Written around 1535, Le Mallade bears witness, as V.-L. Saulnier puts it, to Marguerite de Navarre’s effort to reconcile the official Church dogma with the new Evangelical faith following the Affaire des Placards. But in addition to its documentary value for France’s religious history, this play presents a real scientific interest, which has been neglected until now. Specifically, Le Mallade deals with sixteenth-century attitudes towards sickness and health, different types of medical approaches, and various debates which divided the medical circles of the time on such questions as surgery, bloodletting, and human suffering. This article also examines related issues, including remedies, superstitions, the cult of saints, and the relation between science and faith, as well as a woman’s duty to assist her husband and her family members in sickness and health. Marguerite de Navarre’s intention was to show that “God is the true savior of man.” In order to authenticate the medical metaphor familiar to contemporary Christians that conveyed this idea (“Deus medicus”) and create a sense of urgency, she represents the daily suffering of a patient and the inefficicacy of the medical care that he receives. As for the figure of the charitable, caring wife, it provided a means by which Marguerite could rehabilitate her own image in the trying times that followed the year 1534.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Winn, C. H., (2025), "Témoignage de l'actualité médicale du temps: Le Mallade de Marguerite de Navarre (c. 1535)", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Winn, Colette H. "Témoignage de l'actualité médicale du temps: Le Mallade de Marguerite de Navarre (c. 1535)." Renaissance and Reformation 38 (4): 2020. 91-111. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v38i4.8840. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.