[In the essay that follows, McKinley elaborates the connection between the institutional requirement of women's speech in confession and the increasing authority of that speech on the part of individual women in the Renaissance.]

Confession is to be made before the eyes of all in an open place, to prevent a rapacious wolf from sneaking into corners and causing unthinkably shameful things.

—Jean Gerson, c. 1409

In Heptameron story 41 Saffredent tells of the countess of Aiguemont, who sends for a priest to administer the sacrament of penance to her household. On Christmas Eve, he hears the confessions of the countess, her maid of honor, and the lady's young daughter. Something in the young girl's confession—the narrator calls it “son secret”—emboldens the confessor to chastise her for the gravity of her sins and to impose upon her an unusual penance: she must wear the confessor's cord against her bare flesh (“de porter ma corde sur vostre chair toute nue”) (284;377). The girl at first accepts the penance, but tearfully refuses when the priest insists on attaching the cord with his own hands. The priest suggests that she is a heretic, but the girl remains steadfast in her refusal. The priest then will not grant her absolution, and she leaves, frightened and confused.

The plight of the lady-in-waiting's daughter, like that of the other women represented confessing to a priest in the Heptameron, reflects the early-Reformation polemic on sacramental confession and indicates Marguerite de Navarre's position in that debate. At the same time, these stories also raise broader questions about narrative technique, authority, and gender in the work.

Recent feminist scholars have described the experience of women in early modern Europe as one of enclosure. They portray women as being contained by patriarchal power structures in their homes, in their bodies, and in their speech. A woman's sexual freedom, like her vocal participation in public life, was controlled by the culturally sanctioned dominion that first her father, then her husband had over her. Traditional authority had long linked an outspoken character with sexual licentiousness in a woman, but with eloquence, a highly prized Renaissance virtue, in a man.¹ The discourse of misogyny portrayed woman as naturally wanton, out of control, and tending toward chaos both in her sexuality and in her speech. Husbands were cautioned to contain their wives in these areas and warned of the woes that could follow if they did not.² Sacramental confession was one institution that required women to speak. In fact, it made women become storytellers, narrating the circumstances of their sins to the confessor. Marguerite skillfully uses the confession stories, not only to make an ideological statement about her evangelical criticism of the institution, but to figure the complex emerging narrative voice of women, especially that of one woman named Marguerite. Early feminist ideology, narrative textual practices, and authorial self-representation come together and interact in these stories. This chapter explores that dynamic.

The Fourth Lateran Council decreed in 1216 that all Christians had to confess their sins to a priest at least once a year.³ Those who failed to do so incurred excommunication. Although the decree, Omnis utriusque sexus, did not initiate the practice of private auricular confession, by codifying it under the authority of the pope, it made the sacrament of penance the essential instrument of forgiveness and justification. It thereby invested the priest with crucial authority. The penitent's contrition alone was no longer sufficient to guarantee remission of guilt and reconciliation with God. Only the priest's pronouncing the words absolvo te over the contrite penitent could effect sacramental forgiveness. The decree thereby countered contritionists such as Abelard (d. 1142) who had argued that internal sorrow inspired by the love of God was the essential element in the forgiveness of sins. In that view, successful repentance was principally a matter between the sorrowful sinner and God.

Later medieval theologians continued to debate contrition versus absolution. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), while accepting the importance of contrition in the remission of guilt, nevertheless moved toward absolutionism by declaring that the words absolvo te were what scholasticism called the “form” or essential agent of the sacrament's grace. For Thomas, penance, like all sacraments, was effective not from the work of the person receiving it, ex opere operantis—even though a proper disposition of the penitent was necessary—but ex opere operato, from the action of the sacrament itself. Emphasis on absolution became much stronger in the writings of Duns Scotus. For him, perfect contrition was an ideal too lofty to be realized by any but the most saintly, and the normal way to forgiveness was through attrition, an imperfect but efficacious sorrow. The power of the sacrament made up for the insufficiencies in the penitent's sorrow. Contrition was no longer necessary, or even possible, in most cases. The Scotist doctrine gave penitents security against uncertainty about the quality of their contrition, but it also gave to the priest an ecclesiastically validated authority over the penitent's access to forgiveness and justification.⁴

Story 41 illustrates the domination of the absolutionist position in the late medieval church, as well as the corruption that was its consequence. In practice an unscrupulous priest could withhold absolution as a means of coercion, and literature recounts that such coercion was often sexual, although estimates of its frequency differ.⁵ In story 41, the exchange between the young girl and the priest after she accepts his initial penance—to wear his cord against her flesh—is a striking portrayal of coercion and solicitation.

“Baillez-la-moy, mon pere, et je ne fauldray de la porter.” “Ma fille,” dist le beau pere, “il ne seroit pas bon de vostre main; il fault que les myennes propres, dont vous debvez avoir l'absolution, la vous aient premierement seincte; puis après, vous serez absoulte de tous vos pechez.” La fille, en pleurant, respond qu'elle n'en feroit rien. “Comment!” dist le confesseur, “estes-vous une herecticque, qui refusez les penitences selon que Dieu et nostre mere saincte Eglise l'ont ordonné?”

(284;377)

The story's emphasis on the cord is richly significant.⁶ The cord linguistically as well as literally represents the priest's attempt to secure the woman in sexual bondage (corde + lier). It also evokes metonymically the priest's sexual organs. Finally the cord reminds the reader that the offending confessor is a Franciscan, or Cordelier.

Yet, this is a story of foiled coercion. In spite of her inner conflict—the narrator tells us that the girl “ne luy vouloit desobeir” (284;377)—in her response, the girl distinguishes clearly between church doctrine on confession and her confessor's abuse of it. She reclaims the maternal authority of the church that the priest has misappropriated, and refusing to be coerced, responds with an eloquence that belies her youth: “‘Je use de la confession,’ dist la fille, ‘comme l'Eglise le commande, et veulx bien recepvoir l'absolution et faire la penitence, mais je ne veulx poinct que vous y mectiez les mains; car, en ceste sorte, je refuse vostre penitence.’” Her refusal costs her that essential absolution: “‘Par ainsy,’ dist le confesseur, ‘ne vous puis-je donner l'absolution.’” (284;378)

Confession and its practices were often indicted by the advocates of church reform. In general, Reformist notions of justification challenged absolution's role in the process of reconciliation between the faithful and God.⁷ Disillusion about confession was a central factor in Martin Luther's alienation from the Catholic church. Luther's ninety-five theses, posted at Wittenberg in 1517, reacted to the abuses of indulgences and challenged the church's view of the sacrament of penance. The first two theses set the tone for all that would follow:

1. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” [Matt. 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of penance.

2. This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.⁸

Although the positions of these early reformers differed in many respects, they all challenged absolutionism and taught the primary importance of contrition and faith in divine reconciliation. In a letter written to Marguerite on March 6, 1522, Guillaume Briçonnet, her spiritual director, shows his affinity with them:

Mais tant est Dieu beneficque donnateur et liberal qu'il ne reste que à demander que n'ayons tout. Qui demande obtient (“Dixi: confitebor adversum me injusticiam meam et tu remisisti impietatem peccati mei”) [Ps. 31.5]. Qui demande pardon de ses pechéz par vraie repandance et foy, ilz sont pardonnéz avant que les confesser. Ce n'est à dire pourtant qu'il ne faille les confesser; mais est necessaire qui a le temps et opportunité.

