Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and ItalyExamples, crucial links between discourse and society's view of reality, have until now been largely neglected in literary criticism. In the first book length study of the rhetoric of example, John Lyons situates this figure by comparing it with more frequently studied tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche, discusses meanings of the terms example and exemplum, and proposes a set of descriptive concepts for the study of example in early modern