Introduction: An Incoherent Nouvelle at the Intersection of Early Modern French Storytelling and Preaching

In the twenty-first of her Heptaméron’s (1559) seventy-two stories, Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) writes one of her longest prose fictions about an enduring and virtuous friendship between two harassed members of a bygone royal court, only to veer in an entirely different direction near the story’s end. Parlamente, the fictional narrator of Heptaméron 21, expends much narrative energy to craft a convincing love story, but closes by revealing the male lead as a self-interested fortune hunter, bringing in God’s Providence to put the villainous characters to death, and reincorporating her female protagonist into the aristocratic society that has persistently rejected her.Footnote ¹ In her notes on the twenty-first nouvelle,Footnote ² Renja Salminen, editor of the magisterial 1999 Droz edition of the Heptaméron, cites the editor of Flammarion’s modernized and frequently reprinted 1982 version, Simone de Reyff, to confirm that the story is not coherent: “From a literary standpoint, this unexpected ‘happy ending’ appears a bit artificial. Reyff emphasizes the incoherencies of the story: the bastard’s betrayal, which nothing in his prior behavior prepares or justifies, and Rolandine’s sudden change in behavior. After manifesting an obstinacy ‘that could pass for a form of schizophrenia,’ she benignly accepts a marriage of convenience as soon as she learns of [her lover’s] death.”Footnote ³

Such a dismissal of any possibility of comprehending this narrative begs to be improved upon, and ameliorating readers’ understanding of the so-called incoherencies of texts that nonetheless fascinate and entertain is, in any case, one important purpose of literary criticism. This article will shed some light upon the apparent inconsistencies of Rolandine’s and her friend’s trajectories, demonstrating that Heptaméron 21’s twists and turns may be best understood in light of the many connections between storytelling and preaching that underpin Marguerite’s collection. Attending to the individual preaching styles (understood in terms of both narration and exegesis) embodied by the frame characters Parlamente, Oysille, Symontault, and Hircain can help readers make sense of “Rolandine” within the context of the Heptaméron.Footnote ⁴ Exploring those frame characters’ sermonizing will in turn clarify the intertextual connections between “Rolandine” and two nonfictional early modern genres, the pardon request and the martyr’s tale, helping readers understand “Rolandine” within the context of early modern literature.Footnote ⁵

Lastly, this article will elucidate the relationship of Heptaméron 21 to an unrecognized source text, the twenty-sixth story in the fifteenth-century Cent nouvelles nouvelles. The greater length of novellas like Heptaméron 21 and Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26 enables them to focus on iconographic transformations, whereby generalized characters (icons) identified by simple clusters of modifiers or small image motifs change their identities as icons rather than merely performing one iconographic function in one brief narrative.Footnote ⁶ In most readings of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, novellas are thought of as short, frequently comic narratives with casual attitudes toward sex, violence, and morality, in which men consistently triumph over women and each iconographic character generally plays one obvious part. In Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26, which this article will also call “Katherine/Conrard” for the sake of variety, readers find a story that is comic but also long and didactic, where the clever and virtuous female frame character triumphs over the morally and intellectually inferior male. To do this, however, Katherine has to transform herself outwardly, visually, into a man, Conrard, whose identification as male is underscored by the consistent use of il rather than elle, Conrard rather than Katherine, to refer to this character whenever she is crossdressing.

Heptaméron 21 recycles elements it finds in Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26 so as to shift the focus from literal, visual transformations (dressed in women’s clothing and therefore female, to dressed in men’s clothing and therefore male) to textual, intergeneric ones. “Rolandine” reorganizes narrative elements from “Katherine/Conrard” and recombines them, first with passages resembling the requests for royal pardon that accused criminals commonly presented to their lords during the ancien régime, then with passages resembling the stories about martyrs that were very popular during the Reformation. The newer novella is still about men’s shifting loyalties and the different personas that women have to take on in order to navigate around male treachery to happiness, but Rolandine’s appearance, unlike Katherine’s, does not have to change: instead, the outward projection of personality found in Rolandine’s speeches transforms.

There is more to Katherine’s sartorial transformation than the mere Carnivalesque impulse to turn the world upside down, but her journeys as Conrard are nonetheless temporary. From a typical aging and unmarried court lady, to a citizen requesting pardon on her own behalf for lack of a lawyer, to a triumphant and world-defying religious martyr, Rolandine’s guises change as the injustices to which she is subjected multiply. In search of generic forms that can accommodate such unusually strong and articulate female characters as the Heptaméron’s women without showing too much disrespect for the prevailing patriarchy of sixteenth-century France, “Rolandine” weaves together several different types of narrative discourse. This interweaving can make the story seem disjointed at times, but readers’ disorientation is a price the Heptaméron is willing to pay in order to traverse the boundaries of gender and genre, to reach a space where women may have a Renaissance and a Reformation, in fiction if not in fact.

Summary of Heptaméron 21 and a Review of Relevant Recent Criticism

For readers unfamiliar with Heptaméron 21, it will be helpful to recount its plot in brief. Rolandine is a lady in the household of an unnamed queen of France who torments the heroine because of “some grudge against Rolandine’s father.”Footnote ⁷ Because of the queen’s dislike and her father’s avarice, Rolandine reaches thirty years of age without being married. She forms a close friendship with a “bastard son of a good and noble family,” whose situation resembles her own: he is poor and thus unable to secure a wife befitting his lineage.Footnote ⁸ With the court scandalized by their relationship, the queen’s agents drive their amorous conversations further and further underground, eventually under the threat of death if they continue to meet. Despite the queen’s prohibition, Rolandine and the bastard conduct a clandestine marriage, which she makes him promise not to consummate until her father either dies or consents to their union.

The secret marriage is eventually discovered, whereupon the bastard flees to Germany and Rolandine is sent back to her father’s house to live as a prisoner. The bastard begins to pursue a rich German lady, but Rolandine refuses to renounce her marriage. What finally saves her is her husband’s early death, followed by her father’s decision to arrange an honorable marriage for her after all. Her brother then withholds her share of the family fortune after their father’s death, but the brother, like the bastard, dies soon afterward, leaving Rolandine and her new husband with all of her house’s wealth.