(1.182, no. 36)⁹

Briçonnet is clearly a contritionist. Forgiveness is an issue resolved solely between an accepting God and a contrite, believing penitent who asks for it. Yet, Briçonnet maintains a moderate position by adding the last sentence. Confession, presented almost as an afterthought (“pourtant”) and in a double negative phrase, is necessary, but that necessity is attenuated by circumstance.

The Heptameron's critique of sacramental confession reflects the Reformers' position. By reworking the same basic plot in all of the confession stories, Marguerite criticizes the absolutionists and challenges the sacerdotal role in repentance and justification. In story 41, after the priest refuses her absolution, “[l]a damoiselle, se leva de devant luy, ayant la conscience bien troublée, car elle estoit si jeune, qu'elle avoit paour d'avoir failly, au refuz qu'elle avoit faict au pere” (284;378). At Christmas mass, when the countess and her retinue prepare to receive communion—the narrator calls it the corpus Domini—the young girl's mother asks her daughter if she is ready. Weeping, she responds “qu'elle n'estoit poinct confessée.” In spite of her convictions and her defense of them to the priest, even though she did, in fact, “confess” her sins—she told the priest her “secret”—she feels that the process of her forgiveness is incomplete: “refusant la penitence qu'il m'a baillée, m'a refusé aussi l'absolution” (284;378). Her words imply her understanding that absolution depends on her acceptance of the penance that the priest imposes. Such a notion was vehemently contested by the Reformers, who viewed confessional penance as an erroneous assertion that good works could help a Christian merit salvation. The phrase corpus Domini links the girl's rejection of the confessor's body with her exclusion from receiving communion, the body of Christ. The priest is inappropriately confused with Christ, which is just what Reformers said happened in absolutionist confession.

If the young woman's youth gives her a troubled conscience about these issues, a worry shared by many Christians according to Reformers like Luther, her mother's understanding of the situation is more incisive: “La mere s'enquist saigement et congneut l'estrange façon de penitence que le beau pere vouloit donner à sa fille; et après l'avoir faict confesser à ung aultre, receurent toutes ensemble” (284;378). In this brief sentence the narrator shows the mother resolving her daughter's problem, a problem created by a “beau pere.” The mother becomes the agent of her daughter's successful confession to another priest and thereby makes possible her reunion with Christ, the corpus Domini. Where the corrupt patriarchal institution excludes the young woman from communion and community, a maternal intervention reconciles her daughter with God, with the church, “la mere saincte Eglise,” and with the community of women who “receurent toutes ensemble.” The phrase “après l'avoir faict confesser à ung aultre,” like Briçonnet's sentence, concedes the necessity of sacramental confession. In both cases, the short references to confession help to moderate the anti-absolutionist tone of the passages, but their brevity seems almost dismissive. We learn nothing of the second priest, “l'aultre,” who expedites the penitential process. It is the mother and, at her request, the countess who orchestrate the final justice of the story:

Et, retournée la contesse de l'eglise, la dame d'honneur lui feit la plaincte du prescheur, dont elle fut bien marrye et estonnée, veue la bonne oppinion qu'elle avoit de luy. Mais son courroux ne la peult garder, qu'elle ne rist bien fort, veu la nouvelleté de la penitence. Si est-ce que le rire n'empescha pas aussy, qu'elle ne le feit prendre et battre en sa cuisine, où à force de verges, il confessa la verité.

(284;378)

The countess, a woman of authority, in a comic inversion of penitential practices, makes the priest go to confession in her kitchen. In return for the novel penance he had proposed, she has inflicted upon him a common medieval penance, flagellation. The verges, rods or switches—but verge is also a slang word for penis—recall the corde that the priest wanted to attach to the woman's body. The priest is beaten at his own game by a woman who, although angry, laughs. Her laughter stands in contrast to the young woman's earlier tears. We might say that her laughter wipes away those tears, because it is through the countess's intervention that the victim sees the villain brought to justice. The laughter punctuates a sentence that began with the tearful young woman's decisive words refusing to comply with the priest's coercion. As Bakhtin argues, laughter in the Renaissance always relates “to the freedom of the spirit, and to the freedom of speech.”¹⁰ The story ends with women on top.

The Heptameron troubles the categorical distinction between silent, confined, and sexually chastened women on the one hand, and outspoken, public, and sexually wanton women on the other. The stories and discussions examine many different cases of vocal and of silent women, show different outcomes, and make different judgments. In story 41, for example, the woman's speech in an ecclesiastically approved context, her confessing of her sins to a priest, gets her into trouble. The narrative emphasizes that the priest is aroused by hearing her story: “Et, après qu'elle eut tout dict ce qu'elle sçavoit, congneut le beau pere quelque chose de son secret; qui luy donna envie et hardiesse de luy bailler une penitence non accoustumée” (284;377). This is no Petrarchan innamoramento; the narrator records no visual details about the young woman. Only the priest is, ironically, beau. Eros works through the ears, here and in all the confession stories, thereby foregrounding woman's voice.¹¹

However, if the woman unwittingly ensnares herself through her speech, she also uses it to her advantage. She speaks out to defend her chastity and her autonomy.¹² The clarity and force of the woman's short speech is quite striking, especially since the narrative frames it by details that emphasize her emotional distress: her tears, her troubled conscience, her youth, her fears (“en pleurant … ayant la conscience bien troublée, car elle estoit si jeune, qu'elle avoit paour …”) (284;378). Nothing in her speech betrays that emotional state. Her single sentence seems somehow implausible. It merits reexamination:

—“Je use de la confession,” dist la fille, “comme l'Eglise le commande, et veulx bien recepvoir l'absolution et faire la penitence, mais je ne veulx poinct que vous y mectiez les mains; car, en ceste sorte, je refuse vostre penitence.”

The grammatical structure of the sentence indicates that the young woman is in dauntless control. She utters a complex series of six clauses and delivers them in flawless grammatical form. All of the independent clauses have active verbs in the first person singular; the word je occurs three times. Of the four first-person verbs, all in the unattenuated present tense, the first declares that the woman is the agent in the confessional process, supported by church authority. The next two express decisive positions of the woman's will. With the final clause, she refuses the priest's coercion. The clauses are clearly connected by conjunctions that express a logical sequence of thought leading up to the final refusal. Recalling that, at least since Augustine, the word confession has had two meanings—to declare one's beliefs and to acknowledge one's sins—we can see that the woman confesses in the sentence. This is not the discourse of an intimidated victim nor of a woman whom cultural conventions have succeeded in silencing. As is generally true in the Heptameron, the story gives us practically no detail that would help us discuss the woman's character development. Indeed, the very notion of character development, as modern readers understand that concept, can be applied to Renaissance texts only at great risk of anachronism.¹³ But, for that very reason, the young woman's eloquent rebuff of the confessor calls for comment. It is as if someone else were helping her here—lending her a voice, so to speak—someone who anticipates the subsequent intervention of her mother and of the countess of Aiguemont. It is as if, we might argue, there has been “emphasis added.”

