“Road to modernity” is a metaphor. Nothing wrong with that, but it is worth pointing out that it needs interpretation. In particular it does not mean that the present is the ordained end of history, or that the present is “good,” or that the present actually realizes to the full the potentialities of pantagruelism, the acceptance of difference and uncertainty, and the possible ludic relaxation of some of the more authoritarian forms of divisio. We have not reached the predestined end of any road, but it is now possible perhaps to see that we would all have been—and all would be—better off without the single-mindedly willful ego, relentlessly imposing itself on a potentially flat, monolingual world that is thought to need no interpretation and that is kept in order mainly by the brute force of Leviathan. But then Rabelais would not have needed to be told that.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
The Pléiade edition edited by M. Huchon and F. Moreau (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) contains the French text of Rabelais’s works with a series of useful introductions, textual variants, and notes. M. Screech’s Pantagruel and Gargantua (London: Penguin, 2006) contains a translation of all four of the books that are universally accepted as authentic, presented in the order in which they originally appeared (i.e., Pantagruel first, then Gargantua) and also of the Fifth Book of Pantagruel, which was first published several years after Rabelais’s death, and the authenticity of which is unclear. Screech’s translation also contains rather full explanatory notes, including detailed accounts of the exceedingly complex history of publication of the various versions of all five books, and translations of some relevant ancillary material. The translation that gives the best sense of the style of the original is that by its seventeenth-century translators, Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Anthony Motteux, which has been reprinted many times.
Four authors, two ancient and two “modern,” will on most accounts form particularly important nodes in the literary genealogy of Rabelais. The two ancient authors are Aristophanes, who combines verbal pyrotechnics with a highly developed sense of the absurd in the treatment of what are in themselves weighty and serious topics (war, education, sexual politics) in a way that often seems to prefigure Rabelais. See especially Clouds (on the sophistic movement, especially Socrates) and Frogs (literature and politics).
Rabelais translated several texts by Lucian, a late ancient satirist who was active in a number of genres and in the Renaissance acquired a certain reputation as an “irreligious” writer. The modern reader who is unacquainted with his work might begin with Lucian’s “A True History,” “Sale of Lives,” “Dialogues of the Gods,” and “The Fly.” Usable bilingual editions of Aristophanes and Lucian are available in the Loeb Library series.
The two modern authors whose work throws the most light on Rabelais are the two slightly older “humanists” Sir Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam. There is a good bilingual edition of More’s Utopia, ed. Logan, Adams, and Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Rabelais often seems to be drawing on one or another of the short essays by Erasmus in his huge collection of Adages. A full translation of the Adages by R. Mynors has been published in the context of the Collected Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982–2006); in his translation of Pantagruel and Gargantua (cited above) Screech is very good at drawing the reader’s attention to individual references to the Adages. The other work by Erasmus that stands in the background of much of Rabelais is The Praise of Folly, trans. B. Radice, with an introduction by A. Levi (London: Penguin, 1993).
Three older scholars made contributions that remain of great value to the understanding of Rabelais and his work. L. Febvre’s magisterial The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century: The Religion of Rabelais (originally in French, 1942), trans. R. Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) is the natural place to start thinking about questions of religion.
Erich Auerbach’s famous essay on the world in Pantagruel’s mouth (originally in German, 1946) appears in translation as chapter 11 in his Mimesis, trans. R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (originally in Russian, 1931), trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968) is still a treasure-trove of imaginative reflections on language, high and low culture, laughter, and the grotesque.
Screech’s Rabelais (London: Duckworth, 1979) gives a rather balanced introduction in English to the life and works, and for two slightly more technical, but general books one might recommend Guy Demerson, L’esthétique de Rabelais (Paris: SEDES, 1996); and E. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). A standard older work on Rabelais’s language is L. Sainéan, La langue de Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris: Boccard, 1922–23); slightly more recent is F. Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Droz, 1996). The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais, ed. John O’Brien (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) contains essays by various hands on different aspects of Rabelais’s work and a bibliography of additional works that can usefully be consulted on special topics.
Marguerite de Navarre
Renaissance Woman
WES WILLIAMS
Sometimes described as the “first modern woman,” Marguerite de Navarre occupies an extraordinary place in French Renaissance culture. Commonly referred to simply as “Marguerite,” in part because of the secondary meaning of the name as “pearl,” she was, as well as sister to King François I, a skilled political operator in her own right, working to effect change within the French court and on the wider European stage. At a time when church and state were both inseparable and in conflict, she served as a critical friend to religious reformers, such as Guillaume Briçonnet, the influential bishop of Meaux, and Lefèvre d’Etaples, who published a translation of the Bible into French in 1530. An assiduous letter writer in several languages, she maintained an active correspondence with a wide range of radicals across Europe. The fact that her early modern social network included people who disagreed, often violently, with each other, such as John Calvin and Martin Luther, as well as her fellow-stateswoman-and-poet, Vittoria Colonna, is testament to her ability to sustain civil conversation even in the midst of political and religious turmoil. Her skill in diplomacy was perhaps most spectacularly evident when her brother François lost one of his several wars and Marguerite was sent to Madrid to secure his release from imprisonment and a new treaty with France’s more powerful neighbor, Spain. All of these characteristics and achievements have marked her as a person of interest to historians for some long time; but she was also well respected within her own lifetime as a writer, principally as a poet.