Many critics have argued that “Rolandine” is best read alongside Heptaméron 40, the story of Rolandine’s aunt’s clandestine marriage, although their reasons for maintaining this position vary. Some have noted that Heptaméron 21 forms one end of an internal frame connecting novellas 21 through 40 to a common theme drawn from Saint Paul’s epistles: the universal sinful nature of human beings.Footnote ⁹ At least one scholar, focusing on Marguerite’s positive messages about marriage rather than her negative ones about human nature, finds that Heptaméron 40 “repairs the defective exemplarity of narration” triggered by the discussion following “Rolandine,” which remains silent on the question of clandestine marriage despite the novella’s obvious interest in it.Footnote ¹⁰ Several have argued that Heptaméron 21 and 40 demonstrate Marguerite’s rejection of clandestine marriages, which were controversial during her lifetime, although critics differ as to whether they believe the queen of Navarre’s preferred vision of matrimony, as expressed through her framed novellas, is Calvinist, Lutheran, Catholic, or something else altogether.Footnote ¹¹

In analyzing Heptaméron 21 and 40 together, however, one may also note that the story of her aunt’s tragically thwarted clandestine marriage appears not to have taught Rolandine anything.Footnote ¹² Since Rolandine reacts to her father’s failure to marry her off in nearly the same manner as her aunt did (the same Lord of Jossebelin is responsible for both women’s predicaments), Heptaméron 40 seems an ineffective exemplum. One may see the aunt’s story’s failure to instruct her niece as a symptom of a wider early modern European crisis of exemplarity brought about by individuals’ ability to interpret any given exemplum in multiple ways. Likewise, Heptaméron 21 may also signal Marguerite de Navarre’s rejection of rhetorical and narrative closure in contrast to her collection’s model, Boccaccio’s Decameron.Footnote ¹³

This article will read the Heptaméron as a thoroughly religious text, while disagreeing with the closure that some religious readings attempt to impose upon Marguerite’s project. The present study retains other scholars’ emphasis on the basic openness of Marguerite’s nouvelles to multifarious, even mutually exclusive, interpretations. It is difficult to imagine why Marguerite would have bothered creating ten frame characters, or devisants, whose exegetical styles are so much more diverse and distinctive than those of their Boccaccian forebears, if not to provoke readers to wrestle with different possible interpretations.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, this article will separate itself from these latter scholars’ assertion that Marguerite and her frame characters employ two totally different logics or attitudes in reading the two bodies of evidence found in the Bible, on the one hand, and everyday life, on the other. As John Bernard puts it, “the ‘world’ of Marguerite’s stories remains incoherent precisely because it retains the openness to the manifold possibilities of signification that a good story, or at least a good medieval exemplum, normally denies.”Footnote ¹⁵

One must not push the distinction between a Heptaméron story and “a good medieval exemplum” too far. The internecine turmoil of the early Reformation demonstrated that the Bible itself, like Marguerite’s nouvelles, is open “to the manifold possibilities of signification.” That the Heptaméron’s stories do not function in exactly the same manner as medieval exempla should not blind us to the devisants’ attempts to use their narratives in much the same way that the Reformation’s competing preachers used holy scripture. Like those preachers, the devisants tell stories that their society has agreed to accept as factually true,Footnote ¹⁶ but they proceed from that shared fund of narrative knowledge to a variety of frequently incompatible interpretations.

Rolandine, the Highborn Bastard, and the Element of Surprise

Before exploring the ways in which the Heptaméron stages and frames “Rolandine,” it will be helpful to address some of this novella’s supposed incoherencies with some simpler, intratextual close reading. Although this section will restrict its analysis to Heptaméron 21 and the historical facts on which the novella is based, the points made here will later help in explaining this narrative’s engagement with preaching, nonfiction, and other nouvelles.

Most readers are initially shocked at the bastard’s sudden betrayal of Rolandine after the years of hardship that the two have endured together. Their love affair is one of the most detailed and convincing anywhere in the Heptaméron, and it seems psychologically improbable that he could so easily slip into a relationship with a new woman as soon as he leaves France. This turn of events is particularly difficult to understand given that his move to Germany resembles his earlier travels around Europe. He and Rolandine have often been geographically separated without generating any infidelity or suspicion, so readers wonder why his crossing the Rhine triggers his desertion.

The devisants themselves, however, do not seem to find the story incredible. No fewer than six of the ten storytellers weigh in during the discussion following Heptaméron 21, and none of them expresses surprise at the events that Parlamente has recounted. One might think that this lack of surprise is evidence that the discussion essentially disregards the nouvelle, perhaps suggesting a careless or yet to be refined grafting of frame to story, but the novella is actually quite well integrated into the frame narrative’s storytelling dialogue.Footnote ¹⁷ Upon rereading, one realizes that the devisants, unfazed by the bastard’s perfidy, might simply have been paying closer attention than today’s readers to Parlamente’s language. In fact, when the two lovers first separate, acting on the advice of Rolandine’s governess, they “began to feel a torment that she had never experienced.”Footnote ¹⁸

The collective experience of suffering suggested by the third-person plural “commancerent” (“they began”) is contradicted by the rest of the sentence, which indicates that the bastard has been involved in similar love affairs before, while Rolandine has not. Readers then learn that instead of simply despairing at the loss of his lover, the bastard thinks up resourceful ways to get around her governess’s anxiety and the court’s disapproval. The omen of his later betrayal lies in his motivation for overcoming these obstacles and attempting to marry his beloved: “He considered too the honor that would redound to him if he could but win her, and concluded that he must find a way.”Footnote ¹⁹

In the unromantic prize appended to the telltale “avecques” (“with”) lies the difference between the bastard’s love and Rolandine’s. His love is entangled with social and financial concerns, with the pride of possessing Rolandine; hers is purely based on his virtues and pleasant company. When he reveals his desire to marry her, he is careful to argue that a richer husband would actually be excessively interested in her wealth while neglecting her “personne.” He thereby cleverly allays what would ordinarily be the automatic suspicion of a woman near the peak of the aristocratic hierarchy listening to the proposal of an impoverished and illegitimate suitor: “I know only too well that I am poor. . . . But . . . if I were to be chosen by you for your husband, then I would be your husband, your lover and your servant. . . . If you take a man who is your equal . . . he will want to be your master and will pay more attention to your wealth than to yourself. . . . He will have full right to enjoy your wealth, yet will treat your body other than it deserves.”Footnote ²⁰ It makes sense for Rolandine’s friend to present her with a careful argument, but the use of the legal term “usuffruict” (“usufruct”) should alert readers to his having money on the brain.Footnote ²¹

Therefore, when Rolandine’s misgivings (based on the bastard’s writing which is “so cool, so different in style from the way he had written in the past”) are later confirmed, and she learns that her clandestine husband is now “deeply enamoured of a German lady, and that it was his intention to marry her, for she was a very wealthy woman,” readers should not be totally shocked.Footnote ²² Given his previous experiences in love and his crafty pursuit of Rolandine, this (at least for Salminen’s manuscripts of choice) third amour confirms a consistent pattern.

