The term Novel (from French nouvelle: new) applied both to all entertaining pieces of news (published in journals such as the Mercure Gallant, memoires, collections of letters or individually) and the spectrum of genres we would today read as the novella: exemplary stories as those by Boccaccio, Chaucer, Machiavelli and Cervantes which offered an intrigue, a surprising point and a witty moral lesson. The terminological coincidence was fashionable with all the gossip which was published under the pretext of the poetic genre and the lesson to be taught, whose readers would most of all ask for the key to get the real names of the protagonists. See Olaf Simons, Marteaus Europa (2001), p.462-488, 599-606.