SOURCE: “Inmost Cravings: The Logic of Desire in the Heptameron,” in Critical Tales: New Studies of the Heptameron and Early Modern Culture, edited by John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 3-24.

[In the following essay, Cottrell argues that the Heptameron is guided by spiritual concerns, despite the explicitly worldly themes of the stories.]

“Nous sommes tous encloz en peché.”

—“Novella 26,” Heptameron

“Omnes peccaverunt.”

—Romans 3.23 (Vulgate)

In the Prologue to the Heptameron, the ten stranded travelers—that is to say, the devisants in the frame-narrative—ask Oisille, the most venerable of the group, how they might best occupy themselves during the several days they must spend together while waiting for a bridge to be built. Oisille answers that the only remedy she has ever found for boredom and sorrow is “la lecture des sainctes lettres” (7;66) and explains that she spends her days reading Scripture, “contemplant la bonté de Dieu” (7;66), and singing “les beaulx psealmes et canticques que le sainct Esperit a composé au cueur de David et des autres aucteurs” (7;66). The other devisants observe that Oisille's remedy is not appropriate for them, for they, being younger and more deeply committed to wordly pursuits, need amusement and diversion. Eventually they decide to assemble for one hour each morning in Oisille's room to listen to her read a biblical “lesson” and then to reassemble in the afternoon in a beautiful meadow where they will tell each other stories, the only stipulation being that all the stories must be true. Oisille's biblical “lessons” are not recorded in the text itself, which, except for brief prologues that introduce each “journée,” consists of the stories the devisants tell each other and the discussions that follow each novella.

In his important work on the Heptameron,¹ Philippe de Lajarte distinguishes two discursive registers that, in his view, mark textual practice in Marguerite de Navarre's text. Calling one register “the sacred” and the other “the profane” (“Le Prologue de l'Heptaméron,” 410), de Lajarte claims that the prologue to the Heptameron stages the disappearance of “the sacred” from the profane world of phenomena. Pointing out that the devisants choose not to follow Oisille's example, de Lajarte argues that Marguerite de Navarre's text is a semantic field from which “the sacred” has withdrawn, leaving behind, however, faint traces, which are discernible mainly in Oisille's speech. Because “the sacred” has retreated from the world of the text, the Heptameron, according to de Lajarte, circumscribes a space that has been invaded by phenomena, by “the profane.” To emphasize his point, de Lajarte contrasts the Heptameron sharply with Les Prisons, the long poem Marguerite de Navarre wrote while composing the Heptameron, and maintains that whereas Les Prisons is informed by what he calls the “archaic” ideology of a transcendent Logos, the Heptameron unfolds outside the “monologisme logocentrique” (“Le Prologue de l'Heptaméron,” 419) of sacred speech.

In this chapter, I shall present a different view. I shall suggest that the Heptameron, like Les Prisons (and, indeed, like every one of Marguerite de Navarre's texts) is powerfully informed by “the sacred,” by the Logos, by a Real that is situated eternally beyond the world of phenomena but that is simultancously always inscribed in it. That Real is, of course, Christ, the Word made flesh, which, from the Christian perspective that shapes Marguerite's views as well as those of all the protagonists in the Heptameron, operates in the hic et nunc of phenomena, in the fleshy, sinful, suffering world of the desiring body.

Throughout the Heptameron, the stress on physicality and on pain conforms to the traditions of a culture whose signifying center is occupied by the figure of the Passion. All other figures derive their meaning from the figure of Christ's body, which is a testimony to God's humanization and which is displayed in spectacular, public suffering. As Caroline Walker Bynum has noted, late medieval and Renaissance piety was deeply experiential.² Devotional writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries displayed Christ's suffering body, making of it, and of the human body generally, the privileged place where the Christian can experience Christ.³ As Paul reminded the Romans (8:17), the only way to share Christ's glory is to share his suffering. Christians, Paul affirmed, must offer their bodies to God as a living sacrifice (Rom. 12:1).

The Logos inscribed in the Heptameron is mediated mainly by Paul.⁴ In the prologue to the sixth day, we learn that the scriptural text the devisants studied and meditated on during the previous five mornings was Paul's Epistle to the Romans. (During the morning of the sixth day, they read 1 John; during the morning of the seventh day, Acts and the beginning of Luke; during the morning of the eighth day, they prolonged their devotions in order to read the Epistles of John all the way through.) The biblical text most massively present in the Heptameron is, then, Romans, which, more than any other book in the New Testament, stresses the sinful fleshiness of man's fallen state, from which faith alone can save him. The exemplum that informs the Heptameron from beginning to end is the figure of Christ, who, as Paul explained to the Philippians, humiliated himself and emptied himself of his divinity—or rather of the glory to which his divinity entitled him—and became incarnate in a human body: “He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are; and being in every way like a human being, He was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross” (Phil. 2:7-8).⁵

In the theologically rich discussion that follows the apparently foolish and trivial “Novella 34” (finding wisdom in what appears foolish is an important Christian topos to which the devisants themselves here allude), Hircan, often thought to be the most cynical and “materialist” of the devisants, declares that “la nature des femmes et des hommes est de soy incline à tout vice, si elle n'est preservée de Celluy à qui l'honneur de toute victoire doibt estre rendu” (254;345). Oisille, referring to Paul's observation in Romans 1:24 that “inmost cravings” compel the flesh to do what the spirit abhors (Oisille notes that this was the very text they had read that morning), remarks that the absence of grace and faith is registered on the body as “desordre” (254;344), as unruly graphemes that are visible and legible. And Longarine, the youngest and usually considered to be the most frivolous of the devisants, notes that God's grace, operating through a scopic economy, often makes the sin that is hidden in our heart visible across the surface of our body so that we can see it, thus allowing us to “experimenter [notre] nature pecheresse, par les effectz du dehors” (254;344).

Human beings, then, are “naturally” sinful. The Heptameron is a record of human sinfulness writ large enough for all to see. Pursuing in their individual ways “le chemin où Dieu les conseilloit” (3;62), the devisants find themselves assembled “miraculeusement” (6;65, the text says that God bestowed his grace upon them) at Notre Dame de Sarrance, a site that is constituted as a place of momentary exile that the travelers will soon leave as they go forth and continue to look for a road that will take them back home. They thank God for his great mercy and beseech him to assist them on their return journey, adding that if they return home safely it will not be their doing but rather God's.

