Earthly Treasures: Material Culture and Metaphysics in the Heptameron and Evangelical Narrative

Chapter One: Telling Tableaux and Textual Resurrections: Marguerite de Navarre and the Evangelical Narrative

23 Chapter One Telling Tableaux and Textual Resurrections Marguerite de Navarre and the Evangelical Narrative A Theater of Testimonial Texts The Greek word for gospel, evangelion, derives from the same root as that of “gossip.”1 Telling stories to narrate the Christian experience is thus both a theological and literary technique, and, appropriately, personal witnessing combined with scriptural references, metaphors, and anecdotes typifies sixteenthcentury evangelical expression. Evangelical witness developed from a demand for the scriptural foundation and validation of the conversion experience. This focus infused the daily lives of believers with significance and encouraged the narrating of the relationship of the evangelical with God as he or she perceived it in lay life. The humanist emphasis on textual criticism, a return to sources to determine authoritative texts (ad fontes), combined with popular demand for access to Scripture in the vernacular, prompted the Cercle de Meaux in France, and Luther in Germany, to espouse an unmediated appropriation of the Bible and its thorough, intentional application to every aspect of the believer’s reality. As Larissa Taylor has shown, in the decades prior to the Reformation , Catholic preaching often turned to para-biblical texts for homiletic inspiration, with friars drawing examples of heroic faith from the Golden Legend and the Lives of the Saints more frequently than they referred directly to the Bible.2 Evangelicals, on the other hand, increasingly strove to find in Scripture, for themselves, in their own terms and without clerical intervention, the guidance they sought for daily life. The story-lines of the Heptaméron thus also offer, whether intentionally or not, a sort of homiletics source-book: the nouvelles contain wisdom and illustration useful for evangelical sermons. Often, the Heptaméron’s suggestions for how to 24 Chapter One live life—whether at court, in church, in towns or in villages— develop through negative references to what not to do: Marguerite frequently portrays monks and priors, Catholic preachers, and confessors in the Heptaméron, but they are invariably shown acting in worldly or wanton ways—raping the daughter of their host, coercing a contribution to their personal finances, disavowing their promises of chastity and poverty. Casting a critical eye on how Catholic priests abuse their functions, Marguerite expresses proscriptions on such behavior as well as prescribing how the message of the Gospel should be conveyed.3 On this level, the Heptaméron exemplifies evangelical expectations for effective preaching.4 The criteria of authenticity, simplicity, and practicality in preaching were important for evangelicals, who hoped to return to the biblical stylus rudus, or plain style.Yet the “scandal” of the Gospel (from the Greek, skandalon, or stumbling-block; obstacle) was precisely the straightforward, unadorned language in which its truths were communicated; intellectuals found this unsophisticated, while esthetes tried to dress it up in rhetorical furbelows. Marguerite set herself the task of illustrating biblical truths in a seemingly improbable narrative venue, thereby demonstrating how evangelical preaching could be direct and sincere and also attractive to the listener. In part to make the Bible more appealing and understandable to their audience, evangelical preachers wove descriptions of, and details from, daily life into their understanding of Scripture . They viewed Scripture as an instruction manual for every aspect of life, in this way fostering a pragmatic attitude toward preaching that removed it from ecclesiastical and clerical dominance , placing responsibility for reception of the Word on the laity.5 The devisants—both storytellers of and audience for the text—are analogous to the new position in which the laity was placed by the evangelical shift toward more accessible preaching in the vernacular: members of the laity could now both read and interpret Scripture for themselves as well as implement its teachings, preaching through the example of their daily lives. The nouvelles lead the devisants, and evangelical laity, through a process of progressive spiritual enlightenment, providing instruction in how to preach and how to apply scriptural lessons. Readers participate in a conversion process structured at every 25 Telling Tableaux and Textual Resurrections point on scriptural passages. In this way, their experience mimetically conveys this message of the Heptaméron: the point of preaching is to convert the listener. Martin Luther and the evangelicals who followed him ensconced the Bible, and its treasure trove of inspirational narratives , at the heart both of the individual believer’s spiritual experience and of the community of the Christian church.6 Telling stories became...