"the sacred" from the profane world of phenomena. Pointing out that the
devisants choose not to follow Oisille's example, de Lajarte argues that
Marguerite de Navarre's text is a semantic field from which "the sacred" has
withdrawn, leaving behind, however, faint traces, which are discernible
mainly in Oisille's speech. Because "the sacred" has retreated from the
world of the text, the Heptameron, according to de Lajarte, circumscribes a
space that has been invaded by phenomena, by "the profane." To emphasize
his point, de Lajarte contrasts the Heptameron sharply with Les Prisons, the
long poem Marguerite de Navarre wrote while composing the Heptameron,
and maintains that whereas Les Prisons is informed by what he calls the
"archaic" ideology of a transcendent Logos, the Heptameron unfolds out-
side the "monologisme logocentrique" ( Le Prologue de l'Heptaméron,
419) of sacred speech.

In this chapter, I shall present a different view. I shall suggest that the
Heptameron, like Les Prisons (and, indeed, like every one of Marguerite de
Navarre's texts) is powerfully informed by "the sacred," by the Logos, by a
Real that is situated eternally beyond the world of phenomena but that is
simultaneously always inscribed in it. That Real is, of course, Christ, the
Word made flesh, which, from the Christian perspective that shapes Mar-
guerite's views as well as those of all the protagonists in the Heptameron,
operates in the hie et nunc of phenomena, in the fleshy, sinful, suffering
world of the desiring body.

Throughout the Heptameron, the stress on physicality and on pain
conforms to the traditions of a culture whose signifying center is occupied
by the figure of the Passion. All other figures derive their meaning from the
figure of Christ's body, which is a testimony to God's humanization and
which is displayed in spectacular, public suffering. As Caroline Walker
Bynum has noted, late medieval and Renaissance piety was deeply experi-
ential. ² Devotional writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries displayed
Christ's suffering body, making of it, and of the human body generally, the
privileged place where the Christian can experience Christ. ³ As Paul re-
minded the Romans ( 8: 17 ), the only way to share Christ's glory is to share
his suffering. Christians, Paul affirmed, must offer their bodies to God as a
living sacrifice ( Rom. 12: 1 ).

The Logos inscribed in the Heptameron is mediated mainly by Paul. ⁴ In
the prologue to the sixth day, we learn that the scriptural text the devisants
studied and meditated on during the previous five mornings was Paul's
Epistle to the Romans. (During the morning of the sixth day, they read
I John; during the morning of the seventh day, Acts and the beginning of

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