que plus pour vous je retarde un seul pas

D’avoir le bien de mon contentement,

Que j’ay pour vous perdu trop longuement. (493-98)

 

Nor is there a similar command to the Beloved, who is, after all, the catalyst of transcendence: “Alez lier Satan ou Lucifer, / Je ne veux plus enfer de vostre fer!” (487-500).

Though we are not certain what they are, throughout this long passage we can feel the mounting rage being vented for past humiliations. Despite the fact that she sustains the denunciation of enchainment and captivity , there is no explanation to be found in the first, more “orthodox” part of the allegory for the degree of emotion that is being expressed here. It is not necessary for the purpose of Neoplatonist ascension, on any level of language, to announce to the Beloved that one will have one’s “satisfaction” (“contentement”) from other sources. It is not necessary, in order to rise to a higher plane of loving, to point out to one’s former lover his utter worthlessness. It is not required, for entrance into higher realms, to send the earthly Beloved to the devil. Maurice Scève describes his Beloved as a sort of vampire woman before transcending his love for her, but it is her power to attract him that he rejects, and not her being. Neither does Héroët, whose “Amye” is after all perfect, allow his unfaithful Lover to do any worse than momentarily neglect his constant friend. Not even Castiglione, in his manipulative indifference, casts off love with such vituperation. Such excess is more likely personal than Neoplatonic; and the violence of its images continues to the end of the poem.

    The last angry metaphor Marguerite borrows from the first Book of John (15:1-11), whose good example she turns to one of blame. She calls her husband(s) the “ceptz d’union” to which the family line should have been grafted, from which she would presumably have borne good fruit. Within this image she again evokes some strangely personal abuse that has deeply marked her; for the “ceptz” must be taken in either the sense of vinestem and/or that of the irons of prison torture:

 

Teste, mains, piedz, me bouschiez rudement,

Mais si tresdoulx m’estoit l’attouchement

Que je n’euz onq de ce plaisant toucher

Mal ny ennuy, bien que marque en ma chair

Souvent parut, et en mes mains [estrainctes]

Et piedz foulez, je y en ay bien vu mainctes.

Mon col blessé et mes genoulz pleyez,

Que nuict et jour teniez humiliez. (505-12)

 

Whatever the nature of this mistreatment, whether physical or psychological, it has so deeply embittered the poet towards the one who exercised it upon her that she says though she used to fear the moment of their parting, now she would not even come to cry at the funeral (516). The “ceptz d’union,” the vinestem of the Book of John, is to her worm-ridden, both the heart and the bark, marked for decay.

    Not only does such an image fail to aid in showing the path of ascension to one’s former love, it is moreover the wish of death for that person, the psychological entombment of a mate by whom the author did indeed feel imprisoned. And though the poet says in the remaining two Books of the poem that she will give up rancor in order to continue to instruct the Beloved, it is ostensibly only because she leaves it to either the Holy Spirit—or the fires of hell, it is not clear which—to avenge her: “J’en laisse au feu à faire sa vengeance” (526).

    As a parting gesture, one of dignity in the face of humiliation, the Queen of Navarre says that these complaints have been and will remain hidden from the ears of any third party: “O! que le souvenir / Du mal passé, combien qu’il a fasché, / Est gracieux quand il est bien caché / Et que nul tiers n’en peult jamais parler!” (566-69). Nevertheless, the poet has taken consolation in the private written expression of her feeling. We have no way of knowing whether it ever reached the eyes of the (living) one to whom it was in part addressed, but this seems also to have been her plan: “Mais toutefois, à travers passera / Ma foible plume, estant si bien couverte, / Que l’Huys n’aura par elle mal ne perte./ Vous le pourrez, Amye, tresbien veoir, / Mais autre nul n’en pourra rien sçavoir” (574-78). Needless to say, no poetic convention of the time called for such a reassurance. Moreover, whether it is true, as the poem states, that “amy, pere ne frere / n’ont jamais sceu ung mot de ce mistere,” the poet’s daughter did certainly find out, read, and keep away from the public the private consolations of the tracing of this path from personal disillusionment through learned searching, to a type of mystical healing.

