|
Product Description
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.
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- On Assistance to the Poor (RSART: Renaissance Society of America Reprint Text Series)
- Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime
- Spanish Inquisition, 1478-1614: An Anthology of Sources
- The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century
- The Trial of Tempel Anneke: Records of a Witchcraft Trial in Brunswick, Germany, 1663, Second Edition
- Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
- Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition
- The Return of Martin Guerre
- Thinking About History
- The Allure of the Archives (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)
*If this is not the "Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 5, 2024 18:51 +08.