Guilty Sisters: Marguerite de Navarre, Elizabeth of England, and the Miroir de l'âme Pécheresse
TE MIROIR DE L'AME PkCHERESSE, a volume of devotional verse Lnamed for its principal poem, was published in Alengon in 1531 and in Paris two years later. The Paris edition identifies its author as "Marguerite de France, Soeur Vnicque du Roy," and later as "Royne de Navarre."' Some eleven years later, the daughter of Henry VIII translated the Miroir as a gift for her latest stepmother, Queen Katherine Parr. The poem has thus a doubly unusual status. In an age when literature was overwhelmingly male in its origins, the agencies of genesis and transmission for this work were female. And in an age when most writers came from the middle class, the agents of its production and reproduction were of high birth, members of royal families. Marguerite's title of "queen of Navarre" carried with it a fairly limited sovereignty, such power as there was residing with her husband Henri de Navarre, with the kingdom itself being largely under Spanish rule. And though Elizabeth would eventually reign as queen in her own right, no one in 1544 expected such an outcome. Henry VIII still ruled, and his son Edward was being carefully groomed to succeed him. The salient fact about both Marguerite and Elizabeth was that they were royal sisters: Marguerite being the sister of the present king of France, Frangois I, and Elizabeth of the future king of England, Edward, prince of Wales. The circumstance may be only coincidental, but it provides an interesting vantage point from which to examine both the poem and its translation. As the primary inventor of the Miroir, Marguerite is the main focus for this inquiry. Intelligent and talented, she had been educated along with her brother and in adulthood promoted both the Renaissance and