In her essay by that title, Nancy Miller explores the ways in which women novelists tend to shape their plots differently than men do. Responding to Freud's 1908 essay, “The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming,” she asks, “Now, if the plots of male fiction chart the daydreams of an ego that would be invulnerable, what do the plots of female fiction reveal?” She concludes that female fiction does not reveal a consistent model, but she identifies a category of “women writers” in contrast to what George Eliot referred to pejoratively as “lady novelists.” Women writers assert egoistic desires that arise from a repressed impulse to power. Their works articulate “a fantasy of power that would revise the social grammar in which women are never defined as subjects; a fantasy of power that disdains a sexual exchange in which women can participate only as objects of circulation.” Their fictions express a sense of invulnerability in ways that may seem implausible, in “modalities of implausibility.”¹⁴

The tearful young woman's decisive speech is just such an implausibility. From a position of vulnerability she asserts her right to subjectivity. Her ego prevails over that of her confessor. And if evangelical doctrine aids and abets her in establishing her integrity against the institution of absolutionism, she is equally strengthened in her egoistic stance by another woman, by the author of her story, Marguerite de Navarre. Margaret Miles has argued that, in representing the naked female body, male artists have generally deprived woman of subjectivity.¹⁵ The Heptameron often depicts situations where a woman's subjectivity is denied or stifled by another character. However, the book frequently dramatizes a struggle in which a woman defends her subjectivity aided not only by other characters but by a subtle form of authorial intervention. In story 41, that intervention, the emphasis added, begins well before that of the young woman's mother and then of her mistress, the countess of Aiguemont—a woman who is herself in the service of another woman, named, perhaps not coincidentally, Marguerite.¹⁶

If the saving intervention of the two women does not occur until the end of the story, someone has prepared us for it right from the start, with the story's opening lines: “L'année que madame Marguerite d'Autriche vint à Cambray, de la part de l'Empereur son nepveu, pour traicter la paix entre luy et le Roy Très Chrestien, de la part duquel se trouva sa mere madame Loïse de Savoie; et estoit en la compaignye de la dicte dame Marguerite la comtesse d'Aiguemont” (283;377). By introducing the story in the context of the 1529 Peace of Cambrai, the “Paix des Dames,” the narrator evokes for the reader women who replace men in traditional roles of power, who intervene to promote harmony in a world of discord.¹⁷ These are women—including Marguerite de Navarre's own mother, Louise de Savoie—who speak in public from a position of strength. The story not only ends but also begins with women on top. It is framed by female authority, and that frame surges into the voice of the young woman alone with her confessor “en une chapelle bien fermée” (283;377), a woman standing up to ecclesiastical authority and transgressing the rule of female silence.¹⁸ Although Saffredent is the fictional narrator of story 41, we can read that tale and its women characters as a self-figuration of the author, Marguerite de Navarre.

That is not to say, in facile roman à clef fashion, that the Heptameron's characters are masks that cryptically convey portions of Marguerite de Navarre's biography. Such an attitude, like the once commonly-held notion that Parlamente is in some way Marguerite, clouds more important issues. It is more fruitful to examine the work's textual processes: how the author took the raw material of her véritables histoires and shaped them into nouvelles; how she infused plot and characters with the signature of her own experience and convictions. Nancy Miller quotes Virginia Woolf on George Eliot in the Common Reader: “Her self-consciousness is always marked when her heroines say what she herself would have said” (Miller, 39). Although we can only make informed speculations about what Marguerite herself would have said, what we do know about her suggests that her authorial subjectivity speaks decisively through the young woman's words.

In several ways, that woman's plight figures Marguerite's own experience as a writer. One of her earliest poems, Le Miroir de l'âme pecheresse, was condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities of the Sorbonne. In spite of that attempted suppression, she continued to write mystical poetry, a genre that has been recognized as a voice of dissent.¹⁹ In so doing she acknowledged her affinity with another Marguerite, Marguerite Porete, a woman who was burned at the stake in 1310 for refusing to abjure the radical mysticism expressed, or more precisely, confessed in her Miroir des simples âmes. Marguerite de Navarre extols the author of that Miroir in her longest mystical poem, Les Prisons.²⁰ The mystical voice both confesses belief and confesses sin directly and powerfully to God and reader, often outside of and in conflict with ecclesiastical authority. In his study of mystical discourse, Michel de Certeau argues that the church used sacramental confession to correct and control the subversive voice of mysticism.²¹ And in her own mirror poem, Speculum de l'autre femme, Luce Irigaray describes the woman mystic's confessor as an antagonist in her relationship with God: “Therefore, she is condemned by confessors or inexperienced voyeurs who are horrified to see and hear her.”²²

Throughout her life Marguerite worked from her often tenuous position of power as the king's sister to protect other Reformers and enable them freely to confess their beliefs. According to a letter written in 1555 by her daughter, Jeanne d'Albret, the physical threat to her free expression followed Marguerite even into the intimacy of her immediate family:

The said queen [was] warned by her late brother the King, François of good and glorious memory, my much honored uncle, not to get any new doctrines in her head [mettre en cervelle dogmes nouveaux] so that from then on she confined herself to amusing stories [romans jovials]. Besides, I well remember how long ago, the late King, my most honored father … surprised the said Queen when she was praying with the ministers Roussel and Farel, and how with great annoyance he slapped her right cheek and forbade her sharply to meddle in matters of doctrine. He shook a stick at me which cost me many bitter tears and has kept me fearful and compliant until after they had both died.²³

The letter is intriguingly suggestive about the cause of Marguerite's genre shift from mystical poetry to nouvelles. For our immediate purposes, the account of fraternal duress and of wife and child abuse in the royal family casts a new light on the portrayal of women's discourse in the Heptameron. If it appeared to Jeanne d'Albret that François I's attempt at intimidation had worked, we know that Marguerite's move to romans jovials did not stifle her ideological voice, nor did it cause her to abandon mystical poetry. And if her biological daughter was made fearful and compliant by a physically abusive father, Marguerite gave voice to fictional daughters whose resolute discourse brought down the most domineering of fathers. Rolandine, in story 21, is the most eloquent of those daughters, and the young woman in story 41, who thwarts “le beau pere” her confessor, is one of Rolandine's sisters in spirit.²⁴

The confession stories further dramatize women's enclosure by emphasizing the physical confinement and secret nature of the confessional space. The narrator of story 41 notes that the women's confessions were heard “en une chappelle bien fermée, afin que la confession fut plus secrette …” (283;377). The detail of the enclosed chapel would have signaled to an early Reformation audience that the priest was motivated more by concupiscence than by concern for the young woman's privacy. Allusions to closed secret spaces were common in the ecclesiastical admonitions against sexual solicitation during confession.

Jean Gerson's stern warning about rapacious wolves in corners,²⁵ that I quote as the epigraph to this chapter, is echoed by Bishop Robert of Aquino: “Nam ego nescio laudare illos qui audiunt confessiones mulierum in locis secretis, in cameris, in angulis latebrosis in quibus etiam quandoque et saepe qui boni et justi creduntur ad enormissima sacrilegia et vituperabiles dissolutiones labuntur” (quoted in Lea, 1.394-95). Confessionals, structures in which a grill or screen separated the confessor from the penitent, were instituted by the church later in the sixteenth century not so much to protect the privacy of the penitent as to prevent such enormissima sacrilegia et vituperabiles dissolutiones.

The reference to the enclosed chapel “afin que la confession fut plus secrette,” articulates the figurative relationship between the spatial enclosure and the material of the confession itself—son secret, what the woman told the priest. The story also makes it clear that son secret stands for the woman's sexuality as well, since the priest assigned his invasive penance only after he “cogneut … quelque chose de son secret” (284;377). Finally, son secret refers to the woman's relationship to narrative, to her right to tell her own story.