As for Rolandine’s behavior, her patient suffering ends when God has pity on her pain and calls away to the hereafter first her unfaithful lover and then her ungenerous brother.Footnote ²³ If the bastard’s betrayal appears sudden, the brother’s tardy and villainous appearance — he lives for only a few sentences near the story’s end — is baffling. Like the bastard’s infidelity, the brother’s disputation of the estate sends perplexed readers back to the beginning of Heptaméron 21, wondering whether they have (at least partially) misunderstood the whole story.

In fact, property conflicts constitute a theme running through the entire nouvelle. Although Parlamente specifies neither the queen’s true identity nor the nature of her dispute with Rolandine’s father, Salminen provides the following information in her notes: “Anne of Brittany [the story’s queen] held a grudge against the Rohans [Rolandine’s family] because they had disputed her inheritance of the lands of the last Dukes of Brittany. The viscount of Rohan defended the interests of the French crown to the detriment of those that Anne had as Duchess of Brittany.”Footnote ²⁴ For Parlamente’s purposes, this is an exemplary novella about feminine chastity and loyalty contrasted with masculine infidelity. With Salminen’s help, however, one can see that in the mouth of a different teller, Rolandine’s story could have focused exclusively on the inheritance fights that form its historical basis.Footnote ²⁵

Even in the prologue to day 3,Footnote ²⁶ Parlamente announces that she will change the names of her protagonists “because the lady I want to tell you about is from a good family.”Footnote ²⁷ Rolandine belongs to a coterie of “daughters of important noble families” in the company of the queen.Footnote ²⁸ Her eventual lover is first introduced as a “bastard son of a good and noble family” and only afterward as being “as gallant and worthy as any man of his day.”Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, when Parlamente explains why the bastard cannot marry, she mentions his lack of beauty only after specifying that “he . . . [was] bereft of means.”Footnote ³⁰ From this point on, he will consistently be referred to as either “le bastard de bonne maison” (“the high-born bastard”) or simply “le bastard.”

Likewise, both Parlamente as narrator and Rolandine identify Rolandine’s chief suffering at the hands of her father and the queen as the shame resulting from their failure to secure a husband worthy of her nobility. Rolandine is “she who grew vexed in the end, not so much out of any desire she had to be married as out of shame that she was not.”Footnote ³¹ When her governess advises her to stay away from the bastard for a time in order to appease the court, Rolandine complains, “Alas, Mother, you know that I cannot find a husband to match my family and lineage.”Footnote ³² When the queen criticizes her relationship with the bastard, her foremost counteraccusation is that the queen has not arranged a timely and appropriate marriage for her: “[Rolandine] knew well enough that [the queen] had never wished her to marry at a time when she might have been honorably and comfortably provided for.”Footnote ³³

When subterfuge fails and the queen publicly confronts Rolandine, this same complaint is found in the most prominent position of the latter’s speech: “If you had favored me in the same way as you favored the other girls, who were not even as closely related as I am, I would by now have been married in a manner that would have brought honour to yourself as well as to me . . . [the] good match[es] that I might have made slipped away before my very eyes, thanks to my father’s negligence and to your lack of regard for me . . . in this state of despair I was sought out by a man whose birth would have been the equal of mine, if only love between two persons carried as much esteem as a ring on the finger, for . . . his father was more elevated than mine.”Footnote ³⁴ Despite this speech probably acting, more than any other segment of the novella, to cement Rolandine’s reputation in the readers’ minds as one of the most memorable female characters in the Heptaméron, here the heroine also exposes the flaws in her own logic. She claims that she is right to marry the bastard in part because his father is more powerful or wealthier or better connected (we cannot be certain of what she means by “son pere passeroit devant le myen”) than her own. One might justifiably question Rolandine’s attempt to suggest that her no-longer-secret husband should not be stigmatized as a bastard child while simultaneously continuing her denunciation of the treatment she has received at court and basing her protest primarily on the nobility of her own lineage, so respected, no doubt, because she, like all her known direct ancestors, is a legitimate child. But it should be obvious by this point in the present study that Rolandine’s eventual peaceful acceptance of a husband chosen by her family does not constitute a “sudden change in behavior.” A marriage of convenience, dictated by social status and arranged by her noble superiors (the queen and her father), is exactly what Rolandine has wanted all along. Her deviant clandestine marriage is the result of a breakdown of the normal system of aristocratic bridal exchange, not a deliberate protest against those conventions. Even Parlamente does not view her heroine’s relationship with the (anti)hero as socially acceptable, which is underscored by the storyteller’s comparison of the couple to “thie[ves]” stealing the time that they spend together.Footnote ³⁵

Nonfictional Intertexts: Letters of Remission and Martyrs’ Tales

Having retraced the development of the motivations and events that produce the bastard’s betrayal, there remains one incoherence to address with regard to Heptaméron 21: Rolandine’s persistent loyalty to her disloyal partner, which Reyff compares to a “form of schizophrenia.” Without claiming that Rolandine’s perseverance is productive or therapeutic, her refusal to end her own suffering for the sake of a worthless husband may be better understood in light of some interference from different textual genres within this story. Rolandine’s lengthy speeches are largely responsible for drawing readers’ attention to her. A close examination of three places in Heptaméron 21 where she confidently asserts herself reveals that her declarations begin as a harangue that resembles the pardon requests so frequently addressed to Francis I, but end as something much closer to a martyr’s affirmation of her own righteousness.

In Rolandine’s first extended speech running from line 377 to line 444, she details the unearned scorn she has endured under the queen, her father’s lack of concern for her marital status, and her decision to take charge of her own fate in view of her advancing age. She makes her determination clear, but she also requests the queen’s pardon: “I am determined to hold firm to this resolve, so firm indeed that no torment that I might endure, not even death itself, would make me swerve from what is in my mind. So, Madame, you will be pleased to excuse me for an eminently excusable offence, and permit me to enjoy the peace I hope to find with him.”Footnote ³⁶

Up to this point, Rolandine’s discourse has many features in common with real-life pardon requests as presented by N. Z. Davis’s Fiction in the Archives. The heroine details her antagonists’ abusive behavior, asserts her own spotless conduct (“I was fully resolved to lead a life more religious than otherwise”), and cites her age as a legal excuse for defying marital custom. Rolandine also states that she “had fallen into…despair” as a result of her prolonged mistreatment.Footnote ³⁷ The advocate for one of Davis’s pardon requesters, the husband-murdering Marguerite Vallée, describes the perpetrator’s distraught emotional state resulting from her late spouse’s beatings in precisely the same language: “the said Marguerite allegedly fell . . . into despair about it”; and again, to describe Vallée’s suicidal agony after committing the murder, “out of despair . . . she would have wished to drown, as a desperate woman.”Footnote ³⁸

