A Companion to Marguerite de Navarre ed. by Gary Ferguson and Mary B. McKinley (review)

Scholars at all levels will benefit from this comprehensive review of Marguerite’s opus. The Introduction, co-written by the editors, summarizes her life and role, particularly in a religious context, while providing synopses of the following nine essays. The first two contributions, by Jonathan Reid and Jean-Marie Le Gall respectively, present an intriguing contrast, the former arguing for a strongly Reformist agenda in the author’s life and works, while the latter emphasizes the fact that in many ways her orthodox Catholicism remained intact; certainly, her work was never officially censured, even posthumously. The debate concerning her precise religious position is set to continue — one suspects indefinitely. The late Philip Ford reassesses Marguerite’s Platonism, another unresolved issue, referring both to the Heptaméron discussions and to several of her poems, where the influence of Ficino is traceable. Equally measured and enlightening is Reinier Leushuis’s examination of La Navire and the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, where the reflections on death display a Petrarchan influence equally apparent in the use of terza rima. Jan Miernowski delivers a wide-ranging and informative consideration of the Chansons spirituelles, in which death again figures strongly, though ultimately as a liberating rather than depressing eventuality. Isabelle Garnier collaborates with Isabelle Pantin in studying the two Miroir poems, Miroir de l’âme pécheresse and Miroir de Jésus-Christ Crucifié, which, composed at opposite ends of Marguerite’s literary career, suggest a move from Evangelical militancy in the former to, in the latter, a meditative preparation for her own demise. Particularly intriguing is the numerological pattern the authors discern in L’âme pécheresse, while the manifestly incomplete state of the later work allows for multiple interpretations; other contributors make analogous points. Thus, in his ample treatment of Marguerite’s theatre, Olivier Millet opines that the dramatic dialogism it reveals encourages a strategy of alternative readings surely enhanced by her deliberate and striking use of misunderstanding and incoherent discourse (a pattern also reflected in Miernowski’s comments on her cultivation of chant and ‘speechless speech’ (p. 266), and which, significantly, underscores her ‘distrust of intellectual interpretations’ (p. 304)). Similarly, in her examination of Les Prisons, Cynthia Skenazi understands Marguerite’s purpose to be reader-orientated rather than doctrinal: Marguerite seeks to encourage contemplation, not to dispense the truth, which point is clearly relevant to her mentor Briçonnet in his insistence on Christian humility. The final chapter, by the editors themselves, concerns the Heptaméron and argues the by now predictable but no less valid case that the text, as unfinished, thematically complex, and unresolved in its discussions, invites judgement from the reader but also intimates that one set limits to that judgement. Odd lapses such as the mistitling of the Châteleine de Vergi (sic, p. 357), the suggested derivation of itinerary from intus (p. 226), or the misdating of the Pavia campaign (p. 6: begun in 1524 not 1525), in which d’Alençon was not, it appears, wounded (ibid.), scarcely impair the scholarly value or editorial quality of a richly produced text that offers much to students of literature, music, history, and theology.