Born: 11 April 1492, France
Died: 21 December 1549
Country most active: France
Also known as: Margaret of Angoulême
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
Margaret of Navarre (1492-1549), a French politician, religious reformer, literary patron, and author, born at Angouleme. She was the daughter of Charles of Orleans, and sister of King Francis I. In 1509 she married the Duke d’Alencon, and two years after his death (1527) Henri d’Albret, titular King of Navarre. Their daughter, Jeanne, became mother of King Henry IV of France. Margaret was active in politics, in religious reform, and in literature. Of a strong mystical tendency, she favored religious liberty, and during the ascendancy of her influence with her brother, she was an effectual defender and patron of humanists and men of letters. Her little courts were for a time the most brilliant intellectually in Europe.
Her affection for her brother was especially beautiful. During his captivity in Spain in 1525, she went to console him and tried in vain to secure less rigorous conditions of release from Charles V.
Her literary work consists of poems, letters, and the “Heptameron.” While her poems are usually written in an easy, flowing style, there hovers over them a veil of mysticism which at times obscures the thought. Her Letters are interesting from the historical or literary point of view. But it is as the author of the “Heptameron” that she is chiefly remembered. This work, constructed, as its name indicates in the lines of the “Decameron” of Boccaccio, consists of seventy-two short stories told to each other by a company of ladies and gentlemen who are stopped in the journey homewards from Canterets by the swelling of a river. Internal evidence is strongly in favor of its having been a joint work, in which more than one of the men of letters who composed Margaret’s household took part. It is a delightful book, and while the sensuality which characterized the period appears in it, it is in a less coarse form than in the great work of Rabelais, and there is a poetical spirit which is generally absent from Pantagruel.
Bigotry and the desire to tarnish the reputation of women of letters have led to the bringing of odious accusations against Margaret of Navarre’s character, for which there is not the smallest foundation. Although the poets of the time are unwearied in celebrating her charms, she does not, from the portraits which exist, appear to have been regularly beautiful, but as to her sweetness of disposition combined with intellectual strength, as well as a scrupulous morality free from all prudery, there is universal consent, while she probably contributed more to the renaissance of learning in France than any other individual at that time.