    In one manner, however, Marguerite does not differ from her predecessors. Though warned by more “medieval” Platonist thinkers and by Saint Paul through Briçonnet not to bother searching for happiness on earth (Febvre 314), the poet seems subtly still to maintain, as she surely does in the 19th tale of L’Heptaméron, that in order to accept divine love one must first have loved someone on earth. Whether she feels that one must, in addition, have known the rage and humiliation of being scorned by that person in order to comprehend fully the nature of humility (the role of the “rien” in the last two Books of Les prisons) is not as clear.

    The last fifteen verses of the first Book (“Car ce ne fut jamais à ma requeste: / je n’avoys pas ce vouloir si honneste”) lend themselves, perhaps purposefully, to ambiguity. Mixing the divine register of the courtly god of love with that of the Evangelistic God who dominates the last Book of the poem, in which the poet does transcend all worldly inspirations of ecstacy, they leave the reader wondering whether they refer to the gift of divine grace, or to some more earthly sort of consoling love. Whatever the case, it is clear that the motivating force of the author’s leap to transcend is quite different from that encountered in poetry of this type written by men. It is not the beauty and longed-for bliss of human love that have inspired Marguerite de Navarre to reach beyond her earthly bonds. It is the utter lack of fulfillment she found in such earthly ties that shapes her search for some more generous spirit of caring, beyond the letter of the law describing social duty.

 

Works Cited

Cotrell, Robert D. The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968.

Héroët, Antoine. Œuvres poétiques. Ed. Ferdinand Gohin. Paris: Droz, 1943.

Hyma, Albert. The Christian Renaissance. A History of the “Devotio Moderna.” New York and London: The Century Co., 1924.

Febvre, Lucien. Amour sacré, amour profane: autour de L’Heptaméron. Paris: Gallimard, 1944.

Gelernt, Jules, World of Many Loves: The Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1966.

Jourda, Pierre. Marguerite d’Angouleme, Duchesse d’Alençon, Reine de Navarre (1492-1549): Etude biographique et littéraire. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1930.

Labbé, Louise. Œuvres poétiques. Ed. Françoise Charpentier. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.

Marguerite de Navarre. Les dernières poésies de Marguerite de Navarre. Ed. Abel Lefranc. Paris: Colin, 1896.

___. L’Heptaméron. Ed. Simone de Reyff. Paris: Flammarion, 1982.

___. Les prisons. Ed. Simone Glasson. Geneva: Droz, 1978.

Meylan, E. F. “L’évolution de la notion de l’amour platonique.” Humanisme et Renaissance 1939: 418-42.

Scève, Maurice. Délie. Ed. Françoise Charpentier. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.

Sommers, Paula. Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre’s Poetry of Spiritual Ascent. Geneva: Droz, 1989.


[1]Lucien Febvre made a motion in this direction in his analysis of Marguerite’s lessons from her spiritual guide, Briçonnet: “Car il y aurait à écrire toute une histoire des évenements pauliniens du XVIe siècle, et de toutes les tentatives de retour aux sources vives du christianisme. . . . Ceci en partant des Frères de la vie commune et de leurs disciples . . .” (Amour sacré 127).

[2]Meylan claims that the ascendence of platonist ideal love is tied to the “apologie de la femme” of the continuing “querelle des femmes” initiated by the Roman de la rose; and that with Héroet and Scève the female lover is finally permitted to share “un sentiment chaste et raisonné” (439). Nonetheless, in La parfaicte Amye and in Délie the female lover serves primarily as a source of inspiration: in the first case to the other woman; in the second, to the writing of poetry.

[3]The “tradition courtoise” is often lumped together with the French “pétrarquisme” of the time. Meylan, in his history of the idea of Platonic love, says that towards the end of the century “ces trois mouvements finirent par se confondre . . . on cesse de les distinguer clairement les uns des autres” (437).