BOOK REVIEW:
The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian. By Carol Thysell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 181 pp. ISBN 0195138457.

Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) has long been acknowledged to have been a powerful political and literary figure. Carol Thysell argues that Marguerite was also a theologian, despite the fact that she wrote no systematic theology and used French in her poetry and prose rather than the traditional Latin of the theologians.

Thysell argues further that Marguerites’ last work, her unfinished Heptameron, was written as a response to John Calvin’s treatise against the Libertines, “Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertines que se nomment Spirituelz,” in which Calvin criticized some of the individuals at her court and their beliefs as pantheistic and antinomian. To support this hypothesis, Thysell argues that for Marguerite, as a woman, to have written a formal theological response to Calvin would have been unacceptable and divisive. Furthermore, it was not her style. “Poetic theology” and allegorical rhetoric were. Thus she wrote the Heptameron, in which a group of men and women, isolated together by a flood, studied Scripture in the morning and told stories in the afternoon. According to Thysell, the Heptameron, then, was not merely a collection of stories modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron, a book that Marguerite had had translated into French.

The Heptameron reveals that Marguerite’s opinions were essentially in agreement with Calvin in many areas, including her theological anthropology. Marguerite recognized humans as sinful and in need of God’s grace. She emphasized Providence, and she esteemed Scripture.

Moreover, Marguerite was no pantheist or antinomian, but she differed with Calvin in her toleration of a diversity of opinions in those she gathered around her. She was more optimistic than Calvin about the possibility of human regeneration in this world.  Marguerite’s group of devisants in the Heptameron were guided and regenerated by the Spirit and achieved greater and greater cohesiveness. Marguerite raised doubts about the reliability of conscience. She also saw divine revelation in books other than Scripture. She had a more positive view of the place of women than Calvin, and she gave them more important roles, such as that of the widow Oiselle, leader of the community in the Heptameron.

As compared to Thysell’s positive view of Marguerite of Navarre, Thysell appears to hold a generally negative view of Calvin. Thysell casts her lot against Jane Douglass and those who feel that Calvin was open to a change in women’s roles if historical circumstances were to change. Thysell also take exception to critical comments on Marguerite by scholars as esteemed as Irena Backus.

As for Thysell’s theses: Was Marguerite a theologian? That depends on how one defines theologian. If to be a theologian one must write a systematic theology, then even Martin Luther would not qualify, unless one esteems his small and large catechisms of that caliber, but many people who have theological opinions do not consider themselves theologians—historians of the sixteenth century, for instance. Marguerite was clearly theologian enough or holder of theological opinions enough for the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne in Paris to censure her Mirror of the Sinful Soul for its evangelical or Lutheran ideas. Protected by her younger brother, Francis I, King of France (1515-1547), she continued to write and to publish, one of few women of her era to be able to do so.

As for Thysell’s second thesis, that Marguerite wrote the Heptameron in response to Calvin’s treatise against the Libertines, this seems less probable. Perhaps she had other motives for writing the Heptameron. Perhaps she chose not to respond to Calvin. Motivation in historical figures is often difficult to determine. One is left attempting to psychoanalyze the dead, always a risky proposition.

As for a possible third thesis on whether Marguerite remained a Catholic or became Protestant, Thysell barely mentions this question and rightly so. The year of Marguerite’s death, 1549, was several years before the organization of Reformed congregations in France. To determine the Catholic versus Protestant convictions of those who died in France before the organization of the French Reformed Church, one is left with evidence as shaky as analyzing whether their funerals were unostentatious enough to be considered Calvinist. It is clear that Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, became Protestant and attempted to bring her subjects with her, but Marguerite had let others raise Jeanne.

Despite serious questions about Thysell’s theses, the book is a carefully crafted work, informative, thoughtful, and provocative, which anyone interested in Marguerite de Navarre should not miss. The book contains an index and a bibliography although some significant words and names found in the text are missing in the index.

Jeannine Olson
Professor
Rhode Island College, Providence, RI