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Marguerite de Navarre (French: Marguerite d'Angoulême, Marguerite de Valois, or Marguerite de France) (11 April 1492 – 21 December 1549), also known as Marguerite of Angoulême and Margaret of Navarre, was the queen consort of King Henry II of Navarre. Her brother became king of France, as Francis I and the two siblings were responsible for the celebrated intellectual and cultural court and salons of their day in France.

Marguerite is the ancestress of the Bourbon kings of France, being the mother of Jeanne d'Albret, whose son, Henry of Navarre, succeeded as Henry IV of France, the first Bourbon king.

As an author and a patron of humanists and reformers, she was an outstanding figure of the French Renaissance. Samuel Putnam called her "The First Modern Woman".

Marguerite was born in Angoulême on 11 April 1492, the eldest child of Louise of Savoy and Charles, Count of Angoulême. Her father was a direct descendant of Charles V. He was a claimant to the crown, if both Charles VIII and the presumptive heir, Louis, Duke of Orléans, failed to produce male offspring.

On 16 February 1488, her father, Charles, married eleven-year old Louise, the daughter of Philip II of Savoy and Margaret of Bourbon, who was the sister of the Duke of Beaujeu. Louise was considered one of the most brilliant feminine minds in France and she named their first-born, "Marguerite", after her own mother.

Two years after Marguerite's birth, the family moved from Angoulême to Cognac, "where the Italian influence reigned supreme, and where Boccaccio was looked upon as a little less than a god". Marguerite's brother, Francis, later to be King Francis I of France, was born there on 12 September 1494.

She had several half-siblings, from illegitimate relationships of her father, who were raised alongside Marguerite and her brother. Two girls, Jeanne of Angoulême and Madeleine, were born of her father's long relationship with his châtelaine, Antoinette de Polignac, Dame de Combronde, who later became Louise's lady-in-waiting and confidante. Another half-sister, Souveraine, was born to Jeanne le Conte, another of her father's mistresses.

Her father died when she was nearly four; her year-old brother became heir presumptive to the throne of France. Thanks to her mother, who was only nineteen when widowed, Marguerite was tutored from her earliest childhood by excellent teachers and given a classical education that included Latin. The young princess was to be called "Maecenas to the learned ones of her brother's kingdom". Maecenas served a confidant and political adviser to Octavian, (who was to become the first emperor of Rome as Caesar Augustus and thereby, assessed as a quasi-culture minister to the emperor), and his name had become a synonymous to a wealthy, generous, and enlightened patron of the arts.

When Marguerite was ten, Louise tried to marry her to the Prince of Wales, who later would become Henry VIII of England; but this was "declined with thanks".