There are, however, significant differences between Rolandine’s speech and the story told by a typical request for royal grace.Footnote ³⁹ Rolandine tells of extenuating circumstances that justify her otherwise inadmissible actions and obliquely request that her deeds be “excusez” (“excused”), but supplicants seeking the sovereign’s mercy would never address him in terms this defiant or close their statements by asserting their imminent success.Footnote ⁴⁰ And although Rolandine provides an emotional explanation for her apparent wrongdoing, claiming that she began her relationship with the bastard while in a state of “desespoir” (“despair”), it is the queen’s face that is “troubled and angered,” the queen who acts out of “wrath” in reproaching and insulting Rolandine.Footnote ⁴¹

Parlamente may intend the queen’s “collere” (“wrath”), which resembles the reported emotional state of wretched transgressors who beg for the Crown’s grace more than the majesty that befits a monarch, to sharpen the irony of Rolandine’s request for justice, addressed as it is to an unjust authority figure.Footnote ⁴² After some beratement by the queen, Rolandine continues to elaborate on her rights and reasons from line 454 to line 501. This second part of her self-defense makes the connection between her monologues and pardon requests more obvious, as she explicitly cites the lack of an “advocate to speak in [her] defense” as the circumstance that compels her to “declare [the truth] fearlessly.”Footnote ⁴³

In this regard, however, readers may note another difference between Rolandine’s defense and that of a historical pardon request, which was generally put together by a lawyer on behalf of a supplicant. Because she must speak for herself, Rolandine’s story is told entirely in the indicative mood, as fact, rather than oscillating between indicative and conditional moods, between fact and allegation, as typically happens in the pardon requests.Footnote ⁴⁴ The indicative, which the supplicant’s lawyer slips into from the more skeptical conditional as often as he dares, takes over the entire autobiographical, self-reflective crescendo of Rolandine’s speech.

Rolandine’s language becomes more religious than legalistic as she brings this second installment of her peroration to a close, suggesting that Marguerite ceases drawing from pardon tales, patterning the latter part of Heptaméron 21 on martyrs’ tales instead. As this novella’s protagonist informs the queen and the rest of the court, “I have a Father in Heaven, who, I know, will grant me patience enough to endure the evils which I see you preparing for me, and in Him alone do I place my trust.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The second monologue’s conclusion is the opposite of the first’s: now Rolandine implies that the queen will not excuse her, and that the shortcomings of her biological father will be counteracted only by the support of her heavenly one. Here the heroine steps fully into the classic martyr’s role, publicly and spectacularly confessing her faith and her willingness to suffer for it. The shift in genre associated with Rolandine’s metamorphosis from supplicant in a clandestine marriage case to martyr of love may have motivated Marguerite’s reassigning the role of chief antagonist from the queen to the bastard by having the latter character exhibit the ungentlemanly change that readers have found so confusing.

After an interlude dealing with the king’s unsuccessful attempt to have the bastard arrested, Rolandine has one last chance to dissolve her troublesome matrimonial bonds (which the “men of the Church and . . . members of the King’s Council” assure her can be done “easily”Footnote ⁴⁶ ). Not only does she not do this, but in her indirectly reported one-sentence response of lines 537 to 548, she peels away one more layer of pardon request, revealing the martyr’s speech underneath. No longer is the marriage to which she cleaves merely a “forte oppinion” (“resolve”), as in her first speech: “she would die to preserve her faith, rather than break it and live.”Footnote ⁴⁷

From a desperate lady engaged in a marriage of choice only for lack of an honorable marriage of convenience, Rolandine has grown by the force of her own speech into a woman willing to die rather than deny her faith, of which marriage forms an integral part. She eventually secures her happy ending not by living happily ever after, but by dying a good death: “at last, after having raised the two sons it had pleased God to grant them, she gave up her soul to Him in whom she had always had perfect trust.”Footnote ⁴⁸ She is a secular saint, a woman whose idealistic vision of “love and honest intent founded on the fear of God” as “the true and sure bonds of marriage” turns out to be a premonition of the conjugal bliss made possible by her reintegration into the bridal exchange that patriarchs regulate for the social advancement of their households.Footnote ⁴⁹

Parlamente and Oysille, Storytelling and Exegesis: Rolandine’s Predicatory Function

Parlamente (and Marguerite) wish, perhaps, for a world in which marriage as a sacrament is taken seriously, one where their husbands would shrink before the prospect of divine punishment rather than betray them. But the heroine must show herself at her finest when under the yoke of incomprehensible punishment by her literal, metaphorical, and metaphysical fathers. They come to include the Seigneur de Jossebelin, the wise men of the church and state who try to convince Rolandine to abandon her marriage, the husband who enjoys dominion over a woman as her father once did, and behind and above them, God. Oysille’s praise immediately following her younger companion’s storytelling zeroes in on the suffering that makes Rolandine’s fidelity and patience exemplary: “What enhances her constancy is her husband’s disloyalty,” Oysille explains, “and the fact that he deliberately left her for someone else.”Footnote ⁵⁰

In a less forgiving mood, one may read Renaissance Frenchwomen’s appeals to a masculinized God to intercede with their wayward husbands as a deformed attempt to articulate their demands for respect as women, conditioned by the conservative, patriarchal Christendom to which they speak. The martyred saint’s life depends on the protagonist’s suffering for its narrative authority and emotive force, and readers could see the Heptaméron’s female Christians as masochists or fools offering themselves up for undeserved punishment by a malicious and sexist God. This is probably the Rolandine that Reyff finds “schizophren[ic],” and whose willingness to suffer for her faith puzzles today’s readers just as other early modern martyrs might.Footnote ⁵¹

Then again, suspending their disbelief at the contradictions underlying the devisantes’ simultaneously feminist and patriarchal stance, readers can understand why Parlamente and Oysille would interpret Rolandine as a model woman. Heptaméron 21 is a saint’s life as much as a nouvelle, since the unexpected resolution of the main character’s marital and financial troubles is unnecessary to the substance of her happy ending, the eventual rendering of Rolandine’s spirit to “Him in whom she always had perfect trust.”Footnote ⁵² She correctly identifies her own most salient exemplary feature — the God-given patience to endure her torment with honor — just as her defiant moment of revindication folds into martyred resignation, at the end of her second speech.

