[In the following essay, Persels discusses Marguerite's challenge to the image of the aggressive and exaggeratedly virile male body.]

The Heptaméron offers discursive portraits of five men who represent the few possible variations on the theme of noble Early Modern masculinity, from the apparently uncompromising, ostentatious virility of Hircan to the ultimately misleading, Neo-Platonic “feminism” of Dagoucin, (or “dagoucinisme,” to use Philippe de Lajarte's term [363]), with Saffredent, Simontault and Geburon serving as internal gradations of this range. Marguerite's tellers debate throughout the male's “carnal” nature, so succinctly delineated by Parlamente: “vostre plaisir gist à deshonorer les femmes, et vostre honneur à tuer les hommes en guerre: qui sont deux poinctz formellement contraires à la loy de Dieu” (“26”:221).¹ Resolved: As male pleasure lies in dishonoring women and male honor in killing other men, contrary to God's law, it is time to set forth a new conception of masculine virtue. The debate, like the Heptaméron, remains inconclusive, at least for the characters involved, but the very polyphony of the debaters is crucially important and representative of shifting sensibilities.² Already at mid-century, then, speaking through the cod-piece, as Panurge so literally does in the “disputation par signes” of the 1532 Pantagruel (102-15), has become at the very least problematic.

Yet male desire, as Toril Moi has suggested in her reading of Andreas Capellanus' twelfth-century treatise on love, the De amore (a useful intertext for the Heptaméron) is still expressed, and strongly, through language (Moi 25). And though the overt style and covert intent of Rabelaisian discourse persist, there is a significant shift in register through the other, ostensibly and statedly less masculine voices. These moderate voices point to a new course for figurations of the male that the latter half of the sixteenth-century will develop at length—the “gentil homme” of Marguerite's fiction is becoming the “honnête homme” of Montaigne's fashioning.

It is, moreover, interesting to note that this subtle gender-transformation-in-progress parallels other, recent interpretations of Marguerite's often perplexing narrative and dialogic cycle. Critics have formulated different notions about what we might call the “novel-ty” of this text, on the fence between the novella collection and the novel, between the Reform and the Counter-Reform, between courtly ideologies and religious Neo-Platonism.³ The univocal masculine discourse of the first half of the century is here juxtaposed with, and thus challenged by, a feminine discourse, in a new, admittedly incomplete, gender dialectic.

I shall limit myself in this paper to an explication of the first of the three distinct masculine rhetorics in the Heptaméron, as part of a broader effort to elucidate what I determine to be Marguerite's three major discourses—the Hircanian, the Dagoucinian, and the feminine or syncretically Christian—and how the arguably evangelizing agenda of Marguerite's symposium exploits those representations to point out a new path to non gender-specific virtue.

The prologue introduces five men as successful survivors of different tests of strength and endurance, marking them from the outset as exemplary male figures. Hircan, husband of Parlamente, and the nameless (because quickly dispatched) husband of Longarine, defend valiantly yet vainly their wives and themselves against anonymous brigands taking advantage of their pilgrim's plight. Dagoucin and Saffredent, strange bedfellows, as their later conversation confirms, who happen to be following the married objects of their love and service, Longarine and Parlamente, “pour lesquelles ilz estimoient la mort plus heureuse que la vie après elles” (3), dash in, “comme deux ours enragés descendans des montaignes” (3), to save the day and all characters except for Longarine's husband.⁴ The male trio manage to kill or scatter a group of “bandouilliers” far more numerous, including the vicious wife of their leader.

Geburon's equally narrow escape from bandits stresses not only the valor of the individual man but the underlying code of warrior ethics already evident in the implied unfair odds of Hircan and company's defense. If those bandits are no gentlemen, even less so are the three who set upon a solo Geburon while he is unarmed and in bed. He manages nonetheless to dispatch one of them with his sword (presumably close at hand), but, recognizing the desperate straits of defending himself “nud et eulx armez” (4), he flees, arriving at Saint-Savyn in time for Hircan, Saffredent and Dagoucin to come to his aid and kill the remaining pursuers. The narrative emphasizes repeatedly Geburon's unarmed state, pointing out both the effeminate treachery of the three bandits and Geburon's dexterous rebound from a dire situation where he is, with regard to outward appearances, unmanned.

