Approaches to Teaching Marguerite de Navarre’s ‘Heptameron’ (review)

The MLA’s Approaches to Teaching series numbers, at last consultation of website, a hundred volumes. Like its predecessors, this one reaches far beyond the classroom, offering a general, digestible aperçu and even mise en pratique, of the secondary literature on a work or author as synthesized by the very scholar/teachers who produce it. It is a primer in fruitful ways to read, as much as to teach, one of the most appreciated and influential additions to the early modern French canon to be made within living memory. Moreover—and mirabile dictu—it beats into print a projected volume on Marguerite’s joyously discordant contemporary, François Rabelais, by at least two years. And both, it might be noted with an interrogative arched brow, appear well over a decade after Patrick Henry’s skillfully constructed anthology on teaching Montaigne’s Essays, the last but far from least of the three prose Graces in the standard undergraduate French Renaissance curriculum. It would be ungracious, however, to dwell on the wait, for it has most manifestly been well worth it. Colette Winn, particularly esteemed for her work in the area of early modern women-authored works, has gathered an impressive number of diverse pieces from colleagues across the career span and critical spectrum. Their contributions represent the best aged-in-the-cask musings of mature scholarship as well as the new-wine effervescence of the most recent generation. Writing as one who has taught the Heptameron numerous times, in whole or in part, in both French and English translation, with both undergraduates and graduates, I was yet gratified to find myself pausing on almost every page and reaching for the laptop to note, as it were, new wrinkles on the face of an old friend I thought I knew. The collection is helpfully divided into two parts: materials and approaches. The former provides much useful basic information, including an annotated essential bibliography of primary and secondary sources to complement the list of works cited at the volume’s close, as well as nod to twenty-first-century technology, ‘Marguerite de Navarre Online’, with a follow-through by Sylvie Richards. In Part II, Winn opens with a succinct synthesis of teacher survey responses—odd, however, to include a (short) list of respondents but not the survey tool used—and a brief overview of the approaches. These 27 essays are grouped into four categories: ‘Introducing Backgrounds and Contexts’, ‘Critical Tools for the Classroom’, ‘Teaching the Heptameron in Relation to Other Works by Marguerite de Navarre’ and ‘Selected Courses and Pedagogical Strategies’, essays which exploit a wealth of collective practical experience. They range from outlining specific classroom case studies to highlighting a particular theme or subtext, to unpacking individual tales or the very language of the Heptameron, to viewing the work through specific critical lenses. In short and in sum, yet another welcome vade mecum from MLA, as indispensable a guide for inquiring teachers and students as the devisants expressly hoped their collected tales would be for their contemporaries.