The heptameron marguerite de navarre5/21/2023 Not to be missed is the framing tale of the ten travelers. What we overhear (along with the monks hosting our traveling party) are 72 stories (the book was never finished) of bawd, debauchery, faithlessness and faithfulness, lust, rape, love, women and men, cuckoldry, decrepit and unruly monks and priests, honour and chastity, and in general The Great Battle of the Sexes, Sixteenth Century Edition. They agree to a few ground rules for their storytelling-the stories must be true (identities of guilty parties tend to be protected, but we know who they really are wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and the stories must not be derived from professional tellers of tales. The bridge will take ten days to rebuild, and they agree that each of them will tell one story each day. While they await its rebuilding, they entertain themselves by telling stories. Ten travelers, five women and five men, are delayed in their travels when a rainstorm washes out a bridge. As it is, we owe her even more for her assemblage of a treasury of bawdy tales a cycle which is consciously modeled upon Boccaccio’s Decameron. Even had Marguerite de Navarre not written The Heptameron, the world of letters would be deeply indebted to her for her patronage of Rabelais and his genius novels about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel.
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