Well into the early modern period and beyond, French authors such as Martial d’Auvergne and Marguerite de Navarre remained devoted to the literary representation of oral storytellers. Indeed, far from producing texts with writerly, externalized narrators attached to them, they created images of storytelling circles, scenes that remind readers of how medieval storytelling was thought to have taken place: groups of people, gathered together, orally exchanging stories either with or without the physical presence of a book. Such works provide a fascinating blend of text and represented voice: printed pages which appear to speak, on which nearly all the words are representations of oral discourse, whether the transmission of stories or the exchange of conversation in response to those stories.

Elsewhere I have discussed the depiction of the storytelling scene in such texts as the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, the Évangiles des quenouilles, the Heptaméron, the Caquets de l’Accouchée, Martial d’Auvergne's Arrêts d’Amour and Noël Du Fail's Propos rustiques. However, even a text such as Jacques Tahureau's Dialogues (published 1565), traditionally classified as belonging to the genre of the humanist dialogue, and which does not therefore immediately appear to fit into an analogous pattern, is mediated by an overarching and highly oralized narrative presence on the page. I will show here, therefore, that beyond merely demonstrating the enduring influence of the medieval storytelling circle in the French early modern period, such a text revises our understanding of that influence, dissolving generic boundaries in unexpected ways. It expands our notion of storytelling and participates in many of the paradigms and techniques of storytelling with which we are familiar from the Middle Ages, a world first illuminated for me through the close and enriching work I embarked upon under the guidance of Timmie Vitz.

Openly competing with Boccaccio to create the French Decameron, the anonymous author of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles (1462), Philippe de Vigneulles (author of another early sixteenth-century Cent nouvelles nouvelles) and Marguerite de Navarre (Heptaméron, 1540s), among others, sought to inscribe the storyteller's voice on the page, a technique also seen in late medieval texts as diverse as the anonymous Évangiles des quenouilles (1466–74) or Martial d’Auvergne's Arrêts d’Amour (1460s). However, this technique is not one that disappeared from use with the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and further into the early modern period.

The decision to re-enact on the page a scene of oral storytelling is extraordinarily prevalent in late-medieval French literature, as it will continue to be throughout the sixteenth century. Texts such as the anonymous Cent nouvelles nouvelles (1462) and the anonymous Évangiles des quenouilles (ca. 1470–80) experiment with the staging of oral storytelling in a range of ways, using embedded narratives, the structural device of the frame, and the depiction of storytelling circles. Scenes of oral storytelling are fertile ground for inquiry regarding late medieval practices of story transmission, especially the dynamic relation between performance and audience reception.

This essay proposes to examine how storytelling and story-performance are represented in the narrative literature of late-fifteenth-century France, and why the staging of these processes was so compelling for authors of the period. Indeed, why did late-medieval narrative artists choose not merely to tell stories, but also to show others telling stories, and to contain within their romans and collections of nouvelles reflections upon the art and function of storytelling? What can we posit as the motivation for such complex narrative structurings?

It perhaps goes without saying that the storytelling conventions highlighted in these collections call repeated and insistent attention to the presence of the cercle conteur, begging the question of whether the point of such collections is precisely to illustrate the dynamics of any interpretive community, the reactions of the story recipients, and the necessity of their presence. That is, the authors of these collections elected not merely to tell stories, but rather to show stories in the process of being told and received. Indeed, the meaning of such story collections may lie not only in the stories themselves, or in the reactions of members of the cercle conteur inscribed in the tales, but also in the author's examination of how this crucial transaction takes place.

These texts can (and, I suggest, should) be read as symbolic story performances: the reader-reception circuit – the act of reception and interpretation – is dramatized before our eyes through the evocation of the sound of the human voice. Most theorists of reader-reception have not paid sufficient attention to the medieval or early modern periods, taking as their primary examples contemporary models of textual transmission and reading in which interpretation is a solitary act accomplished in silence and/or in writing.