Heptaméron

by Marguerite de Navarre

Marguerite d'Angoulême, duchesse d'Alençon puis reine de Navarre, nous a laissé un recueil de soixante-deux nouvelles qui devait composer un Décaméron français. Dans cette suite d'histoires le plus souvent joyeuses, parfois aussi sérieuses, ce ne sont que mauvais tours joués par les femmes à leurs maris, ou l'inverse, entreprises déloyales de moines paillards, roueries de religieuses alertes, où la vertu tient autant de place que la gaillardise. Mais ces contes, composant l'une des grandes oeuvres de la littérature française, ne sont pas que pure gauloiserie. Derrière la satire, Marguerite de Navarre dénonce l'intolérance d'un monde brutal, les mensonges et l'hypocrisie des rapports entre hommes et femmes.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Short Stories, France, French Literature, 16th Century, Literature

564 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1558

About the author

Marguerite de Navarre, also known as Marguerite d'Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was the queen consort of King Henry II of Navarre. As patron of humanists and reformers, and as an author in her own right, she was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her "The First Modern Woman".

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

Taking her inspiration from Bocaccio's Decameron which she read in a French translation around 1545, Marguerite de Navarre, the well-educated daughter, sister, and wife of kings, decided to create a similar collection of 100 stories.

The frame she invented as a setting for her short tales, and which she introduces in her Prologue, tells the longer story of ten characters, five men and five women, variously known or connected to one another, who had all been taking the waters in the spa town of Cauterets in the Pyrenees area of the south of France—which was part of the kingdom of Navarre at that time. However the ten are obliged to leave Cauterets because of exceptional flooding in the area. After a few adventures on the road, one of which involves a bridge being washed away, they eventually seek shelter in a monastery while the bridge is being repaired, work which is expected to take ten days. The characters decide to tell each other ten stories every afternoon to help pass the time.

So why is the book called a Heptaméron (meaning seven days in Greek) and not a Decameron (meaning ten days)?
Unfortunately, Marguerite de Navarre died before her Decameron was finished so it only has seven days' worth of stories—though she had managed to write two of the stories for the eighth day before she had to abandon the project. The book wasn't published until after her death.

To say she had written the seventy-two stories may not be quite accurate as many of them existed in other sources though she did gather them all together, and adapted some of them to her own time and place. But what she definitely did invent were the ten fictional travelers and their colorful adventures as told in the Prologue—but more importantly, she invented the seventy-two short discussions which the characters engage in after each story has been told.

These discussions were the most interesting aspect of the Heptaméron for me. Some characters happen to be lovers/followers of others, though there's one married couple among them—who may also be lovers of other characters. And in keeping with that dynamic, a lot of the stories are about lovers and about betrayals, plus there's a bunch about plain old lust.

As the stories and days go by, the reader learns more and more about each character, not only from their individual choice of stories but also from their comments on each others' choices. Some characters tell serious stories and rarely joke in the discussions afterwards, other characters tell funny stories and joke frequently in the discussions. Some tell stories which show women to be foolish, others tell stories about the perfidy of men, and those characters' pointed comments after each others' stories continue the themes of female foolishness and male perfidy—although on occasion, it is male foolishness and female perfidy that emerges in the stories and the discussions.

All of the characters tell stories in which the clergy—particularly an order of monks known as 'cordeliers'—are ridiculed, and those stories unite everyone in laughter afterwards.

When I finished the seventy-second story, ie, the second story of the eighth day, and discovered that the third story was to be told by my favourite character, Nomerfide, reliably irreverent and invariably scatological, I was hugely disappointed—even though I knew the end of the book was nigh—to realise that there was no third story and that the fun was over. Who would have thought I would have enjoyed it so much!

In an interesting parallel, I read the seventy-two stories with a small group of GR friends over a period of several months, and like the Heptaméron characters we had serious as well as humorous discussions after each story—and learnt a thing or two about each other in the process!

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

A ravishing romp of courtly tales from 1500s France, a world where an unchivalrous manoeuvre could see you banished from the kingdom or sliced quarterwards like succulent salami. Across these 72 tales, wives are perpetually incapable of identifying their husbands from strangers in the sack, perennially scheming Franciscans contrive means of raping maidens and nuns, honest lovers spend their lives in chaste pursuit of madams sending more mixed signals than an epileptic crosswalk, and misunderstood remarks result in a bloodbath of several generations and someone being locked in a forest castle until death. It is heartening to note that bedroom farce and revenge porn are among the oldest literary forms, and Navarre punches on a par with her pal Boccaccio in this tantalising slab of ancient storytelling.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marguerite de Navarre was the sister of Francis I of France and so was the grandmother of Henri de Navarre, and the great-aunt of Marguerite, better known as 'la reine Margot' from the Dumas novel and far more fabulous film.

Although her authorship is disputed, the Heptameron is usually attributed to her, and first appeared in print in the mid-1500s. Inspired by Boccaccio's The Decameron, this uses a similar framework of a group of noble French men and women trapped and taking refuge in a flood: in order to amuse themselves, they take it in turns to tell a series of stories each day on a set theme.

