History as Rhetoric, Fable, and Literary Genre

Abstract

This article provides an insight into the notion of history as a literary genre. It argues that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the concept of “history” was mostly employed in its plural form: “the stories” and not “history” were the predominant form of the concept of history. These “stories” were related to the ancient Ciceronian rhetorical and moral tradition of history as Magistra Vitae (history as life's teacher) and were considered part of the so-called belles-lettres or “literature”.