As a writer and religious intellectual, she engaged with the humanist and reform movements that were reshaping European culture, and her Heptaméron reflects her interests in religious questions, in women’s experiences, and in the complexities of human moral life.

The collection of tales in the Heptaméron covers a range of subjects and tones, from comic to tragic, from celebratory to condemning.

The sixty-seventh tale — the one that preserves Marguerite de la Rocque’s story — is among the more serious in the collection, treating its subject with gravity and a clear moral sympathy for the woman who survived the abandonment.

The tale’s preservation in the Heptaméron means that it circulated among the educated readers of the French Renaissance and was read alongside the other works that shaped the literary culture of the period.

It was not a marginal or obscure document; the Heptaméron was a widely read and widely discussed work, and its tales were known among the literate classes of France and beyond.