Navarre, Marguerite de | Carla Freccero (essay date 1994)
Carla Freccero (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: “Practicing Queer Philology with Marguerite de Navarre: Nationalism and the Castigation of Desire,” in Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 107-23.
[In the essay that follows, Freccero discusses the significance of a passing reference to Lucretia in the context of the Heptameron's depictions of marriage, desire and law.]
Every encounter with a representation of the rape of Lucretia is an encounter with a literary topos of Western civilization. And, as topos, the meaning of this rape is constructed as universal, transcending historical conditions: in every age and place, Lucretia had to be raped so that Rome could be liberated from tyranny.
—Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism
At the end of The Heptameron's “Novella 42,”...
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