Discuss the point of the selection from Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron (Reading 16.1). What similarities do you find between the Spanish wife’s reasoning in the story and the movement of the “modern devotion” (discussed in Continuity & Change)?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

In fifteenth-century Northern Europe a new mode of devotion took hold in numerous cities. Lay citizens gathered to promote a lifestyle similar to that lived by monks and nuns and to integrate their religious practice into daily life. These movements stood in contrast to the ostentation of the Church in Rome.
Marguerite de Navarre’s excerpt from the Heptameron (Reading 16.1) displays a similar longing for authenticity and simplicity in religion. Oisille says: “Indeed, I am frequently astonished that they presume to be able to appease God by means of the very things, which, when He came to earth, He condemned—things such as fine buildings, gilded ornaments, decorations and paintings. But, if they had rightly understood what God has said of human offerings in a certain passage—that ‘the sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despite.’”