Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 398 - Pearls of Wisdom - Marguerite of Navarre.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. I don't know about you, but when I was eleven years old, I spent very little time translating spiritual poetry from French. This is just one of several respects in which I differ from Queen Elizabeth I. At that tender age in 1544, she produced an English version of a work called Mirror of the Sinful Soul. It was written by another queen, namely Marguerite of Navarre, also known as Marguerite d'Angoulin. In fact, Marguerite was almost an English queen like Elizabeth. When she was young, it was proposed that she be matched with the much older Henry VII. She angrily declared, in her first recorded words, I will marry a man who was young, rich, and noble without having to cross the Channel. Happily, from her point of view, the idea was indeed dropped, and she spent her life in France and Navarre, which is in what we now think of as northern Spain. The King of Navarre, Henri de Aldrei, was her second husband. She didn't have to cross the Channel to marry him, but as her youthful protest suggests, she didn't mind crossing people. Her relationship with her brother, the quintessential French Renaissance King Francis I, was mostly one of cordial alliance, yet she was willing to stand up even against him in the cause of church reform, which made some other people cross too, notably the schoolmen of the University of Paris. Indeed, Marguerite was at the center of the two great developments that marked France in the first half of the 16th century, humanism and reform. Like King Francis, she offered patronage to a range of poets and other humanists. Particularly noteworthy for us was her project of getting scholars to translate Plato's dialogues into French, along with the commentaries of Marsilio Ficino. This undertaking may remind us of the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene and her circle of commentators on Aristotle back in the 12th century. It involved such men as the poet Antoine Herouet, whose works The Androgyne and The Perfect Friend exemplify the use of Platonic themes in French literature of the time, especially themes drawn from Plato's erotic dialogues, like The Symposium and Phaedrus. As we'll be seeing, this was a feature of Marguerite's own writings too. Other humanist poets who enjoyed her favor were Joachim Doubelais and Pierre Ronsard, who I talked about last time. Both of them wrote poems in her honor. You might recall that at the end of the last episode, I quoted from Doubelais's lyrics in her praise. As for Christian reform, this was at least as strong a part of Marguerite's agenda. From early on, she campaigned to improve religious houses and supported and corresponded with such figures as John Calvin. She also appreciated the work of Jacques Lefebvre d'Etople, who controversially translated the Bible into the French vernacular. At first, Marguerite had the backing of Francis in supporting the cause of reform, though it should be stressed that for them, this meant reform within the Catholic Church, along the lines endorsed by Erasmus. This is exemplified by the case of Louis du Bercan, who translated Erasmus into French and wrote A Defense of Luther. Encouraged by Marguerite, Francis protected him when he was charged with heresy, though in the end without success. Du Bercan was put to death in 1529 by a decision of the Paris parlement. Then in 1533, the year of Elizabeth I's birth, as it happens, Marguerite invited the reformist rector of the Sorbonne to deliver an important sermon. When his evangelical ideas caused outrage, he fled Paris along with Calvin, a key moment in the latter's career. One year later, in 1534, came another key moment, for French religious life in general and the life of Marguerite in particular, the notorious Affair of the Placards. Evangelical agitators put up posters around Paris, attacking the Church and the Sacrament of the Mass, along the lines of the teaching of Zwingli. This must have horrified Marguerite, as she was devoutly committed to the Mass, but it did not change her stance towards reform in general. By contrast, it was the straw that broke the back of Francis's sympathy. He increasingly became willing to persecute, and even execute, evangelists. Now Marguerite's continued lobbying caused friction with the King, as did the suspicion that she put the interests of her adopted kingdom, Navarre, above that of the French Crown. It's probably no coincidence that she waited until just after Francis's death to publish a collection of her works, since they included works of daring theological content like Mirror of the Sinful Soul. Though it appealed to her fellow queen, Elizabeth, the theologians of Paris did not care for it. They briefly had the Mirror placed on a list of prescribed books before royal pressure got this overturned. Another poem of Marguerite's, The Fable of False Pride, illustrates the way that she slipped reformist philosophical and theological ideas into her literary productions. It also illustrates the classicizing humanist world of ideas in which she moved. The Fable is superficially pagan in content, a retelling of an ancient myth about the goddess Diana. Her virgin handmaidens are sexually assaulted by a gang of satyrs, and she turns the women into willow trees to save them. And by the way, a word of warning, sexual violence is a common theme in Marguerite, and it's going to come up again later in the episode. Some of the Christian ideas tattely woven into the fabric of the narrative are innocuous enough, for instance that the maidens' souls will remain immortal even if their bodies have now been transformed. But there is a distinctly