Navarre, Marguerite de | Judy Kem (essay date 1993)
Judy Kem (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: “Sins of the Mother: Adultery, Lineage and Law in the Heptaméron,” in Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, edited by Dora E. Polachek, Hestia Press, 1993, pp. 51-9.
[In the following essay, Kem examines the diverse moral judgments regarding adultery made by the listeners in the Heptameron.]
At the end of “Novella 40” in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron (1559), the devisants discuss the role that class distinctions play in marriage. Saffredent asks why it is wrong for a simple gentleman to marry a woman of the high nobility to which Dagoucin responds:
Pour ce … que pour entretenir la chose publicque en paix, l'on ne regarde que les degrez des maisons, les aages des personnes et les ordonnances des loix, sans peser l'amour et les vertuz des hommes, afin de ne confondre poinct la monarchye. Et de là vient que...
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