Marguerite de Navarre

Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), also known as Margaret of Angoulême, was a French princess, writer and patron of the arts. The elder sister of King Francis I, she married Henry II of Navarre and became queen of that small kingdom. She protected humanists and religious reformers, including Rabelais and Clément Marot, and her court was a center of the French Renaissance. She wrote devotional poetry, such as The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, which was condemned by the Sorbonne, plays and the Heptameron, a collection of tales on the model of Boccaccio's Decameron, published after her death.