Simontault's escape from the violent waters of the swollen ford, after the death of his (lesser) men, and rescue by a kindly shepherd (5), in true pastoral tradition, though more indicative of simple endurance than active strength, completes the rendering of superior men against unfair odds. Here Simontault battles, unsuccessfully but not mortally, the forces of nature that keep the entire party captive, however pleasantly, in the mountain monastery.

In this respect, the importance of the prologue is to effect a winnowing or triage. Those men who survive to reach the private, temporary Eden of the Heptaméron's setting have had to win entrance to it, for themselves and for the women in their care. The varletz in their service did not measure up. Marguerite sets up strenuously masculine and physical rites of passage—the triumph of the male body against unfavorable odds—and is careful to note how the five men who attain the haven and reward of Nostre-Dame de Serrance adhere to the prevailing code of courtly conduct. They speak first and foremost through active, bodily participation in the prologue frame-narrative, playing out the burdens of manhood that will color so exclusively their later rhetoric.⁵ Individual character traits find expression as early as these prologue introductions, traits that prove telling with regard to the men's choice of tales and reactions to them. We should note that Hircan, for example, is not only the first man presented but is also the leader in coming to Geburon's aid (4). He is, moreover, the only man to have a say in the group's agenda and then it is to suggest that Oisille's proposed pastime of devoted Scriptute reading might prove insufficient to the company's needs and to seek a complementary activity as pleasant and useful to the body as Scripture is to the soul (7-8). Asked what he would recommend, Hircan immediately hints that sex with his wife would be his most agreeable pastime, but leaves the actual choice of group amusement to Parlamente. The structure of this exchange is worth reading closely:

“—Quant à moy, dist-il, si je pensois que le passetemps que je vouldrois choisir fust aussi agreeable à quelcun de la compaignie comme à moy, mon opinion seroit bientost dicte; dont pour ceste heure je me tairay et en croiray ce que les aultres diront.” Sa femme Parlamente commença à rougir, pensant qu'il parlast pour elle, et, un peu en collere et demy en riant, luy dist: “Hircan, peult estre celle que vous pensez qui en debvoit estre la plus marrye auroit bien de quoy se recompenser s'il luy plaisoit; mais laissons là les passetemps ou deux seullement peuvent avoir part et parlons de celluy qui doibt estre commun à tous.”

(8-9)⁶

With a patently empty wish for reciprocity of desire, Hircan obliquely proposes what his wife's blush and half-angry, half-amused riposte make clear: an intimate exercise that denies the needs of the group as a whole. Hircan not only suggests the one activity, (that it is conjugal and therefore legitimized notwithstanding), antithetical to Oisille's proposed group contemplation of Scripture, but also one that runs counter to the highly social peregrinatio of the narrative and dialogic process of the Heptaméron and threatens to rend both its social and narrative fabrics. His suggestion is here intentionally exclusive, as is his periphrastic rhetoric, focusing on the satisfaction of his own desire, the expression of his own sexual example.

The prologue spells out, as well, and in no uncertain terms, in its initial and principle exchange, the clash between the Evangelical, Christocentric ethic and rhetoric of Oisille and the aggressive, body-centered ethic and rhetoric of Hircan. In terms of First Corinthians (“5”:15), one of the Heptaméron's guiding subtexts, bodies that are members of Christ oppose the bodies that are members of a harlot, both represented in the conflicting “pastimes” proposed by the Pauline Christian widow (as Paula Sommers has aptly characterized Oisille [57-58]) and the lustful, unrepentant warrior. For Oisille, “le repos et la santé du corps” is a result of “la vraie et parfaicte joie de l'esprit,” achieved only through close knowledge of Scripture (7). For Hircan, self-designated male representative—“parlant pour la part des hommes” (8)—the reverse is true. What Marguerite sets up in the prologue, then, is a conflict, grounded in Biblical authority, articulated in conflicting uses of the body both literal and rhetorical, whether in Pauline moderation (or even abnegation) as exhorted by Oisille; or in sexual indulgence and excess as represented by Hircan, in terms of an exaggeratedly masculine ethic and rhetoric. Prompt in the use of arms, restless for activity, particularly of a carnal nature, and insufficiently satisfied by the contemplation of God's word, Hircan marks himself from the start as the extreme stereotype of the male whose concept of heroic virtue is indeed adequately condensed by Parlamente. Hircan defines the masculine, and hence heroic, virtue exclusively through unceasing activity, sexual and military, and active incorporation of that activity in his discourse.

