Post Keynesian economic theory Book

Even had Marguerite de Navarre not written The Heptameron, the world of letters would be deeply indebted to her for her patronage of Rabelais and his genius novels about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. As it is, we owe her even more for her assemblage of a treasury of bawdy tales; a cycle which is consciously modeled upon Boccaccio's Decameron.

Ten travelers, five women and five men, are delayed in their travels when a rainstorm washes out a bridge. While they await its rebuilding, they entertain themselves by telling stories. The bridge will take ten days to rebuild, and they agree that each of them will tell one story each day. They agree to a few ground rules for their storytelling--the stories must be true (identities of guilty parties tend to be protected, but we know who they really are; wink, wink, nudge, nudge); and the stories must not be derived from professional tellers of tales. What we overhear (along with the monks hosting our traveling party) are 72 stories (the book was never finished) of bawd, debauchery, faithlessness and faithfulness, lust, rape, love, women and men, cuckoldry, decrepit and unruly monks and priests, honour and chastity, and in general The Great Battle of the Sexes, Sixteenth Century Edition.

Not to be missed is the framing tale of the ten travelers. Their stories are chosen to bolster their own views about the relations of the sexes; this one to demonstrate the faithlessness of the supposedly chaste woman, that one to demonstrate the lack of control men have over their own lust, the other to prove that one should never leave a monk alone with a maiden or one's own wife. Their discussions about each story reveal a complex hermeneutic, one person claiming that the story demonstrates that the protagonist is a faithful wife, while the other claims that the story proves that women are only after their own pleasure. de Navarre knows better than to tell us any kind of truth about a quagmire as rich in literary possibilities as is the everlasting battle of the sexes.

I read the Chilton translation of 1984 from Penguin. It is a rather stiff-collared translation, somewhat stilted, feeling more archaic than contemporary, even without archaisms. de Narvarre's language is multi-voiced and a translator must pay close attention to multiple subtleties. I won't enthusiastically endorse Chilton, but whichever translation one picks-up, be sure that it contain as complete a text as possible; The Heptameron has a rather checkered textual history.