As they reshaped the Italian novella under the inquisitorial atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation, Spanish narrators labelled their texts as exemplary. However, critics have usually agreed that there is a contradiction between the morals preached in the narrative frames, prologues, and sententiae of Spanish novellas and the content of the plots. This book argues that this ambiguity is a result of the use of the rhetoric of the fictitious case. Spanish novellas rewrite the Italian genre through the rhetoric of the fictitious case and with the specific purpose of either challenging or validating the new set of rules regarding marriage introduced by the Council of Trent.