Almost every even moderately serious lover of literature knows Giovanni Boccaccio’s erotic classic The Decameron, which he wrote around 1350. But few have become acquainted with its little sister, The Heptameron. Learned debate still continues over its true origins, but traditionally the book is attributed to Princess Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549), although the first version of the work was published posthumously, only after her death, in 1558.
In the picture, Marguerite is about forty years old, in a painting by Jean Clouet from around 1530. If the author really is Princess Marguerite, she is one of the founding mothers of the European novel, even though Cervantes’s Don Quixote, often considered the first true novel, was still almost a hundred years away in 1605.
To modern eyes, the eroticism of The Decameron may seem somewhat questionable, because the main point of the stories is usually lust, sin, and cunning in matters of love, rather than eroticism itself—though of course in cinematic versions of the book the eroticism missing from the narration is easy to bring out. The same feature also characterizes The Heptameron.
This is certainly not because eroticism at the time was somehow milder, but because, after the Middle Ages and still in the early Renaissance, the scarcity of available sexual imagery and narration made people more sensitive to even the smallest stimuli. As late as the nineteenth century, the sight of a refined woman’s bare leg, even only halfway up the calf, could make a European gentleman’s cheeks flush with passion and women take offense at such frivolity.
At the beginning of the book, a small group of people, harried by floods, robbers, and bears, seek shelter in a monastery in the Pyrenees. To pass the time, they begin telling stories. This setting naturally brings to mind not only The Decameron, but also The Canterbury Tales and The Thousand and One Nights. The tale-within-a-frame was a natural form for the age, not least because of the saints’ lives and moral teaching stories of the Catholic Church, to which everyone had been abundantly exposed.
The stories of The Heptameron are tales of love, lust, cunning, fortune and misfortune, and sometimes punishment. As such, The Heptameron is a very human and entertaining book, if nothing else as a picture of its time, or as a landscape of the soul, in which the stern seriousness of the Church and the human being’s natural inclination toward bodily and spiritual freedom contend with each other in a lively way.
The book is usually read as literature in the manner of The Decameron, but at least some of the stories in The Heptameron have been shown from historical sources to be based on real events. They were the scandals of their age, whispered about behind the backs of those involved.
According to one version, the stories were indeed written by Marguerite herself. Another says that her servants told them to Marguerite as she was carried around the country in a litter. Most scholars today probably believe that, in any case, there were several writers behind the stories. Over the course of history, at least seventeen different versions of the book have also circulated, with variations in the number, order, and details of the stories.
