PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

‘histoire’ to be an account or narrative which served as example and had didactic
purposes. Jacques Amyot, for instance, noted that ‘l’Histoire est une narration
ordonnee des choses notables, dictes, faittes, ou advenues par le passé, pour conserver
la souvenance à perpetuité, et en servir d’instruction à la postérite’. 478 This idea
served as a mirror of the Human Condition, a moral lesson which could teach Man
how to improve himself. 479 The use of the adjective ‘tragic’ added a dramatic context
aiming to portray the Sinful Human Condition and its consequences, in order to act as
a warning to the readers. Thus, the combination of the terms ‘histoire’ and ‘tragique’
added a theatrical dimension to the work, similar to that experienced in ancient Greek
and Roman tragedies which created the emotions of fear, pity and relief. 480 This
notion of tragedy echoed the humanist trends evident in French literature.
One such trend was the preoccupation with the study of history and its instructive
role, which Boaistuau successfully accommodated in the short story. Like many
humanists, he shared the belief that the past could be used to interpret the present and
to avoid new mistakes, a theory popular among Renaissance thinkers at the time. This
idea that history provided information about events as well as morally useful
knowledge was evident in Histoires tragiques, in which an attempt was made to
present all the stories through the lens of historical authenticity to make them appear
as exempla. In three stories this authenticity was given by the names of notable
historical figures – which in two cases were also the main characters. ‘Histoire
premiere’ was set during the reign of Edward III, and Boaistuau also noted a
478
Quoted in Simonin, M., ‘François de Belleforest, traducteur de Bandel dans la premier volume des
Histoires Tragiques’, in L’encre et la lumière, p. 38. Bold font is mine.
479
Jouanna, A. et al., Histoire et dictionnaire des guerres de religion (Paris, 1998), p. 975. Similarly to
Amans fortunez, the idea of virtue was also one of the main structural themes in Histoires tragiques.
480
See Stanford, W. B., Greek Tragedy and the Emotions: An Introductory Study (London, 1983), and
Lesky, A., Greek Tragedy (London, 1978).
- 160 -