A timely homage, in many ways, to the great structuralist theorists of literature, drawing especially from the work of Gérard Genette, who passed away in 2018, and surely inspired by the classic Grammaire du Décaméron of Tzvetan Todorov, who died in 2017, Philippe de Lajarte's latest book offers a narratological reading of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron. The inclusion of the Heptaméron on the reading list for the 2021 aggrégation in modern literature by France's Ministry of Education and Youth also points to the timeliness of this study. In his examination of Marguerite de Navarre's collection of novellas, Lajarte provides a compelling demonstration of the fact that works that were overlooked during the heyday of structuralist and poststructuralist critique can stand up to the rigors of this kind of analysis and offer lessons to be learned.

Carefully distinguishing the content of the novellas from the way they are told, and paying close attention to the conversations among storytellers that frame and connect these tales, Lajarte notes that much of the hermeneutical work of the Heptaméron takes place in the text itself, as the storytellers, or devisants, debate the meanings of the tales they tell. He observes, moreover, that when Marguerite de Navarre lays out her plan for this collection in the prologue to the Heptaméron, in which she explains that all of the stories must be true and must be told by unlettered men and women, she fails to mention the exchanges among devisants, which, he argues, not only distinguish the Heptaméron from its model, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, but also give it singular status among the narrative literature of the Renaissance.

Lajarte's typologies of stories, dialogues, characters, and narrators lead him to many insightful observations. He finds, for example, that although the stories can be grouped into two broad categories, tales that serve as recreation and tales that illustrate or investigate a moral truth, Marguerite de Navarre, with the conversations she stages among the devisants, brings these two categories together. In the Heptaméron, the search for truth is pleasurable in itself, and so investigation is already recreation. He also points out the absence in the Heptaméron—in contrast to the Decameron and other similar collections of stories—of tales of fate or luck, magic or the supernatural, irrationality, and unbounded violence (violence in the Heptaméron, he argues, is always tempered), noting that Marguerite de Navarre's novellas deal invariably with either the erotic or trickery, and that even the erotic tales are designed to elicit reflection on the part of the reader rather than an emotional or sensory response.

One of Lajarte's most intriguing observations involves the opposition between men and women, a major structural principle of the Heptaméron. In addition to the fact that the male and female devisants tend to disagree about the stories’ interpretation, he finds that even when a mixed-sex group reaches agreement, members of that group never take issue with devisants of the same sex who are outside this group. This observation leads him to conclude that the storytellers’ views stem almost inevitably from their social positions, a mechanism that explains, he says, how individuals who share spiritual beliefs and intellectual and moral convictions can still disagree completely on practical matters—in the sixteenth century as today.

Scholars of Marguerite de Navarre will appreciate Lajarte's comprehensive analysis of the Heptaméron. He examines all seventy-two novellas and provides valuable data for future research. His book will appeal more directly, however, to scholars of narratology and critics with interests in structuralism (and poststructuralism) and semiotics more generally. Indeed, Lajarte positions his work more in the context of literary theory than of scholarship on Marguerite de Navarre, directing his readers to other sources for references to recent publications on her life and works and citing only a handful of monographs on the Heptaméron. Still, Lajarte writes in his conclusion, the Heptaméron is a source of richness and pleasure to readers who are prepared to rise to the level it demands. The same may be said for his book.