Absolutionist confession gave priests the power to manipulate a penitent's narrative. Although official church doctrine discouraged prurient questioning, some penitential manuals encouraged confessors to ask detailed, voyeuristic questions that forced the penitent to tell his or her story in specific ways.²⁶ Confession required a mastery of rhetoric, because penitents had to persuade the confessor to grant them absolution. The shaping of their narratives, the way they told their secrets, was a central aspect of that rhetoric.²⁷ Story 41 portrays the young woman as a storyteller whose narrative arouses the confessor's erotic desire. Her rhetoric has an unintended effect. Or we might say that the priest is a bad reader. He imposes a lascivious interpretation on the woman's narrative, much as Hircan often does in reacting to another's stories.²⁸ At the same time the story, by its narrative structure, eschews the probing, voyeuristic invasion of the penitential manuals. The young woman's secret remains secret: we never read the story that the confessor heard. It is as if the person who shaped story 41's narrative respected the seal of confession, the rule forbidding confessors to reveal what they had heard from penitents. Within story 41 is an ellipsis, the absent story which arouses the priest's erotic desire and generates the story we are reading. The chapelle bien fermée where the young woman's secret emerges reminds us that closed spaces are where narrative is born. The closed chapel is, like a Russian doll, found within another closed space: “dedans ce beau pré le long de la riviere du Gave, où les arbres sont si foeillez que le soleil ne sçauroit percer l'ombre ny eschauffer la frescheur; là, assiz à noz aises, dira chascun quelque histoire qu'il aura veue ou bien oy dire à quelque homme digne de foy” (Prologue, 10;69).

And the libidinous priest is not far removed from the storytellers, who agree on their pastime after hearing Hircan's suggestion that they spend the afternoons making love. As Peter Brooks reminds us in Reading for the Plot, “Desire is always there at the start of a narrative, often in a state of initial arousal, often having reached a state of intensity such that movement must be created, action undertaken, change begun.”²⁹ The opening sentence of the prologue to the second day illustrates Brooks's assertion: “Le lendemain, se leverent en grand desir de retourner au lieu où le jour precedent avoyent eu tant de plaisir; car chascun avoit son compte si prest, qu'il leur tardoit qu'il ne fust mis en lumiere” (87;155).

The complex dynamic among eros, secret, and narrative is the mainspring of the Heptameron.³⁰ Here narration is figured by an absence, by a story told but not recorded. The young woman's secret and, indeed, all of story 41 call attention to a dark, sheltered place (“le soleil ne sçauroit percer l'ombre ny eschauffer la frescheur”) that figures early modern woman's narrative; a cave-like space that while appearing hollow, is productive: “Car Nature leurs a dedans le corps posé en lieu secret et intestin un animal, un membre, lequel n'est es hommes, on quel quelques foys sont engendrées certaines humeurs salses, nitreuses, bauracineuses, acres, mordicantes, lancinantes, chatouillantes amerement” (Rabelais, TL, 32).³¹

The physician Rondibilis's garrulous and misogynist declamation on women in the Tiers Livre contains one of the more colorful Renaissance descriptions of the uterus as animal avidum generandi.³² Appropriately, his speech is followed by a series of stories that interrupt the progression of Panurge's consultations. Occupying chapters thirty-three and thirty-four, the stories “dilate” Rabelais's narrative before it returns in chapter thirty-five to the counsel of Trouillogan.³³ All three of the stories betray fear of women out of control: the feast of Cuckoldry evokes unbridled female sexual desire, while the nuns of Coingnaufond (another enclosed space) and the mute wife reflect popular versions of female garrulity. The second of these tells of nuns who confess their sins to each other and whose respect for the seal of confession the pope tests by leaving in their care (“en quelque lieu sceur et secret” TL, 34) a sort of Pandora's box which they waste no time in opening. The farce of the mute wife features a husband who first desires to hear his wife's voice, but who, when she is cured and becomes garrulous, regrets the satisfaction of that desire. When the doctor who cured her muteness tells him that there is no cure “contre cestuy interminable parlement de femme,” the husband chooses to become deaf.

This brief dilation out of the Heptameron and into the Tiers Livre, a work published in 1546 and dedicated by Rabelais to Marguerite de Navarre, invites comparison between two figurations of the womb relating to narrative. The form of the Heptameron suggests dilation, “cestuy interminable parlement de femme” (TL, 34). It is no doubt going too far to see in these words an allusion to Marguerite's book and her leading devisante.³⁴ But, as a corrective to Roland Barthes's model of narrative, and to the aspects of Peter Brooks's use of that model that similarly tend to gender narrative as masculine, the texts under consideration here recognize, albeit differently, a feminine narrative principle.³⁵ Looking ahead, it is interesting to recall that for the subject matter of the earliest novels, women authors in the seventeenth century turned to the secret inner desires of their female protagonists.³⁶ The Heptameron eschews sexism in its figurations of narrative; men as well as women are presented as internal narrators: Bernage in story 32; the duke of Burgundy in 70; the widow in 4, whom Brantôme identified as Marguerite; the naked narrator in 62.³⁷ But the confession stories as a group chronicle the larger emergence in the Heptameron of an animal avidum narrandi, of woman's narrative voice, and, as we shall see, of one woman's authorial voice within the generally inhospitable climate of early-Reformation France.

Focusing on the details that I have emphasized in story 41, the shortest of the confession stories, helps us to delineate problems of narrative, authority, and gender that emerge in the longest one, story 22, the story of Marie Héroet. The same elements of enclosure, coercion, spoken resistance, reprisal, and ultimate vindication recur in that story, as if it were a rewriting and elaboration of the shorter one. Erotic reaction to the woman's voice is more explicitly detailed: “Marie Heroet, dont la parolle estoit si doulce et agreable, qu'elle promectoit le visaige et le cueur estre de mesme. Parquoy, seullement pour l'ouyr fut esmeu en une passion d'amour” (177; 256). The family drama is more complex, because along with the young outspoken daughter, the concupiscent, threatening “father” (“Je suis votre pere,” 181;261), and the powerful, rescuing mother, there are two surrogate mothers, one good, one evil, represented by the two abbesses, a good father confessor who is destroyed by the bad one, and finally, one brother who mediates in the mother's rescue of the daughter. That rescue is effected through the intervention of “la Royne de Navarre,” who, like the countess of Aiguemont, hears the offending priest's “confession” and reestablishes order in the end (184-85;264). Marie Héroet strikingly figures woman's appropriation of narrative, because she writes her story after she has been silenced and negotiates her own liberation by slipping her text to her brother, who, although nameless in the story, probably represents another writer, the poet Antoine Héroet, a courtier of Marguerite de Navarre.³⁸

However, I would like to leave Marie Héroet for now and focus instead on the last story in the collection as we have it. Story 72 takes place in a hospital. One night when a poor man is dying there, a monk arrives to hear the man's confession and administer extreme unction. A young nun stays to help the monk assist the dying man and prepare his body for burial. The narrator says that the nun feared the monk “plus que le prieur ny aultre, pour la grande austerité dont il usoit tant en parolles que en vie” (425;540). As they enshroud the cadaver, austerity gives way to desire:

commencea le religieux à parler de la misere de la vie et de la bienheureuseté de la mort; en ces propos passerent la minuyct. La pauvre fille ententivement escoutoit ces devotz propos, et le regardant les larmes aux oeilz: ou il print si grand plaisir, que, parlant de la vie advenir, commencea à l'ambrasser, comme s'il eut en envye de la porter entre ses bras en paradis. La pauvre fille, escoutant ces propos, et l'estimant le plus devost de la compaignie, ne l'osa refuser. Quoy voiant, ce meschant moyne, en parlant tousjours de Dieu, paracheva avecq elle l'oeuvre que soubdain le diable leur mit au cueur.