Bawdy, erotic, sweet, tragic, witty and funny, these tales chart a verbal battle of the sexes, and the story-tellers reveal and conceal their own erotic fears and fantasies. Slightly reminiscent, also, of Chaucer, the stories are full of tricky wives, adulterous husbands, corrupt churchmen and nobles either getting away with it, or their come-uppance, depending on the ideology of the teller.

More disturbing is the number of stories which centre on rape and sexual violence against women, often depicted as merely excessive passion on the part of the male lover - and it's this aspect of the book which has attracted the attention of so many feminist scholars.

Equally fascinating is the relationship between the story-teller and the story they tell, as well as the gradually-revealed tensions within the group itself: we're never quite sure about the back-histories and sexual currents that flow between husbands, wives, mistresses and lovers, but certainly the stories are used as weapons and coded messages. In this sense, the 'real' story takes place in the interstices of the ostensible tales and emerges only provisionally and hesitantly.

Whether this was really written by a woman, or merely collected by her with just some of her own writings included, this throws a fascinating light on C16th French debates about the nature of gender, and particularly the politics of the erotic.

Thanks to Jeanne, David, Kalliope and Fionnuala for your company on this read.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The narrators in Marguerite de Navarre's masterpiece are trapped in a solitary place and spend the time telling each other stories à l'italienne, recalling Boccaccio. Sounding familiar?

Recalling Marguerite de Navarre recalling Boccaccio brought me back to my university years and my immersion in this surprisingly modern collection of tales from the Renaissance world. People are people are people, through good times and bad times, through changing fashions and social codes and centuries. We love and we don't, we win and we lose, we are happy and sad and frustrated and humorous and nostalgic and melancholy and we don't understand each other but we find solace in listening to others telling a story of misunderstanding. We come together randomly, we share, we part.

Aren't we in some kind of Boccaccio style confinement now, sharing stories via our computers in the same way the Renaissance storytellers shared at the fireplace?

Aren't we happy to listen to other stories that confirm our own ideas or challenge them in a constructive way? Aren't we once again reduced to (or maybe I should say elevated to) the essence of storytelling to replace the daily hamster wheel?

To Marguerite de Navarre, who would have known how to tell the story of our times through a hundred perspectives if she had been among us today!

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Even had Marguerite de Navarre not written The Heptameron, the world of letters would be deeply indebted to her for her patronage of Rabelais and his genius novels about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. As it is, we owe her even more for her assemblage of a treasury of bawdy tales; a cycle which is consciously modeled upon Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Ten travelers, five women and five men, are delayed in their travels when a rainstorm washes out a bridge. While they await its rebuilding, they entertain themselves by telling stories. The bridge will take ten days to rebuild, and they agree that each of them will tell one story each day. They agree to a few ground rules for their storytelling--the stories must be true (identities of guilty parties tend to be protected, but we know who they really are; wink, wink, nudge, nudge); and the stories must not be derived from professional tellers of tales. What we overhear (along with the monks hosting our traveling party) are 72 stories (the book was never finished) of bawd, debauchery, faithlessness and faithfulness, lust, rape, love, women and men, cuckoldry, decrepit and unruly monks and priests, honour and chastity, and in general The Great Battle of the Sexes, Sixteenth Century Edition.

Not to be missed is the framing tale of the ten travelers. Their stories are chosen to bolster their own views about the relations of the sexes; this one to demonstrate the faithlessness of the supposedly chaste woman, that one to demonstrate the lack of control men have over their own lust, the other to prove that one should never leave a monk alone with a maiden or one’s own wife. Their discussions about each story reveal a complex hermeneutic, one person claiming that the story demonstrates that the protagonist is a faithful wife, while the other claims that the story proves that women are only after their own pleasure. de Navarre knows better than to tell us any kind of truth about a quagmire as rich in literary possibilities as is the everlasting battle of the sexes.

I read the Chilton translation of 1984 from Penguin. It is a rather stiff-collared translation, somewhat stilted, feeling more archaic than contemporary, even without archaisms. de Narvarre’s language is multi-voiced and a translator must pay close attention to multiple subtleties. I won’t enthusiastically endorse Chilton, but whichever translation one picks-up, be sure that it contain as complete a text as possible; The Heptameron has a rather checkered textual history.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of my incentive for reading books like these for my own pleasure (this copy of mine, purchased at a library sale, has a sticker from being checked out of a college reserves for a Medieval and Romance class) is encountering this chunk of the canon on my own terms before some future class sinks its claws into it. I wouldn't say that all first meetings with a text that occur in a classroom are doomed (Hamlet in my senior year of high school is a prime example), but enough of my past has been littered with such misguided ruination that I prefer to take what I can get while I still have the time. Also, I will not deny that another part of the urge is to be able to say yes indeed I have read the thing and can discuss it with you to the full extent of text and capabilities so giving me that sidelong look of snickering disbelief will only leave you with a brainfull of hurt, so. Both conscientious autodidacticism and personal pride work out in the end.

I must admit to two things in regards to this work. One, were it not for the intermissions where the storytellers debate among themselves over the previous story's merits, accuracy, and interpretations, I would have ended the book bored out of my gourd. Two, The Decameron is one of the few books that I gave up in high school and haven't yet given a second chance; as the most famous example of the breed The Heptameron belongs to, it's not a mark in my favor that it remains abandoned. However, that happened in 10th grade, and I feel I've come far enough in my reading to try my hand again at books of its sort. Besides, next year's looking good for a return to Boccaccio, so it won't remain stalled for much longer.