evangelical flavor to the treatment of Diana herself. Speaking of the virgins, she is made to say, Those souls are not just immortal, but united eternally to Diana through grace. Now, you might argue that one did not have to be a Protestant sympathizer to thematize grace in this way. What distinguished the reformers was stress on faith in grace as opposed to good works. And for that, we may turn to another narrative poem by Marguerite, the Comédie des mons demansons, a late work written in 1548, one year before her death. This work is in the form of a dialogue, or perhaps better, play. We know that some of Marguerite's comedies were actually performed by the royal entourage by her aristocratic friends. In this one, three characters dominate the drama, a hedonistic, worldly woman, an ascetic spiritual woman, and a wise woman who shows them the errors and limitations of their perspectives. Moral chastisement is unsurprisingly meted out to the worldly woman, and on Platonist grounds, she can only think of the interest and pleasure of her body, yet the body is merely a mask for the true self, which is the soul. Then the spiritual woman is blamed for the opposite mistake of thinking she can win salvation by mortifying the body. No, says the wise woman to her, you will destroy your body before your soul is taught virtue, and it is against God's will to abuse the body. She advises, Do not hope to gain anything by bathing your body in blood or by roasting it over a fire. For if your heart is not joyous, charitable, and loving, then you can do nothing but lie to God. If your heart is not clean of pride and is blemished with it, I say that your work is worth little. This might very easily remind us of Erasmus with his emphasis on internal spirituality, or even Luther with his impatience for Christians who suppose they could persuade God to save them by good works, including a life of abstemious, ostentatious piety. Alternatively, if you have a really good memory, you might be reminded of another author, one also named Marguerite, namely Marguerite Poirette, whom we covered back in episode 267. She was also stern in her criticisms of asceticism, which she equated with worldly virtue. Because of such daring proposals that the pure religious soul can leave virtue behind, she was burned at the stake in 1310. The Parisian authorities really had it in for people named Marguerite. I wouldn't be surprised if the cafeteria at the Sorbonne to this day refuses to serve pizza margarita. Poirette's execution was brought on by her refusal to disown her book, Mirror of the Sinful Soul, and I cannot help wondering whether the similarity of that title and Marguerite of Navarre's Mirror of the Sinful Soul is more than a coincidence, as the earlier mirror would have been known at this time. In fact, Marguerite refers to an unnamed female author as an inspiration in another work, called The Prisons, and it has been suggested that she may have had Poirette in mind. If so, maybe Marguerite was also thinking of her when she came to write the last section of her Comédie des mons de maison. Here a fourth character comes along, a simple shepherdess who flummoxes even the wise woman by saying, I know nothing outside of love, I don't need any other knowledge. This brings us to another theme of Marguerite's writing, an intense and often eroticized longing for God which is reminiscent of Poirette and other female medieval mystics. It's an idea she explored in her extensive correspondence with the Bishop of Mont Guillaume Brissonné, who was also a colleague of the aforementioned Lefebvre des Taples. We have 123 surviving letters between Marguerite and the bishop, which forms only a part of her voluminous body of epistolary exchanges. Brissonné shared and probably encouraged both Marguerite's reformist tendencies and her interest in Platonism. More important still was his commitment to a spiritualist, even mystical approach to religion. We find this frequently in Marguerite too, not least in a text I just mentioned, The Prisons. It's main character, called simply The Lover, suffers from the same failing mentioned in the title of The Fable of False Pride. Pride, here translates coup d'etre, a kind of self-deception that separates the soul from God. To escape pridefulness, The Lover must free himself first from worldly love of his mistress, then from worldly ambition, and finally from all forms of worldly knowledge. He achieves this through asceticism and prayer, but as in the Comédie, this approach is shown to be limited. The more sin resembles virtue and is clothed like it, the more dangerous are its lies. Like Poet, The Lover finds peace only through mystical union with God and annihilation of the self. Marguerite takes up these same motifs in that poem that attracted the attention of Elizabeth, and may be her most obviously philosophical poem, The Mirror of the Sinful Soul. As the title leads us to expect, the speaker of the poem begins by lamenting her sinfulness, which makes her, a slave to evil, pain, suffering and distress, a brief existence, an uncertain end. Self-abnegation here comes not in the form of ascetic discipline, but as a realization that due to sin, she is nothing at all, or even less than nothing. This fits with the typically Platonist idea that evil is just the absence of being or absence of goodness, which also appears in the Fable of False Pride. It's a very traditional notion, one that goes all the way back to late antiquity. But we might see here a distinctively 16th century spin on it, insofar as Marguerite dwells so much on the soul's sinfulness, rather than on the ontological disappearance of the inferior, finite soul in God's superior, infinite reality, which is more what we find in