(425; 540-41)

Unlike Marie Héroet and the young woman at Marguerite of Aiguemont's court, the naive young nun is silent. She fails to distinguish between the monk's improper advances and the ecclesiastical authority he represents, but above all, her fear makes her fail to speak out and challenge him.

It is worth noting that, unlike stories 41 and 22, in which the young women come from families of wealth and status, in story 72, the young nun is a pauvre fille both affectively and economically. She is intimidated by the priest's reputation as devost and austere and overcome more than seduced by the discourse he misappropriates from his duties as a preacher (“parlant de la vie advenir … parlant tousjours de Dieu”).³⁹ In contrast to his speaking, she only listens. “[E]scoutant ces propos,” she is as passive as the dying man who, “peu à peu perdit la parolle.” The narrator suggests that the priest perverts the pastoral duty he was called to perform for the dying man and lustfully misdirects it toward the nun (“comme si ‘il eut eu envye de la porter entre ses bras en paradis”). The narrator records no reaction from the young nun except her listening, while the priest continues to speak, “l'asseurant que ung peché secret n'estoit poinct imputé devant Dieu, et que deux personnes non liez ne peuvent offencer en tel cas, quant il n'en vient poinct de scandalle; et que, pour l'eviter, elle se gardast bien de le confesser à aultre que à luy” (425;540).

Here again the word secret is highly resonant. The peché secret refers to their sexual intercourse, the sin of fornication. Such a sin, the priest maintains, is not blameworthy before God; its “secrecy” somehow protects them from divine reproach.⁴⁰ However, this time, we as readers witness the secret. We know that the monk is the agent of the “secret,” and although the sexual transgression does not occur in the context of confession, he lodges it there so that he may control its narrative.⁴¹

Leaving the monk, the nun goes into a chapel dedicated to Our Lady, and there she speaks for the first time in the story, addressing her words to another woman: “Vierge Marie!”⁴² Those words remind her “qu'elle avoit perdu ce tiltre de virginité, sans force ny amour, mais par une sotte craincte” (425;541). That thought makes her weep bitterly.⁴³ The priest, overhearing her, “se doubta de sa conversion, par laquelle il povoit perdre son plaisir.” To prevent that loss, he reproaches her harshly and tells her that “si elle en faisoit conscience, qu'elle se confessast à luy et qu'elle n'y retournast plus, si elle ne vouloit, car l'un et l'autre sans peché estoit en sa liberté.” If the priest's argument seems muddled to the reader, it succeeds nevertheless in convincing the nun: “La sotte religieuse, cuydant satisfaire envers Dieu, s'alla confesser à luy, mais pour penitence, il luy jura qu'elle ne pechoit poinct de l'aymer, et que l'eaue benoiste povoit effacer ung tel peccadille. Elle, croyant plus en luy que en Dieu, retourna au bout de quelque temps à luy obeyr; en sorte qu'elle devint grosse” (426;541).

As in story 41, the confessor uses penance as a means of sexual coercion. The practice of imposing penance as part of the ritual of penitence grew from a belief that sinners must not only be forgiven but must also pay for their sins in the form of some kind of punishment. The nun confuses the penance with confession itself. Penance was a bone of contention in the early Reformation, not only because it implied the efficacy of good works, but because of the passionately contested practice of indulgences as a means of accelerating the expiatory process. To assign as a penance the repetition of the very sin that had brought the penitent to confession would have required a striking perversion of the confessor's role.

The nun's pregnancy moves her to regret her actions and to accuse the monk. Her dilating womb requires that she tell her story. The first woman she turns to for help fails her: “Elle suplia la prieure de faire chasser hors du monastere ce religieux, sçachant qu'il estoit si fin, qu'il ne fauldroit poinct à la seduire. L'abbesse et le prieur, qui s'accordoient fort bien ensemble, se moquerent d'elle, disans qu'elle estoit assez grande pour se defendre d'un homme, et que celluy dont elle parloit estoit trop homme de bien” (426; 541). The nun then seeks a solution that typifies the superstitious ideas that the Reformers decried: “A la fin, à force d'impétuosité, pressée du remords de la conscience, leur demanda congé d'aller à Romme, car elle pensoit, en confessant son peché aux piedz du pape, recouvrer sa virginité” (426;541).

Filled with remorse, the nun has what the contritionists considered the requisite disposition for divine forgiveness, but her request indicates that she trusts only absolution, and only papal absolution at that. The extent of her confidence in the pope's power shows that just as she had shown misplaced faith in the priest, “croyant plus en luy que en Dieu,” she attributes to the pope god-like powers.⁴⁴ Seizing the opportunity to be rid of her, the prior and prioress send the nun on her way. But it is not the pope who saves her. “Mais Dieu voulut que, elle estant à Lyon, ung soir, après vespres, sur le pupiltre de l'eglise Sainct Jehan, où madame la duchesse d'Alençon, qui depuis fut royne de Navarre, alloit secretement faire quelque neufvaine avecq trois ou quatre de ses femmes, estant à genoulx devant le crucifix, ouyt monter en hault quelque personne” (426;542). Seeing that the person is a nun,

afin d'entendre ses devotions, se retira la duchesse au coing de l'autel. Et la religieuse, qui pensoit estre seulle, se agenouilla; et, en frappant sa coulpe, se print à pleurer tant, que c'estoit pityè de l'oyr, ne criant sinon: “Helas! mon Dieu, ayez pitié de ceste pauvre pecheresse!” La duchesse, pour entendre que c'estoit, s'approcha d'elle, en luy disant: “M'amye, qu'avez vous, et d'où estesvous? Qui vous amene en ce lieu cy?”

(426-27;542)

Here the nun seeks forgiveness following Briçonnet's advice: admitting her guilt [“frappant sa coulpe”], she asks for pardon directly from God. And as if to illustrate Briçonnet's assurance, “il ne reste que à demander que n'ayons tout. Qui demande obtient …,” her prayer is immediately answered. To the devisants, who had listened to Oisille read that morning from the “Canonicque de sainct Jehan” (420;535) the scene might well have recalled the words that stand behind Briçonnet's: “Et quelque chose que nous demanderons nous le receverons de luy” (1 John 3:22).⁴⁵ It is surely not a coincidence that the scene takes place in the eglise de Sainct Jehan. The duchess appears, like a dea ex machina, to facilitate the nun's reconciliation with God.