No character in the Heptaméron goes by the name of Griselda, Boccaccio’s famous final heroine distinguished by her patient suffering at the hands of her husband, yet in Rolandine readers find one of her many avatars. The female Job, like God’s people, and (ideally) like the king’s good subjects, finds freedom and happiness in cheerful submission to sometimes inexplicable authority. Reflecting her own position as a long-suffering but seldom silent wife, Parlamente’s storytelling revolves around the construction of a nonlegendary women’s martyrology, wherein contemporary pious female protagonists struggle valiantly against male infidelity, oppression, and violence. The tenth, thirteenth, twenty-first, fortieth, forty-second, and seventy-first novellas, six out of the eight that Parlamente tells, fall into this category. She tells these stories of exemplary women for several different reasons, of which this article will discuss only two: one, to explicitly exhort female listeners to virtuous conduct, and two, to surreptitiously communicate with male listeners.Footnote ⁵³

Parlamente chiefly encourages her female listeners to follow her exempla in preserving their chastity, as Floride, the old pilgrim’s wife, Rolandine, and Françoise all do.Footnote ⁵⁴ At the same time, Parlamente concentrates on examples of feminine patience, so even characters like Floride, Rolandine, and Françoise will try to avoid violent or unpleasant resistance in the face of their tormentors. None of these women successfully reports her problems to an authority that can protect her: Floride’s mother and Rolandine’s father both act to increase their children’s suffering, and Françoise’s mistress makes matters worse by forcing her to speak privately with the importunate prince. Each of these martyr-protagonists lives in conditions that heighten the temptation to despair of continuing in a chaste and virtuous life. These include Floride’s love for Amadour and the disagreeable marriage that traps her; the pilgrim’s wife’s marriage to a much older man; Rolandine’s marriage vows to an unfaithful, banished husband; and Françoise’s predicament, which may be the trickiest of all: she, a poor servant girl, must resist the attentions of a persistent, young Francis I, who does not hesitate to use bribery and threats.Footnote ⁵⁵

It might be objected that Parlamente’s characters cannot be interpreted as martyrs per se, since they do not die for their beliefs, according to the modern acceptance of martyr. One of the most thorough recent historical analyses of early modern martyrologies, in fact, criticizes implicitly atheist historians of early modern religion for anachronism but announces its own use of “contemporary [late twentieth-century] criteria” for defining what martyrs are without any attempt to justify this anachronistic analytical category.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Éditions Larousse Dictionnaire du moyen français: La Renaissance gives the following definitions for the related Middle French terms: “martyr . . . 1. Torture. 2. He or she who suffers for a good cause . . . martyre . . . suffering in love.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Notice that a martyr in Middle French could thus be anyone who “suffers for the good cause,” and that martyrdom could refer to “suffering in love,” the affliction among women that the Decameron, according to its prologue, offers to relieve. In fact, in Lutheran martyrologies, such as that of Ludwig Rabus, more quotidian and less physically violent but equally real suffering by the believer could take the place of actual torture and death for the cause; thus Luther’s first few generations of followers celebrated him as a martyr.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Cryriakus Spangenberg’s 1568 Zehende Predigt defines one, a martyr is a witness “who gives public confession of Jesus Christ with the mouth, that he alone is our righteousness and that there is no other forgiveness of sins to be found.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Françoise, Floride, Rolandine’s aunt, and Rolandine all testify to their willingness to suffer and even die rather than renounce their faith and their chastity. While Floride bears the most graphic witness to this martyr-like willingness to suffer, disfiguring her own face with a stone so as not to attract Amadour’s extramarital lust, in Rolandine readers find the woman’s testimony at its most clearly theological.Footnote ⁶⁰ Parlamente’s other three great women are more articulate about their allegiance to a secular code of honneur, but Rolandine’s speeches, morphing from the legal-historical into the soteriological, make clear her primary, exemplary identity as a Christian martyr.

The argument that provides the transition from day 3’s prologue to Heptaméron 21 itself advertises the story much as Parlamente announces “Floride and Amadour.”Footnote ⁶¹ As Floride proves the possibility of “a lady . . . truly in love, who had been desired, pursued and wooed, and yet had remained an honest woman, victorious over her heart . . . body . . . love . . . [and] would-be lover,” day 3’s first story will “demonstrate . . . that there are women who in their love have had in view nothing other than honor and virtue.”Footnote ⁶²

While Parlamente is demonstrating her storytelling skill by remixing older texts in novel ways and preaching “honor and virtue” to the devisantes through examples of martyred women, she also uses her stories to talk in code to several male audiences. These include the monks, her husband, and her serviteurs (literally servants, but in the context of courtly love, men who are in love with her), and in all three cases the communication is integrally tied to her radical pose as a woman preaching to men. Regarding the monks, one must remember that Heptaméron 21 is intricately linked not only to the subsequent stories of day 3, but also to the end of day 2.Footnote ⁶³ At the second day’s end, the devisants discover that a group of monks has been secretly listening to their stories from behind a thick hedge.Footnote ⁶⁴ Day 3’s stories, therefore, are the first group that the devisants knowingly tell to the monks and not merely to each other. Day 3’s prologue’s reference to the monks’ infamous gluttony and the suddenly much higher frequency of anticlerical stories (four out of ten, compared with only three among the first twenty novellas) further demonstrate that both the authorial voice and the frame characters are sensitive to their altered audience.Footnote ⁶⁵ Spinning a yarn about a woman whose understanding of marriage is morally superior to that of the churchmen, Parlamente gets her fellow storytellers started on a roast of their now-acknowledged monastic listeners.Footnote ⁶⁶

In telling her stories of patient wives, Parlamente is also sending a message to her husband Hircain: she is faithful, he is unfaithful, and she intends to embarrass him about this imbalance via both comments made during group discussion and veiled analogies to her own tribulations contained in her stories. Readers are given no stage directions for Parlamente, Oysille, and Longarine here, so they must guess whether these characters gaze calmly at one another or glare at the men. One might infer from the greater frequency of their biblical citations that these three devisantes are the ones most seriously interested in scripture.Footnote ⁶⁷ These same three women act in concert to shape a fiercely feminist opening of the post-21 discussion.

First, Parlamente uses her ostensibly all-female audience to bounce a challenge to the devisants: “Well, Ladies, let the men . . . produce an example of a husband who was as good, as faithful and as constant as the woman in this story.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The slippery syntax, “Mesdames, je vous prie que les hommes,” which speaks to the devisants while maintaining the disingenuous periphrastic “Mesdames,” is repeated in other forms elsewhere in the Heptaméron.Footnote ⁶⁹ As Parlamente and Hircain form the only husband and wife pair among the devisants, and Parlamente consistently champions chaste behavior while Hircain brags about his sexual prowess and appetite and approves of scabrous stories where tricksters win the day, this challenge is especially addressed to him.Footnote ⁷⁰ Oysille’s approval of Rolandine has already been cited above, and Longarine also chimes in to support her sistren.

