Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549)
Filed under the name Marguerite · May 23, 2026
Marguerite de Navarre was a Renaissance queen who also happened to write the Heptaméron, a collection of stories that made her one of the most influential writers of her whole era, which is a genuinely absurd amount of range for one person to have — running a court and also basically inventing a literary form on the side. I think about this in terms of "founder mode" a lot, ironically enough for a sixteenth-century royal: she had a day job with actual life-or-death stakes and still found the bandwidth to build something creative and lasting on top of it. My own attempt at "balancing a day job with a creative side project" is doing backend engineering during the week and bombing at open mics on weekends, which feels a little less impressive by comparison. Marguerite used her position to patronize writers and thinkers too, not just produce her own work, which is basically Renaissance-era venture capital for ideas. Royalty aside, that's a founder-and-investor combo most people in tech would kill to pull off in one lifetime.