Poetry around 1500, among the Rhétoriqueurs of France, is characterized by various kinds of hybridizations of genres (chronicle/epic, propaganda or moral lesson/lyricism, official discourse/familiar epistolarity, brief poetic genres/narration, etc.). Our premise is that these crossings reflect a confrontation between a still-vibrant French poetic tradition and the new literary resources that characterize the Renaissance (discoveries and critical editions of ancient authors, diffusion of Italian poetry). The Rhétoriqueurs of France discovered Italian culture and their claim to a “Renaissance” of the arts at the time of the Italian wars: they were confronted with a rich and attractive literary revival, but it was embodied by the enemy. The hybridizations of different poetic genres reveal a real stance towards this Renaissance: one of critical appropriation, refusing to simply replace the French poetic tradition, as the Pléiade poets would later do. The project therefore aims to change the way French literary history around 1500 is represented, by providing the means to replace the teleological narrative of a period of “Middle Ages” followed by a “Renaissance”, which has prevailed for a long time. The project is based on two work packages. The first one aims to explore and edit a vast unpublished corpus, that of Guillaume Cretin’s Chronique française, a historical account of the French monarchy that borrows epic structures. The second, which builds on the reading hypotheses and method developed for the edition and study of the Chronique, consists of a literary history study of genre hybridizations among the Rhétoriqueurs of France (Robertet, Saint-Gelais, La Vigne, Auton, Marot, Picart, Lemaire, Cretin).