Margaret of Angoulême

or Margaret of Navarra French Marguerite d'Angoulême

born April 11, 1492, Angoulême, France

died Dec. 21, 1549, Odos-Bigorre

Queen consort of Henry II of Navarra and an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance.

She was the daughter of the count d'Angoulême. When her brother Francis I acceded to the crown in 1515, she became highly influential in his court. After her first husband died, she married Henry in 1525. She was noted as a patron of humanists and reformers and of such writers as François Rabelais. She was a writer and poet herself; her most important work was the Heptaméron, 72 tales modeled on Boccaccio's Decameron and published posthumously in 1558–59.

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▪ French queen consort and poet

also called  Margaret Of Navarre,  French  Marguerite D'angoulême, or De Navarre,  Spanish  Margarita De Angulema, or De Navarra 

born April 11, 1492, Angoulême, Fr.

died Dec. 21, 1549, Odos-Bigorre

 queen consort of Henry II of Navarre, who, as patron of Humanists and Reformers, and as an author in her own right, was one of the most outstanding figures of the French Renaissance.

      Daughter of Charles de Valois-Orléans, comte d'Angoulême, and Louise of Savoy, she became the most influential woman in France, with the exception of her mother, when her brother acceded to the crown as Francis I in 1515.

      After the death of her first husband, Charles, duc d'Alençon, in 1525, she married Henry II of Navarre (Henry d'Albret). Although she bore Henry a daughter, Jeanne d'Albret (mother of the future Henry IV of France), the couple was soon estranged. Margaret was, on the other hand, always devoted to her brother and is credited with saving his life when he became ill in prison at Madrid after his capture at Pavia during the disastrous French expedition into Italy in 1525.

      Margaret extended her protection both to men of artistic and scholarly genius and to advocates of doctrinal and disciplinary reform within the church. François Rabelais, Clément Marot, Bonaventure Des Périers, and Étienne Dolet were all in her circle. Her personal religious inclinations tended toward a sort of mystical pietism, but she was also influenced by the Humanists Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Guillaume Briçonnet, who saw St. Paul's Epistles as a primary source of Christian doctrine. Although Margaret espoused reform within the Catholic Church, she was not a Calvinist, and her relations with her daughter were therefore strained. She did, however, do her best to protect the Reformers and dissuaded Francis I from intolerant measures as long as she could. In the end, however, as persecution by the crown increased, she was unable to save Des Périers, Dolet, or Marot.

      The most important of Margaret's own literary works is the Heptaméron (published posthumously, 1558–59). It is constructed on the lines of Boccaccio's Decameron, consisting of 72 tales (out of a planned 100) told by a group of travellers delayed by a flood on their return from a Pyrenean spa. The stories, illustrating the triumphs of virtue, honour, and quick-wittedness, and the frustration of vice and hypocrisy, contain a strong element of satire directed against licentious and grasping monks and clerics.

      Although some of Margaret's poetry, including the Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (1531; trans. by the future Queen Elizabeth I of England as A Godly Meditation of the Soul, 1548), was published during her lifetime, her best verse, including Le Navire, was not compiled until 1896, under the title of Les Dernières Poésies (“Last Poems”).

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