Intro -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I: Putting the Real into Words -- 1. The Memorialist and the Historian: A Tale of Two Storytellers -- 2. "Ceste histoire veritable": Women's Narrative and Truth-Telling in the Comptes amoureux and the Angoisses douloureuses -- 3. The Queen's Quandary: Storytelling in Jeanne d'Albret's Ample Déclaration -- 4. Telling the True and the Real in the Canards Sanglants -- Part II: Playing with Expectations -- 5. Urania in Physician's Robes, or Poetry in the Service of Medicine: Girolamo Fracastoro, Syphilis sive morbus gallicus (1530) -- 6. Storytelling at the Crossroads of Diplomacy, History, and Poetry: "The Story of the Death of Anne Boleyn, Queen of England," by Lancelot de Carle -- 7. In Defense of Stories: Henri Estienne Reclaims the Story Collection for a New Readership -- 8. Recasting the Heptaméron Novellas in Brantôme's Vie des dames galantes -- Part III: Repurposing Stories through Shifting Forms -- 9. Sex, Salvation, Extermination: Contrafacta and the French Wars of Religion -- 10. Storytelling in Tapestry: Examples for a French Queen -- 11. The Night before Geology: Fossil Stories from Early Modern France -- Contributors -- Index.