Almost every even moderately serious lover of literature knows Giovanni Boccaccio’s erotic classic The Decameron, which he wrote around 1350. Far fewer, however, have made the acquaintance of its little sister, The Heptameron. Learned debate still continues over the book’s origins and textual history, but it is traditionally attributed to Marguerite de Navarre — Margaret, Queen of Navarre — who lived from 1492 to 1549. The work first appeared in print posthumously in 1558 under the title Histoires des amans fortunez; the title Heptaméron was introduced in a revised edition the following year.
The picture shows Marguerite in a portrait from the late 1520s or early 1530s, traditionally attributed to Jean Clouet. If Marguerite really was the central author of the book, she deserves to be counted among the foremothers of European narrative fiction, even though Cervantes’ Don Quixote, often regarded as the first modern European novel, was still almost a century away in 1605.
To modern eyes, the eroticism of The Decameron may seem somewhat questionable, since the point of the stories is often lust, sin, and cunning in matters of love rather than eroticism as such — though, of course, in cinematic adaptations it is easy enough to supply the sensuality that the narration itself leaves unstated. The same feature also characterizes The Heptameron.
This was certainly not because erotic feeling was somehow weaker in those days, but rather because, after the Middle Ages and even in the early Renaissance, the scarcity of available sexual imagery and narrative made people more sensitive to even the smallest stimuli. As late as the nineteenth century, the sight of an elegant woman’s bare leg, even only halfway to the knee, could still make a European gentleman blush with passion, and make women take offense at such frivolity.
At the beginning of The Heptameron, a small company of noblemen and noblewomen, delayed by floods and other dangers while travelling in the Pyrenees, seeks refuge in an abbey. To pass the time, they begin to tell stories. This frame, of course, immediately brings to mind not only The Decameron, but also The Canterbury Tales and The Thousand and One Nights. The narrative form was natural to the age, not least because of the Catholic Church’s saints’ lives and moral tales, to which everyone had been abundantly exposed.
The stories of The Heptameron are tales of love, desire, cleverness, fortune and misfortune, and sometimes punishment. As such, The Heptameron is a deeply human and entertaining book — if for no other reason than as a picture of its age, or of a mental landscape in which the stern seriousness of the Church and the human being’s natural inclination toward both bodily and spiritual freedom compete with refreshing vigor.
The book is usually read as literature, much like The Decameron, but at least some of the stories in The Heptameron have been connected with real events and historical figures. They were the scandals of their time, whispered about behind the backs of those involved.
According to tradition, the stories were written by Marguerite herself. At the same time, the book’s origins are not simple: courtly anecdotes, oral storytelling, manuscript transmission, and later editorial reshaping all seem to have played a part. The first printed edition of 1558 contained only sixty-seven stories and was heavily edited by Pierre Boaistuau; Claude Gruget’s 1559 edition restored more of the frame structure and gave the work the title by which we now know it. Over the centuries, the book has circulated in several forms, with variations in the number, order, and details of the tales.