While Parlamente and Oysille praise Rolandine’s steadfast loyalty to the unfaithful bastard, Longarine focuses on the psychic pain of being scorned by one’s true love. As she says, “no burden is so heavy that it cannot be carried with a cheerful heart; but when one of them fails to meet the demands of duty and leaves the full burden to be borne by the other, the weight is beyond endurance.”Footnote ⁷¹ The length and complexity of this story, the proliferation of scenes of concealment and dramatic monologues that define Rolandine’s and the bastard’s ongoing relationship is intended precisely to accentuate this impression of Longarine’s: the weight of the text is the weight of love’s burden, unbearable when the other is unfaithful. The pain of the husband’s disloyalty is exacerbated, and Rolandine’s martyrdom that much more brilliantly emphasized, as Parlamente’s shifting and multiform fiction is able to provide a convincing history of the two lovers’ shared suffering, so that her listeners can understand more exactly what makes the heroine think that the bastard’s love will last forever.

Although the present study’s principal argument is that the Heptaméron’s novellas, including “Rolandine,” fulfill a predicatory function, the reader should remember that most of the devisants are involved in numerous romantic intrigues as well. As the prologue informs us, many frame characters are either married to one another (Hircain and Parlamente), pursuing other frame characters as desired love objects (Saffredent, Dagoucin, and Symontault), or being pursued (Longarine and Parlamente). Ennasuitte and Nomerfide, although they are not explicitly identified as parts of any dame-and-serviteur couples, appear at various times during the framing discussions to be the objects of Saffredent’s and Hircain’s attentions. Thus all the devisants except the elderly Oysille and Geburon are involved in amorous subplots. The roles that these frame characters play as courtiers, however, do not exist separately from their roles as preachers.

This means that Parlamente’s tales of faithful wives, like almost all the other nouvelles, can be interpreted in at least two different ways. Her exemplum may be a straightforward reflection of her own identity as an unfailingly chaste married woman, placing her in the same category with her heroines as an example for other ladies to follow. On the other hand, given that the authorial voice acknowledges Symontault as Parlamente’s long-time serviteur and that she coughs after the first novella in order to prevent Hircain from noticing that Symontault has made her blush, the reader must wonder what her precise relationship to Symontault is.Footnote ⁷² If Parlamente has been unfaithful to Hircain, clearly she would not reveal that fact to her companions. Her martyrs’ tales may thus be an elaborate ruse to deflect attention away from her own failings, but the Heptaméron will never let its readers decide with certainty whether this is the case. That the geriatric Oysille and Geburon are the only characters who are free of any suspicion of sexual transgressions plainly suggests that, in the world of Marguerite’s frame narrative, biological age is the only factor that can remove a person from the perils of amorous desire. Symontault and Hircain operate within this self-interested preaching system as well.

Geburon plays word games with Longarine’s language — “Well then . . . you ought to take pity on us, seeing that we bear the whole burden of love and you never lift a finger to ease the load!” — but the real argument is left to Parlamente and Hircain.Footnote ⁷³ Rather than let Longarine respond to Geburon herself, Parlamente jumps back in to claim that the situation the old man has described is caused and justified by men’s and women’s diametrically opposed definitions of love. Hircain, however, points out that Parlamente’s black-and-white dichotomy of male and female love (founded on “pleasure” and on “God and . . . honor,” respectively) unjustly makes abandonment of men by their ladyloves laudable, but the reverse situation deplorable.Footnote ⁷⁴ As he complains, “if what you’re maintaining . . . is that an honest woman can honourably abandon her love for a man, but that a man can’t do the same, then it’s just an argument made up to suit your own fancies. As if the hearts of men and women were any different! Although their clothes and their faces may be, their dispositions are the same — except in so far as the more concealed wickedness is worse!”Footnote ⁷⁵ Parlamente, growing angry with her husband, infers that the latter must prefer “women whose wickedness is not concealed.”Footnote ⁷⁶

At this point, Symontault, Parlamente’s serviteur, calls for an end to the discussion by declaring that “the best of them is good for nothing, be they men or women.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Geburon then makes Symontault’s biblical allusion explicit by quoting the 115th and 13th Psalms before taking the floor for Heptaméron 22.Footnote ⁷⁸ Having reviewed the ways in which Parlamente uses “Rolandine” as a message to the monks and to Hircain, this article will now consider what she is communicating to Symontault. Symontault’s exegesis largely coincides with Hircain’s: both assert that men and women are similarly sinful, in spite of outward appearances. Yet readers of the Heptaméron’s cornice will note that these two devisants are involved in a conflict of interests.

Hircain is married to Parlamente and considers that “infidelity is the greatest injury a woman can inflict on a man.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Symontault, as Parlamente’s serviteur, wishes her to grant him sexual favors, which would make Hircain a cuckold. Although Symontault does not explicitly state this wish, he admits that he favors feminine chastity only in his own wife’s case and even excuses the clerical rapist-villain of Heptaméron 41.Footnote ⁸⁰ As a predicant storyteller, Symontault tells the majority of his stories in order to criticize hypocrisy, to suggest that women are just as lustful as men, and to encourage the belief that deceivers should be deceived in turn. His hypocrites include Madame de St.-Aignan in Heptaméron 1, the Milanese lady in Heptaméron 14, and the incestuous priest-and-sister couple in Heptaméron 33. His deceivers deceived include all the aforementioned characters as well as the secretary in Heptaméron 28 and the lawyer in Heptaméron 52.

Symontault does not hesitate to tie his stories to biblical passages. His explanation of Heptaméron 33 states that Christians should not be expecting a second virgin birth of the sort that the priest’s sister claims to experience, since John 19:30 informs us that, with Christ’s Passion and death, “Consummatum est” (“It is finished”).Footnote ⁸¹ After his story of Bernard du Ha and the wooden ham (Heptaméron 28), Symontault connects Bernard’s outfoxing the tricky secretary to a perverse interpretation of the golden rule, which appears in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31. Rather than seize upon the morally upright, straightforward interpretation of these passages — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — Symontault suggests that it is right to deceive those who are in the habit of deceiving others — “Do unto others as they do unto you.”

