Dedicated to the memory of Bernard Dwork 1. Introduction In this series of two papers, we prove the p-adic meromorphic continuation of the pure slope L-functions arising from the slope decomposition of an overconvergent F-crystal, as conjectured by Dwork 6]. More precisely, we prove a suitable extension of Dwork's conjecture in our more general setting of-modules, see section 2 for precise deen...