Marguerite of Navarre 1492 – 1549

Marguerite of Navarre, also known as Marguerite of Angouleme, was a French Renaissance queen, poet, and religious philosopher, sister of Francis I of France and queen of Navarre, whose court at Nerac became one of the chief centers of French humanist and reform-minded thought in the first half of the sixteenth century. Her Heptameron, a frame-narrative collection of seventy-two stories on love, marriage, and human folly modeled on Boccaccio's Decameron, embedded sustained philosophical conversation among its narrators, while her Mirror of the Sinful Soul mounted an evangelical reflection on the soul's relation to God that brushed Lutheran reform without quite committing to it. She protected reformers from persecution while remaining a member of the Catholic royal house.

Marguerite of Angoulême was born at Angoulême in April 1492, the elder sister of the future Francis I of France. She was tutored at her mother's court in Latin, Italian, and Spanish and married first Charles, Duke of Alençon, in 1509 and after his death the Calvinist-leaning Henri d'Albret, King of Navarre, in 1527; their daughter Jeanne d'Albret was the mother of Henry IV of France. From 1521 she became the principal patron of the Catholic evangelical reformers led by Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet of Meaux and Lefèvre d'Étaples, and she protected Calvin, Marot, Bonaventure des Périers, and Rabelais.

Her own writings include the long meditative poem Le Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (1531, condemned by the Sorbonne in 1533 and rescued only by her brother's intervention), the biblical mystery plays of Théâtre profane and Comédies bibliques, the Chansons spirituelles, the verse autobiography Les Prisons (1547), and the prose Heptaméron (published posthumously in 1558–1559), seventy-two of a projected hundred Boccaccian tales framed by debates on love and religion.

Marguerite combined a Catholic Neoplatonic mysticism with a vigorous Erasmian and reformist sympathy that kept her at the centre of the religious crisis of the 1530s and 1540s without ever leaving the Roman Church; her literary court at Nérac and Pau formed an entire generation of French humanist writers. She died at the castle of Odos near Tarbes in December 1549.