The title derives from a book by Robert D. Cottrell, published by The Catholic University of America Press: The Grammar of Silence, A Reading of Marguerite de Navarre's Poetry.

Most of Marguerite poems are devotional, composed in her carriage trips across France, or in convents to which she frequently reitred for meditation. (The writer, Pierre Brantçome (1540?-1613) wrote, in his Les Dames Illustres, that "She was very fond of composing devout verses, for she was much inclined to godliness.")

Cottrell says her poems reveal a Marguerite who apparently knew the anguish and joy of the Christian wayfarer seeking to ascend the ladder of perfection (scala perfectionis) to attain the final stage of mystical ecstasy (unio mystica). This is a longing for union with God, aspiring to a spiritual state such that everything in the world is perceived as a signifier of the referent Christ, the uniquely signified. She communed with the tradition from St. Augustine and the Pseudo-Dionysius which equates St. John's logos (or the Word) with silence, transcending human discourse. Marguerite's prayer-poems relentless seek a language for signifying "Divine Silence", the generator of all discourse.

Cottrell calls his book "a grammar" because "it studies the parts of speech and the syntax" of that language above language. Cottrell says that "in the tradition that informs Marguerite's poetry, creation is viewed as a series of texts that, together, constitutes God's Book. Each discrete text is a metaphor (translatio) for Christ the Text, the Verbum that was in the beginning."

a text revealing only one message: the reign of charity. It is believed that Briçonnet's "vocabulary and thought" are present in all of Marguerite's poetry. Marguerite's first two long poems -- "Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne" and "Petit Oeuvre d&eacut;vot et contemplatif" -- "were probably written during the years when she was i constant contact with Briçonnet.

As a young "pagan" teacher of rhetoric, Augustine was bothered by the style of the Bible which differed so from that of Cicero. But Augustine learned to read allegorically, bypassing the literal text for figurative meaning. Thereby, Augustine became converted to Christianity and one of the great fathers of "The Church". Cottrell says that Augustine developed "a theory of figurative reading that would in fact permit the Christian to see everything in the world as a written code that must be translated into spiritual truth."

(This tradition flourished among English and American Puritans, as in John Bunyan's classic, Pilgrim's Progress. We also find it, for example, in The Diary of Cotton Mather (1663-1728), a Puritan famed in history as one of the judges in the New England "Witchcraft Trials". Once, after a quarrel with his wife, Mather wrote, "What did God mean by that?")

Augustine developed a theory of signs, which anticipates Charles S. Peirce's 19th century semiotics: the theory or study of signs, which I discuss, develop, and extend elsewhere. Augustine distinguished between natural signs, such as thunder, and conventional signs, such as military banners and writing. But his theology led him to blur the distinction between things and words as Augustine contemplated the Gospel According to John (I, 1):"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God" and "The Word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory."

In his letters to Marguerite, one of Briçonnet's favorite words was cristiforme, meaning that (to quote Cottrell) "the Incarnation [Christ become man], by renewing the faculties of man, overcame the inadequacy of human speech by uniting the divinity and humanity in the Word made flesh. In Christ, God speaks to man" and this "crisitforme ... enables man to communicate with God by means of words. .... Briçonnet stresses the dynamic aspect of the process by which the soul becomes evermore chritoforme."

But Cottrell says that "the style of [Briçonnet's] letters to Marguerite [is] designed to do violence to their recipient, to begin the process of pulverization and annihilation that will ultimately be taken over by the fire of love ... to paralyze reason, to still discourse, to transcend language. The constant hum of words becomes the semantic equivalent of silence. By silencing reason, the text performs the fuction of readying the reader for the experience of love. .... [Thereby] the spirit of Briçonnet is everywhere apparent in Marguerite's poetry."

Marguerite's most controversial poem, Mirror of the Sinful Soul, was condemned as heresy by the theologians of the Sorbonne, but cancelled their action by order of her brother, King François I. In Cottrell's interpretation of this poem, "The illumination afforded by the Holy Spirit effects a redefinition of the terms of reference. No longer is man the reality whose image is reflected in the mirror/text. God, rather, is the source, and man, who has become christeforme through the operation of the Word, is now the image, the derivative, the reflection. .... Although Marguerite's poems tend to culminate in the experience of illuminatio, they open in darkness and fear. .... A 'correct' reading of Marguerite's texts, one that leads the mind away from the letter and toward the spirit, is tantamount to the cleansing of the reader's own soul. .... Ultimately the text asks the reader to perceive it not as an artifact but as a secular act of baptism, that is to say, a sign of oneness in Christ. And just as the sign that is baptism is ever operative in the Christian soul, so the experience that the text generates is, ideally, ever present in the reader's mind, contributing to his progressive illumination."