With almost wearying consistency, Hircan sizes up the circumstances of each tale and swiftly accepts or rejects the suitability of the subjects' actions according to his narrowly defined notion of heroic virtue. The gentleman's failed rape attempt of Ennasuitte's first tale provokes his exasperated outburst:

—Il me semble, ce dist Hircan, que le grand gentil homme, dont vous avez parlé, estoit si despourveu de cueur, qu'il n'estoit digne d'être ramentu; car, ayant une telle occasion, ne debvoit, ne pour vielle ne pour jeune, laisser son entreprinse. Et fault bien dire que son cueur n'estoit pas tout plain d'amour, veu que la craincte de mort et de honte y trouva encores place.

(“4”:34)

And he concludes: “Si j'en étois jusques là …, je me tiendrois pour deshonoré si je ne venois à fin de mon intention” (34). Such impotence does not deserve to be commemorated, as it were, by a tale. The gentleman's lack of courage, indicative in Hircanian psychology of a corresponding lack of heroic virtue, results in shameful and unmanly dishonor, the worst that could befall him.

This is the first indication of the utter confusion of love with aggressive expression or fulfillment of masculine sexual desire—rape—that characterizes both Hircanian notions of appropriate masculine ethics and discourse. The confusion lies at the heart of what Hircan and his brother-in-arms Saffredent claim to be the appropriate “use” of women, one which conflates assault in the bedroom with assault on the battlefield into a single, unifying, unambiguously virile “entreprinse”. And any display of impotence in the individual male body threatens impotence in the body politic.

The fear of impotence (and one of its principal avatars, the fear of cuckoldry) explains Hircanian body rhetoric and its obsessive exploitation of the armored male body, of masculine defensive action, of the complete association between lover and warrior. Hircan can thus protest in all innocence that a woman, whose husband proves his virility by raping her chambermaid over both women's objections, should find him an all the more “hardy et gentil compaignon” (“59”:364). The rules of the game are simple, and a completed rape would have gone so far as to inspire admiration in his wife, for a true man would scarcely be daunted by the pleas of two women: “Il est vray, dist Hircan, mais ung homme fort et hardy ne crainct poinct d'en assaillir deux foibles, et ne fault poinct d'en venir à bout” (364).

Kathryn Gravdal has shown that this is, indeed, the standard rhetoric of the medieval French pastourelle, which assumes compliance and complicity on the part of the lascivious, always desiring woman (372). Behind the rhetoric of Hircan and Saffredent stretch centuries of narrative representation of the aggressively sexual male obliged to force his attentions on the initially protesting but ultimately grateful woman.

As in this instance, the men of the Heptaméron capitalize to an extraordinary degree on the rhetorical potential of the martial trope in their conception of love. A seduction is to be undertaken as a campaign, a siege in particular. As on the field of battle, retreat is unthinkable: the soldier must push through to the victorious conclusion of his “enterprise,” no matter the cost. In keeping with the traditional tenets of both courtly and courtier traditions, the bearing of arms as the duty and sign of the well-born Renaissance male receives considerable attention in the Heptaméron's representations of masculinity and its virtues. On several separate and key occasions, the men (all save Dagoucin) metonymically employ armor and the wearing of it to evoke the martial duties and virtues of their gender, in strongly marked sexual contexts.

