The Power and Patronage of Marguerite de Navarre (review)

Biographies of Marguerite de Navarre, including Jourda's 1932 hefty opus, have portrayed her as a devoted sister subservient to her brother King Francis I and, in her later years, as a withdrawn woman seeking apolitical, spiritual seclusion. Her contemporaries Marie Dentière and John Calvin contributed to that view in letters urging her to be more forceful in defending religious reform, and Rabelais dedicated his 1546 Tiers Livre to her with a poem inviting her to leave her mystical domain and return to earth. Recently, some scholars have challenged that image. They present a much more politically savvy Marguerite who worked behind the scenes to achieve her political goals. Jonathan Reid's 2001 doctoral dissertation shows her striving until the end of her life to support evangelical reform. Barbara Stephenson, reevaluating Marguerite's abundant correspondence, finds evidence of a uniquely placed powerful woman who mastered the rhetorical conventions of the French royal court and its network of noble families. Stephenson declares a twofold goal for her work: to challenge the traditional image of Marguerite's public role and, more broadly, to examine the relationships among the French nobility in the early sixteenth century. She situates her study within recent theories of early modern patronage and clientage, theories that she discusses at length in the introduction and first chapter. She emphasizes Marguerite's role as a bridge linking several noble families through her family of birth, the royal family after Francis ascended to the throne in 1515, and her two marriages. She finds evidence of clientage relationships in Marguerite's extensive correspondence and proposes her own theoretical model to describe them. Crucial in Stephenson's argument are the formulaic endings and signatures of the letters. In chapter 2, she asserts that subtle variations of wording in those closings reveal much about Marguerite's view of her position vis-à-vis her correspondents and her efforts to manipulate those relationships. I found the discussion of language game models and the analyses of numerous fragmented examples of signatures from Marguerite's letters less satisfying than the subsequent chapters. Stephenson generally insists that the language of those closings gives us a reliable indication of Marguerite's relationship with and feelings toward the recipient. However, she cautions us not to trust the sentiments expressed in the closings of letters to Marguerite's adversaries, because standards of courtesy had to prevail over sincerity. That puts the reader in the difficult position of needing to know beforehand Marguerite's disposition toward the recipient in order to use the language of the letters to determine that disposition. Stephenson leaves no doubt, however, that Marguerite had a masterful grasp of the epistolary rhetoric used by the French nobility and that she manipulated language to consolidate power for herself and for those she favored. She shows how exceptional was Francis's appointment of Marguerite to the ducal peerage when he gave his sister the duchy of Berry in 1517. That peer status, otherwise reserved for males, gave her political authority that was far from simply nominal. In her last three chapters, Stephenson uses an engaging narrative approach. By following chronologically the letters to and from Marguerite's most frequent correspondents, she allows them to tell an intriguing story of her relationships with those people. She traces the vicissitudes of Marguerite's dealings with the Duke de Montmorency, and she offers a fresh appraisal of Marguerite's relationship with Francis, demonstrating that the sister's loyalty to her brother did not imply constant subservience. Marguerite's difficult role balancing the interests of her husband Henri d'Albret against those of Francis is effectively presented. Most thought provoking is Stephenson's analysis of Marguerite's correspondence with Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux and advocate of evangelical reform. Scholars have emphasized in those letters Marguerite's role of seeker and Briçonnet's response as...