If the flood from which they were saved evokes the image of the flood from which Noah was saved, it also evokes the waters of baptism.⁶ In Romans 6, which Briçonnet interpreted at length in his letter of May 18, 1522, to Marguerite, Paul explains that baptism joins us to Christ's Passion and initiates us into his death.⁷ In baptism we are “joined to Him by dying a death like His” (Rom. 6:5). Baptism is a sacrament that, to use a favorite word of the late fourteenth-century English anchoress, Juliana of Norwich, “ones”⁸ us with the figure of Christ's suffering and humiliated body, so like ours in every respect. Salvation, which becomes a virtuality at the time of baptism, depends upon our willingness to “one” ourself with his tormented body and to acknowledge the sinfulness of the flesh, which, as long as we are in this world, will bear the marks of Adam's disobedience.

Like the human creature whose body registers visible signs of the Fall, the Heptameron is a script across whose surface are inscribed the signs of sin rendered legible. It is a confession of “la fragilité de noz cueurs” (221;306), to cite Longarine, who here echoes the words Hircan had just spoken: “En bien nous mirant, n'aurons besoing de couvrir nostre nudité de feulles, mais plustost confesser nostre fragilité” (221;305). In its own materiality, in its splits, divisions, gaps, ruptures, and contradictions, the text is a body that re-presents the human body, which, burdened with fleshiness, with its cravings for pleasure and for pain, is the site God chose for his incarnation, the place where, according to God's plan, the Christian encounters Christ. For, as Monseigneur d'Avannes, restating the Augustinian topos that God makes use of the visible and the fleshy to lead us to the invisible and the divine, explains in “Novella 26”: “Dieu, incongneu de l'homme, sinon par la foy, a daigné prendre la chair semblable à celle de peché, afin qu'en attirant nostre chair à l'amour de son humanité, tirast aussi notre esprit à l'amour de sa divinité; et s'est voulu servyr des moyens visibles, pour nous faire aymer par foy les choses invisibles” (214;298).

THE POLITICS OF GENDER

Although the devisants in the Heptameron all belong to the same aristocratic circle, antagonisms emerge, the most important of which is what may seem at first to be an ontological split between men and women. The tension between men and women in the Heptameron reflects no doubt the mores of a sixteenth-century aristocratic society shaped by the masculine ethos of conquest, honor, and military glory, an ethos that the increasingly powerful bourgeoisie appropriated for its own purposes and translated into the language of economic and, according to Michel Foucault, sexual power.⁹ Indeed, throughout the Heptameron women are figured as possessors of a precious commodity (chastity) that men seek to despoil. Addressing with astonishing frankness the five aristocratic women present among the devisants, Geburon claims to speak for men when he says that “nostre gloire, nostre felicité et nostre contentement, c'est de vous veoir prises et de vous oster ce qui vous est plus cher que la vie” (133;208). Female honor, on the other hand, is shaped by a different dynamic, for, as the text points out several times, a woman's honor depends on denying men access to the priceless commodity she possesses, metaphorized variously as a treasure (37;100) and, in a tradition that was codified in Le Roman de la rose, a flower (182;261).

Although there is no doubt that the relationship between men and women in the Heptameron reflects to some degree the social environment in which the text was produced, that relationship is reduced so obsessively, so repetitively, so phantasmatically, to what Scripture calls “lust of the flesh” (1 John 2:16, King James version) that surely it is—to use the psychoanalytic term—overdetermined. Surely the “meaning” of the relationship between men and women in the Heptameron exceeds any meaning that can be secured in sixteenth-century social conventions or in the contemporary praxis of secular power.

Such overdetermined “meaning” can, I believe, be secured only in the discourse of divine power. This is simply another way of saying what the text itself says over and over—namely, that the visible and material things of this world are informed with the invisible presence of the Logos, which, operating through the mechanics of desire and of sin, humiliates and annihilates the flesh and thereby draws the beloved creature closer to Christ.

In a scriptural passage that resonates with particular force in devotional literature throughout the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, John declares in his First Epistle (2:16) that the world of matter is marked by “concupiscentia carnis,” “concupiscentia oculorum,” and “superbia vite,” words that Briçonnet, who comments on this passage twice in his letters to Marguerite, renders with only partial accuracy as “luxure, avarice et orgueil” (2.270), and which the New Jerusalem Bible translates as “disordered bodily desires, disordered desires of the eyes, pride in possession.” Although this passage is by John, the dynamics of concupiscence preoccupied Paul far more than it did John, who focused primarily on the efficacy of love. Indeed, Paul's Epistle to the Romans is an especially powerful statement of the way flesh and sin function in the economy of salvation.

Paul uses the term “flesh” to designate the matter of which the body is composed. Occasionally he uses other terms, such as “human nature,” “natural inclinations,” “physical descent,” to designate the body or various of its attributes, but they are all subsumed in the word “flesh.”¹⁰ “Flesh,” therefore, is constituted primarily as the arena in which the passions and sin operate. Augustine, elaborating on Paul, saw in sexual desire the passion that overrides all others. In the tradition derived from Augustine, sexual desire, therefore, epitomizes sin in general.¹¹ Often rendered as “pleasure,” it is the primary stigma of the Fall.

