Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron.

Dora E. Polachek, ed. Heptameron. Amherst, MA: Hestia Press, 1993. 170 pp. $19.

We have here a collection of essays (nine in English and two in French) from a colloquium commemorating the 500th anniversary of Marguerite's birth held in Massachusetts in 1992. The breadth and richness of these eleven contributions renders any attempt at synthesis, particularly in this short space, problematic at best. The conference's bipartite theme is, in part, an attempt to answer Marcel Tetel's 1973 call for more research on laughter and the comic in the Heptameron. At first glance, the themes of heroic virtue and comic infidelity might not seem to be complementary, but as the papers of Jeffrey Persels, Gary Ferguson, Paula Sommers, and Jerry Nash demonstrate, under Marguerite's feminist pen, representations of heroic virtue are more frequently comic than exemplary, and while calling male honor into question, frequently make men the butt of the joke. Stories of comic infidelity also provoke laughter at the expense of men, though infidelity is comic only in certain specific circumstances as the papers of Judy Kem and Sommers show.

Marguerite's originality as an author is revealed in the contributions of Patricia Cholakian, Dora Polachek, and Ferguson, which examine how her creative and feminine reworkings of earlier tales and motifs reveal a uniquely feminist agenda and viewpoint. Marguerite may have borrowed material from earlier sources, but she has transformed it to make it exclusively and completely her own, displaying her own comic flair in the process. A different aspect of this feminism is studied in the essays by Carla Freccero and Francois Pare, which examine violence used to oppress women, and in particular, the subject of incest.

In addition to its feminist agenda, Robert Cottrell and Robert Melancon demonstrate that the Heptameron is also delivering a clear evangelistic message which Cottrell describes as Christian caritas (34-35). The devisants in their temporary utopia at Notre-Dame de Serrance are clearly better Christians than the monks! Persels identifies three separate discourses within the work, "the Hircanian, the Dagoucinian, and the feminine or syncretically Christian which the "arguably evangelizing agenda of Marguerite's symposium exploits ... to point out a new path to non gender-specific virtue" (91). Not only did Marguerite set up the possibility for the devisants to convert their hidden audience of monks with their stories showing friars and others in a negative light -- with Melancon suggesting that Marguerite "les engageait dans les chemins de l'evangelisme" (50) -- but so did she leave open the possibility for the individual members of this new evangelical Christian community to establish the same new order in the "real" world once they left the abbey.

What emerges from this volume is a keen sense of Marguerite's originality: her feminism, her evangelism, and her creative reworking of sources to better exploit their comic potential in the service of promoting women. The Heptameron is a far more modern book than any of its predecessors, reflecting a new reality where chivalry and old ideas of courtly love are dead. While certain contemporary critical inquiries perceive the terms feminism and evangelism as mutually exclusive, several of these authors, on the contrary, argue that for Marguerite they worked together. Marguerite's characters -- the devisants as well as the characters in the tales they tell -- illustrate both a new Christian virtue and a feminist ideal, as men and women, both in the stories and in the discussions are given equal voice. And, in the ideal world of Marguerite's vision women would be treated equally. This volume should lay to rest, once and for all, any lingering questions concerning the authorship of the Heptameron; as these essays all demonstrate, Marguerite is most definitely and firmly in control.