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Fiction in the archives : pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France by Natalie Zemon Davis is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

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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, depi

Who reads Fiction in the archives : pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France?

Author

Natalie Zemon Davis

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published

1990

Language

EN

ISBN

9780804717991

Category

history

Subjects

Fiction, Literary Fiction, History

Rating

3.89 / 5 (25 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14