As if to reinforce the remarkable—we might even say implausible—quality of the encounter, the nun unwittingly reveals that the duchess's arrival at that moment is the answer to a yet unuttered prayer. “La pauvre religieuse, qui ne la congnoissoit poinct, luy dist: ‘Helas! m'amye, mon malheur est tel, que je n'ay recours que à Dieu, lequel je suplie me donner moien de parler à madame la duchesse d'Alençon, car, à elle seule, je conterai mon affaire, estant asseurée que, s'il y a ordre, elle le trouvera’” (426-27;542). The nun's statement, as indeed the entire exchange between the two women, is striking for both its theological and its narratological implications. Her recognition that her only recourse is God is correct evangelical doctrine. The narrator corroborates that position by introducing the scene in the church as an act of divine providential intervention: “Dieu voulut que. …”

In the course of the story the nun has moved from beliefs about repentance and reconciliation that the Reformers attacked: that holy water could efface her sin and that a pilgrimage to Rome could restore her virginity, to the belief that she is totally powerless and that only “Dieu beneficque, donnateur et liberal” will save her. And she respects Briçonnet's admonition that even the pardoned sinner should confess her sins. However, in a curious displacement of hierarchy, she asks God to give her the opportunity both to “confess” her sin and to tell her story [“je conterai mon affaire”] not to a priest but to the duchess of Alençon, and she expresses her assurance that, if there is order to be found in that “affaire,” the duchess will find it.

In answering the nun, the duchess creates a fictional double to hide her true identity: “‘M'amye,’ ce luy dist la duchesse, ‘vous povez parler à moy comme à elle, car je suis de ses grandes amyes’” (427;542). It is not entirely clear at this point why the duchess does that, but it makes the nun resist: “‘Pardonnez-moy,’ dist la religieuse, ‘car jamais aultre qu'elle ne saura mon secret.’” The formula “Pardonnez-moy” evokes confession as the nun insists on the duchess's exclusive right to know her secret, to hear her story. “Alors la duchesse luy dist qu'elle povoit parler franchement et qu'elle avoit trouvé ce qu'elle demandoit.” The second part of the duchess's statement to the nun makes the reader pause. What is the antecedent of ce? Taken generally, the word could simply refer to “her wish,” as in the Chilton rendering “her wish was granted” (542). But what wish? If it is the wish to speak to the duchess, celle seems more appropriate: she had found the woman she was asking for. Ce allows for ambiguity. It could also mean the forgiveness for her sins, the answer to her plea: “mon Dieu, ayez pitié de ceste pauvre pecheresse.” The duchess told her that she could speak freely and that she had (already) found what she was asking for. The duchess would then be reassuring her with Briçonnet's message: “Qui demande pardon de ses pechéz par vraie repandance et foy, ils sont pardonnéz avant que les confesser.”

The ensuing scene reinforces the image of the duchess as evangelical confessor: “La pauvre femme se gecta à ses piedz, et, après avoir pleuré et cryé luy racompta ce que vous avez ouy de sa pauvreté. La duchesse la reconforta si bien, que, sans lui oster la repentance continuelle de son peché, luy mist hors de l'entendement le voiage de Romme” (427;542).⁴⁶ The duchess hears the story of the nun's sin, comforts the sinner and shows a reformer's attitude toward the practice of imposing a penance. She removes the traditional penance of pilgrimage but leaves in place “la repentance continuelle de son peché.” The notion of continual repentance recalls Luther's first thesis: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of penance.”

The story ends, as do stories 22 and 41, with a woman of authority reestablishing order, helping the female victim to resume normal life in a community of women and having the wicked priest punished. The duchess sends the nun back to her convent, “avecq des lettres à l'evesque du lieu, pour donner ordre de faire chasser ce religieux scandaleux” (427;543). She exercises her authority by writing letters that give an order. The word ordre in the story's final sentence echoes the nun's statement that she would tell her story, “mon affaire,” only to the duchess of Alençon, “estant asseurée que, s'il y a ordre, elle le trouvera” (426-27;542). The duchess has indeed put the nun's affairs back in order. But her task of finding and giving order assumes a larger dimension in the light of the duchess's double identity: “madame la duchesse d'Alençon, qui depuis fut royne de Navarre” (426;542). The woman represented in the third person, whose authoritative intervention saves the nun, is of course the author herself, Marguerite de Navarre. The story figures her as consoling confessor and powerful rescuer but just as pointedly as storyteller, as narrator, and as author. A storyteller must learn the secrets of others in order to find the material for her narrative. When Dagoucin introduces “la duchess d'Alençon, qui depuis fut royne de Navarre,” the duchess is hiding her true identity, casting a veil of secrecy about herself as she entered the church: “[elle] alloit secretement faire quelque neufvaine” (426;542). She is entering the secret space of narrative. When she first hears, then sees the nun, she becomes an eaves-dropper: “afin d'entendre ses devotions, se retira la duchesse au coing de l'autel.” She thereby enters the intimate space of the nun, “qui pensoit estre seulle.” When she hears the pitiful prayer, she approaches the nun, “pour entendre que c'estoit” and asks her a series of questions that will draw out her story. The duchess shows the curiosity of a voyeur, and in that respect she figures all narrators. In this case the nun willingly recounts her affaire, but it becomes the story we read only after the duchess has found and given it order (“s'il y a ordre, elle le trouvera,” 427;542).

In the discussion opening the day in which this story is told, the narrator says that the devisants spent their midday meal “parlans encore de la Journée passée, se defians d'en povoir faire une aussy belle” (421;535). In response to the challenge of creating stories worthy of those in the preceding day, “pour y donner ordre, se retirerent chascun en son logis.” The devisants withdraw into a private space in order to begin the task of fabulation, the work of giving order to the secrets they have found in the hidden corners of human experience. When the last sentence of the story describes the duchess giving an order that will punish the priest, it is not just a coincidence that the words echo those of the day's prologue. Political authority and narration are linked in the expression donner ordre, just as the politically powerful female figure in the story and the author of the Heptameron are linked. Dagoucin, the fictional narrator of the story, acknowledges the duchess in the next line of text, the first line of the discussion following the story: “Je tiens ce compte de la duchesse mesme” (427;543).

The phrase “la duchesse d'Alençon, qui depuis fut royne de Navarre” heralds the subtle but crucial dynamic between character, narrator, and author in the Heptameron. Just as the duchess hides her identity from the nun, presenting herself to the woman through the mediation of a fiction (“vous povez parler à moy comme à elle, car je suis de ses grandes amyes”), Marguerite de Navarre the author conceals her authorial identity from the reader and represents herself through the mediation of a powerful female authority figure, the historical character, Marguerite de Navarre. Whoever is responsible, author or editor, for making this story the final one in the collection, it is fitting that the Heptameron's nouvelles end with such a striking signature of authorial control.

The confession stories portray strong, maternal women rescuing vulnerable younger women from threatening paternal figures.⁴⁷ And these stories reflect the relationship between the authorial voice of Marguerite de Navarre and the political authority of the same name represented in the Heptameron. One of the best-kept secrets in that book is the identity of its authorial voice. Just as the tearful young girl needed the help, first of her mother, then of the laughing countess, just as the nun sought help from the duchess, so the authorial voice in the Heptameron, an unobtrusive voice, seeks and appropriates authority by portraying powerful women characters, especially one named Marguerite de Navarre. That character becomes a signature of authority and a strategy allowing the author to remain anonymous. She is an advocate, “une grande amye” of the authorial voice. But, like the invisible hand that operates a puppet, the authorial voice is the stronger of the two, because she controls and manipulates self-representation. Like the untold but telling secret in story 41, the near-silent authorial voice of the Heptameron is a powerful absence.

If François I thought he had successfully bullied his sister into silence (thereby doing just the opposite of what Marie Héroet's brother did by carrying his sister's text forth into the public world), he underestimated her rhetorical strategies.⁴⁸ Her romans jovials continue the tradition of her mystical poetry by forcefully advocating dogmes nouveaux. The author silences herself so that she can speak louder.