In light of his pursuit of Parlamente and the numerous suggestions in the framing dialogues that Hircain is unfaithful to his wife, Symontault’s preaching seems designed to provoke Parlamente into taking revenge on her rakish spouse and granting her serviteur’s wishes, thus turning Hircain into one more deceiver deceived. At the same time, Symontault competes against his apparent rival for Parlamente’s affections, Dagoucin, a comically Neoplatonist champion of women and possible clergyman inexperienced in physical love, by suggesting that outwardly saintly men are not what they seem. This trend is particularly evident in the very first nouvelle, which involves the bishop of Séez as one of its villains (Nicolas Dangu, bishop of Séez, is regarded as the probable closest historical analogue of Dagoucin), and in Heptaméron 33, which ends with the burning of the incestuous priest and his sister.Footnote ⁸²

Symontault opens up the floor for discussion of Heptaméron 33 by emphasizing that “the faith of the good count remained firm against outward signs and miracles,” making “the False Virgin” into a story about a victorious main character whose chief attribute is a faith solid enough to guard him against precisely the kind of specious evidence that Dagoucin has boldly offered in his opening of Heptaméron 9.Footnote ⁸³ As Dagoucin says just before his novella about the poor but virtuous gentleman who dies of unrequited love, “In order that signs and miracles may prove the truth of my words, and bring you to have faith in them . . . I shall recount to you what happened not three years ago.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Symontault’s reduction of “Rolandine” to a sweeping condemnation of all people, male and female, can thus be understood as part of his overall strategy designed to inculpate Hircain and Dagoucin and convince Parlamente to give in to his desires.

Like Symontault, Hircain approves of men’s deception or even rape of women who resist them.Footnote ⁸⁵ In this respect, both he and Symontault find themselves in agreement with their older companion, Saffredent; all three of these characters are direct descendants of the narrators of the fifteenth-century Burgundian novellas known as the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. Marguerite satirizes the misogynist francophone novella tradition exemplified by the Cent nouvelles nouvelles by allowing male storytellers to speak for themselves: the cuckoldry-obsessed men who told the Cent nouvelles nouvelles at the court of Duke Philip the Good exert their intertextual influence through the misogynist, patriarchal, and frequently rapist attitudes of the Heptaméron’s three rogue storytellers.

Fictional Intertext: Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles 26

Marguerite’s use of the Decameron, the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, and the fabliau tradition as sources for her novellas has been widely documented, but critics have never associated Heptaméron 21 with any particular ancestor text. Nevertheless, the twenty-sixth story of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles Footnote ⁸⁶ contains so many features in common with “Rolandine” that the older text, Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26, or “Katherine/Conrard,” does seem to be a source for Parlamente’s novella, albeit a non-analogous source. Unlike Heptaméron 8, for example, which largely retells Cent nouvelles nouvelles 9 and alters its source material more in framing than in content, Heptaméron 21 thoroughly transforms the events and characters of Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26. For readers unfamiliar with the Burgundian novella, its plot is as follows: Katherine and Girard live at the “ostel” (“house”) of a great baron in the Duchy of Brabant.Footnote ⁸⁷ They fall in love and enjoy a close friendship for two years, but love so blinds them that their confidence in their own secrecy turns out to be mistaken — in fact, the whole court talks of nothing but their relationship. At the urging of one of Katherine’s companions, Girard takes leave of the lord and lady of the house and enters the service of a new lord in Barrois.Footnote ⁸⁸ Meanwhile, Katherine’s parents want her to marry another man, so she tells them that she has promised God not to “change condition” without first going on a pilgrimage to Saint Nicolas of Warengeville.Footnote ⁸⁹ To get there more cheaply and safely, she suggests that she travel with her bastard uncle, dressed as a man, rather than parade about with a full retinue of young ladies.

Once under way, Katherine reveals to her uncle the real purpose of the journey (to check up on Girard) and promises to reward him monetarily for his cooperation. Dressed as Germans, they infiltrate the house where Girard now lives in Barrois, and Katherine — now called Conrard by both narrator and characters alike — is lodged in the same room with her lover because they both come from Brabant.Footnote ⁹⁰ Conrard annoys his companion with long lamentations about the lady he has supposedly left behind in Brabant, prompting an exasperated Girard to advise his overwrought roommate to follow in his own footsteps. Conrard must realize, Girard counsels, that women are the same everywhere, and get himself a new one. Katherine, having discovered her lover’s disloyalty, goes home after leaving Girard a note where she outs herself and tells him off. When Girard arrives at the feast of her wedding to the suitor her family favors, she refuses even to dance with him; the narrator intercedes at the story’s end to exhort unfaithful male readers to “look into the mirror of this example.”Footnote ⁹¹

One obvious similarity between Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26 and Heptaméron 21 is their length, as each is among the longest three stories of its respective collection.Footnote ⁹² Also, both stories feature properly named protagonists, whereas numerous nouvelles in both books — especially the shortest and most comic ones — use only anonymous characters. Aside from these purely formal considerations, Rolandine’s and Katherine’s stories converge in many other respects. Each text suggests (although only “Rolandine” actually demonstrates) that a lover’s letters are more indicative of his level of sincerity than personal interaction. Both stories turn on similar questions of a female’s threat to family honor: both couples exchange vows and precious objects with no other (human) witnesses present and despite the suitor’s unacceptable poverty, although both narratives reassure readers that the protagonists’ sexual contact goes no further than kissing. Each couple is found out by the court where the lovers reside, forcing the man to flee to another territory, and in each case he soon begins pursuing a new lady. Both women use their positions of power — access to money, servants, and supplies — to check up on their men, and the desire of an inheritance-challenged bastard for a share of the heroine’s wealth acts as a plot motor in both stories. After the departure of both women’s original lovers but before the heroines learn of their disloyalty, each woman is pressured by her family to marry a different man. And at both stories’ ends, the heroines marry the men of their families’ choosing.

As so many critics have read Heptaméron 21 alongside Heptaméron 40 in order to better understand the former text, the present study equally claims license to read “Rolandine” alongside “Katherine/Conrard.” Because Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26 is an extended, complex, unpredictable narrative with a didactic thrust, it shares many features with the Heptaméron’s longest and most fully developed nouvelles. This fact should give pause to any critic claiming that the Heptaméron’s short fictions attain some essential complexity that is lacking in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles.Footnote ⁹³ The Heptaméron is not only or primarily an intermediate step between the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, a medieval collection dominated by the nouvelle-fabliau, and the histoires tragiques of a Boaistuau or a Belleforest, an early modern collection dominated by longer, explicitly didactic novellas with greater psychological depth. Analysis of Marguerite’s transformation of Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26 will advance further by looking once again at the feature of the Heptaméron that most obviously sets it apart from prior novella collections: its frame.

