SOURCE: “Practicing Queer Philology with Marguerite de Navarre: Nationalism and the Castigation of Desire,” in Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 107-23.

In the essay that follows, Freccero discusses the significance of a passing reference to Lucretia in the context of the Heptameron's depictions of marriage, desire and law.

Every encounter with a representation of the rape of Lucretia is an encounter with a literary topos of Western civilization. And, as topos, the meaning of this rape is constructed as universal, transcending historical conditions: in every age and place, Lucretia had to be raped so that Rome could be liberated from tyranny.

—Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism

At the end of The Heptameron's “Novella 42,” Parlamente concludes her tale in characteristic exemplary moralistic fashion with the words, “‘Je vous prie que, à son exemple, nous...