2017/07/14
#French Renaissance literature #mystical poetry #short story
paper · doi:10.18130/v3sr1d
The second story of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, the tale of a mulekeeper’s wife who is raped and murdered by her husband’s servant, incorporates many elements of Marguerite’s mystical poetry. Precise details of the woman’s ‘agony’ and death echo the mystic’s gradual sublimation of the body as she progresses toward ecstatic union with Christ. Passages in Les Prisons describe the death of Louise de Savoie, Marguerite’s mother, as a mystical ecstasy. In Le Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié, Marguerite depicts her own approach to ecstatic union with similar language. Those two works, composed around the same time as the Heptaméron, invite us to see the humble mulekeeper’s wife in a sort of mystical sorority with those two royal women. In her portrait of the dying woman, Marguerite offers a mediated self-portrait. She thereby obeys the lesson that Oisille, the narrator, gives at the end of story two: “that is why we must humble ourselves, because God’s grace is not given to men for their nobility and wealth…. He often elects the lowly in order to confound those women whom the world regards as highborn and honorable.”