Cottrell notes that Michel Foucault, critic and historian, has written "about the profound effects of the Lateran Council's decision (1215) requiring all Christians to confess at least once a year and to probe their conscience and disclose to their confessor their most secret thoughts, feelings, and desires. Western society developed complex confessional techniques and made confession one of the major rituals for the production of truth."

Foucalt speaks of the communicant becoming "une bête d'aveu" (a confessing animal) and the society of communicants "une société singulièrement avouante" (a singularly confession society), Foucault says of confessional discourse (translation):
"The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modification in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation."

Having given these comments of Faucault on the confession, Cottrell then says: "Foucault's remarks shed light on the Briçonnet-Marguerite correspondence. The letters exchanged between the two correspondents record a performance in which each partner plays a part that is determined by the ritual of confession: she, the troubled penitent who confesses; he, the judge and dispensor of truth and pardon. .... the entire corpus of Marguerite's poetic production is a confession to Christ, the supreme confessor."

But Cottrell notes that in the controversial poem, "Mirror of the Sinful Soul" -- and perhaps this is what brought on the charge from the Sorbonne of heresy -- "the reflexive motifs that run through the Miroir transform the text into a ritual in which the narrator confesses to her own reflected image. The 'I' both confesses and absolves. A poem by Marguerite often modulates in such a way that the narrator, who, at the beginning of the poem. plays the part of the penitent, becomes the adjudicator as well. There is a theological (some might say a specifically 'Lutheran') basis for this assimilation of the confessing 'I' with the judge; confession is, after all, the art of dissipating the cloudy elements that obscure the central core of self, which is Christ. The 'I' of Marguerite's texts often comes to realize that, because Christ is imminent in creation and resides in the heart of man, it, too, partakes of divine authority. As the 'I' moves from penitent to judge, the poem traces a shift away from voice to law, to decree, to text. The penitent eventually stops speaking and the 'partenaire' (Foucault's word) to whom the confession has been addressed pronounces a judgment. In the final analysis, the partner who has heard the penitent's confession is the reader. In theological terms, this reader is Christ, for He reads man's heart; In terms of Marguerite's letters to Briçonnet, he is Briçonnet, the reader of her pleas for guidance; in terms of Marguerite's published work, the partner who hears her confession is the reading public. In each case, the reader, by interpreting a decoding the confession-text before him, becomes the author of a discourse in which truth is definitively revealed.

".... Marguerite's poetry tends always toward a deconstruction of the visual, the concrete, the fleshy. Her landscapes are not of the outer but of the inner world. The ultimate decor in all her poetry is the human heart. .... The emblem method of linking the concrete and the abstract (the flesh and the spirit, in Christian terms), of fusing visual imagery and spatial form with the concepts of linearity and temporality, characterizes many Renaissance poems that are not, however, accompanied by actual pictures. Such textx may be read as emblems with the title taking the place of the picture. Many of Marguerite's poems (especially those with titles that evoke the emblematic tradition: Le Miroir, La Navire and ... Les Prisons) fall in this category."

Cottrell closes his book, The Grammar of Silence, by saying: "Marguerite's texts are allegories of the Christian's search for the Word, i.e., the Silence, the 'Uniformity' which, Augustine says, is 'our native country'. Exiled for a time from our homeland, we move forward, wishing -- in Augustine's words -- to 'return' to the country where 'we may comprehend the eternal and the spiritual'. Marguerite's poems are also alleories of the Word's operation in human language. In the temporality of its unfolding along the syntagmatic axis of metonymic succession, allegorical narrative actualizes the paradigm whose loss is the origin of speech. In their wholeness and 'uniformity', Marguerite's poems end up embodying and signifyiing the unio, the 'native country' toward which all words 'wish to return'. Seeking to recover Silence, that is to say, the primal metaphor that antedates the signifying chain of narrative time, each of Marguerite's texts is a discourse whose structurality, or metaphoricity, holds out the promise of a final -- though perpetually deferred -- return to 'The Absolute Perfection' of the Word."

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