Critical Tales

New Studies of the "Heptameron" and Early Modern Culture

John D. Lyons, Mary B. McKinley, John D. Lyons, Mary B. McKinley

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780812232066, 9780812232066
• eBook ISBN: 9781512804171
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Appearing in print for the first time in 1558, the book that we now know as the Heptameron is the work of Marguerite, Queen of Navarre. Left incomplete, but dearly modeled on Boccaccio's Decameron, the Heptameron consists of a frame narrative and seventy-two tales told by five men and five women characters in the shady meadow at Notre Dame de Sarrance.As John D. Lyons and Mary B. McKinley contend in their introduction to this volume, the tales of the Heptameron portray the conflicts, ruptures, and upheavals that agitated early modern French society. They present a forum in which different elements of Renaissance and Reformation culture meet and, at times, collide. Contradictory suppositions about men and women are easily discerned behind almost all of the stories, and the discussions among the fictional storytellers represent attitudes both feminist and misogynist, masculinist, and misandrous. Less oppositional are the religious conflicts among the storytellers; some are less ardently religious while others are concerned with the corporeal rather than the spiritual.The stories of the Heptameron are often cautionary tales about the corruption of the late medieval church, about decadent priests and monks, or about the unfortunate faithful whose belief in the efficacy of good works for salvation leads to disaster and death. The conflicts of the Reformation loom over the Heptameron not just as the origin of its ideological tensions but also as a prominent symptom of the larger, related disruptions that marked sixteenth-century Europe.Provocative and wide-ranging, appealing to specialists in numerous fields, Critical Tales is the first collective volume of studies in English on the Heptameron. The authors—Robert D. Cottrell, Hope Glidden, Marcel Tetel, Donald Stone, Tom Conley, Michel Jeanneret, Cathleen M. Bauschatz, François Cornilliat and Ullrich Langer, Mary B. McKinley, Philippe de Lajarte, Andre Tournon, Daniel Russell, François Rigolot, Paula Sommers, and Edwin M. Duval—present different approaches to Marguerite de Navarre's tales, dealing with such topics as confession, rape, the impact of printing on knowledge and narrative, narrative theory, and androgyny. The contributors to Critical Tales, like the storytellers of the Heptameron, are not afraid to challenge the critical establishment and one another. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of French and comparative literature and women's studies.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• I. Generic Transformations and Graphic Transgressions
• 1. Inmost Cravings: The Logic of Desire in the Heptameron
• 2. Gender, Essence, and the Feminine (Heptameron 43)
• 3. The Rhetoric of Lyricism in the Heptameron
• 4. “La Malice des hommes” : “L’Histoire des satyres” and the Heptameron
• 5. The Graphics of Dissimulation: Between Heptameron 10 and l’histoire tragique
• II. Narrative Systems and Structures
• 6. Modular Narrative and the Crisis of Interpretation
• 7. “Voyla, mes dames ...” : Inscribed Women Listeners and Readers in the Heptameron
• 8. Naked Narrator: Heptameron 62
• 9. Telling Secrets: Sacramental Confession and Narrative Authority in the Heptameron
• 10. The Voice of the Narrators in Marguerite de Navarre’s Tales
• 11. Rules of the Game
• III. Character and Community
• 12. Some Ways of Structuring Character in the Heptameron
• 13. The Heptameron and the “Magdalen Controversy”: Dialogue and Humanist Hermeneutics
• 14. Writing the Body: Androgynous Strategies in the Heptameron
• 15. “Et puis, quelles nouvelles?”: The Project of Marguerite’s Unfinished Decameron
• Critical Tales: An Epilogue
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index