climate of unrest, menace, and hostility that characterizes the prologue also
portrays the world of the Heptameron in general, the physical world from
which the storytellers flee and to which they wait to return, and their overall
view of the human condition as well. The conflicts of the Reformation
loom over the Heptameron as a prominent symptom of larger, related dis-
ruptions and new departures that marked mid-sixteenth-centuryEurope.

This volume proposes that the Heptameron both records and contrib-
utes to those changes. The queen of Navarre's tales signal new ways of
thinking and writing. The words vérité and véritable recur frequently in
these pages, but if the stories are all true, as the prologue decrees they must
be and their tellers insist they are, the lessons they ostensibly convey
contradict each other so relentlessly that the very notion of truth in human
experience is subverted. The differing connotations of such pivotal words
as love and honor -- and the way the stories and discussions foreground
those differences -- point to a crisis in language and epistemology. That
semantic instability mirrors, in turn, a precarious ontology. If we were to
define the human condition on the basis of what the Heptameron shows us,
we would have to conclude with Montaigne that it is vain, diverse, and
undulating. Only the theological belief system set forth in the book offers
an anchor, in the promise of Christ the Logos. We are frequently reminded
of the other textual activity that structures the storytellers' days, the morn-
ing scriptural readings that, while they are ostensibly apart from the Hep-
tameron's text, surface repeatedly in both the stories and the discussions.

Our contributors show how shifts in structures of thinking manifest
themselves not just thematically but formally, linguistically, and aestheti-
cally as well. Discontinuity is also a structural principle of the Heptameron.
Stories alternate with discussions. Poetry interrupts prose. Editors' glosses
shape our reading of each new tale. Stylistic tics occur in one story that
reappear nowhere else in the book. Within this literary heterogeneity
emerge new ways of generating and manipulating narrative. These are,
indeed, critical tales.

Like the Heptameron, this volume is a forum bringing together dif-
ferent views and approaches. Their very diversity is a measure of the
Heptameron's rich complexity. Our contributors use various words to refer
to the book's contents. Are these stories, tales, or novellas? Do they alter-
nate with discussions, conversations, dialogues, debates, or commentaries?
Such changing terminology reflects the problem of assigning the Hep-
tameron to a standard generic category. Just as several literary genres leave
their traces on its pages, the question of genre recurs in different forms in

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