Marguerite of Navarre: a mystical fable

Abstract

This essay proposes a reading of the feminine figure of folly in the works of Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549), intended as a specific reception of the theme of the unintelligibility of God’s wisdom to humanity, the scandal of Christ’s cross in the eyes of worldly-wise, and the exaltation of the humble, the “nothing”, the rejected, the foolish (1 Cor 1:18–25; 3:19). The essay will focus on Marguerite’s sources, first and foremost her spiritual father, Guillaume Briçonnet, and the theological traditions that mediated this notion from late antiquity to the early modern era. In both Briçonnet and Marguerite, the gendered presupposition implying a closeness between femininity on the one hand, and, on the other hand, materiality and irrationality on the other plays in favor of this paradoxical reversal: gendered figures of folly, precisely because of their gender, can better represent the nothingness saved by grace. In doing this, their words intercept one of most famous characters of the literature of the century, Erasmus’ Madam Folly, a woman, an ambivalent and paradoxical prophetess of truths.