Following Geburon's tale of the clever ferrywoman who outwits two lecherous monks, Longarine's expresses repugnance to sleeping with Franciscans. Geburon reminds her that:

celles qui n'ont poinct accoustumé d'avoir de tels serviteurs que vous, ne tiennent poinct fascheux les Cordeliers; car ilz sont hommes aussy beaulx, aussi fortz et plus reposez que nous autres, qui sommes tous cassez du harnoys.

(“5”:37)

Likewise, Hircan, understanding if not actually defending a lady's scandalous congress with “un palefrenier,” explains to Oisille:

—Helas! Madame, dist Hircan, si vous sçaviez la difference qu'il y a d'un gentil homme, qui toute sa vie a porté le harnoys et suivy la guerre, au pris d'un varlet bien nourry sans bouger d'un lieu, vous excuseriez ceste pauvre veufve.

(“20”:155)

Saffredent later lectures Parlamente on the enviable advantages of the poor man's life relative to that of the rich, following her expression of doubt concerning the flowering of love “en un cueur villain” (“29”:228). He cites the authority of Le roman de la rose in defense of the universality of love, though it vary in quality and nature according to the station of the lover:

—Et aussi l'amour de qui le compte parle, n'est pas de celle qui faict porter le harnoys; car, tout ainsy que les pauvres gens n'ont les biens et les honneurs, aussy ont-ilz leurz commoditez de nature plus à leur ayse que nous n'avons.

(“29”:228)

Among those “conveniences” he lists the freedom to take their pleasure more often and without fear of the “paroles,” or gossip, that accompany the claustrophobic world of the court.

A man's heroic virtue is narrowly defined by his ability to “porter le harnoys” or “la cuyrasse,” his exhausting need to maintain perpetual vigilance to protect his king, himself and what is his. While attesting indisputably to his manly station, this practice paradoxically enfeebles him to an extraordinary degree, or at least provides him the convenient excuse for explaining away any woman's preference for the sexual charms of the lower orders. Saffredent claims repeatedly that the physical burdens of courtly manhood seriously curtail his sex drive. In this sense, peasants and priests are more manly than he, for they have the simple leisure and earthy diet to keep up their strength. This is another well-attested courtly conceit. Andreas Capellanus' De Amore capitalizes on the same fears of the potency of the peasant classes by denying them entry into the subtleties of courtly love: the low-born aspirants of Capellanus' dialogue always fail to win the favor of the higher-ranking lady. Paradoxically, Saffredent is suggesting that were he not such a man's man, he could be more a lady's man. He argues correspondingly, when Longarine scoffs at his pretensions to martyrdom in defense of women, claiming proverbially that he and the other men present seem in better health and are worth more now than before they were married:

—Je sçay bien pourquoy, dist Saffredent: c'est pour ce que souvent nostre valeur est esprouvée, mais si se sentent bien nos espaules d'avoir longuement porté la cuyrasse.

(“54”:344)

Saffredent seems to argue that men are indeed improved through marriage, with no thanks to any ministrations on their wives' part, but rather through the trials of endurance marriage forces on men, a negative twist on courtly convention. He then juggles the earlier meaning of the military metaphor “porter la cuyrasse” to mean the armor required of husbands on the marital battlefield, again distorting a courtly metaphor, the arma amoris of Capellanus' knight (De amore 66). Married noblemen bear the weight of a double armor, as it were, that of waging war in defense of their patrimony and of waging war in marriage. Battle-scarred men, in this double sense, make better, if wearier, husbands.

Ennasuitte's double-edged riposte bitingly suggests that the men's claim to unflagging valor on either battlefield is a useful fiction:

—Si vous aviez esté contrainctz, dist Ennasuitte, de porter, ung mois durant, le harnoys et coucher sur la dure, vous auriez grand desir de recouvrer le lict de vostre bonne femme, et porter la cuyrasse dont vous vous plaingnez maintenant.

(344)

The men, she is certain, would be only too happy to assume the armor of marriage if they but really knew the hardships of the warrior metaphor they so fluently exploit.

