title: Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France
author:  Natalie  Zemon Davis 
description: This book is an account of life and death in early modern France. It is an analysis of the crime stories which men and women told their judges in order to try to save themselves from the gallows. To receive a royal pardon for murder in 16th century France, a supplicant had to tell the king a story. Thousands of such stories are found in the French archives, providing evidence of the narrative skills and life conditions of peasants, artisans and the well-to-do. Many of the pardon tales are accounts of murder for sexual motives and thus reveal something of the sexual conventions of the time and the inequalities between men and women. The author examines the different ways in which men and women, and especially husbands and wives, told their murder stories and the differing ways in which their explanations and excuses were received. This work is a blend of history, literature and law and should be of interest to students of early modern European history, Renaissance literature, the history of criminal law and women's studies.
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  DUKE 
  UNIVERSITY 
  LIBRARY 
  GIFT OF 
  The hstate of 
  Jean Alice Mary Baldwin 
  
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  Digitized by the Internet Archive 
  in 2018 with funding from 
  Duke University Libraries 
  https://archive.org/details/landofpardons01lebr_0 
  
  ‘
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  THE LAND OF PARDONS 
  
  A BRETON VILLAGP: 
  
  THE 
  LAND OF PARDONS 
  BY 
  ANATOLE LE BRAZ 
  TRANSLATED BY 
  FRANCES M. GOSTLING 
  WITH 12 ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR 
  BY T. C. GOTCH 
  AND 40 OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS 
  THIRD EDITION 
  METHUEN & CO. 
  36 ESSEX STREET W.C. 
  LONDON 
  
  First Published 
  Second Edition 
  Third Edition 
  May igob 
  December igo6 
  January igog 
  
  9N. W) 
  LHS'l&A 
  TO 
  THE REVERED MEMORY 
  OF 
  MY MOTHER 
  
  CONTENTS 
  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE . 
  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION 
  THE PARDON OF THE POOR . 
  THE PARDON OF THE SINGERS . 
  THE PARDON OF FIRE 
  THE PARDON OF THE MOUNTAIN 
  THE PARDON OF THE SEA 
  INDEX . 
  xiii 
  xvii 
  I 
  58 
  131 
  198 
  249 
  287 
  
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