SOURCE: Ferrier, Janet. “An Experiment in Adaptation: Le Petit Jehan de Saintré.” In Forerunners of the French Novel: An Essay on the Development of the Nouvelle in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 54-78. Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1954.

In this essay, Ferrier characterizes Little John of Saintré as essentially an failed experiment, but defends the work's breaking with the traditional romance and chronicle genres. Ferrier praises La Sale's serious attempt at innovation in introducing the notion of a full-length fictional work.

It is a curious fact that a work which has frequently been acclaimed as the first modern novel, and which certainly differs in kind from the rest of the literary output of the fifteenth century, should have been produced, near the end of his life, by one of the most conservative of authors. This conservatism appears to have extended to every sphere of activity of Antoine de...