Toril Moi's stimulating reading of the De amore provides a rich framework and precedent for interpretation of the psychology of exaggeratedly masculine expression in the Heptaméron. The connections are many, and not only due to the similarity in subject (love and sexual relations), form (dialogic), and tone (the aggressive nature of masculine desire). Moi's self-proclaimed feminist interpretation opens up a field of inquiry into the structure and function of erotic discourse in the Heptaméron. In the strikingly verbose and univocal speech of Capellanus' lovers, who attempt to talk women of divergent social stations into granting the first (if not immediately the fourth) gradus of love, Moi observes a displacement of sexual desire from the physical to the linguistic; the male's pleasure

lies in his mastery of language, obtained through his neurotic ordering and scholastic subdivision of his discourse … The lover is in love with his own eloquent lucidity: by dominating the word, he gains a phallic power that contradicts his seemingly humble stance towards his lady.

(24)

No one would accuse Hircan and Saffredent of the conscious verbal eloquence of Capellanus and the lovers' mastery of rhetoric. Yet the potency of the warrior trope compensates for lack of eloquence as well as mimics in speech the physical acts of martial and sexual aggression Hircan and Saffredent seem to postulate as essential to the complete and virtuous male. As Moi writes of Capellanus' representation of the lover, “his language enacts his aggression” (25).

Hircanian desire, then, like that of Capellanus' medieval lovers, is expressed primarily through the tried and true rhetoric of aggression and domination glossed over by the courtly idea of “service,” for which, paradoxically Hircan seeks sympathy and understanding. Male sexuality appears entirely grounded on identification with the warrior image. Reduced to its simplest expression, as Hircan and Saffredent would have it, love and sexual relations require the same approach. They perpetuate the medieval hierarchy of gender relations defined in terms of warrior service: the serviteur serving (and, consequently, expecting to service sexually) his lady, but minus the emotional accretions and psychological blackmail of the courtly romance or Neo-Platonic idealizations. The warrior ethic constitutes the social fetters, analogous to the rhetorical chains of scholastic discourse evoked by Moi (24), that govern his conduct as well as his language. Saffredent's excuse to Longarine on the burdens of the “cuyrasse,” elaborates this notion of man as imprisoned in the armor that protects him, defines him and allows him to protect.

Such overstated masculine and self-pitying discourse actually undermines the foundations of the uncompromising masculinity it is meant to represent. Hircan and Saffredent dissemble the weakness that their constant repair and maintenance of their virile facade induces. The omnipresent and omnipotent martial metaphors that color their rhetoric of sexual relations betray rather than fortify the fear that haunts them, mainly that they may not live up to a masculine code equally as complex, idolatrous and impossible as the courtly and Neo-Platonic romance they disdain as enfeebling and womanish—that they may, in fact, be impotent. Saffredent even raises the specter of physiological impotence in an effort to explain the student who manages to pass successfully a series of medieval chastity tests: “Et que sçavons-nous, dist Saffredent, s'il estoit de ceulx que ung chappitre nomme de frigidis et maleficiatis?” (“18”:141).

The men's constant defense of active sexual assault seems aimed as much at reducing the actual risk of impotence as removing from their language even the suggestion of it as possibly afflicting them. Whatever its root—witchcraft, being “despourveu de cueur,” or effeminacy—impotence is something to be warded off valiantly, and it serves as metaphor for everything a man should not be. The very rhetoric, then, of Hircan and Saffredent perpetuates and “abuses” (to use Saffredent's own term concerning the idolizing of women) the myth of the male. The aggressive posturing of the “harnoys” and the “cuyrasse” functions for them, as the cod-piece does for Panurge in Rabelais, as the sacred anchor of their gender identity, with all its implications intact. What at first glance seems language on the offensive to defend woman and patrimony is in actuality offensive rhetoric on the defensive. The “harnoys” and “cuyrasse” are, after all, protective weapons.⁷

There is a significant exchange between Oisille, Parlamente and Saffredent following the latter's tale about the indulgent wife who laughs off her husband's open display of affection for her chambermaid. The discussion focuses on how men should value their wives and vice versa. Establishing a pointedly Christian analogy (Ephesians V:24-25), Oisille entreats women to serve and obey their husbands “comme l'Eglise à Jesus-Christ” (343). When Parlamente completes the allusion, that husbands should then behave toward their wives as Christ toward his Church, Saffredent affirms:

—Aussy faisons-nous […] et, si possible estoit, nous le passerions, car Christ ne morut que une foys pour son Eglise; nous morons tous les jours pour noz femmes.

