Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron: A New Translation and Critical Edition

FAIN: RQ-50877-14

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Mary B. McKinley (Project Director: January 2014 to February 2017)

Preparation for print and e-book publication of a critical edition and translation into English of the Heptameron, a 16th-century French text by Marguerite de Navarre. (24 months)

We propose a new translation and critical edition of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron that will make that work accessible to an American audience as it has never been before. Our edition's introduction and notes draw on decades of scholarship as well as on new unpublished research; it will bring into sharp relief the book's connection to contemporary culture through careful attention to the terminology of early modern debates about gender, theology, and epistemology. We aim to make the Heptameron available to the general reader, the college classroom, and to researchers in a number of fields across the humanities and social sciences, from history and religious studies to gender studies and comparative literature. Given the importance of the Heptameron in Renaissance literature and the importance of its author in sixteenth-century European history, such a translation is long overdue.