Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net.

Today's episode, Pearls of Wisdom, Milgrit of Navar.

I don't know about you, but when I was 11 years old, I spent very little time translating spiritual poetry from French.

This is just one of several respects in which I differ from Queen Elizabeth I.

At that tender age in 1544, she produced an English version of a work called Mirror of the Sinful Soul.

It was written by another queen, namely Margurite of Navar, also known as Margurite d'Angoulin.

In fact, Margurite was almost an English queen like Elizabeth.

When she was young, it was proposed that she be matched with the much older Henry VII.

She angrily declared in her first recorded words,

I will marry a man who was young, rich, and noble without having to cross the channel.

Happily, from her point of view, the idea was indeed dropped, and she spent her life in France and Navar, which is in what we now think of as Northern Spain.

The King of Navar, Henri d'Albe, was her second husband.

She didn't have to cross the channel to marry him, but as her youthful protest suggests, she didn't mind crossing people.

Her relationship with her brother, the quintessential French Renaissance king, Francis I,

was mostly one of cordial alliance, yet she was willing to stand up even against him in the cause of church reform,

which made some other people cross, too, notably the schoolmen of the University of Paris.

Indeed, Margurite was at the center of the two great developments that marked France in the first half of the 16th century, humanism and reform.

Like King Francis, she offered patronage to a range of poets and other humanists, particularly noteworthy for us,

was her project of getting scholars to translate Plato's dialogues into French, along with the commentaries of Marcelo Fettino.

This undertaking may remind us of the Byzantine princess Anna Camine, and her circle of commentators on Aristotle back in the 12th century.

It involves such men as the poet Antoine Erouet, who's works the anger giant and the perfect friend,

exemplify the use of platonic themes in French literature of the time, especially themes drawn from Plato's erotic dialogues,

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