Marguerite, working within the theological tradition that goes back through Briçonnet to Augustine and Paul, uses the term “plaisir” in the Heptameron to designate, mainly, sex outside of marriage. But if extramarital sexual activity is a sign of our fallen state, so is sexual activity in marriage, which both Paul and Augustine tolerate only with reluctance. Indeed, love for the creature is, as Scripture teaches, incompatible with love for the Creator (I John 2:16), and in the Heptameron neither marriage nor love of another creature is a source of “joy,” this term being reserved almost exclusively for union with Christ. Briçonnet, in a passage that stresses the necessity of submitting the flesh to mortification, had explained to Marguerite that God, wanting men and women to see their insufficiency, to recognize their lack, had mingled salt and bitterness in marriage so that they would not become prisoners of passion and of pleasure. Briçonnet explains that, in accordance with God's design, the bitterness inscribed in marriage will cause the creature ultimately to reject human love and turn to Christ, the fountain of divine love:

Et pour ce que l'unyon du mary et de la femme n'est que l'ombre du mariage spirituel, qui est umbre du divin avec nature humaine …, ne voulant la bonté divine nature humaine se acoquiner et tant effriander à l'umbre, qu'elle laissast et oubliast la verité, à laquelle est appellée, et pour icelle crée, a meslé en la première umbre (qui est la mariage charnel) de l'amertume, pour suspirer et desirer l'unyon du spirituel, qui est sans amertume, umbre toutesfois de l'infinye, inexpressible doulceur, verité des deux. … Et, combien que la tristesse et douleur viegne a cause du peché …, toutesfois doulceur sans amertume n'eust esté si bon resveille matin pour congnoistre sa nature pellerine et desirer autre pays et region, où est nature humaine apellée. Et sainct Paul estime le mariage charnel (combien que embridé de tristesse) estre empechement du spirituel et, par ce, conseille se rettirer de l'umbre, pour plus commodement vaquer en oraison. Quel eust il esté sans avoir du sel au pot, qui est la tristesse, et le souvienne vous de moy, estant lors nature immortelle, eust par infidellité voulu demourer en l'ombre, sans desirer la lumiere et verité. Ce sçachant, la bonté divine, jalouze de nature humaine (de laquelle desiroit la totalle et parfaicte unyon), par la mixtion de tristesse avec plaisir, luy a donné lumiere de congnoissance qu'il y autre plaisir, pur et sans enuy, en abisme et source de toute joye et consollation.

(2.251-52, emphasis added)

Marguerite's depiction of human love in the Heptameron and, indeed, elsewhere throughout her work is informed with Briçonnet's revelation that bitterness marks the relationship between men and women. Parlamente remarks that there is “pour le moins autant de peyne que de plaisir [dans le mariage]” (277;371), and Madame de Loué, the protagonist of “Novella 37,” speaking in even broader terms, observes “qu'il n'est plus grand desespoir que l'amour” (267;359). Similarly, Dagoucin says that marriage is often “un fauxbourg d'enfer” (280;374). For Marguerite, human love does not in any consistent way lead to or shade into love for Christ, which is what generally happens in works marked strongly by Neoplatonism.

There is of course an occasional Neoplatonic cast to Marguerite's thought.¹² But as Christine Martineau points out, it is important to distinguish between two fundamentally different currents of Neoplatonism in the sixteenth century.¹³ One is a religious current that runs back through Briçonnet, Lefèvre d'Etaples, a host of late medieval mystics, Cusa, Pseudo-Dionysius, and the patristic fathers. In this current, “Platonism” had been so deeply absorbed into Christianity that it was seldom thought of as being a form of “Neoplatonism.” It was simply “Christian.” The other current is what Martineau calls “un néo-platonisme amoureux,” which was mainly a literary, especially poetic, phenomenon that was a powerful force in Italian literature at the end of the fifteenth century (the key figure here is Ficino) and that marked French literature of the sixteenth century. “Néo-platonisme amoureux” became increasingly important in French literature from around 1540, the date at which Marguerite seems to have become interested in it. Throughout the 1540s, scholars in her entourage wrote texts in which Neoplatonic elements figured more or less prominently (Héroët's La Parfaicte amye and Pontus de Tyard's Solitaire premier, for example). The Neoplatonism of these texts derives almost exclusively from the Ficinian model (Martineau's “néo-platonisme amoureux”), according to which human love serves as a stepping stone to divine love.

Marguerite herself, however, never embraced the fundamental tenets of “le néo-platonisme amoureux.” In her work during the 1540s, she occasionally mentions Plato (for example, novellas “18” and “34”), always unfavorably however, with the exception of two laudatory passages in the last book of Les Prisons. In any case, Marguerite never suggests, as does Ficino, that human love can mutate into love for Christ. On the contrary, throughout her work she stresses that human love, which in the Heptameron is articulated most often in the syntax of sexual desire, is an obstacle that must be annihilated before the Christian can arrive at Christ. Even Dagoucin, the most Platonizing of the devisants, points out that one has every reason to fear “ce petit dieu [Cupidon], qui prent son plaisir à tormenter autant les princes que les pauvres, et les fortz que les foibles, et qui les aveuglit jusque là d'oblier Dieu et leur conscience, et à la fin leur propre vie” (94;163). And Madame du Vergier in “Novella 70,” realizing that her love for a certain “gentil homme” had turned her away from Christ, apostrophizes her soul before dying of grief: “Helas! ma pauvre ame, qui, par trop avoir adoré la creature, avez oblié le Createur, il fault retourner entre les mains de Celluy duquel l'amour vaine vous avoit ravie” (414;528). Insofar as we equate “Neoplatonism” with the Ficinian model (which is what twentieth-century readers nearly always do, collapsing the religious current of Neoplatonism into Augustinianism or more generally into Christianity), we must say that Marguerite is not in the least “Neoplatonic.” Her positioning of human love within the arena of sinful flesh is a mark of her profound rejection of Ficinian “Neoplatonism.”

“WOMAN AS SYMBOL OF HUMANITY”

¹⁴ Nearly all the men in the Heptameron are driven by “la fureur de la concupiscence” (189;269), by a peculiarly masculine “malice”¹⁵ that compels them to satisfy their desire in a paroxysm of what the text calls “jouissance” (140;217) on the conquered and humiliated, often raped and wounded, female body. The occasional woman in the Heptameron who is driven by sexual desire (for example, Jambicque in “Novella 43”) ends up not by conquering the body of the Other as men do, but by being herself subjected to humiliation, the marks of which are inscribed on her body. (To discover the identity of his mysterious masked mistress, Jambicque's lover makes a chalk mark on the back of her shoulder as they embrace so that he can later identify her at court.)

Throughout the Heptameron, the humiliated body is far more often female than male, although there are examples of humiliated male bodies, too. The violence done to the female body in the Heptameron is not only, perhaps not even mainly, the violence of sexual politics grounded in a patriarchal order that, equating woman with matter and man with spirit, exercized repressive control over woman's body. It is also the sacramental violence that Christ demands of all humans, men and women, who seek to join him in “joy.” Paul had declared that “in Christ … there can be neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). Male and female share in Christ an identity where opposites meet and are negated. To relate the treatment of the female body in the Heptameron only to the sexual politics of the Valois court is to restrict meaning to mimesis. In the devotional and representational practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the female body was not legible first of all as mimesis but as sign. To read images of the “mortified” female body mimetically only, that is, to see in them nothing more than reflections of reified female bodies exploited by males in a patriarchal society, is to bracket out the function of desire, physicality, and mortificatio in the economy of salvation.

