SOURCE: “Regenerating Feminine Poetic Identity: Marguerite de Navarre's Song of the Peronelle,” in Romanic Review, Vol. 78, No. 2, 1987, pp. 165-76.

In the essay that follows, Ahmed argues that Marguerite de Navarre rewrote a secular French song as a spiritual quest for unity with God, a quest which is specifically feminine.

O Mutation délectable (v. 40) 

Chanson spirituelle XXX

Marguerite de Navarre's place in the well-known French polemic of the late 1540's between the proponents of the national chanson form and those of the ode borrowed from Antiquity is not an evident one. She is mentioned neither in Thomas Sebillet's definition of the chanson form in his Art poétique françoys (1548) nor in Joachim du Bellay's definition of the ode in his Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549).¹ Marguerite does nonetheless occupy a pivotal position in French literature of the 1540's between the songs of Mellin de...