MARGARET OF ANGOULÊME, Queen of Navarre. - Duchess of Alençon, then queen of Navarre, b. at Angoulême on 11 Apr. 1492, d. at Odos-en-Bigorre on 21 Dec. 1549. Daughter of Charles of Orléans and of Louise of Savoy, and therefore elder sister of Francis I, she was one of the most cultured and intelligent women of the French Renaissance, admired and praised for the liveliness of her wit and the refinement of her feeling. She received a careful education in a humanistic environment: to her knowledge of Italian, Spanish and Latin she later added that of a little Greek and Hebrew. From natural dispositions and from the influence of French Humanism she derived the desire for a refined religiosity and a disgust for religious worldliness.
Two figures of French religious Humanism exercised a particular influence on M.: the celebrated Lefèvre d'Etaples (v.), and Guillaume Briçonnet (v.), bishop of Meaux, M.'s spiritual director, known for an attempt at reform begun in his diocese (1518) and inspired by the religious-humanistic ideals of the age.
In an environment in which the ideal indeed always remained that of an energetic reform, but far removed from any schism, moral symbolism came to pervade and almost to transform traditional beliefs. For example, the Virgin appeared in the Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (Alençon 1531), which aroused the most violent criticism and was condemned in the 1533 edition by the Sorbonne (a condemnation withdrawn through the intervention of Francis I), almost as a symbol of the purified soul: indeed, faith itself, far removed from Luther's radical predestinarianism, seemed almost to identify itself with «the illumination to which the Platonic dialectic of love leads» (Renaulet).
The vicissitudes of a life that was, in many respects, contrary to what were her most intimate dispositions and her very temperament contributed to plunging M. ever more deeply into this atmosphere. Married twice, always for political reasons and without true love on her part, first to Charles III of Alençon (1509) and then, widowed in 1525, to Henry d'Albret king of Navarre (1527), she placed in her studies and in the life of a small court, wholly dominated by her culture, all her interest, and in her brother Francis I, tenderly loved by her, all her affection.
To understand M.'s attitude toward Protestantism one must take account of this complex of facts. Like many other cultured contemporaries she saw in the Protestant reform, up to a certain point, a movement of moral revision inspired by evangelical ideals, while, in particular, its violent repercussions disturbed her sensibility as a woman. More than in favor of the Protestant cause, she worked in favor of many persecuted persons, Protestants and non-Protestants. In 1543 indeed she went so far as to receive at her court of Nérac certain libertines persecuted by Calvin, drawing upon herself, for this, the severe condemnation and hostility of the Genevan reformer. In short, M., like many others, failed to grasp the overall character of the Protestant movement, and therefore her desire to remain inwardly faithful to the ideal and concrete unity of the Christian world cannot be called into doubt.
Her literary production, poetic works, dialogic compositions that were performed at her court, novellas, devotional writings, etc., is of unequal importance: literature, in short, rather than artistic work. Special mention deserves the Heptameron, in which, following the example of Boccaccio's Decameron, a company of ladies and knights is described, engaged in recounting various novellas, many of which are a lively description of the customs of the age and a precious testimony to the taste and art of her time.
Bibliography10 works
L. Febvre, Autour de l'Heptaméron, Paris 1944; for the overall environment: H. Hauser-A. Renaudet, Les débuts de l'âge moderne (Peuples et civilisations), ed. L. Halphen-Ph. Sagnac, ibid. 1946, pp. 233-42 and passim.
Franco Bolgiani