Notes

1. Several important studies have called attention to the linking of women's speech and sexual licentiousness throughout history: R. Howard Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” Representations 20 (Fall 1987): 1-24; Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender and Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987); Margaret Ferguson, “A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers,” in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, ed. C. Koelb and S. Noakes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 93-116; Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123-42. Constance Jordan's thorough analysis of the Renaissance texts that codified women's enclosure as well as those which defended women is extremely valuable. See Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).

2. See Natalie Zemon Davis's essay, “Women on Top” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965-75), 124-51.

3. The literature on the history of sacramental confession is vast. For an accessible overview from a position sympathetic to but not uncritical of the church, see John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), esp. chaps. 4-8. Lea's A History of Auricular Confession in the Latin Church (see note 1) is factually detailed but markedly anticlerical in tone. The article “Pénitence,” by E. Amann and A. Michel in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique 1st ed. (Paris, 1909-1950), vol. 12.1, 722-1127, is very informative, as is Jaroslav Pelikan's The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 4, Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984). Jean Delumeau considers the 1216 Lateran decree a turning point in the history of Western mentality and examines confessional manuals and practices in L'Aveu et le pardon: Les Difficultés de la confession XIII^e-XVII^e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990). The study which most helped me in this chapter is Thomas Tentler's Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

4. See Tentler, Sin and Confession, 18-27; Delumeau, L'Aveu et le pardon, 51-56.

5. See McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls, 147-48; Lea, Auricular Confession 1.382-93; Tentler, Sin and Confession, 104.

6. Paul Chilton uses cordelier as an example of the difficulties in translating the Heptameron. See the introduction to his translation, p. 29.

7. Early Reformers, like John Wycliffe and John Hus, denied the priest's role and the necessity of sacramental confession for complete repentence and reconciliation. In 1415 the Council of Constance condemned such positions. Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. 12.1, col. 1051-52.

8. Martin Luther's 95 Theses: With the Pertinent Documents from the History of the Reformation, ed. Kurt Aland (Saint Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1967), 50.

9. Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite de Navarre, Correspondance (1521-1524), eds. Christine Martineau, Michel Veissière, and Henry Heller, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, Travaux d'humanisme et Renaissance), I, 1975; II, 1979, vol. I, p. 182. For additional documents reflecting early-Reformation beliefs about confession, documents that Marguerite would have known, see Myra D. Orth, “Radical Beauty: Marguerite de Navarre's Illuminated Protestant Catechism and Confession,” forthcoming in the Sixteenth Century Journal.

10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968), 70.

11. Margaret R. Miles has described a shift in emphasis from the visual to the auditory in Reformation theology and culture. See Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), chap. 5, “Vision and Sixteenth-Century Protestant and Catholic Reforms,” 95-125.

12. On chastity and virginity as strategies of independence in the early church, see Joyce E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London/New York: Verso, 1991); V. Burruss Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of Apocryphal Acts, (Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1987). With allowances made for the different time period under consideration, the general conclusions of these studies seem applicable to women and the church in Marguerite's time.

13. On character and characterization in the early sixteenth century, see Daniel Russell, “Conception of Self, Conception of Space, and Generic Convention: An Example from the Heptameron,” Sociocriticism 4-5 (1986-87): 159-83; and Russell's article in this book, “Some Ways of Structuring Character in the Heptameron.”

14. Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 25-46.

15. In Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1991), Margaret R. Miles examines the way that artists representing the naked female body generally deprived woman of subjectivity.

16. John Bernard notes that some of the stories allude to “a highly placed, titled female who can be viewed as a surrogate for Marguerite” (265). See “Sexual Oppression and Social Justice in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 19, no. 2 (1989): 251-81. In story 41 that surrogacy is signaled by the apparent coincidence of Marguerite d'Autriche's name.

17. Cotgrave gives among his definitions of traicter: “to deale in, or meddle with, to discourse, debate, or make mention of; also, to covenant, or contract with.” Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, reproduced from the first edition, London, 1611, intro. William S. Woods (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1950;1968). Peacemaking was one of the few public exercises of power allowed to women. See the catalog of a recent exhibition by H. Diane Russell with Bernadine Barnes, Eva/Ave: Women in Renaissance and Baroque Prints (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; and New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1990), 30.

18. Colette Winn has analyzed the rule of silence and its transgressions in “La Loi du non-parler dans l'Heptaméron de Marguerite de Navarre,” Romance Quarterly 33 (1986): 157-68.

19. See Stephen Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973); Sarah Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe,” in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers (Brighton, England: The Harvester Press, 1986), 34-57; and Michel de Certeau, La Fable mystique, 1: XVI^e-XVII^e siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).

20. See Marguerite de Navarre, Les Prisons, ed. Simone Glasson (Geneva: Droz, 1978), Introduction, 45-53; and 3.11.1313-1375; Robert D. Cottrell, The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre's Poetry (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press, 1986), 299-302; Jean Dagens, “Le ‘Miroir des simples âmes’ et Marguerite de Navarre,” in La Mystique rhénane, Colloque de Strasbourg, May 16-19, 1961 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963), 281-89.

21. “Les campagnes ecclésiastiques de la fin du Moyen Age développent les procédures qui font ‘revenir’ les expériences ‘mystiques’ dans le champ de l'institution visible. Le ressort commun de ces méthodes—leur modèle technique—semble être la confession.” Michel de Certeau, Fable, 117.

22. And again: “Her confessor will not always lend an approving ear to this,” Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985; trans. of Speculum de l'autre femme [Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974]), 198, 202.

23. Jeanne d'Albret to the Vicomte de Gourdon, August 22, 1555. B.N., F fr 17,044, fol. 446. Translated and quoted in part by Nancy Lyman Roelker in Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d'Albret (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, The Belknap Press, 1968), 127.

24. John Lyons's analysis of Rolandine's discourse first drew attention to the women in the Heptameron who speak forcefully in response to others' attempts to limit and control them. See his Exemplum: the Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), chap. 2, “The Heptameron and Unlearning from Example,” 72-117. Carla Freccero explores further the politics of voice in “Rewriting the Rhetoric of Desire in the Heptameron,” in Contending Kingdoms: Historical Psychological and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. Mary-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 298-312. For a careful reading of how such women might relate to questions of authorial and narrative voice, see Deborah N. Losse, “Authorial and Narrative Voice in the Heptaméron,” Renaissance and Reformation, 23, no. 3 (1987): 223-42. Patricia F. Cholakian has proposed that the entire Heptameron is its author's voicing her protest after she was the victim of an attempted rape. See Rape and Writing in the “Heptaméron” of Marguerite de Navarre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).

25. “Fiat confessio coram oculis omnium, in patente loco, ne subintroeat lupus rapax in angulis suadens agere quae turpe est etiam cogitare.” Orat. in C. Remens. ann. 1409 (Gousset, Actes etc., 2.657), quoted in Henry Charles Lea's A History of Auricular Confession in the Latin Church, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers and Company, 1896), vol. 1, 394.

