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 narratives categories. Through studies of storytelling in tapestries, stone, and music as well as in historical, professional, and literary writing that addressed both erudite and common readers, the contributors evoke a society in transition.

EMILY E. THOMPSON is a professor of French and international studies in the Department of Global Languages, Cultures and Societies at Webster University in Webster Groves, Missouri. She contributed an article on Pierre Boaistuau’s edition of Histoires des Amans fortunez to the forthcoming collection Pierre Boaistuau ou le génie des forms and co-translated and co-edited Jeanne d’Albret’s Ample declaration with Kathleen Llewellyn and Colette Winn. 

Emily E. Thompson, Introduction
 
Part I: Putting the Real into Words
Chapter 1. Amy Graves Monroe, “The Memorialist and the Historian: A Tale of Two Storytellers” 
Chapter 2. Kathleen Loysen, “‘Ceste histoire veritable’: Women’s Narrative and Truth-Telling in the Comptes amoureux and the Angoisses douleureuses”
Chapter 3. Marian Rothstein, “The Queen’s Quandary: Storytelling in Jeanne d’Albret’s Ample Déclaration” 
Chapter 4. David LaGuardia, “Telling the True and the Real in the Canards Sanglants”
 
Part II: Playing with Expectations
Chapter 5. Colette H. Winn, “Urania in Physician’s Robes or Poetry in the Service of Medicine: Girolamo Fracastoro, Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (1530)”
Chapter 6. JoAnn DellaNeva, “Storytelling at the Crossroads of Diplomacy, History, and Poetry: ‘The Story of the Death of Anne Boleyn, Queen of England,’ by Lancelot de Carle”
Chapter 7. Emily E. Thompson, “In Defense of Stories: Henri Estienne Reclaims the Story Collection for a New Readership” 
Chapter 8. Dora E. Polachek, “Recasting the Heptaméron Novellas in Brantôme’s Vie des dames galantes” 
 
Part III: Repurposing Stories through Shifting Forms
Chapter 9. Cathy Yandell, “Sex, Salvation, Extermination: Contrafacta and the French Wars of Religion” 
Chapter 10. Sheila ffolliott, “Storytelling in Tapestry: Examples for a French Queen”
Chapter 11. Phillip John Usher, “The Night before Geology: Fossil Stories from Early Modern France” 

Works Cited
About the Contributors