Recent studies of late medieval piety demonstrate that women theologians and mystics (and an increasing number of male mystics) saw woman as the symbol of all humanity, where humanity was understood as physicality.¹⁶ Mary, redeeming and recuperating Eve, was the human source of salvation. Through her, the Word was made flesh. Ambrose had explained that although Christ “did not take His origin from the Virgin,” he did take his body from her; Christ may be “white … for He is the brightness of the Father,” but he is also “ruddy, for He was born of a Virgin.”¹⁷ All medieval theologians agreed that Christ, who did not have a human father, took his flesh from Mary. Hildegard of Bingen even argued that since Christ's body was formed from Mary's flesh it is identical with female flesh.¹⁸ In Hildegard's view, female flesh, therefore, restores the world. Briçonnet repeatedly identified woman with the earth, with flesh, with humanity: “Terre, chair et femme (qui est ung)” (2.259); “le Verbe superceleste [chemine] en terre (en nature humaine)” (2.239). Elsewhere he observed that God used a woman to save the world, “car de la femme (qui est la sacrée Vierge) est le doux Jhesus vraye semence de vie, venu pour nous retirer de Sodome et Gomorre, mer et abisme de peché” (2.249).

Given that the dynamics of salvation required a “taking on” of Christ's pain (mortificatio), women often sought to join with Christ by emphasizing their own physicality and weakness. In the spirituality of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the imitatio Christi, tracing an arc that moves from the pain of mortificatio to the jubilation of illuminatio, was staged more often than not across flesh that was theorized as female. Registering the mystical imperative to annihilate the body in order to accede to union with Christ, woman's body represented the flesh of all humans. As such, it was the supreme carnal site for securing Christian experience.

In both her poetry and prose, Marguerite de Navarre conforms to a tradition (going back through Augustine to the Bible) in which spiritual processes are articulated in the syntax of bodily functions. Here Briçonnet, once again, was Marguerite's mentor, for in his letters to her he presented the functions of the body as paradigms of spiritual operations. Eating was one of the most important of those functions and one of the richest in spiritual implications. Images of eating and drinking abound in Briçonnet's letters to Marguerite, who repeats them and elaborates on them in her letters back to him. In part, Briçonnet is making artful use of a biblical tradition, for images of food as metaphors for spiritual nourishment appear throughout the Bible. In part, he is following a tradition codified by Augustine, who, as Kenneth Burke points out, repeats almost to the point of obsession images of God as food, as, for example, in the invocation of Book Four of the Confessions, where he speaks of himself as sucking God's milk.¹⁹

Throughout the late Middle Ages, writers of mystical persuasion dwelled on the mystery of the Eucharist, which entailed, of course, eating Christ's body and drinking his blood. Recent scholarship has shown that blood, in particular, became an increasingly powerful symbol in late medieval and Renaissance devotional works.²⁰ Caroline Walker Bynum has argued that “all human exuding—menstruation, sweatings, lactation, emission of semen, etc.—were seen as bleedings.”²¹ Furthermore, all bleedings were viewed as food and nourishment. Artists and devotional writers often represented the wound in Christ's side as a breast spurting nourishing blood into a chalice held by Mary. Catherine of Siena spoke of drinking blood from the breast of mother Jesus.²² For male writers, too, Christ's body was metaphorized as food. The preacher Jean Geiler, for example, devoting a series of sermons to the Passion, allegorized Christ's crucified body as rabbit stew that God prepared for the faithful.²³

Read in the context of that tradition, which, moreover, Marguerite exploited in Le Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié, contemporaneous with the Heptameron, the alimentary and gustatory metaphors in the Heptameron acquire a rich resonance.²⁴ Over and over the text metaphorizes woman's body as a “viande,” a “bonne chere,” a “friandise” that arouses and satisfies desire. Moreover, woman's body is linked metonymically to other objects that are also figured as “viande,” the most important of which is the Bible, identified as a “viande” (328;428) that sustains us, a “norriture” (393;503) that God gave humanity. Scripture is the Word made flesh, where flesh (inseparable from the female body) is understood as nourishment.

In the spirituality of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, “le corps alimentaire”²⁵ was indistinguishable from the eroticized body. Bernard (1091-1153) had linked the eating of Christ's body and the drinking of his blood to erotic experience. Around 1200, women mystics began to articulate with increasing frequency their experience of Christ in the register of erotic desire and sexual fulfillment. They stressed their joy at feeling their body pressed against Christ's body, their ecstasy at pressing their lips against his wound, often figured as a mouth that uttered ineffably beautiful sounds. From around 1400 on, male mystics began to express their experience of Christ in similar terms. Given the “female” nature of Christ's body, it is not surprising that late medieval artists, isolating Christ's wound for specific, almost fetishistic depiction, represented it in some instances very like a vulva.²⁶ At the heart of “le sacré médiéval” there is, as Jean Wirth has noted, “une série d'équivalences symboliques entre la nourriture, le sexe et la parole. L'acte sacré par excellence est l'union fécondante due à la manducation du Verbe.”²⁷

If in the Heptameron the word “plaisir” designates primarily sexual gratification and is sharply distinguished from “amour,” it also designates the gratification that is derived from speech. “Le plaisir de parler” is often linked with “le plaisir de faire bonne chere,” one of the text's euphemisms for sexual activity. In the Heptameron, speaking, like eating, is eroticized. Several times Longarine, whose name suggests skillful speaking (langue orine: “golden tongue”), declares that, for men at least, sexual gratification is incomplete until it is articulated in the register of discourse. “Il n'y a veneur qui ne prenne plaisir à corner sa prise” (322;422), she says, referring to the practice of sounding a horn when the animal pursued in a hunt is caught. In “Novella 18,” speech is a substitute for sex. The lady in the novella demands that her suitor spend the night with her in bed, without, however, seeking to obtain any sexual favors other than kisses and speech. Although he was tempted to seize the “bonne chere qu'elle luy feist” (138;215), he kept his promise to restrain his passion and spent the night talking to her.

