Margaret of Navarre
Margaret of Navarre, (1492–1549), queen of Navarre, 1527–49. She is also known as Margaret or Marguerite of Angoulême, Orléans, or Valois. Margaret was the sister of King Francis I of France. In 1527 she married Henry II, titular king of Navarre. (Most of the kingdom was under Spanish occupation.) Margaret's court was a brilliant center of the French Renaissance and a refuge from persecution for Protestants and freethinkers. She sheltered John Calvin in 1534 and patronized François Rabelais, who dedicated the second book of Gargantua and Pantagruel to her.
Margaret wrote several volumes of poetry and prose. Her most notable work is the Heptaméron, a collection of 72 stories modeled after Boccaccio's Decameron.