Storytelling In Sixteenth Century France

Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France is an innovative, interdisciplinary examination of parallels between the early modern era and the world in which we live today. Readers are invited to look to the past to see how then, as now, people turned to storytelling to integrate and adapt to rapid social change, to reinforce or restructure community, to sell new ideas, and to refashion the past. This collection explores different modalities of storytelling in sixteenth-century France and emphasizes shared techniques and themes rather than attempting to define narrow kinds of narrative categories. Through studies of storytelling in tapestries, stone, and music as well as distinct genres of historical, professional, and literary writing (addressing both erudite and more common readers), the contributors to this collection evoke a society in transition, wherein traditional techniques and materials were manipulated to express new realities. Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This book focuses on the role of represented speech in four short story collections from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France: the anonymous Evangiles des quenouilles; Martial d'Auvergne's Arrêts d'Amour; Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron; and Noël Du Fail's Propos rustiques. As a study of the narrative staging of the acts of storytelling and conversing, it raises issues of orality, aurality, and literacy, as well as of the processes of textual production, transmission, and reception. In addition, the conversational frame of these short story collections deliberately sets up questions about the accessibility and reliability of truth. While these collections claim to enter upon the path toward universal truth, the difficulty of such an enterprise is revealed through their very narrative structure, where the polyphony of opposing voices and divergent opinions is engaged by the very acts of conversation and storytelling themselves.

To receive a royal pardon in sixteenth-century France for certain kinds of homicide--unpremeditated, unintended, in self-defense, or otherwise excusable--a supplicant had to tell the king a story. These stories took the form of letters of remission, documents narrated to royal notaries by admitted offenders who, in effect, stated their case for pardon to the king. Thousands of such stories are found in French archives, providing precious evidence of the narrative skills and interpretive schemes of peasants and artisans as well as the well-born. This book, by one of the most acclaimed historians of our time, is a pioneering effort to us the tools of literary analysis to interpret archival texts: to show how people from different stations in life shaped the events of a crime into a story, and to compare their stories with those told by Renaissance authors not intended to judge the truth or falsity of the pardon narratives, but rather to refer to the techniques for crafting stories. A number of fascinating crime stories, often possessing Rabelaisian humor, are told in the course of the book, which consists of three long chapters. These chapters explore the French law of homicide, depictions of "hot anger" and self-defense, and the distinctive characteristics of women's stories of bloodshed. The book is illustrated with seven contemporary woodcuts and a facsimile of a letter of remission, with appendixes providing several other original documents. This volume is based on the Harry Camp Memorial Lectures given at Stanford University in 1986.

Brantôme was a gentleman who traveled through Europe in the latter half of the 16th century. The stories he relates not only describe famous duels, but they also give glimpses into lives of royalty and celebrities.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1904 Edition.

Must a gift be given freely? How can we tell a gift from a bribe? Are gifts always a part of human relations--or do they lose their power and importance once the market takes hold and puts a price on every exchange? These questions are central to our sense of social relations past and present, and they are at the heart of this book by one of our most intersting and renowned historians.