Poret. Similarly, Marguerite innovates by playing variations on the old theme of the soul and God as lovers. Medieval mystics had repurposed the emotional rhetoric of courtly love poetry to evoke the longing of the soul for God. Marguerite does that too, but expands the range of interpersonal relationships exploited in the metaphor. Her soul is God's wife, but also his sister, his daughter, and paradoxically also his mother. In love, she writes, I can boldly call you son, father, spouse, and brother, father, brother, son, and husband. Perhaps reflecting on her own experiences of frustrated attempts at motherhood—she experienced miscarriages and false pregnancies before finally having children—Marguerite describes sin as a lifeless child, and her bond with God as the truly fruitful union. In a final twist on these metaphors, Marguerite compares herself in the mirror to a faithless wife. Whereas you are more likely to turn the skies upside down than to find a husband who will forgive an adulterous woman, God is willing to forgive the sinful soul. In these lines, Marguerite is recognizably the same author who produced a vastly longer and, at first glance, very different book, The Heptameron. The title refers to the set in days over which the action of the work unfolds. A group of aristocrats, evenly divided between men and women, are staying at an abbey and agree to pass the time by telling a series of stories for mutual edification and enjoyment. The often naughty tone of the work is captured in the prologue, when one of the men says he can think of something else he'd rather be doing, only to be told by the central female character Paul L'Amante. Let's leave aside pastimes that require only two participants. The name of this character suggests that she is a spokeswoman for Marguerite, because Marguerite means pearl and peulement means loving pearl. Of course, there's also a political pun. Perhaps it's a dig at the anti-reformist Parisian parlement. She used the same pun, by the way, for the title of her collected works, Marguerite des les Marguerite des Princesses, meaning Pearls from the Pearl of Princesses. The Heptameron is highly entertaining, and not infrequently bawdy and even dirty. Literally, one of the stories involves an unfortunate encounter with a latrine. It can be hard to believe that it was produced by the same woman who wrote the works of pious spirituality we've discussed so far. The most obvious point of continuity is the use of tropes from courtly love literature. In the Heptameron, heroic characters are typically those who remain devoted in the face of long separation from their love objects, or who are able to endure chastely in the face of temptation or threat. Threat is in fact all too frequent, as story after story depict rapes and attempted rapes. Sometimes this is played for laughs, as when a clever woman escapes two rapist Franciscan monks by abandoning them on an island. At other times, the stories convey dismay and indignation, understandably so when you learn that at least one of the tales, the fourth one, probably fictionalizes an assault endured by Marguerite herself when she was in her twenties. The heroine of this tale manages to fend off her attacker, but is then advised not to tell anyone else about it, since no one will believe she was an innocent victim. Though this passage remains depressingly relevant today, the Heptameron is often a backwards looking text. In the prologue, Marguerite has one of her characters refer to Boccaccio's Decameron, which is clearly her primary model. The ninth story alludes to the Romance of the Rose and its allegorization of seduction, or rape, as the violent storming of a fortress. The male narrators in Heptameron are constantly lamenting the suffering inflicted upon men who are refused sexual favors. One of them sounds like some loser on the internet when he says that women are only put on Earth for the benefit of men, so in demanding sex they are only taking what is theirs by right. Loftier talk of virtue and honor is also cynically admitted to be just a more subtle form of seduction. This leaves the women to speak up for a genuinely pure love that is exalted over the pleasures of the flesh. It's especially Paul Emond who voices such ideals, to the point that she sounds like she's been making a careful study of Plato and Ficino. She describes how the soul graduates from unsatisfying physical beauty to the richer rewards of spiritual and divine beauty. This is a clear allusion to the climactic speech of Plato's Symposium, which by the way is also delivered by a woman character, Diotima. The contrast between the men and women in the Heptameron is of course no accident. The whole book has been taken as a contribution to the long-running Carelles de Fane, or debate about the worth and virtue of women. Not long ago we saw how Cornelius Agrippa wrote on this topic, and before that we saw how it was an abiding concern of Italian humanists. The same was true in France, where for instance, Symphoréon Champier contributed to the genre with his Ship of Virtuous Women. We'll return to him later in the context of talking about medicine in Renaissance France. Marguerite puts this dispute front and center of the Heptameron. The very first story is told by a man and depicts a vicious woman, and it is immediately rebutted with a tale narrated by a female character about virtuous resistance to male advances. This is coupled with the observation that the misdeeds of a single woman should in any case not be taken to undermine the honor of all women, as had been argued more than a century earlier in France by Christine de Pizan. That might seem beside the point, since the deeds and misdeeds of fictional characters should have little if any