Margaret of Navarre

Margaret of Navarre, also Marguerite d'Angoulême (1492-1549), Queen of Navarre, and sister of King Francis I of France, born in Angoulême, France. In 1527, after the death of her husband, Charles IV, duc d'Alençon, Margaret married King Henry II of Navarre, to whom she bore Jeanne d'Albret, the mother of King Henry IV of France. Margaret was a defender and a patron of such French humanists and men of letters as the biblical scholar Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, the satirist François Rabelais, and the poet Clément Marot, whom she welcomed to her court. The queen strongly reflected the spirit of the French Renaissance in her espousal of Church reform and religious liberty and through her own writings; her major work was The Heptameron (1558; trans. 1905), a collection of about 70 stories that are similar in structure to The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.