16th Century
Rabelais. First Book of Pantagruel Second of the whole, 1533; Gargantua, 1535; rest of Pantagruel at intervals, to the (posthumous) Fifth Book in 1564.
Marguerite de Navarre. Heptameron. Written before (probably some time before) Marguerite's death in 1549. Imperfectly published as Les Amants Fortunés, etc., in 1558; completely, under its permanent title, next year.
Bonaventure Despériers. Cymbalum Mundi, 1537; Contes et Joyeux Devis, 1558, but written at least fourteen years earlier, as the author died in 1544.
Hélisenne de Crenne. Les Angoisses, etc., 1538.
Amadis Romances. Date of Spanish or Portuguese originals uncertain. Herberay published the first part of his French translation of Amadis itself in 1540.
Many of the small pastoral and adventurous stories noticed at the beginning of Chapter VIII. appeared in the last fifteen years of the sixteenth century, the remainder in the first quarter of the seventeenth. But of the Greek and Spanish compositions, which had so great an influence on them and on the subsequent "Heroic" School, the work of Heliodorus had been translated as early as 1546, and the Diana of Montemayor in 1578.