bearing on our assessment of actual women, but it is stressed at the outset of the work that these are stories based on true events, albeit with invented names. Sometimes the narrators even allude to the Queen of Navarre, explaining how Marguerite came to hear the story, and as just mentioned she may have drawn on her own experience of sexual assault for one or more of the tales. Unlike Christine de Pizan, Marguerite does not have a widespread reputation as a proto-feminist icon, but she should. The Heptameron is a playful and ironic dialogue, not a polemic, like some Defenses of Women written in this period, yet it is all the more effective that the misogynist characters are allowed to damn themselves from their own mouths. In addition, too, Marguerite's attitude towards herself as a female author is highly self-conscious. Pre-modern female authors often indulge in self-deprecation. Even the forthrightly defiant Christine de Pizan had done so. Marguerite is no different, describing her writings as mere women's work, and so on. But this was usually a strategy used by women to disarm their readership before then claiming to have a profoundly valuable message. A few lines of poetry from the preface of Marguerite's collected writings is a perfect example. Excuse the rhythm and style, seeing that it is the work of a woman who has neither learning nor knowledge, but only the desire to show to all the power that is the gift of God the Creator when He wants to absolve a heart. As a woman, Marguerite could not attend the universities, or fight in wars, or engage straightforwardly in politics, even if she was unusually active in that sphere, as when she negotiated with the Holy Roman Emperor for the release of her brother Francis after he was captured in battle. But she could write, and write about the most important topics of all, like God and salvation. She was encouraged to do just that by another woman, one who already featured in episode 385, Marie d'Antierre. I mentioned then in passing that she corresponded with Marguerite. In one letter, d'Antierre argued forcefully that Marguerite should use her position and talent to write about theology, even if this was not expected for those of their gender. If God has given graces to some good women, should they, for the sake of the defamers of the truth, refrain from writing down, speaking, or declaring it to each other? It was a challenge Marguerite was willing to take up, even if she did so rather indirectly, in the form of spiritual poetry and in the heptameron. At least this is how some have read the work. It may be a collection of sex comedies and romantic tragedies, but it is also yet another chance for her to present her distinctive ideas about Christian religion. Already Montaigne, just a few decades after her death, was complaining about the mixed nature of the resulting work, which in his view just goes to show that women should not attempt to address such matters. But Marguerite had good reason for doing so, beyond the encouragement offered by Marie d'Antierre. She may have been provoked by John Calvin's attack on the sort of intensely spiritual Christianity she favored. He took aim at a group he called the Spiritual Libertines, whom he saw as being protected by the French court. These Libertines, he said, took the view that there is no such thing as sin, because God infuses all creation with his being. Calvin accused them of thinking as follows. Does an assassin murder an upright citizen? He has carried out, they say, God's plan. Has someone stolen or committed adultery? Because he has done what was foreseen and ordained by the Lord, he is the minister of God's providence. The leading Reformers were never shy about polemic, and as we've seen before, they got especially bent out of shape when confronted with what might seem to be the logical conclusions of their own teachings. For Luther, this was the anti-authoritarianism of the Peasants' Revolt. For Calvin, it was the Libertines' plausible inference that if God predestines everything, as Calvin himself taught, then among the things he wills are wicked actions. We know from letters sent by Calvin to Marguerite that he feared she would take offense at his diatribe. Her response seems to have come only in an indirect form. She would write works that defended the Spiritual Libertines by emphasizing the spiritual part. The narrators of the Heptameron, for all their eroticized banter, are also a group of pious contemplatives. They find sustenance in daily readings of scripture, and are more devoted to God than their hosts, Franciscan friars who do things like skipping prayers so they can eavesdrop on the storytelling. Marguerite no doubt anticipated that her readers would also hang on every word, hoping for salacious details, but she hoped that along the way they would absorb the Platonic teaching that true love, true eros, is pursued through the soul and not the body. So it's apt that when Marguerite died, the poet Charles de Saint-Martes wrote an encomium for her full of classical allusions which poses the question, if Plato were alive today, what do we think he would say of Marguerite? I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm pretty sure that if Marguerite were alive today, she'd tell you not to miss the next episode, because we'll be looking at a man who also contributed to the debate over women, also saw his works, placed on a list of prescribed books in Paris, also attracted concerned criticism from Calvin, and, like Marguerite, didn't mind a bit of lewd humor. Or, to be honest, a lot of lewd humor. So you can call the pause between this episode and the next one the interlude until I cover Francois Rablé here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.