The Visionary Queen affirms Marguerite de Navarre's status not only as a political figure, author, or proponent of nonschismatic reform but also as a visionary. In her life and writings, the queen of Navarre dissected the injustices that her society and its institutions perpetuated against women. We also see evidence that she used her literary texts, especially the
Heptameron, as an exploratory space in which to generate a creative vision for institutional reform. The
Heptameron's approach to reform emerges from statistical analysis of the text's seventy-two tales, which reveals new insights into trends within the work, including the different categories of wrongdoing by male, institutional representatives from the Church and aristocracy, as well as the varying responses to injustice that characters in the tales employ as they pursue reform. Throughout its chapters,
The Visionary Queen foregrounds the trope of the labyrinth, a potent symbol in early modern Europe that encapsulated both the fallen world and redemption, two themes that underlie Marguerite's project of reform.
About the AuthorTheresa Brock is Assistant Professor of French Studies at Smith College. She received her PhD from Penn State and has published articles on women writers, literary genre, and religious studies in the early modern era, with particular emphasis on the sixteenth century.
Book InformationISBN 9781644533086
Author Theresa BrockFormat Paperback
Page Count 238
Imprint University of Delaware PressPublisher University of Delaware Press
Weight(grams) 45g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 18mm