The queen of Navarre’s treatment of the story in the Heptaméron suggests that at least some of Marguerite’s contemporaries were capable of looking at the story and finding in it not a demonstration of appropriate punishment but a demonstration of female resilience and the arbitrariness of male authority.

The sixty-seventh tale frames the captain’s abandonment of the woman as an excessive response to a human failing, and it frames the woman’s survival as a testament to her character rather than as a miraculous sign of divine approval of the punishment she received.

But this was a minority interpretation.

Other tellings of the story — particularly those aimed at audiences that were less sympathetic to the critique of male authority — tended to emphasize the moral lesson rather than the injustice: here was a woman who had transgressed, who was punished appropriately, and who was redeemed through suffering and faith.

Both interpretations miss something about the actual historical person.