However, although the law of men attaches dishonor to women who fall in love with those who aren’t their husbands, the law of God does not exempt men who fall in love with women who aren’t their wives.

I like variety in my feminist texts so as to keep the critical thinking fresh and the respect for differences of opinions sound. In light of that, while this is yet another white woman that I'm reading, 16th century French nobility is nothing to sneeze at, especially when considering the author was almost declared a heretic in times when that still meant sociopolitical death. Also, the text itself is of merit on its own terms, as the adherence to stories of what had actually occurred told by characters based off of real life personages makes for a fascinating cross section of both history and historical thought. Trust me, when you know that the character Parlamente is a stand in for Marguerite de Navarre herself and Hircan is her husband the King, their clashes of opinion take on a new and powerful context.

‘In my opinion,’ said Saffredent, ‘when a man desires that sort of thing from a woman, the greatest honour he can do her is to take her by force.’

A popular sentiment in those days that has changed less in the last four and a three quarter centuries than most would like. This, along with other claims of death by lack of love and/or (male) fucking supported by arguments of honor and God made for a multifarious thought experiment equal parts empowering, odious, and insightful. As for favorites, Story 49 involved a woman having sex with one man after the other who each thought he was the only one, a group of that after discovering the truth attempted to slut shame her en masse and ended up failing miserably. The woman neither died of shame nor was murdered by irate manpain, and that's just the way I like it.

Although what the Queen of Castille had done was certainly not something to be praised either in her or anybody else, Oisille could see that on the pretext of criticizing her behaviour the men would go so far in speaking ill of women in general [that] they would no more spare women who were modest and chaste than they would those who were wanton and lewd.

In terms of my favorite of the ten characters, while Parlamente can be most relied upon for moral intelligence, it is the super religious Oisille that is the owner of that brilliant tidbit above. When combined with this later musing of hers:

Man’s greatest woe, therefore, is to desire death and not to be able to have it. Consequently, the greatest punishment hat can be meted out to an evil-doer is not death but continuous torture, torture, severe enough to make him desire death, yet not so severe that it causes death.

she's definitely the most hardcore of the lot, a lot whose bantering discussions I was sad to see end. Instead of the planned 100, Navarre's work stretches only to 72, but the bulk has enough going for it to make the abrupt parting a thoughtful one. The work's survived 472 years and counting for good reason, I can tell you that much.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, how things are connected.

Having read Montaigne’s “Les Essais” with the GR reading group, I learned about Marguerite de Valois, who married Henri IV, king of Navarre in the 16th century. Their wedding led to the infamous Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre in 1572. The mother of Henri IV was Jeanne d’Albret, who ruled as Queen of Navarre from 1555-1572. She was the daughter of Henri II and Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), the author of this book. Her brother Francis I was the king of France and ruled from 1515 -1547.

It is one thing to read a book written by the sister of the king of France, especially in the 16th century, but the book has an interesting premise. A group of ten travellers are delayed crossing a river when a storm destroys the bridge. They take lodging at the baths of Cauterets while a new bridge is constructed. There are five women: Parlamente, Oisille, Longarine, Ennasuitte et Nomerfide, and five men: Hircan, Geburon, Simontault, Dagoucin et Saffredent. The mother figure Oiselle offers to read from the holy book when the nobleman Hircan proposes they could do something else. His wife Parlamente suggests that each of them tell a story every day for the next ten days until the new bridge is done.

Modeled after the story telling of Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written about a hundred years earlier (1349-53), the book was published posthumously in 1558. Marguerite had completed 72 of the 100 stories and instead of ten days, the book ends two stories into day 8. The title, L’Heptaméron is the Greek for “Seven Days.”

The stories themselves vary, from scenes of every day commoners to nobility. In fact, Marguerite herself is mentioned as was her daughter’s wedding. Of course, over time critics have suggested that these various characters were actually based on the real court characters: Parlamente is Marguerite, Hircan is her husband Henri II, Oiselle is Louise de Savoie, Marguerite’s mother, and Saffredent is possibly Admiral Bonnivet, who May have taken advantage a younger Marguerite (also one of the stories).

What truly makes the book unique is that after each of the stories, a group discussion follows. As the book progresses, we see clearly how the various members debate amongst themselves. Often there is conflict and battle lines are drawn. It’s a time when the values of chivalry, the role between men and women, social positions and the church were changing. Most notably the Cordeliers or Grey Friars were under scrutiny as the new religion Protestantism (Huguenots in France) was making headways.* In short, this is a revelation about the French court, the people from this period, and of course Marguerite herself.

*the underlying cause of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre was tensions between the Catholics and Huguenots

I would be remiss without thanking my colleagues, Kalliope, Clodia, Fionnuala, and Jeanne for making this seemingly foreign world so much easier to read and understand.