In the prologue, the devisants discussed how they might spend the ten days waiting for the bridge to be built. (Catherine of Siena spoke of Christ's body as a bridge the Christian must cross.)²⁸ Politely rejecting Oisille's suggestion that they spend their time in meditation and devotion, Hircan proposed that they engage in “les passetemps ou deux seullement peuvent avoir part” (9;68). Parlamente, in turn, rejected this proposal as inappropriate and suggested that they tell each other stories. Accepting Parlamente's suggestion, the devisants relate stories that turn out, however, to be substitutes for the very activities they had rejected. Their stories and the discussions that follow are informed by the imperatives of both spiritual and erotic desire, displaced now from devotion (Oisille's solution to the temporality of existence) and from sex (Hircan's solution to the same problem) into speech and textual production.

The Heptameron can be viewed, then, as a phantasy generated in part by erotic desire that is openly avowed in the prologue and then repressed. In the economy of the text, the “repressed” returns in a discourse where speech itself becomes an erotic act. But if erotic desire is displaced onto the text, so too is what one might call “devotional” desire. The Heptameron can be read as a commentary on—a staging, embodiment, or “enfleshment” of—the scriptural passages (Romans, mainly) that the devisants reflect upon every morning. Though not overtly manifest in the text except in an occasional citation, Scripture circulates through the interstices of human speech, filling discourse with the invisible presence of the Word.

The devotional nature of the Heptameron becomes even more apparent if we read the text in light of devotional practices in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. In an article entitled “The Humanity and the Passion of Christ,” Ewert Cousins points out that “the roots of meditation on the life of Christ can be traced to the monastic lectio divina,”²⁹ a slow and meditative reading of Scripture that, throughout the late Middle Ages, focused more and more on Christ as the man of sorrows. Stress on Christ's body, on his suffering flesh, resulted in devotional practices in which visual images played an increasingly important role. In line with the tendency toward greater affectivity in devotion, the notion of pietas became inseparable from the sense of compassion and pity: the pity of Christians before the image of the crucified Christ and the pity of Christ and his saints before the image of human misery and suffering.³⁰ Devotion merged into what Alois Maria Hass calls “an urgent ‘passion-mysticism.’”³¹

With increasing frequency, wealthier Christians sought to provoke Christ's pity and to express their own compassion by commissioning paintings in which they were represented as penitents. Given to churches, these paintings were not only expressions of devotional impulses but also emblems of social status, wealth, and power. Put on display, they served as the focus of public, sometimes spectacular, devotional practices that became increasingly theatrical in nature. Wirth has pointed out the extent to which devotion became “performative”: “Visant à un gain spirituel, la dévotion peut être assimilée symboliquement au travail ou au jeu, mais c'est l'assimilation au jeu qui l'emporte, vu la disproportion du gain et l'engagement affectif. Les écrits dévots opposent Marthe et Marie, le travail et la dévotion oisive; ils utilisent le symbolisme du jeu érotique en développant les metaphores du Cantique des cantiques. La parenté entre la dévotion et le jeu est non moins évidente dans l'utilisation du terme devozione, en Italie, pour désigner le théâtre religieux.”³²

Of Marguerite de Navarre's poems, Le Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié is a particularly forceful demonstration of the mechanics of devotion expressed in the register of the private and the individual.³³ Articulated in the language of tears, it illustrates how pity flows back and forth between Christ and the Christian, between the image that is the object of devotion and the spectator who, at the termination of the devotional exercise, is the recipient of Christ's pity. Insofar as the Heptameron is informed by a devotional urge, the text is legible as a representation of devotion cast now in the register of the public and the social. Read through the grid of devotional practices, the novellas function as images that do indeed often draw tears from those present. The elegance of the assembled devisants, the elaborate orchestration of each afternoon's performance (the order of the speakers, the alternation of male and female voices, and so on), and the beauty of the site where each performance takes place all point to a sumptuousness and a spectacularity that, because of sumptuary laws and prohibitions against games, had been confined to devotion, which in Wirth's words, “apparaît ainsi comme la seule pratique somptuaire et ludique qui soit légitime et honorable.”³⁴

Theatricality is heightened by the fact that the devisants carefully rehearse their parts before each performance. Furthermore, they perform before an audience, for with the permission of the devisants, monks from the monastery lie in a ditch behind a row of bushes that separates them from the aristocratic storytellers and listen, spellbound, to everything that is said. Here the theatrical shades off into the confessional. The claim that all the stories are true is consistent with the confessional format within which the performances take place. “Confession,” as Foucault has pointed out, “is one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth.”³⁵ Moreover, the stress on concupiscentia carnis is also consistent with the confessional format, for (quoting Foucault again) from the Middle Ages on “sex [has been] a privileged theme of confession.”³⁶

The Heptameron, then, is deeply informed with the problematic of penance, which, as Paul suggests in his letter to the Romans, is inseparable from the phantasmatic of “fleshy” desire. As creatures of “flesh and blood,” we are “slaves to sin” (Rom. 7:14). But if Paul stresses the weakness of flesh, inevitably driven to sin, he also stresses salvation through faith. Eschatology is central to the Pauline tradition. It is also central to all of Marguerite de Navarre's work. The Heptameron generates its most powerful meanings when the relationship the text maps out between man and woman is seen in light of Pauline eschatology, when, that is to say, it is situated in the economy of salvation.

In Romans 5 (the biblical chapter Briçonnet and Marguerite mention most often in their correspondence), Paul says that because of Adam's disobedience, sin and death “spread through the whole human race” (5:12) only to be overcome in turn by the obedience and sacrifice of another man, Jesus, who, performing his father's will, delivered from death those who have faith in him. “Christ,” Paul says, “died for the godless” (5:6); “we have been justified by His death” (5:9). Throughout her poetry, Marguerite maps the journey from sin to salvation (a road each Christian, guided by faith, seeks to follow) as a progression away from the old Adam, figure of the reign of sin and the harsh retribution of the Law, to the new Adam, to Christ, to the “new man,” figure of a salvation that is effected through suffering and mortificatio, divestiture and loss.³⁷

The same journey, I believe, is mapped out in the Heptameron. The increased devotional fervor of the devisants (manifested, for example, by the enthusiasm with which they extend their morning devotions on the eighth day) and the shift away from Romans after the fifth day toward the letters of John, redolent with the spirit of love and grace, point powerfully to progress along the via Christi.³⁸ Compelled by the storm to remain for ten days at Notre Dame de Sarrance, the devisants undertake a spiritual journey that, like all spiritual journeys, depends on the arrest of time. Or rather, on the perception that time, like flesh, is a medium designed to be “used” (uti), as Augustine says, “used up” or “annihilated” (anichilé), as Briçonnet puts it.

