The pleasure of discernment: Marguerite de Navarre's 'Heptameron' as a literary/theological response to John Calvin's treatise, 'Against the Spiritual Libertines'

Calvin's 1545 polemical treatise "Against the Spiritual Libertines" criticized the theology of a group of individuals who served in the court of Queen Marguerite de Navarre, sister to King Francis I. Though no document exists registering her response to Calvin, all further contact between the two ceased. This dissertation argues that the Queen's most famous literary work, the Heptameron, is in fact a veiled theological response to Calvin.;Marguerite de Navarre, a patron of humanists and reformers alike, was in conversation with a variety of intellectual and social movements, including the reformers at Meaux, the tradition of women mystics, the Florentine neoplatonists, and the querelle des femmes. All informed her theological response to Calvin, who objected to the libertines' beliefs about evil, providence, moral discernment, and hermeneutics. Nevertheless, the Queen is found to be largely in agreement with Calvin in the first three areas, though she emphasizes more than he the Spirit's work in regeneration. She accepts Calvin's belief in justification by faith, which rests on a universal anthropology of fallenness, but the doctrine's very universalism allows her to critique his appropriation of his culture's gendered virtues. She agrees with Calvin, however, on the need for moral discernment and behavior in lieu of a pantheistic determinism.;Where Marguerite de Navarre differs most from Calvin is in her view of the Spirit's role in interpretation. Rather than adopting either the medieval church's fourfold or the reformation's literal methods of interpretation, the Heptameron directs the reader to the secular literary theory of Boccaccio, who equates poetry and theology as if their subject matter is the same. In the tradition of Boccaccio and later Renaissance allegorical rhetoric, the Heptameron constructs an allegory of spiritual interpretation which, because of its various levels, can accommodate its society's divisions in order to further the goal of union with God. As a complement to the divisive prophetic message of reformers such as Calvin, the Queen's allegorical rhetoric voiced a larger truth which allowed her to defend her own theology and yet to promote the unity of church and society in a tumultuous period of European history.