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, it turns out that one of my favorite literary forms is what the editor of the Penguin edition of Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa has dubbed “The novel in frames.” This form would be a collection of tales recounted (specifically, usually stories bearing traces of an oral tradition; they were called novellas in the Middle Ages when this form was prevalent) within some sort of frame-story pulling the disparate tales collected into a cohesive narrative whole of one type or another. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (AKA The Golden Ass) is perhaps the oldest Occidental novel-in-frames and The 1,001 Nights and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron are certainly the most well know. However, Potocki's clever pseudo-Gothic extravaganza and Marguerite de Navarre’s study of the concept and practice of love and male/female relations in early 16th century France, Spain, and Italy, are both lesser-known but none-the-less lovely and worthwhile exemplars of the minor Occidental tradition of the form.

The most interesting element, for me, of The Heptameron is how well it exploits the proliferation of voices in its story-telling frame. In fact, although not exactly what he had in mind in his study of Dostoevsky’s novels, I can think of no other text that so well evokes what critic Mikhail Bakhtin calls “The dialogic.” In its exploration of simple conversation and argumentation, The Heptameron acts like a narrative Socratic dialogue upon the subject of romantic love, with theses, discussion, and examples. Fascinatingly the tales bring up the obvious but difficult fact that love is the vaguest of all of our Indo-European words, with as many concepts surrounding it as people have existed, used, lived by, and grown disillusioned with the word.

Of course, since romantic love is also gendered by its practitioners, the male and female tale-tellers here tell tales from their genders' two perspectives, and then argue copiously about what the narratives philosophically signify to the tellers and listeners. Not only is this entertaining—for what a narrative means once it has been told is always fascinating, says this literary scholar, and having the text itself offer more than one interpretation for each of its narratives is certainly food for thought and tends to lift us out of our modern and opinionated subjectivity—but we’re offered a female perspective here from an era in which women were almost only seen and hardly ever heard so the perspective is welcome. The text’s opinions are also expressed in ways surprisingly different from our modern identity-politics and editorial arguments. Although the male characters’ views are a bit extreme at times—perhaps invoked more to be ridiculed rather than to be examined?—I didn't find the interpretive discussions following the narratives annoyingly one-sided. After all, men do often take ultra-stances in order to be taken for more masculine than we really are, and women often fall back on religion, which protects them and their chastity in situations where they are otherwise vulnerable to the sexual double standard or to the threat of sexual violence. So, while extreme views are taken on both sides, the text is never really feminist in the modern sense of the word—although I do think that, collectively, the stories seem to favor the female perspective. (It would be fascinating if the text turned out to have been written by a man, which I think is not at all impossible given the vagaries of Medieval and Early Modern authorship, and would, in the best case scenario, underscore my feelings that great texts are not gendered nearly as much as we assume them to be.)

The Heptameron takes on its theme, love, as a feeling, certainly, as desire, as jealousy, as joy and/or a font for melancholy, even frustration and disappointment, but also love as the social convention that institutions have made it, part of clan-building (that European tradition of nobility passed down from the Roman patrician class). Marriage is presented therefore as duty, or among the lower classes perhaps as a bond, a relationship with others. But love in the Early Modern period was also a part of the culture’s social manners, of courtly decorum, an entirely symbolic bond (that fine amours of chaste medieval lovers who exist in idyllic realms outside of either marriage or illicit sexuality) as well as the partial property of the Catholic Church’s societal control during the period, when romances were often meddled with the priests and monks who, although officially exempt (this text makes abundantly clear), were also the most sexually frustrated characters of the period. Even beyond the courtly situations, dynasty-moves, and emotional states—all of which we might expect from a text of this period on this topic—I was surprised by the novel’s unveiling of actual erotic issues (the randiness of the Franciscans for example) and even female sexual desire without, of course, being explicit in any way.

Narrative is the perfect place for the unfolding of eroticism, it now occurs to me, linking it implicitly with all of the other issues mentioned above. For, in real life, we never—or at least I never have—approached a stranger in a neutral room in order to perform a sex act, as contemporary pornography frames it, in a theatrical and groundless manner void of content and therefore any inhibitions or even, occasionally, goodwill. In reality we walk a delicate crossroads between emotion, sexual desire, social convention, future allegiance, ideology, and romanticism whenever we speak to another human being. The Heptameron reminded me just what a complex conglomerate our interest in love is and how wholly it is interconnected to nearly every other aspect of our social lives, despite our culture’s holding its very core as its greatest taboo topic.

Also interesting here is the Early Modern (quite early) tone of the collection. For some reason—perhaps a misleading, anachronistic Penguin book cover—I assumed for years that The Heptameron was from a later period, seventeenth or eighteenth century. Actually, it appears to have been collected/composed in the first half of the sixteenth century, smack-dab in the first days of what we used to call the Renaissance. The Heptameron therefore rests, like its cousins, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Cervantes’s more satirical Don Quixote, as a text soaked in the Medieval idyllic invention of the concept of courtly, chivalric love, full of emotion and social convention, but it also enacts, in many of its narratives, the staining and ruination of such a concept and its conventions when some fail to play by the rules. Particularly at fault here is the priest/monk class, who more often than not impede love in these tales or, because of their own inability to adhere to any of the social conventions of love and romance (because their vocation precludes either marriage or fine amours, the only acceptable outlets for love or sexual desire), simply rape. Such realism, which quickly produces irony and cynicism, is perhaps why this medievalist finds the Early Modern period so disappointing/depressing (Machiavelli et al). To me, at least literarily, the Renaissance represents the loss of innocence in the Occident and our introduction to the Satanic—to witch hunting, vigilantes, inquisitions, and the rule of the law enacted not through reason or justice but rather through despotic execution and pure power—that so quickly follows the disappointment of such cynical enlightenment.

