Marguerite de Navarre, also known as Margaret d’Angoulême, a sister of the late king Francis and the queen consort of King Henry II of Navarre, expresses her intensely felt religious views in poetry and plays.
As patron of humanists and reformers, and as an author in her own right, she is an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance.
Marguerite, who has written many poems and plays, has also written penned the classic collection of stories, the Heptameron, as well as a remarkably intense religious poem, Miroir de l'âme pécheresse or Mirror of the Sinful Soul.
This particular poem is a first-person mystical narrative of the soul as a yearning woman calling out to Christ as her father-brother-lover.
That her work was passed to the royal court of England provides the basis for conjecture that Marguerite had influence on the Protestant reformation in England.
Anne Boleyn, future second wife and Queen to Henry VIII of England, had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude during her years in France before returning to England.
There is conjecture that the court of Queen Claude and the court of Marguerite overlapped and that, perhaps, Anne was in service to Marguerite rather than to Claude, as well as that Anne Boleyn may have become a friend, admirer, and disciple to Marguerite, who absorbed Marguerite's radical views about Christianity.
A written letter by Anne Boleyn after she became queen exists in which Boleyn makes strong expressions of affection to Marguerite.
It is conjectured that Marguerite had given Anne the original manuscript of Miroir de l'âme pécheresse at some point.
It is certain that in 1545, sometime after Anne Boleyn's execution by her husband Henry VIII, that Anne's daughter, who will become Elizabeth I (1533–1603), had translated this very same poem by Marguerite into English when she was twelve years old and presented it, written in her own hand, to her then-stepmother, the English Queen Catherine Parr.
This literary connection among Marguerite, Anne, Catherine Parr, and the future Queen Elizabeth I suggests a direct mentoring link between the legacy of reformist religious convictions and Marguerite.
As a generous patron of the arts, Marguerite befriends and protects many artists and writers, among them Rabelais, Marot and Ronsard.
Marguerite is also a mediator between Roman Catholics and Protestants (including Calvin).
Although Marguerite espouses reform within the Catholic Church, she is not a Calvinist.
She does, however, do her best to protect the reformers and had dissuaded her brother from intolerant measures as long as she could.
She dies on December 21, 1549, at the age of fifty-seven.