(“54”:344)

The martyrdom of married life for men sanctifies them; the daily, wearing burden of bearing armor in literal and figurative battles—the masculine burden—would elevate the host above Christ himself (“si possible estoit,” Saffredent modestly qualifies). The armor of noble male status furnishes spiritually-nuanced foundations for a virtuous martyrdom of almost blasphemously heroic proportions. Hircan seems to exploit further the holy conflation of Christ as mortal male in the discussion on the reality of repentance following Longarine's thinly veiled tale of a young François I^er dissembling his visits to the wife of a prominent lawyer. Frequent attendance at mass, in the monastery through which his nocturnal trysting obliges him to pass, furnishes him with the semblance of a morally improving alibi. Rather than question the motives and sincerity of the prince, now King of France, the tellers discuss the problem of repentance for “une chose si plaisante,” as Hircan puts it (“25”:207). The focus again is on masculinity defined as intrinsically pleasure-seeking; Hircan baits Oisille with his own particular brand of casuistry:

—Il vauldroit mieulx, dist Oisille, ne se confesser poinct, si l'on n'a bonne repentance.—Or, Madame, dist Hircan, le peché me desplaist bien, et suis marry d'offenser Dieu, mais le peché me plaist tousjours.

(207)

He admits of an essential contradiction in masculine ethics and somewhat wistfully insinuates that God, as one good buddy to another, might do better to align his morality along what could easily be termed Panurgian principles, which Parlamente makes explicit:

—Vous et vos semblables, dist Parlamente, vouldriez bien qu'il n'y eust esté ne Dieu ne loy, sinon celle que vostre affection ordonneroit?—Je vous confesse, dist Hircan, que je vouldrois que Dieu print aussi grand plaisir à mes plaisirs, comme je faictz, car je luy donnerois souvent matiere de se resjouir.

(207)

Hircan's theology harks back, indeed, to Panurge: a curious interpretation of Christian charity that truly begins at home. In Hircan's estimation, a healthily virile God should delight in the antics of his carousing creation. The sins of the flesh are foregrounded in an almost nostalgic expression for a sanctioned return to Panurgian desire. What Hircan seems to be lamenting is the loss of the Creator's delight in the body. Good Pauline Christians all, the women and at least Dagoucin are to close in on and root out bodily expression throughout the Heptaméron. Yet rather than receiving the expected censure for such personal and radical theologizing—perhaps none of the devisants takes him seriously—Hircan's conditional is curiously cut off by the laconic, moderate Geburon:

—Si ne ferez-vous pas ung Dieu nouveau, dist Geburon; parquoy fault obeyr à celluy que nous avons. Laissons ces disputes aux théologiens. …

(207)

The sanctioned expression of Hircan's desire would require the creation of a new God, a virile God, who understands rather than condemns the male body and its desires, His first and supreme human creation, after all. Hircan's brief and failed attempt at theology would seem to posit Man free of the consequences of the Fall. Perhaps Parlamente is scandalized into silence, astonished that Hircan should venture further into the shadow of blasphemous anarchy raised in her question—“would you want there to be no God nor law?” This exchange repeats the well-established polarity of all debates between Hircan and Parlamente in the Heptaméron. He takes the lead in defending exaggeratedly and exclusively virile discourse and ethics against the encroachments of “Dagoucinism” and the religious Neo-Platonism of Parlamente and Oisille, both of which seem to point, as far as he can tell, toward a syncretic feminism.