The Cent nouvelles nouvelles does not have a frame narrative in the sense of a larger fiction containing other fictions told by internal narrators. Their lack of any formal cornice, however, should not fool readers into thinking that these Burgundian stories are totally unframed. The dedicatory letter at the collection’s beginning establishes that these novellas have been gathered at the request of Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, and recorded by one of his servants.Footnote ⁹⁴ The duke tells numerous stories about men trying to sleep with other men’s wives, and he sets the pace for the other storytellers, who also repeatedly display an obsession with cuckoldry, adultery, and the establishment of relations between two men via the desired body of a woman. That men generally function as the only subjects in these stories, with women playing the role of sex objects, leads David LaGuardia to characterize the Cent nouvelles nouvelles as a series of variations on the theme of hyperbolic “male homosocial domination.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In addition, LaGuardia affirms that late medieval and early modern French nouvelles narrate iconographically, meaning that characters are identified by small groups of key images or icons that define them as belonging to particular types (miller, clerk, merchant, etc.), rather than possessing distinct individual personalities.Footnote ⁹⁶

The vast majority of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles conform well to LaGuardia’s model of “male homosocial domination,” but “Katherine/Conrard” does not. Here readers find no cuckoldry, no adultery, and a foolish male character outwitted by an astute female character who, although she may not attain the distinctiveness of a heroine like Rolandine, is able to assume a number of different guises and styles of speech according to varying circumstances. The chain of iterations of the same transgressive story of one man pursuing another’s wife is broken by Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26, and the narrator’s final remarks drive the point home. Most of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles finish with the storyteller’s assertion that he has heard no more about the characters — “and I never found out,” “it hasn’t yet come to my attention” — or that he is going to stop talking now — “that suffices for the first story,” “about the rest . . . this story is silent” — if indeed any conclusion is offered.Footnote ⁹⁷ “Katherine/Conrard,” however, reveals an unusually didactic intent at its end: “Thus as you’ve heard, the disloyal man lost his woman. If there are still men like him, they should look at this example like a mirror; it’s noteworthy and true and happened recently.”Footnote ⁹⁸

For scholars concentrating on Marguerite de Navarre’s texts, this language might evoke her own Miroir de l’ame pecheresse, the spiritual poem that was censored by the Sorbonne in 1533.Footnote ⁹⁹ Hircain also borrows this specular metaphor in his exegetical opening of the discussion following his own Heptaméron 35, about a wanton wife’s infatuation with her parish priest. As he announces, “Ladies . . . when you have looked well into this mirror, instead of trusting in your own strength, you will learn to turn back to Him in whose hands your honor lies.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Parlamente, reacting combatively to Hircain’s attempt to extend this one woman’s deviance into a statement about all women, retorts: “I’m glad to see . . . that you’ve started to preach for the ladies.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Her sarcastic reference to Hircain as a preacher is not haphazard. In fact, her two perfect lovers gone bad, Amadour and the bastard, are both described as preaching deceptively to women. When Amadour first attempts to consummate his relationship with Floride, she asks him, “And what . . . has become of the honor you preached about so often?”Footnote ¹⁰² When Rolandine first tries to justify her relationship with the bastard, she describes him very similarly to her governess: “I have found this gentleman wise and virtuous as you know, who never preaches anything but goodness and virtue to me.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Parlamente is constantly aware not only of men’s deviousness in general, but of their tendency to deceive women using predicant speech.

Conclusions

“Rolandine” is emblematic of the ways in which the Heptaméron plays upon, contradicts, and challenges the (gendered) expectations of its readers, both in the sixteenth century and today. In “Recreating the Rules of the Game,” Margaret Ferguson points out that the Heptaméron has frequently been compared unfavorably to Boccaccio’s Decameron, even by people hoping to sell Marguerite’s books to today’s readers.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ What has sometimes been read as Boccaccio’s “consummate narrative skill,” which would thus be lacking in the Heptaméron, seems to refer to the Decameron’s novellas’ more clearly and consistently fulfilling certain functions.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It is true that an effective piece of short fiction must typically match its register, idiom, tone, diction, characters, and plot to some degree. Certain mixtures in this regard (unaccountable shifts in register or characters speaking in dialects not of their own time and place, for example) will tend to mark a piece of writing as defective or incomprehensible.

Yet the contract between writer and reader need not always follow a preestablished generic pattern; indeed, for new genres to be born, old generic patterns have to be altered and occasionally broken. By tacking themselves on after mornings dominated by Oysille’s Bible lessons, the devisants’ stories transform Oysille’s school into a laboratory for a new type of storytelling. The sort of freedom of expression that for Marguerite could only exist in a fictional place like the meadow of Nostre Dame de Serrance allows experiments in textual hybridity that, in turn, have implications for the larger social and political climate of early modern Europe. Even though the twists and turns of a story like “Rolandine” may seem unrealistic or implausible, modern criteria for determining plausibility in a fictional narrative are themselves largely a constellation of calcified genre conventions. The energy that drives an innovative text like the Heptaméron is precisely the need to push the limits of conventional thought, to contribute to a strand of literary history (early modern European framed-novella collections) in such a way as to alter that history’s course.

In order to forge a new genre, or family of genres, through which to rethink classic narratives, an author must draw on new material and combine it in new ways. The queen of Navarre’s access to nouvelles — literally “news” — in the form of pardon requests and other legal documents of the French national bureaucracy must have been extraordinarily vast, especially during the periods when she was in favor at her brother’s court. In any case, the documents of her own sovereign territories, such as Berry and, later, Navarre, would potentially all have been at her fingertips.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Like the material that “Rolandine” draws from Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26 (or some closely related intertext), the nonfictional sources that influenced Marguerite’s novellas came to her as discrete, formatted packets leaving historical traces in the fictional narrative. As Fiction in the Archives asks what it means to find hallmarks of fictive narration in supposedly true and accurate accounts of historical events, one can usefully explore the signs of nonfictional (martyrological, legal, predicant) discourse in the Heptaméron’s apparently fictional stories.

In the broader religious and social context, Catholic France’s priestly monopoly on predicant activity reflects the sort of male-only subjectivity to be found in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. Rolandine, a Renaissance heroine for whom the established nouvelle, fabliau, and romance genres could provide no model, must transcend the boundaries of preexisting literary forms and some of the ethical assumptions that accompany them. In crossing those borders, she strays into territory unfamiliar to most of her readers, leading some observers to brand her a madwoman. Supplicant and saint, misfit and martyr, she surpasses Katherine/Conrard because she transforms through self-interpretation, speaking her metamorphosis to the reader rather than relying on a male storyteller to frame her transformation.Footnote ¹⁰⁷