[J.C.]

I have been chickening out of reviewing this book, especially as everyone else in the study group has written such brilliant reviews – David, Fionnuala, Roman Clodia and Kalliope, whom I wholeheartedly thank for introducing me to Marguerite de Navarre and her writing, and enhancing my reading of this book. I’ll link their reviews at the end of this, because each one is very different, but all equally informative and perceptive.
David, on his review’s page, raised a question about what this book is, and wherein lay its purpose, or main thrust. I started it expecting to find an early exploration of the role of women, and ended up understanding that Marguerite was not the first to challenge the way women were seen and the way they had to live and behave, and also that she addressed wider issues.
On the face of it the book is a collection of 72 tales – Marguerite was aiming for 100, as in Boccaccio’s Decameron, which she had read in 1545. She had been collecting and writing out tales for a few years prior to this, and decided to gather them together in the same format, a group of people stuck together (in Boccaccio, by plague, in the Heptameron by flood) and entertaining each other by telling stories each day. Although the characters in the book are supposed to tell only true stories, Marguerite draws on earlier material as well as pertinent tales of people whom her characters would recognise, actually naming some, including herself and her own brother, François I of France.
For all of us in the group the discussions and interaction between the characters who come up with these tales, sometimes linked to each other in theme or moral aspect, were much more interesting than the stories themselves – although they could be comic at times, and certainly tragic, some might say unnecessarily so, as their protagonists seem often to be bound by the notions of courtly love, or the corrupted version of it that they live with in their milieu – a means of trickery and deceit, of mischief, unfaithfulness, often ending in tragedy. I use the word ‘trickery’ to translate Marguerite’s “finesse”, and I find it interesting that my chosen word of translation has moved away from what appeared to be something of an admirable trait in some of these tales and the ensuing discussion.
I mustn’t go on at length – there’s so much to say about this book, and it’s just occurred to me that I didn’t even think of writing this in French, which I normally do if I read a book in that language. There’s an entire social structure to be considered here, which I don’t think Marguerite was opposing in toto (she was married to one king and sister to another), although she has many tales of ‘finesse’ or trickery having to feature because marriages were arranged for wealth, prestige and power, often leaving lovers the choice of adultery or death. She indicts the ‘Cordeliers’ or Grey Friars, who are lewd and even wicked – but we remember that these were not necessarily religious people in the first place, but young men who may have been forced into the Order simply because they were younger sons and could not be provided for. The same applied to girls becoming nuns if they had no prospects of a prestigious marriage through lack of a dowry. Obviously there’s a lot of detail here about the social structures of the time that I can’t go into here, but over and above the social aspects there are religious and moral ones, debated by the group of people stranded by flood. This is where the real interest of the book lies for me. The people discussing the tales could very well be based on people in real life – there are some grounds for believing this – but nothing is black and white in this book. The respected older person in the group, Oisille, could be based on Marguerite’s own mother, whose name was Louise. In the story she begins each day with a religious exposition of the gospels. This is not gone into in detail, but it is contrasted with the dogma and practices of the Roman Catholic faith at that time, and there is evidence for Marguerite’s evangelical beliefs that uphold the then new Reformist thinking. In real life she did not embrace such change for herself but sympathised with the focus on the Gospels that came with the Reformation.
Morally, my favourite story involved a heartfelt plea and calm reasoning from a wronged wife, who had, in turn, ‘erred’. This is the clearest expression of Marguerite’s opposition to double standards of morality for men and women. It does occur in other stories, but in this particular one the bell is rung loud and clear. I couldn’t help thinking of this story when I happened to watch again a powerful filming of “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” (Hardy). It was alright for Angel to have strayed from the straight and narrow, but as soon as it happened to Tess her fate was sealed. So goes it for the women of these stories, and from the midst of the corruption and trickery that brought about their downfall appears yet another moral question, that of which is more important to these people, the ‘sin’ itself or whether it will become known in society, to the shame and ruination of the woman (not the man, of course).
There’s growing dissention amongst the people in the group who reacted to these stories in their different ways. We in the study group found it fascinating to follow their different natures and the interactions between them. It was frustrating to have to leave them at story 72, when much more may have been revealed about them, and about the moral issues raised, if Marguerite had lived to complete the book. Whether she would have developed her tale in the way we have come to expect in our time remains an unanswered question. I’m tempted to think that no, there we would have been disappointed.
I think this would be better as a group read. I learned so much from the lovely people in the links below:
David: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Fionnuala:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Roman Clodia:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Kalliope:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Brodolomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

U ovoj renesansnoj zbirci novela iz 16. veka imamo iščezli kurtoazni svet – vrle gospe i gospe ocvale u poroku, verne vitezove i neverne muževe, lobanju bivšeg ljubavnika iz koje se pije vino, napaljene fratre i benediktance, duboki mrak spavaćih soba gde žene nisu u stanju da razlikuju kada im u krevet dolazi muž a kada uljez, tajne susrete, relikviju u vidu dragine rukavice, manastirske zatvore, naskakanja i čuvanje časti, nesrećne ljubavi koje vode u manastir, raspojasanu erotiku, neoplatonizam, oholost i podvizništvo, zakletve i nevere.

