Marguerite de Navarre
1492-1549 16th century
Prayer turned into song, when fear or illness has taken up all the room.
Who was Marguerite de Navarre?
Sister of Francis I and queen of Navarre by her second marriage, she kept one of the most learned courts in Europe and sheltered writers the Sorbonne was pursuing. She wrote herself: tales, pastoral plays, and above all poems of prayer. Her Mirror of the Sinful Soul, published in 1531, was condemned by the Paris faculty of theology. She died at fifty-seven, two years after her brother, having spent her last years writing spiritual songs.
In their own words
O God, who love your own, to you alone I bring my complaint; you who hold friends in esteem, see the love I bear without pretence.
Here is new joy: the night full of darkness is past; and here is the day, in which we walk in safety […]
The labour night and day that I take harms me so, that I must rest.