My first chapter, "Four Frames for a Portrait of a Patient Wife," looks at Marguerite de Navarre as part of the broad historical community of European framed short fiction writers, comparing her work to that of Giovanni Boccaccio, Francesco Petrarca, and Geoffrey Chaucer. While no Heptaméron character goes by the name of "Griselda," this famous heroine - or her closest analogs - turn out to leave peculiar traces in the frame-structure of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales as well as the Heptaméron. Extreme examples of female submission to male authority like Griselda's serve to expose fissures in patriarchal ideology, although different framed-novella writers are more or less prepared to face the implications of those aporia. While previous studies have analyzed the Cent nouvelles nouvelles as an example of iconographic and hyperbolic male homosocial domination, my second chapter shows that the Heptaméron's recycling of the earlier book's "Katherine/Conrard" as "Rolandine" illustrates a process by which the invisible male storytellers of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles become the male chauvinist devisants of the Heptaméron, while iconographic transformations in Cent nouvelles nouvelles 26 find their textual descendants in Heptaméron 21's intergeneric transformations. My third chapter addresses the Heptaméron's attempts to answer the arguments of the all-male preaching communities that the historical Marguerite de Navarre could favor or counter at court but never directly debate. In taking up some of the themes of preachers like Aimé Meigret (an early reformer imprisoned for heresy whose sole surviving sermon was probably printed at Marguerite's behest) and François Le Picart (a steadfast opponent of the Reformation who was imprisoned for branding Marguerite and her husband Henri de Navarre), the     Heptaméron's frame-characters chart an alternative predicant path. Their preaching activities, in which men and women take equal part, are an example of fiction literature leading the history of ideas. Marguerite employed dozens of preachers during her lifetime, but only in the imaginary storytelling world she created could women like herself fully assert their views on theological issues, pointing towards a more open and honest Christian community freed from the male monopoly on preaching.