Neskriveni uzor za pisanje „Heptamerona” bio je Bokačovljev „Dekameron”. Kraljica Margerita je čak planirala da i napiše 100 novela, ali ju je smrt u tome omela, te je zbirka dospela do nas u vidu 72 novele + plus vrlo razvijene okvirne priče. Umesto sedam devojaka i tri mladića izbeglih iz Firence zbog epidemije kuge, ovde imamo 5 plemića i 5 plemkinja – različite starosti, naravi i iskustva – okupljenih u manastiru gde, pričajući priče, prekraćuju vreme, dok čekaju da se obnovi most, uništen u poplavama, ne bi li prešli na drugu obalu i nastavili svoje putešestvije. Ali, dok okvirna priča „Dekamerona”, i pored poetski nadahnute situacije, ostaje razvijena uglavnom na početku, okvir se u „Heptameronu” stalno aktuelizuje – posle svake priče pripovedači razgovaraju, komentarišu, raspravljaju o postupcima junaka i analiziraju njihove motive. Samim time, likovi pripovedača su daleko više individualizovani, te vremenom razotkrivaju sebe i međusobne odnose u okupljenom društvu, što po izboru priča, što po tome kako komentarišu tuđe priče. Razgovor u društvu uvek postaje motiv za pričanje sledeće novela, a svaka nova priča rađa novu raspravu, tako se ostvaruje organsko povezivanje priče i govora o priči, uz implicitno podsećanje da je razgovor o književnosti isto sladak koliko i njeno slušanje/čitanje. Pošto su pripovedači različiti – a raspon je širok od bogobojažljive i uzvišene plemkinje do raspusnog i ciničnog viteza – isto onoliko koliko su različite i priče, težište je na polifoniji ideja i važnosti kulture dijaloga. Jedan pripovedač će brak da uzdiže kao svetu instituciju, drugi će brak da tretira kao društveno ropstvo; dok će jedna pripovedačica da slavi ispripovedanu priču o čistoj ljubavi, druga će o njoj praviti cinične primedbe, itd. Pripovedači se neće međuslobno složiti ni u jednoj stvari, osim u tome da svako ima pravo da svoje mišljenje obrazloži i da sasluša drugog. To je implicitna humanistička poruka „Heptamerona” o vrednostima dijaloga kao pokušaju da se ljudi bolje razumeju u svojim različitim pogledima na život. Naposletku, pripovedači su se i okupili jer čekaju da se most obnovi i da se dve obale spoje, što jeste simbolički korelativ onoga što oni čine međusobno – pričom i razgovorom o priči premošćavaju međusobne razlike.

Same novele, iako donekle raznolike, obuhvataju uži opseg tema nego one u „Dekameronu”. Pre svega, ovde nema novela istočnjačkog porekla, egzotike, pa ni avanturističkih sižea. Inistira se da su sve priče istinite, a ne izmaštane, te se uglavnom i odigravaju u krugovima plemstva; krugovima kojima je pripadala i sama autorka. Najveći broj je očekivano posvećen pitanjima ljubavi i seksualnosti, ali su one lišene renesansnog joie de vivre. Te čak i kad su priče „masne”, one nisu slasne kao burek, nego naginju... posnoj trpezi. Umesto humora i narodne telesnosti imamo težnju ka ozbiljnom tretiranju situacije, što rađa zametke psihologizacije, te se „Heptameron” ispostavlja kao važna stanica u genezi psihološkog romana, koji se javlja 100 godina kasnije u vidu romana „Princeza de Klev” (jedan od mojih književnih favorita). Meni su najdraže bile one novele sa neoplatonističkim koncepcijama ljubavi. Interesantno je da za Margeritu Navarsku uslov koji omogućava i pokreće uzdizanje na platonovskim „ljubavnim lestvicama” isključivo nesrećna i zabranjena ljubav, nikada srećna.

Pročitah „Dekameron”, „Kenterberijske priče” i „Heptameron”. Sada mi ostaje još „1001 noć” kao najkrupniji zalogaj!

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction:
1. The Text
2. The Storytellers
3. The Stories
4. Translations
5. Translatability

Biographical and Historical Summary
The Names of the Storytellers
Bibliography

Summaries of the Stories

--The Heptameron

[Yann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ça faisait longtemps que je voulais lire ces histoires écrites sur le modèle du Décaméron de Boccace. Ici seulement sept journées au lieu des dix de l'italien pour Marguerite de Navarre(1492-1549), sœur de François Ier, mais c'est assez. J'ai apprécié la variété comme le piquant des situations, mais aussi les échanges animés et plein de sel de nos conteurs. Mais la lecture a été lente et parfois un peu pénible: le texte est en français d'époque, et ça demande un effort d'adaptation un peu usant à la longue, qui l'emporte sur la satisfaction ou le plaisir de lire un français un peu différent. Sinon, c'est une très belle œuvre, plaisante et drôle. Cette édition a un appareil critique conséquent, et comme j'avais acheté un livre d'occasion, j'ai pu profiter de tous les crayonnages de la précédente lectrice, laquelle avait vraisemblablement étudié le texte dans ses moindres détails.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Heptameron is an extremely important historical document and great work of literature. The author was the Queen of Navarre and mother of Jeanne d'Albret who will become the Queen of France and will play a major role in the success of the Calvinist Reformation in France. From the Heptameron one gains tremendous insight into the values and social attitudes of the aristocratic classes that were about to wreck havoc in Europe.