A well-placed patron, she protected dissident writers from the forces of cultural conservatism of her day, most notably the Sorbonne, which regularly condemned the works of many of her circle, and her own. Much of Marguerite’s writing was published only after her death; even now the full extent of its range—from didactic and mystical poetry, through satirical plays, to the collection of tales known as the Heptameron—is little appreciated. In its diversity alone this body of work stands as an exemplary demonstration of what one woman, given the advantages of her station, could, and did, achieve. The poetry and the plays repay close study, and some useful pointers are offered in Edwin Duval’s brief treatment of the poetry in this volume. But it is with the Heptameron that Marguerite de Navarre secured herself a place in literary and intellectual history, and it is this complex, hybrid collection of stories that most deserves, and rewards, the attention of the contemporary reader. The following introductory outline of the prehistories and critical afterlives of her work has two principal aims. The first is to present curious anglophone readers with inroads into the contexts of its original mid-sixteenth-century appearance in print; the second is to give some sense of the enduring interpretive challenges and pleasures that the Heptameron still affords.
Begun perhaps as early as 1520, but probably composed for the most part in the last five years of its author’s life, the Heptam
eron was left unfinished and unpublished at her death in 1549. Its title derived from the Greek term for “seven”; the collection has as its heart seventy-two stories, interspersed by a series of often extended discussions between the storytellers themselves. We do not know what title Marguerite intended for her work, nor do we know if she ever planned to publish it herself. A selection of the tales was first printed in 1558 by the scholar and entrepreneur in the (then) fairly new field of vernacular publishing, Pierre Boiastuau. An odd and fascinating character in his own right, Boiastuau was a prolific translator and compiler of accounts of monstrous births, natural disasters, and historically significant characters, and his collections—variously published as “tragic tales” and “prodigious, or marvelous stories”—proved enormously successful. They also served, among other things, as a source-book for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Boiastuau’s Histoires des amans fortunez, or Verie Pleasant Discourses of Fortunate Lovers, as the first, Elizabethan, translation has it, contains just sixty-seven stories, arranged in an order different from that found in any of the later versions of the text. It omits the “frame”—the discussions between the storytellers that are found in the fullest manuscripts—and makes no mention of Marguerite at all. Within the year, a rival Protestant publisher, Pierre Gruget, brought out an “authorized” edition: L’heptaméron des nouvelles de très illustre et très excellente Princesse Marguerite de Valois, Royne de Navarre both assigns the text to the (now long dead) queen and claims to have “restored it to its true order.” Marguerite’s prologue is reinstated, as is the crucial internal framework of discussion between storytellers, with tales distributed over seven days. Gruget further “authorizes” his edition with a fulsome dedication to his patron, Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne d’Albret.
The extensive prologue sets the scene: a group of travelers—five men and five women—are thrown together by natural disaster; stranded, while their servants build bridges back to the world from which they have been cut off, they tell each other stories to pass the time. A hybrid of the philosophical dialogue form and the collection of tales, both of which had been successful modes of vernacular writing in Renaissance Italy, the Heptameron makes the most of its author’s analytical interest in topics such as love and friendship, marriage and (in)fidelity, and the conflict between personal conviction and established religion. Self-consciously reworking Boccaccio’s Decameron, the tales are often cautionary in content and tone, expressing either anger or a tragicomic sense of resignation, both at the state of the Catholic Church and at human corruption in general. Some of the storytellers seem motivated by steadfast religious convictions, while others (the majority) play out through their narratives what have been rightly called “restless scenarios of unsatisfied desire.” Decadent or abusive priests and monks line up to minister to credulous Christians, whose belief in the efficacy of good works or ritual actions leads to disaster and death. Husbands deceive their wives (and often their chambermaids, too), and wives trick faithful, would-be chivalric suitors into committing not only adultery, but also murder. Rape is more common than consent, and sex is rarely, if ever, fun; incest (even when it is enjoyable) takes place more by mistake than design.
