This three-volume critical edition of the Heptaméron joins six earlier volumes in the project directed by Nicole Cazauran to edit Marguerite de Navarre’s complete works. It brings to the public Marguerite’s best-known work (at least to modern readers), her novella collection, accompanied by valuable material elucidating that work’s complex early history.

Volume 1 contains a ninety-four-page preface by Nicole Cazauran and Sylvie Lefèvre. The editors explain their choice of the 1559 Gruget printed version, dedicated to Marguerite’s daughter Jeanne d’Albret, as the basis of this edition. They offer informed hypotheses about the growth of the project from groups of initial stories to the elaboration of the frame story and the prologue. They consider its self-proclaimed relation to Boccaccio’s Decameron, and they grapple with scholars’ reactions to its problems of structure and coherence.

Part 2 of the preface raises the question of the unfinished status of the Heptaméron as well as the quest for its true text. The editors consider its various manuscripts and their relationship to each other and to the first printed editions, Boaistuau’s incomplete and unauthorized 1558 Histoire des amans fortunez and Gruget’s 1559 Heptaméron, a name invented by the editor. A “Description des manuscrits de l’Heptaméron” follows with details of the twenty extant manuscripts, now found in Berlin, New York, Turin, London, and the Vatican, as well as in France. Annie Charon-Parent and William Kemp continue the early material history of the work, offering a descriptive inventory of the printed editions between 1558 and 1561. The text of Heptaméron follows, beginning with Gruget’s table of summaries of each story. The three stories new in Gruget (11, 44, and 46) are followed by the original stories occupying those positions in the manuscripts. Volume 1 contains the prologue and stories 1 through 20, days 1 and 2 (pages 1–296). Fragments that Gruget omitted, apparently because they risked being considered doctrinally unorthodox in the conservative reign of Henri II, are reinstated from the manuscripts, along with variants that the editors found clearly preferable. All of these additions to Gruget are presented in italics. That solution allows for a smooth reading of the work while making apparent the inserted stories and passages.

Volume 2 contains the remaining stories, 21 through 72, days 3 through 7 and the prologue to day 8 with stories 71 and 72, plus the “curé auvergnat,” a story that appears in some manuscripts but in none of the complete versions. Variants appear on the bottom of each page. A glossary of words no longer in use or whose meanings have changed since the sixteenth century occupies pages 785–805. Volume 3 opens with 250 pages of notes on the text, 807–1056. As Nicole Cazauran announces in the preface, the notes primarily offer details that attempt to anchor the stories in a historical context and signal the work’s many biblical references. The forty-five-page bibliography, necessarily selective, follows (1057–1101). Again the emphasis is on historical background and, with few exceptions, on books and articles published in French. The large body of literary criticism done by British and North American scholars has scant representation here. The several indexes (names, places, themes, biblical references, and proverbs) will be useful. Also valuable are the three appendixes that close volume 3: the liminary pieces accompanying the editions of Boaistuau (1558; privilege, dedication to Marguerite de Bourbon, laudatory poems, and Boaistuau’s address to the reader) and Gruget (1559; dedication to Jeanne d’Albret, two sonnets, and privilege); a transcription of BnF manuscript FR 1513 (particularly interesting because this manuscript presents the twenty-eight stories considered to be the earliest stage of composition of the project); and a note on the curious manuscript held in the Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 242, with examples showing the aggressively anticlerical modifications that characterize that manuscript. Scholars working on the Heptaméron will find in this new edition a valuable resource for their further studies.