Marguerite de Navarre was a serious minded woman who viewed the conventions of her time with a critical eye. Unlike the Boccaccio's Decameron on which it was modelled, the Heptameron is only intermittently funny. Marguerite finds the corruption and lechery of the clergy reprehensible. She cannot laugh at it all the time. She has to attack it outright on occasions. Similarly, she occasionally sees humour arising from the powerlessness of women in her society but unlike Boccaccio she will not simply laugh when she describes women who use deceit to get around their male masters. She wants things to change and believes they can. With such a mother we can understand why her daughter embraced Calvinism. Mother and daughter wanted society to change and improve itself.

The Heptameron was supposed to be a Decameron but the author only lived to write 72 tales. As in the Decameron (or the Canterbury Tales) there is a group of 10 people who take turn telling tales. What is so distinctive about the Heptameron is that after every tale, there is a group discussion in which widely differing interpretations are put forward. Marguerite de Navarre does not take sides. She wants to show that among intelligent people there existed well thought out divergence of opinion on most issues.

This is an outstanding document of its time. It demonstrates that critical thinking has been with us for a very long time.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marguerite de Navarre was the sister of Francis I of France and so was the grandmother of Henri de Navarre, and the great-aunt of Marguerite, better known as 'la reine Margot' from the Dumas novel.

Although her authorship is disputed, the Heptameron is usually attributed to her, and first appeared in print in the mid-1500s. Inspired by Boccaccio's Decameron, this uses a similar framework of a group of noble French men and women trapped and taking refuge in a flood: in order to amuse themselves, they take it in turns to tell a series of stories each day on a set theme.

Bawdy, erotic, sweet, witty and funny, these tales chart a verbal battle of the sexes, and the story-tellers reveal and conceal their own erotic fears and fantasies. Slightly reminiscent, also, of Chaucer, the stories are full of tricky wives, adulterous husbands, corrupt churchmen and nobles either getting away with it, or their come-uppance, depending on the ideology of the teller.

And it is this fascinating relationship between the story-teller and the story they tell, as well as the gradually-revealed tensions within the group itself that lift this beyond the purely entertaining (not that there's anything wrong with the pure ability to entertain).

Whether this was really written by a woman, or merely collected by her with just some of her own writings included, this throws a fascinating light on C16th French debates about the nature of gender, and particularly the politics of the erotic.

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ebook version of this that I've read wasn't as long as it states here. Maybe it have more parts and I've only read one? Nevertheless I liked it. It's cool I can read novels from the 1530s? (don't remember when it was written right now) in the comfort on my phone and home.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hope de Navarre is suing the makers of the Tudors. I really do.

Talk about your love triangles.

[Mateo R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un singular collage de fe fervorosa y pasiones carnales, de enredos de telenovela, de sentencias morales y justicias divinas bien propias de la época (aunque alguna que otra, no tanto), de fijación enfermiza con el honor y de virginidades fácilmente perdidas (a veces para hecatombe, y otras sin escándalo), y de firme creencia en el Dios cristiano pero también, por ejemplo, una consistente representación de los clérigos cristianos como violadores y pecadores. Y mientras que a veces se siente como estar leyendo nuevamente los mismos argumentos que en el Decamerón, el Conde Lucanor o los cuentos de Canterbury, otras tiene un sabor completamente singular.

[verbava · Rating 2 out of 5]

оповідання маргарити наваррської трохи втомлюють, але трапляються в них речі, від яких тяжко відірватися (і які в момент написання були непомітні): асиметрія статей – що для чоловіка легкі розваги, те для жінки привід бути довічно ув'язненою в кімнаті зі скелетом свого коханця; виправдання згвалтувань – і взагалі, вона сама дражнилася, руки показувала; ідея честі – поки ніхто не помітив, то й честь незаплямована, але якщо вже гулянки вийшли на яв, лишається хіба зарізатися; принципове розрізнення любові й сексу, через яке в цій книжці з'являється добра половина покійників, – дружина і кохана то найчастіше дві різні жінки, і в ідеалі обидві довічно. про виразну меблевість жінок, зокрема в оповіданнях, жінками розказаних, уточнювати особливо й не треба.
якщо коротко, то не так вражають сюжети, як світогляд; і не так сам світогляд, як те, що через півтисячоліття в ньому все одно стільки знайомого.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the early sixteenth century, a group of nobles are gathered in a monastery, awaiting the repair of a bridge so they can return to the French court. They decide to pass the time telling tales, with the caveat that every tale told must be true, and must es with the question of whether women or men are more virtuous.

Queen Marguerite de Navarre composed the stories, it is said, while lying in her litter, and based the story-tellers on members of her court. The prolog of this edition includes scholarship guessing at the identities of the various characters. It's generally assumed that Parlamente is Marguerite herself and Hircan her husband Henry. Certainly of all the couples they have the most heated back-and-forths.

