Antoine de Nervèze (c. 1570 – after 1622) was a French nobleman and writer of novels, translations, letters and moral works at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries.
Nervèze is representative of a younger generation following on the literary developments of French novelists Nicolas de Montreux and Béroalde de Verville, and he is often associated – along with authors Nicolas des Escuteaux and François du Souhait – with the sentimental novels (or "amours") published during the reign of Henry IV.
His collected novels were published several times in anthologized form, and the number of editions seems to indicate commercial success.
His Catholicism is mixed with elements of stoicism and he idealized the chastity and purity of his characters (who frequently seek out retreat in convents to assuage their woes) and his novel Les amours de Polydore et de Virgin[i]e celebrates divine love as a cure for the ravages of earthly love.
In the first decades of the 17th century, Nervèze, Des Escuteaux and their colleagues were seen by their detractors (such as Charles Sorel) as ridiculous purveyors of rhetorical and metaphorical excess, but their works represent an important stage in the development of the novel in France (leading to L'Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé and, later, to Madeleine de Scudéry and Madame de Lafayette), in the development of etiquette and a moralized sense of nobility (the conception of the "honnête homme") and in the evolution of the French language (prefiguring the "Précieuses").