THE POETICS OF CHASTITY

Augustine stressed that the road the Christian travels is not “a road from place to place but a road of the affections.”³⁹ What propels the Christian forward is desire. Analyzing the nature of desire, Augustine distinguished between “things that are to be enjoyed” and “things that are to be used” (DDC 1.4.9). The only “things” that are to be enjoyed are “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” (DDC 1.5.10). All other “things” are to be “used.” Now desire, which is harbored in the flesh, constantly exerts a pull toward “fleshy” things that ought be “used” but that, because of their “perverse sweetness” (DDC 1.4.10), lure the Christian toward improper “enjoyment,” that is to say, toward sin. In the Heptameron, the drive that propels the human creature toward the improper “enjoyment” of “fleshy” things is figured mainly, but by no means exclusively, in males. Moving in the immediacy of appetitive time, males represent, in one sense at least, the old Adam. On the other hand, the drive that propels the human creature toward the only “things” that can properly be “enjoyed” is figured primarily in those females whose overwhelming desire is for chastity.

Chastity, of course, signals purity. “What,” Ambrose asked, “is virginal chastity but purity free from stain?”⁴⁰ In the Heptameron, however, chastity denotes also (and more crucially) an enjoyment that is potential and therefore not yet realized. Chastity is the supreme emblem of Christian “enjoyment,” an “enjoyment” that is deferred and that will be experienced in a future that lies outside of time itself, beyond flesh and beyond discourse. The unfinished state of the Heptameron, whatever the reasons, translates with uncanny accuracy the perception that “enjoyment,” in the Augustinian sense, can occur only beyond the “fleshy” words on the page.

Of course, not all women in the Heptameron strive to resemble Christ; and, naturally, a number of men do. Still, throughout the text, “woman” far more often than “man” is figured as that part of the human creature that strives to resemble the new Adam, or Christ, whose humanity, as we have seen, late medieval spirituality gendered as female. It is surely not by accident that the spiritual journey undertaken by the devisants during their several days together occurs at Notre Dame de Sarrance, a site to which they were miraculously led by God. In the economy of the text, the trajectory from Romans to John is identical with the movement from the old Adam to the new Adam, to Christ, figured as (female) flesh that suffers.

Although Marguerite distinguishes between chastity and virginity, early church fathers tended to use the terms interchangeably. In patristic texts, virginity always contains a reference to the blissful state of Adam and Eve before the Fall. The “paradise of virgins” to which Jerome refers is, in theological terminology, the “angelic,” or asexual, state.⁴¹ As Peter Brown points out, angels and virgins (because of the “abnormal” state of the virgin body) were viewed as “mediator[s] between the human and the divine.”⁴² In the “angelic” state, the human creature is not yet—or no longer—a sexual being. Virginity, moreover, was linked to Mary, who, by bringing Life into the world, redeemed Eve. Jerome explains that it is because of Mary that “the gift of virginity has been bestowed most richly upon women, seeing that it has its beginning from a woman.”⁴³ And Ambrose, in a passage that links Christ's humanity with female flesh, identifies Christ as “the Virgin Who bare us, Who fed us with her own milk.” “From Christ,” he observes, “the teats fail not.”⁴⁴

The desire for virginity is the desire to transcend the corporeal, a wish that amounts to a yearning to return to an original state. Though it is not inaccurate to claim, as R. Howard Bloch does, that “in this desire for totality lies the unmistakable symptom of a death wish,”⁴⁵ it is misleading, for the register in which the desire for virginity, for chastity, for totality, must be situated is not Freudian but Christian. Central to the Christian tradition is the concept of reversal. What Bloch identifies as the symptom of a death wish is an overwhelming desire for life in Christ.⁴⁶ In his letter of August 31, 1524, to Marguerite, Briçonnet, explaining that life is death and death is life, shows how the properties of each of the terms of what one would have thought to be a binary opposition cross over and come together in such a way that their opposition is inscribed into a system of exchange that is structured like a trope, chaismus, the figure that, more than any other, deeply informs Christianity.

Peter Brown has pointed out that “the debate about virginity [in the early church] was in large part a debate about the nature of human solidarity. It was a debate about what the individual did and did not need to share with fellow creatures.”⁴⁷ From the pagan point of view, sexuality was (in theory, at least) a desire that led to a social act. Marriage was an investment in the future of the social order. By refusing marriage, and more drastically, sexuality, Christians claimed for themselves a “freedom” that loosened the bonds of community. The body that was maintained in a virgin state was kept out of circulation and could not be recruited by society for its own benefit. It resisted the demands that society made on it and thus represented a threat to the sexual social contract that held society together. As the pagan elite recognized, the Christian advocacy of virginity implied a new social order that was radically different from the old.

