MARGHERITA d'Angoulême, queen of NAVARRA. — Duchess of Alençon, then queen of Navarre, born at Angoulême on 11 April 1492, died at Odos-en-Bigorre on 21 December 1549. Daughter of Carlo di Orléans and Luisa di Savoia, and consequently elder sister of Francesco I, she was one of the most learned and intelligent women of the French Renaissance, admired and praised for her liveliness of spirit and subtlety of feeling. She received a careful education in a humanistic milieu: to her knowledge of Italian, Spanish, and Latin, she later added some Greek and Hebrew. From her natural dispositions and from the influence of French Humanism came her desire for a refined religiosity and her distaste for religious worldliness.
Two figures of French religious Humanism exerted a particular influence on M.: the celebrated Lefèvre d'Etaples (v.), Briçonnet (v.), bishop of Meaux and M.’s spiritual director, known for an attempt at reform begun in his diocese (1518) and inspired by the religious-humanistic ideals of the period.
In an environment in which the ideal in fact always remained that of an energetic reform, but one far removed from every schism, moral symbolism came to permeate and almost transform traditional beliefs. For example, the Virgin appeared in the Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (Alençon 1531), which provoked extremely violent criticism and was condemned by the Sorbonne in the 1533 edition (the condemnation was withdrawn through the intervention of Francesco I), almost as a symbol of the purified soul: indeed, faith itself, far removed from Luther’s radical predestinarianism, seemed almost to coincide with “the illumination to which the Platonic dialectic of love leads” (Renaulet).
The circumstances of a life that was, in many respects, contrary to her most intimate dispositions and to her very temperament helped to immerse M. ever more deeply in this atmosphere. Married twice, always for political reasons and without genuine love on her part, first to Carlo III d'Alençon (1509) and then, widowed in
1525, to Enrico d'Albret, king of Navarre (1527), she devoted all her interest to study and to the life of a small court, wholly dominated by her culture, and all her affection to her brother Francesco I, whom she tenderly loved.
To understand M.’s attitude toward Protestantism, this complex of facts must be taken into account. Like many other educated 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 feminine sensibility. Rather than working in favor of the Protestant cause, she acted in favor of many persecuted persons, both Protestants and non-Protestants. In 1543, in fact, she went so far as to receive at her court in Nérac several libertines persecuted by Calvin, thereby drawing upon herself 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 her desire to remain inwardly faithful to the ideal and concrete unity of the Christian world therefore cannot be doubted.
Her literary production—poetic works, dialogical compositions performed at her court, short stories, devotional writings, and so forth—is of unequal importance: literature, in short, rather than artistic creation. Special mention must be made of the Heptameron, in which, following the example of Boccaccio’s Decameron, a company of ladies and gentlemen is said to spend its time recou-
counting various tales, many of which offer a lively description of the customs of the period and precious testimony to the taste and art of her time.
L. Febvre, Autour de l'Heptaméron, Paris 1944; for the broader milieu: H. Hauser-A. Renaudet, Les débuts de l'âge moderne (Peuples et civilisations), ed. L. Halphen-Ph. Sagnac, there 1946, pp. 233-42 and passim. Franco Bolgiani