A courtly pastime, Marguerite’s collection is also a deliberately provocative transposition of the scenes and themes of Castiglione’s urbane (and distinctly urban) Book of the Courtier into the oddly determined setting of an abbey in the Pyrenees. Sharing much with its Italian sources (the second of which is already a response to the first), the Heptameron also differs from both in important respects. Boccaccio has his characters initially gather at a church before leaving Florence to stay in a villa outside town, thereby escaping the plague. Marguerite’s storytellers, by contrast, are all far from home when disaster strikes; pilgrims, patients, or tourists, they were taking the waters in the mountains when the heavens opened and floods made the roads home impassable. Readers of the Bible might already be inferring particular significance from Marguerite’s flood; they might begin to see the Heptameron as something akin to a set of ransom tales, and imagine that the characters here gathered are somehow exemplary, representatives of a wrongful world, in danger of extinction. They would not be mistaken in so doing, for the survivors themselves wonder what they might have done to deserve such punishment, loss, and temporary exile. Their stories are in part pastime; but they are also penance of a kind.
For the wrongs of Marguerite’s world are certainly plentiful. Shaped by a distorted courtly code and by religious conventions that serve principally to mask the abuse of power, her stories evoke a society in which a model of masculinity consisting of conquest and military glory has been transposed into the language of economic and sexual power. In tale after tale, marital fidelity and religious faith are trafficked in exchange for temporary (and, so the argument goes, illusory) reward. The culture evoked is one Marguerite knew well: that of sixteenth-century aristocratic society. But it is also our own, for, as the discussions between the storytellers makes plain, theirs is a world in painful transition, with its values, ethos, and codes being appropriated to its own needs and desires by the increasingly powerful bourgeoisie. The Heptameron can be read both as an index of time-bound processes of cultural appropriation and as a timeless inquiry into something called “human (as opposed to bestial, or angelic) nature.” The meditation on human frailty it fosters is encouraged both by the religious setting and by the further changes Marguerite makes both to the Italian tradition and to recent French responses to it, such as that of Rabelais, with his utopian (anti)monastery, Thélème (for more on this, see Raymond Geuss’s chapter in this volume). After giving her storytellers refuge in an abbey (as opposed to a villa), she further complicates social and spiritual hierarchies by suggesting that narrative, scripture, and discussion might all prove redemptive. First, she places a woman, Oisille, the wisest and the oldest of the survivors, in the role of religious leader of the assembled gathering; she then has Oisille (possibly an anagrammatic representation of Marguerite’s own mother, Louise) read aloud each day the scriptures in French, accompanied by a brief analysis of the text she has selected for the day. There are, as noted above, similarities here with Rabelais’s Gargantua; but the frame in which the Heptameron’s stories are told is at once more pious and more radical. With a powerful woman determining the structure of their day, Marguerite’s storytellers learn to draw lessons from their collective experience, much as they had from Oisille’s reading and exposition of scripture. The local monks, meanwhile, can occasionally be seen hiding behind a hedge, eavesdropping on both the tales and the conversations of their curious visitors.
That an equal number of men and women survived the flood might be taken as a further sign. As Marguerite’s characters enter (like animals) the “ark” that is the abbey garden “two by two,” romantically minded readers might anticipate their return home as fully-fledged humans: each paired off happily with another. But in fact both gender difference and distinctions between human and bestial love turn out to be conflictual, unresolved themes in these tales. Here again, Marguerite can be seen to be responding critically to her sources. Boccaccio’s Decameron pitted three women against seven men, and Castiglione’s company comprised just four women to ten men, more than one of whom argues that since women are “most imperfect beasts and of little or no worth in respect of men, incapable of performing any virtuous actions in themselves” it is quite right and proper that they “should have a bridle put upon them, creating shame and fear of infamy, such that they may by force be brought to some good.” In such a context, the priority given to Oisille and the equality afforded to male and female participants in the narrative exchange staged by the Heptameron clearly serves to signal polemical opposition to Marguerite’s precursors’ views on the quality of, and the (supposedly bestial) relations between, the sexes.
The last of the significant differences from her Italianate sources is marked by Marguerite through the figure of Parlamente (a character commonly iden
tified with the author herself). She recalls that when the French court had first thought of reworking the Decameron, all present had decided “to exclude those who studied and were men of letters”; the worry was that anyone so trained could not avoid “adding such art and rhetorical ornament to the telling that they would in part falsify the truth of the accounts.” Perpetuating this resolutely amateur aesthetic, the Heptameron’s storytellers agree to the same constraints: they swear to tell only stories that they know to be true. In so doing, they not only diverge from the Italian tradition, they also lay the foundations of a specifically French mode of philosophical narrative: Montaigne both read and learned from Marguerite’s tales, and he echoes the words of the Heptameron’s prologue very precisely in his essay “On Cannibals.” Marguerite inaugurates, then, a radical truth-telling project, which, although it remained both unpublished and incomplete in her lifetime, endures to this day. As if to signal the fact that the story had only just begun, she leaves us not with the full one hundred tales we might have expected from a French Decameron, but just seventy-two and the promise of more to follow. The discussion after the final tale concludes with the following, teasing invitation: “It’s about death, and it’s about a monk. So please all listen carefully.”
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