In a key passage, Ambrose explains that “virginity is not praiseworthy because it is found in martyrs, but because itself makes martyrs” (emphasis added)⁴⁸ The supreme virtue of virginity is that it effects the annihilation and mortification of the body that allows accession to Christ. That is precisely the function of chastity in the Heptameron: it makes martyrs and thereby accomplishes the operation of grace. The woman in “Novella 2” is an exemplar of the many chaste women in the Heptameron. A mule-driver's wife, she resisted the advances of her husband's servant. Enraged by her resistance and inflamed by an “amour bestialle” (19;79), the servant stabbed the woman several times. Bleeding profusely, she grew weaker and prayed to Christ, asking him to accept her soul, secure in her faith that her sins had been effaced by the blood of his sacrifice. The servant then raped her, and she, “une martire de chasteté” (21;81), died “avecq un visaige joyeulx” (20;81), a joyful death being an infallible sign of salvation in Marguerite's works.⁴⁹

Something of the debate about what one owes society and what one can (or even must) withhold from society lingers on in Marguerite's advocacy of chastity. Distinguishing chastity from virginity, Marguerite seldom, if ever, praises virginity per se. Nor does she ascribe positive value to chastity in the sense of sexual abstinence. Throughout the Heptameron, chastity means fidelity (fides, the first of the ecclesiastical virtues). It denotes a fidelity so absolute that it “makes martyrs.” Often marriage is the scene within which fidelity—or its lack—is demonstrated. But not always. In “Novella 70” (a retelling of the thirteenth-century poem La Chastelaine de Vergi), the young and beautiful widow Madame du Vergier is secretly the mistress of a young and handsome “gentil homme.” Their love, which is “chaste, honneste et vertueuse” (413;527) and which “[n'est] tachée de nul vice” (414;528), depends on being kept secret. The young man's fidelity is manifested by his refusal to speak about his love, by his willingness to withdraw from the public arena in order to experience passion in a wholly private and inward space, figured in the text as a room in a tower of the chastelaine's castle, which is located at some distance from the court. To approach the tower, the lover must pass through a small garden door, which he locks after him. When his master, the duke, driven on by his wife's jealousy, compels the young man to reveal his love, the chastelaine dies of grief. The lover, apostrophizing his tongue as the instrument of his infidelity, kills himself for having spoken. The duke, realizing that it was his wife's speech that had made him force a confession from the young man, turns on his wife and stabs her to death. In “Novella 70,” as elsewhere in the Heptameron, silence and chastity are inseparable, one serving as a metaphor for the other and both functioning as metaphors for the inwardness of a faith so strong that, as Paul explained to the Romans, it alone separates the saved from the damned.⁵⁰

Indeed, two races inhabit the world of the Heptameron: the damned and the elect. The damned, like the Serpent, live out their lives in dust and filth, driven forward through time by the discourses of concupiscence and garrulity. Like “la mauvaise femme” in “Novella 1,” they die “miserablement” (17;77). The elect, too, are driven by a desire they cannot control. They do not choose their election; rather, they are marked for election.⁵¹ They are driven toward Christ by the fire of a faith that traverses them and consumes them, that in fact destroys their humble dreams of happiness (in marriage, family, friends, social respectability) and leaves them with no desire save the wish to be annihilated in him. God, as Briçonnet repeated over and over to Marguerite, is a consuming fire. Christ is “la fournaize virginalle” (2.231) in which the elect are burned until, reduced to “pouldre,” they are “semblables au doux Jhesus” (2.249). They are projected upward, away from the axis of metonymic succession, by the desire Paul articulated when he said, “Cupio dissolvi et esse cum Christo” (Phil. 1:23). Plotting the Christian trajectory from sin to salvation across the human body, Marguerite sees in the cry of desire (cupio) the means whereby grace, operating mysteriously and miraculously, rotates the elect away from “la terre” and propels them toward Christ.

The intense desire to escape from desire is itself the source of the desire that projects the elect toward Christ. Though the desire for chastity, for totality, for deferred enjoyment, may hold the phantasy of an escape from desire, it is itself inscribed in the logic, in the theatrics, of desire. And it is through this logic, which brings together in chiastic concatenation the violence of desire and the desire for violence, that God operates his will and draws those he has chosen to him.

Notes

1. Philippe de Lajarte, “L'Heptaméron et la naissance du récit moderne: Essai de lecture épistémologique d'un discours narratif,” Littérature 17 (1975): 31-42; “Le Prologue de l'Heptaméron et le processus de production de l'oeuvre,” in La Nouvelle française à la Renaissance, ed. Lionello Sozzi (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981), 397-423 (henceforth “Le Prologue de l'Heptaméron”); “Modes du discours et formes d'altérité dans les ‘Nouvelles’ de Marguerite de Navarre,” Littérature 55 (1984): 64-73.

2. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 399-439, esp. 413. See also Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

3. Speaking about the evangelical attitude toward death and suffering, Claude Blum, La Représentation de la mort dans la littérature française de la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 1989), vol. 1, 259, notes: “Dans cet immense jeu de significations, le corps humain tient un rôle central: il est ‘modèle,’ lieu originel de toutes les figures de Péché et de la Mort. Il devient, pour les Evangéliques, un élément privilégié d'insertion du récit de la Chute et de la Rédemption dans l'espace et le temps du monde.”

4. On the biblical intertext in the Heptameron, see Nicole Cazauran, “Les Citations bibliques dans l'Heptaméron,” in Prose et prosateurs de la Renaissance: Mélanges offerts à Robert Aulotte (Paris: SEDES, 1988), 153-61. Also Mary B. McKinley, “Scriptural Speculum: The Biblical Sub-texts in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron,” unpublished paper read at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Boston, 1989.

5. Unless indicated differently, all English translations of the Bible are from The New Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1985). The theological term for Christ's “humiliation” is kenosis. On the prominence accorded the concept of kenosis in evangelical texts, see Robert D. Cottrell, “The Poetics of Transparency in Evangelical Discourse: Marot, Briçonnet, Marguerite de Navarre, Héroët,” in Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance Essays for Donald Stone, Jr., ed. Barbara C. Bowen and Jerry C. Nash (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1991), 40-41.

6. On the thematics of water in the Heptameron, see Claude-Gilbert Dubois, “Fonds mythique et jeu des sens dans le ‘prologue’ de l'Heptaméron,” in Etudes seiziémistes offertes à M. le professeur V.-L. Saulnier par plusieurs de ses anciens doctorants, Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance 177 (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 151-68.

7. Guillaume Briçonnet and Marguerite d'Angoulême, Correspondance (1521-1524), ed. Christine Martineau, Michel Veissière, and Henry Heller. 2 vols. Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance 141 (Geneva: Droz). 1 (1975), 2 (1979). 1:195-214. Subsequent references to the Correspondance will be identified in the text by volume and page number.

8. Juliana of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1902), 143.

9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980).

10. For a discussion of Paul's term “flesh,” see The New Jerusalem Bible, p. 1877.

11. Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1989), 109-11.

12. Blum, La Représentation de la mort, vol. 1, 279: “Le platonisme fournit aux Evangéliques des images, des formules, non une spiritualité.”

