Tales of the Heptameron

Marguerite de Navarre was the queen consort of King Henry II of Navarre. She was an author and patron of the arts, called by Samuel Putnam "The first modern woman." "The Heptameron" is a collection of stories modelled after Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decameron," Many of the stories deal with love, lust, infidelity and other matters romantic and sexual. "Never," she wrote, "shall a man attain to the perfect love of God who has not loved to perfection some creature in this world." Begun as a collection of one hundred stories set over a ten day time period, the work was never completed, and a total of 72 stories in seven volumes exist. This volume is the third of the five.