Marguerite's men are on the defensive. The exploitation of the martial ethic as metaphor provides the closest thing in the Heptaméron to the aggressive masculine body rhetoric of the first half of the century, so evident in Rabelais and the blasonneurs. I contend that it is Marguerite's design to send it up against different conceptions of masculine discourse and conduct championed by Dagoucin and the women, for whom heroic virtue is grounded on and expressed through very different uses of the body, both male and female.

Notes

1. All quotations will be taken from the Michel François edition of the Heptaméron. Within these quotations, any emphasis added is my own. When I give two numbers in my references to the text, the first one indicates the novella in question, and the second the page number.

2. In this I am convinced of the stance of much recent Heptaméron criticism, that it is misleading to look to Parlamente or Oisille for a dominant narrative voice, whether or not historically identified with Marguerite herself. See, for example, John D. Lyons (115); Glyn P. Norton (447); and Doranne Fenoaltea (404-5).

3. For a critical sampling, see Febvre, Lyons, Norton, de Lajarte, Martineau, and Bernard.

4. Fenoaltea remarks in a like manner on the companionship of Saffredent and Dagoucin (397).

5. Glyn Norton cites the medieval peregrinatio, the obligatory test of the perilous journey, as influential governing principle for the first half of the prologue (447).

   Despite the copious debate surrounding the oft-discredited notion of “amour courtois,” I choose to perpetuate use of the adjective “courtly” to refer broadly to that tradition of aristocratic love ethics, lived or wholly literary, summarized in and widely disseminated through Andreas Capellanus' twelfth-century De amore. Whether or not Marguerite herself had direct knowledge of this important text is a fact I should like one day to substantiate; its influence is nonetheless pervasive in most medieval and Renaissance love dialogues.

6. I wish to thank Robert Melançon who, during discussion following the session in which this paper was read, suggested that on the contrary, these men and their conduct in the prologue are far from exemplary, victims rather of almost comic circumstances in which they do not make the best of showings. I would agree insofar as any parody that Marguerite could perhaps be making of the men's “heroic” efforts, particularly when contrasted with those of Oisille, would serve even better to underscore the uneasy bluster of their later rhetoric. As I hope my lengthened reading has shown, the fact of these “rites of passage” remains evident; Marguerite, whether comically or in earnest, is testing the mettle of her men.

7. The role of the cod-piece, “premiere piece de harnoys pour armer l'homme de guerre,” according to Panurge (Tiers livre 68), is distincly analogous in Rabelaisian literature. It offers a potentially rich contemporary social and historical context for studying gender roles in the Heptaméron.

Works Cited

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Capellanus, Andreas. De amore. Trans. P.G. Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982.

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Fenoaltea, Doranne. “Brigands and Bears in the Prologue to the Heptaméron.” French Studies 39.4 (October 1985): 395-407.

Gravdal, Kathryn. “Camouflaging Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in the Medieval Pastourelle.” Romanic Review 76 (November 1985): 361-73.

Lajarte, Philippe de. “L'Heptaméron et le ficinisme: rapports d'un texte et d'une idéologie.” Revue des sciences humaines XXXVII, No. 147 (juillet-septembre 1972): 339-71.

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Martineau, Christine. “Le Platonisme de Marguerite de Navarre?” Bulletin de l'Association d'études sur l'Humanisme, la Réforme et la Renaissance II.4 (November 1976): 12-35.

Moi, Toril. “Desire in Language: Andreas Capellanus and the Controversy of Courtly Love.” Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History. Ed. David Aers. Brighton: Harvester P, 1986. 11-33.

Norton, Glyn P. “Narrative Function in the Heptaméron Frame Story.” La Nouvelle française à la Renaissance. Ed. Lionello Sozzi. Geneva: Slatkine, 1981. 435-47.

Rabelais, François. Pantagruel. Ed. V.L. Saulnier. Geneva: Droz, 1965.

———. Le Tiers livre. Ed. M. A. Screech. Geneva: Droz, 1974.

Sommers, Paula. “Feminine Authority in the Heptaméron: A Reading of Oysille.” Modern Language Studies 13.2 (Spring 1983): 52-59.