I found the stories enjoyable to various degrees, though for a bit there I wondered if EVERY story would involve someone having sex with someone and thinking it was really someone else because, like, it was dark.

The story-tellers never question the mechanics of this in supposedly true stories. It's something I've seen in medieval fiction, for certain, but I can't stop thinking "But how do you not know the dude you're having sex with isn't your husband??"

I digress. Not ALL the stories had that mechanic. Quite a lot of them had outright rape. I found it telling that one of the stories told to show how women are more wicked then men is a story about a woman who is forcibly raped - she then commits the sin of telling someone else it happened to her, under the guise of saying it happened to someone else, but at the end of the story accidentally slips in an "I". The cast of noble women and men both agree that she's a silly woman to be laughed at and now caught in her 'sin'. tee hee. Wait - what about the part where she's a rape victim?

Heralded as a "battle of the sexes" the book frames the debate in a way that is revealing to modern eyes. Are women less than men in all things but virtuous and good or are women less than men in all things and also wicked?

Another interesting fact was the way they believed that unconsummated love could, in fact, kill people, or at least make them very ill - but also that having too much sex would also make them weak and ill. Toward the end there is a discussion of whether a woman just up and dying from love itself is, in fact, less virtuous than her lover who then kills himself for her sake. (The argument is, she had no volition in dying from love, therefore it shouldn't count ad a mark in her favor.)

The character of Hircan can be counted on after any tale to say that the man in the tale should have had sex as much as possible with as many women as possible whether they liked it or not. I was quite annoyed with him, and also with Simontaut and Saffredent, two men who say various quaint things like "He should have taken her by force - it's the highest honor he could do her. Everyone knows that when a lady is taken by force she's refused the fellow all other options." and lots of little things about women's cruelty knowing no bounds and all women being out for evol and only acting pious because they want to be known to be pious.

I've gone on a bit. Obviously, I found it very, very interesting as regards gender and sex relations in the early modern era.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read through day one of the seven days of stories. They are all a lot alike, dealing with sexual mores and shenanigans among (mostly) the nobility in 16th century France. More interesting is the author herself, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre (1492-1549) and loving sister of Francis I. Her religious sympathies lay with those trying to reform the church. She used her position to protect those favoring reform in France. She came very close to being charged a heretic, but in turn was sheltered by her brother, the King. She tended toward a mystical form of faith, and gathered around her those with similar views. The Heptameron is not mystical though. It's earthiness points to the double standard at play in relationships between the sexes in French society. Of the ten story-tellers (5 men and 5 women), the men generally stand on the side of conquest, while the women tend toward the virtue of fidelity.

[Set · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a fast read at all, there are V (5) long volumes with many sections but completely worth it. It was meant to be 100 stories but Marguerite de Navarre died and ergo there are 72 stories and I shall salute you if you've read them all. The dialogue between the narrators are absolutely hilarious. The morals are ridiculous such as a woman's fervor might kills her with fever should she be too chaste or a warning to not test a lover in too difficult a test or you might lose him. These are tales that explore the avarice of earthly desire and the virtues of the human heart, both with their recompense. Some stories are just downright hilarious like Tale V from the Volume I (1), Grey Friar Deceiving The Gentleman of Périgord from volume III (3), and Young Gentleman Embracing his Mother from volume III (3).

[Marcos Augusto · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the 1530s, Marguerite had begun a collection of short stories that would be published after her death as the Heptaméron, many of them composed in her litter as Marguerite made her frequent journeys across France. Patterned on Boccaccio's Decameron in structure, Marguerite's work rejected his misogynist view. Rather than portraying women's weakness and sinfulness, Marguerite's stories depicted women's strength and piety, and many of them condemned men for behavior that led to the ruin of women. In her later years, Marguerite wrote a number of short "closet" plays, meant to be read by her immediate circle but not to be staged and produced. These works also reflected her spiritual ideas.

[Gabriella Pérez · Rating 3 out of 5]

she is so silly for this

[Steven "Steve" · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspired by the Decameron, Marguerite de Navarre wrote a series of tales told to pass the time by a group of people who are unable to leave a monastery. Unfinished due to the death of the author, there are still 72 delightful and (allegedly) true tales concerning primarily the battle of the sexes. The Penguin translation contains an excellent introduction and a guide to the very odd names given to each of the the tale tellers (mostly anagrams to protect the innocent).

[♡ Angélie ♡]

Des scènes de viol en vieux français à chaque dizaine de pages

J'ai abandonné à la moitié mdr

[Blaine]

I've read all I'm going to read.

[Maddy Jolie]

Deux premières journées

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

de Navarre ties love & sex to female guilt & male violence as much as the play & subversion of Boccaccio & Chaucer. Why? Female author? Religious context? Social realism?

[Elsa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked some parts... The rest was just too old for my taste. And the XVI century vocabulary was terribly difficult. I just read the parts I had to read for class... still boring and tedious. Good luck with it.

[eve · Rating 3 out of 5]

un ouvrage dense, où la philosophie platonicienne côtoie les Évangiles, où le féminisme occasionnel des conteuses se heurte à la misogynie assumée de Hircan et de la société du XVIe siècle. des nouvelles sur l’amour à l’époque médiévale, sur l’infidélité, la vengeance et la vertu.