SOURCE: “Introduction: The Celestial Ladder,” in Celestial Ladders: Readings in Marguerite de Navarre's Poetry of Spiritual Ascent, Librarie Droz, 1989, pp. 9-17.

In the following essay, Sommers characterizes Marguerite's poetry as a delicate combination of mysticism and the instructional motif of the celestial ladder.

“The mystic, as we have seen, makes it his life's aim to be transformed into the likeness of Him in whose image he was created. He loves to figure his path as a ladder reaching from earth to heaven, which must be climbed step by step.”

Wiliam Randolph Inge, Christian Mysticism (London: Methuen, 1948) p. 9

Reflecting her desire to understand the process of salvation and her awareness of divine mystery, Marguerite de Navarre's religious poetry can be prosaically transparent or mystically opaque. The mixture of stylistic levels that results from her attempts to communicate religious experience in its intellectual and affective totality has not often found...