26. “Priests were guided on how to lead the penitent through a detailed, specific recollection of each occasion of sin—what prior actions had led up to it, what emotions surged while committing it, when remorse set in, whether the resolve truly was there to avoid a similar temptation in the future.” Rudolph Bell, “Telling Her Sins: Male Confessors and Female Penitents in Catholic Reformation Italy,” in That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity, ed. Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane, and Elisabeth W. Sommer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 118. Bell's article contains colorful excerpts from the penitentials. For a more balanced view of the confessional manuals, see Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Consiglio Spirituale e controlo sociale: Manuali per la Confessione stampati in volgare prima della Controriforma,” in Città Italiane del '500 tra Riforma e Controriforma: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Lucca, 13-15 ottobre, 1983 (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 1988), 45-59. Michel de Certeau argues further that “la confession auriculaire ou privée introduit dans le savoir clérical les dérives cachées du vécu quotidien, tous les escapismes dont les secrets sont poursuivis, nommés, convoqués sous le nom de ‘péchés.’ La confession s'insinue dans le dédale des existences, elle les interroge, elle les fait parler, ainsi elle les exorcise” (Fable, 117). See also Tentler, Sin and Confession, 88-95.

27. Natalie Zemon Davis argues that similar rhetoric was needed by supplicants petitioning the king for pardon. See Fiction in the Archives (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987). The situation of a woman using storytelling skills before a man in order to assure her salvation recalls the narrative frame of The Arabian Nights.

28. Augustine attributes faulty reading of the Bible to a refusal of charity and “the reign of cupidity.” See On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson (New York: Bobbs, Merrill, 1958), 2.41.62 and 3.9.13-10.16.

29. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 38.

30. The association of sexuality, narrative, and confession is the focus of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité, 1: La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). As is often the case with Foucault's illuminating analyses, his time frame seems inaccurate for the sixteenth century. Foucault places the twilight of frank expression of sexuality only at the beginning of the seventeenth century. However, although many sixteenth-century texts might illustrate Foucault's thesis, Montaigne, in his “Sur des vers de Virgile,” records his struggles to articulate sexual experience in a culture that he says has already made it impossible to talk about sex. See Les Essais de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey and V. L. Saulnier, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 840-97.

31. Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Pierre Jourda, vol. 1 (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1962), 540. Quotations from Rabelais's Tiers Livre are cited in the text using the abbreviation TL and chapter number.

32. For an explanation of that anatomical tradition, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 40-42.

33. I call here on Patricia Parker's notion of dilation as a rhetorical trope associated with women. See Literary Fat Ladies, chap. 2, 8-35.

34. Although Tom Conley's and Hope Glidden's chapters in this book encourage me in that direction.

35. Glidden examines Barthes's notion of the probing motivation of narrative in her chapter in this book. In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks distinguishes between a male and female dynamic of plot motivation in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. See in particular, chap. 2, “Narrative Desire,” 37-61. Susan Winnet has taken issue with Brooks's gendering anatomy of narrative in “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure,” PMLA 105 (1990): 505-18.

36. John Lyon's paper, “The ‘Cueur’ in the Heptaméron,” delivered at the conference on Marguerite de Navarre held at Duke University in April 1992, suggested that connection to me. Acts forthcoming, ed. Marcel Tetel.

37. For more on the internal narrators in those stories, see the chapters by François Rigolot, François Cornilliat and Ullrich Langer, and Hope Glidden in this book. Response to my paper on the duke of Burgundy as a voyeuristic narrator, “The Poetics of Desire in Heptameron 70,” delivered at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in 1991, helped me a great deal in this present chapter.

38. See the biographical notice in F. Gohin's critical edition of Antoine Héroet, Oeuvres poétiques, Société des Textes Français Modernes (Paris: Cornély, 1909), ix.

39. Cathleen M. Bauschatz argues that the Heptameron frequently portrays men as unfit to teach or preach to women. See her contribution to this book, “Voylà, mes dames … : Inscribed Women Listeners and Readers in the Heptameron.”

40. For Imputé, Cotgrave gives “Imputed, attributed, ascribed unto; laid unto the charge of” and for “Imputation” he gives “An imputation; reproach, blame, or fault laid to the charge of” (A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues).

41. Late medieval theological debate about the seal of confession argued whether a penitent was morally bound—or morally forbidden—to reveal the name of the partner with whom he or she had committed a sin. The distinctions the priest raises as mitigating circumstances—that their act was not adultery because neither is married and not a serious offense because there was no scandal—echo the refinements found in the penitentials.

42. See François Cornilliat's analysis of this story in “Pas de miracle: La Vierge et Marguerite dans l'Heptaméron,” Travaux de Littérature, forthcoming.

43. Her reaction is understandable. Loss of virginity was considered the greatest catastrophe that could happen to a nun. Virginity, its maintenance and its loss, was a favorite topic in the patristic writings that continued to prescribe monastic life. Saint Jerome's “Letter to Eustochium” gives a chastening description of the end awaiting the woman who fails to protect her virginity. For a study of this tradition in the monastic rules of the Middle Ages, see Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, “The Heroics of Virginity: Brides of Christ and Sacrificial Mutilation,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 29-72.

44. In the patristic literature on virginity and the consequences of its loss, there was doubt that even God could save a fallen virgin. Saint Jerome warns, “although God can do all things, He cannot raise up a virgin after she has fallen.” See The Letters of St. Jerome: Ancient Christian Writers, trans. Charles Christopher Mierow (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1963) 1.138. Quoted in Schulenburg, “The Heroics of Virginity,” 33.

45. 1 John 3:22, Le Nouveau Testament, trans. Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples (Facsimile de la première édition Simon de Colines, 1523, Yorkshire: S.R. Publishers Ltd.; New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation; Paris: Editions Mouton & Co., 1970). John's epistle echoes in turn Matt. 21:22.

46. Briefer suggestions of women assuming the priest's role as confessors include story 67, where a man dies, “n'aiant service ne consolation que de sa femme, laquelle le servoit de medecin et de confesseur” (393-504). Again, in story 25, where the prince's curious sister, presumably a representation of Marguerite de Navarre, seeks information about her brother's secret life: “La seur, qui eut envie de sçavoir quelle congnoissance ce beau pere avoit de la bonté de son frere, l'interrogea si fort, que, en luy baillant ce secret, sous le voile de confession” (206;289).

47. These stories of maternal support provide another dimension of what Carla Freccero has called the Heptameron's “mother-daughter dialogue.” See her “Marguerite of Navarre” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 145-48. If, as Freccero notes, the book often depicts maternal authority serving the patriarchal order, it also offers models of maternal figures protecting and empowering young women against that order.

48. Several recent studies have heightened my awareness of such strategies. Annabel Patterson has examined the way censorship pressured English Renaissance writers into developing rhetorical strategies that also led to thematic, formal, and stylistic innovations. Although she does not discuss the Heptameron, in her introduction she uses the example of Clément Marot. See Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Alison Weber argues that Teresa of Avila used complex rhetorical strategies to negotiate her place in Inquisition Spain. See Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990). In a different area, but one that has been very suggestive for my present work, Joan DeJean has shown how Lafayette maintained and manipulated a posture of anonymity surrounding the publication of La Princesse de Clèves. See “Lafayette's Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity,” PMLA 99, no. 5 (1984): 884-902. Susan Sniader Lanser's Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), brings together feminist and narratological theory to analyze the emerging voices of women authors. Finally, Catherine Randall Coats has studied the effect of Calvinist theological conventions on the shaping of d'Aubigné's authorial voice. See Subverting the System: D'Aubigné and Calvinism, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 14, Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, Inc., 1990). All of these studies suggest that examining extra-textual constraints may lead to a richer understanding of the authorial voice in the Heptameron.

As co-editor of this book I have been privileged to read the chapters of the other contributors while I was revising my own. I have tried to acknowledge particular debts, but my thinking has profited in a more general way from all of them.