13. Christine Martineau, “Le Platonisme de Marguerite de Navarre?” Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance 2, no. 4 (1976): 13-14.

14. The phrase is by Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 261.

15. The words “la malice des hommes” appear at least twice in the text, 75;143 and 295;390.

16. The literature is extensive. See in particular Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Bynum, “‘… And Woman His Humanity’: Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages,” in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Steven Harrell, Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 257-88. Also Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), and Eleanor McLaughlin, “‘Christ My Mother’: Feminine Naming and Metaphor in Medieval Spirituality,” Nashota Review 5 (1975): 229-48.

17. Ambrose, “Concerning Virgins,” in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2d series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, vol. 10 (New York: The Christian Literature, 1896), 366.

18. See Elisabeth Gössmann, “Das Menschenbild der Hildegard von Bingen und Elisabeth von Schönau vor dem Hintergrund der frühscholastischen Anthropologie,” in Frauenmystik im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer, Wissenschaftliche Studientagung der Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, February 22-25, 1984, in Weingarten (Osfildern bei Stuttgart: Schwabenverlag, 1985), pp. 24-47, and Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 264-65.

19. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 66, 119.

20. See James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative (Kortrijk, Belg.: Van Ghemmert, 1979); Lionel Rothkrug, “Popular Religion and Holy Shrines: Their Influence on the Origins of the German Reformation and Their Role in German Cultural Development,” in Religion and People, 800-1700, ed. James Obelkevich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages”; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast.

21. Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” 436.

22. See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 271.

23. See Jean Wirth, L'Image médiévale: Naissance et développements (VIe-XVe siècles) (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989), 326.

24. Marcel Tetel, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron: Themes, Language and Structure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1973), 43-54, discusses food metaphors in the Heptameron. See also Colette H. Winn, “Gastronomy and Sexuality: ‘Table Language’ in the Heptaméron,” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 7 (1986): 17-25. On food metaphors in the Briçonnet-Marguerite Correspondance, see Robert D. Cottrell, The Grammar of Silence: A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre's Poetry (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 19-21.

25. The phrase is by Wirth, L'Image médiévale, 325.

26. See the illustrations in Wirth, L'Image médiévale, 329-31.

27. Wirth, L'Image médiévale, 340.

28. Catherine of Siena, Il Dialogo della Divina Provvidenza ovvero Libro della Divino Dottrina, ed. Guiliana Cavallini (Rome: Edizioni Cateriniane, 1968), 179.

29. Ewert Cousins, “The Humanity and the Passion of Christ,” in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 377.

30. See Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1981), 14-23. Also F. O. Büttner, Imitatio Pietatis (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1983).

31. Alois Maria Hass, “Schools of Late Medieval Mysticism,” in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 155.

32. Wirth, L'Image médiévale, 279-80.

33. See Robert D. Cottrell, “The Gaze as the Agency of Presence in Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié,” French Forum 13, no. 2 (1988): 133-41.

34. Wirth, L'Image médiévale, 280. On sumptuary laws in Renaissance France, see Louise Godard de Donville, Signification de la mode sous Louis XIII (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1976), esp. “Annexe I: les édits somptuaires,” 205-13.

35. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, 58.

36. Ibid., 61.

37. On the old Adam/new Adam opposition and on the mortificatio in Marguerite's poetry, see Robert D. Cottrell, The Grammar of Silence, esp. 51, 107, 117, 174-75. On the journey metaphor and on the importance of time in the Heptameron, see Glyn P. Norton, “Narrative Function in the ‘Heptaméron’ Frame-Story,” in La Nouvelle française à la Renaissance, ed. Lionello Sozzi (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981), 435-47.

38. Paula Sommers, “Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron: The Case for the Cornice,” The French Review 57, no. 6 (1984): 786-93, argues that the increased spiritual fervor in the prologues is systematically deconstructed in the epilogues.

39. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Library of the Liberal Arts, 1958), Bk. I, Chap. 17, p. 6. Henceforth identified in the text as DDC, the numbers referring to book, chapter, and page.

40. Ambrose, “Concerning Virgins,” 366.

41. Jerome, “Letter 22,” in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2d ser., ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, vol. 6 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1961), 29.

42. Peter Brown, “The Notion of Virginity in the Early Church,” in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 433. See also Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), and Jane Tibbets Schulenburg, “The Heroics of Virginity: Brides of Christ and Sacrificial Mutilation,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 29-72. Because angels were “superior” to humans, virginity, which made humans angel-like, could be a source of power. On this, see Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989).

43. Jerome, “Letter 22,” 30.

44. Ambrose, “Concerning Virgins,” 366-67.

45. R. Howard Bloch, “Chaucer's Maiden's Head: ‘The Physician's Tale’ and the Poetics of Virginity,” Representations 28 (1989): 120.

46. Bloch is aware of this and footnotes the sentence quoted above with the words: “I am not unaware of the fact that according to a certain Christological logic, virginity can also be said to triumph over death.”

47. Brown, “The Notion of Virginity in the Early Church,” 436.

48. Ambrose, “Concerning Virgins,” 365.

49. Citing verses from Marguerite de Navarre's poetry, Blum, La Représentation de la mort, vol. 1, 280, observes, “L'heure de la mort retrouve alors une signification: elle est l'heure sans mensonges, l'instant où l'on peut distinguer les fidèles de ceux qui ne le sont pas.”

50. Virginity and silence were linked from the time of the church fathers on. Thus Georges d'Esclavonie, “chanoine et penencier de l'eglise de Tours,” in a work entitled Le Chasteau de la virginité (Paris: 1505) writes to a young girl who has just entered a convent: “Tu garderas la virginité de la langue.” Relying heavily on Jerome and especially Ambrose, d'Esclavonie notes that “la virginité a fait les anges & celuy qui la garde est devenu ange.” Observing that angels do not speak in human tongues, d'Esclavonie tells the girl that if she wishes to be like an angel she must refrain from speaking.

51. Blum, La Représentation de la mort, 213, insists on the difference between the evangelical notion of predestination and that of Calvin. He points out, however, that certain verses in Marguerite de Navarre's late poetry suggest the influence of Calvin. Calvin's influence is even stronger, I believe, in the Heptameron, a text Blum never mentions.