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Incoherent Texts? Storytelling, Preaching, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 21*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

António De Ridder-Vignone
António De Ridder-Vignone*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Abstract

To analyze Marguerite de Navarre’s response to the misogynist francophone novella tradition, this article asks how material provided by older nouvelles is reorganized in the Heptaméron, blurring both normative definitions of masculinity and femininity and the lines between framed novellas and other genres. This article describes Marguerite’s use of nonfictional sources as well as Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26. Visual iconographic transformations in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles are converted in the Heptaméron into textual and intergeneric transformations. In the distance between Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26’s elaborate crossdressing farce and Heptaméron 21, which blends romance, pardon request, and martyr’s tale, one perceives the differences in gendered thought and rhetorical strategy separating Marguerite from her anonymous predecessors.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , Summer 2015 , pp. 465 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2015

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Footnotes

I wish to extend my warmest thanks to William J. Kennedy, Kathleen Long, Colin Macdonald, Joseph Bowling, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and revisions. I would also like to thank my wife Kathryn for her continual enthusiasm regarding the present study. The editions of the Heptaméron used here are the original French edited by Salminen (1999) and the English translation by Chilton (1984). I use my own translations in cases where Chilton’s version, by translating one French word differently in different places, obscures the strategic reuse of vocabulary that a reader of the original text would no doubt notice. All translations of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles are my own.

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