Marguerite authored poetry and sto-
ries. On the death of her infant son in
1530 she wroteMiroir de l’Ame Pecheresse,
which Catholic theologians labeled a he-
retical work. After her death, her stories
were collected in a volume known as the
Heptameron. These tales took as their
model theDecameronof Giovanni Boccac-
cio but took the woman’s side in the con-
flicts and misunderstandings between the
sexes.
SEEALSO: Calvin, John; Francis I; Rabelais,
Francois
Marlowe, Christopher ......................
(1564–1593)
English playwright and contemporary of
William Shakespeare who wrote moving,
tragic plays in the new medium of blank
verse. Born in Canterbury, he prepared for
the ministry at the University of Cam-
bridge. Some historical documents indi-
cate that Marlowe was engaged by the
minister Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen
Elizabeth’s secretary of state, to serve as a
spy in France. After earning a master’s de-
gree at Cambridge, he moved to London,
where he joined the Lord Admiral’s Com-
pany and soon ran into trouble with the
law. He was arrested and jailed in 1589 for
taking part in a deadly brawl. In 1593, he
was arrested again under the charge of
atheism.
Historians are still piecing together the
obscure details of Marlowe’s life and writ-
ing career. In the course of his short life,
he wrote only one extended poem and six
plays. His earliest work,Tamburlaine the
Great, was written in two parts and printed
in 1590. The play describes the career of a
cruel Mongol tyrant. This play was fol-
lowed by Dido, Queen of Carthage; The
Massacre at Paris; Edward, II; andThe Jew
of Malta, which presents a deviously ambi-
tious central character presented quite
sympathetically among a hostile milieu of
Christians. All of Marlowe’s works involves
a powerful man who is laid low by his own
outlandish personality and ambition. His
best-known play isDoctor Faustus, which
recounts the familiar story of a brilliant
scholar who sells his soul to the devil.
Marlowe died in the town of Deptford
on May 30, 1593, during a brawl in a pri-
vate home. The circumstances of his mur-
der are shrouded in mystery, and some
historians believe it is connected to his
shadowy double life as a spy and govern-
ment agent. According to some accounts,
his killer, Ingram Frizer, was working on
instructions of a more powerful man or
on the government’s wishes for Marlowe’s
death. Others believe Marlowe’s own fiery
temperament and penchant for physical
assault brought about his death at the
hands of Frizer, who was judged by the
authorities to have acted in self-defense.SEEALSO: drama; England; Shakespeare,
WilliamMasaccio .........................................
(1401–1428)
Tommaso Cassai, nicknamed “Masaccio”
or “Thomas the Absent-Minded,” was an
artist of the early Renaissance who broke
new ground in the technique of painting.
Born in San Giovanni Valdarno, a small
town near Arezzo in Tuscany, Italy, Masac-
cio traveled to Florence, where he joined
the city’s painters guild as well as a circle
of artists, including Filippo Brunelleschi
and Donatello, who were developing new
ways of depicting the human form and
setting it in three-dimensional space. His
first major work was a fresco painting,Sa-
gra del Carmine, done for the cloister of
Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. This
work, one of the first large paintings toMarlowe, Christopher