Jonathan Patterson | University of Oxford (original) (raw)
Books by Jonathan Patterson
H-France, 2022
Four leading scholars discuss my book, Villainy in France. Read their essays and my response essay.
Combining insights from legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, Jonathan Patter... more Combining insights from legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, Jonathan Patterson examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts. Whilst few people obtained justice through the law, many pursued out-of-court settlements of one kind or another. Literary texts commemorated villainies both fictitious and historical; literature sometimes instantiated the process of redress, and enabled the transmission of conflicts from one context to another. Villainy in France follows this overflowing current of pre-modern French culture, examining its impact within France and across the English Channel.
Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Mol... more Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Molière's famous comedy, L'Avare? As wars and economic crises ravaged France on the threshold of modernity, avarice was said to be flourishing as never before. Yet by the late sixteenth century, a number of French writers would argue that in some contexts, avaricious behaviour was not straightforwardly sinful or harmful. Considerations of social rank, gender, object pursued, time, and circumstance led some to question age-old beliefs. Traditionally reviled groups (rapacious usurers, greedy lawyers, miserly fathers, covetous women) might still exhibit unmistakable signs of avarice — but perhaps not invariably, in an age of shifting social, economic and intellectual values. Across a large, diverse corpus of French texts, Jonathan Patterson shows how a range of flexible genres nourished by humanism tended to offset traditional condemnation of avarice and avares with innovative, mitigating perspectives, arising from subjective experience. In such writings, an avaricious disposition could be re-described as something less vicious, excusable, or even expedient. In this word history of avarice, close readings of well-known authors (Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Montaigne), and of their lesser-known contemporaries are connected to broader socio-economic developments of the late French Renaissance (c.1540-1615). The final chapter situates key themes in relation to Molière's L'Avare. As such, Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France newly illuminates debates about avarice within broader cultural preoccupations surrounding gender, enrichment and status in early modern France.
Articles by Jonathan Patterson
Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 32:2 (2010), 206-20 , Jan 1, 2010
Marie de Gournay’s poetic treatises and epic translations highlight her disgust at seeing the st... more Marie de Gournay’s poetic treatises and epic translations highlight her disgust
at seeing the stylistic concept of douceur overly feminized in the verse
of her Malherbian contemporaries. For Gournay this had rendered French
poetry incapable of cognitive complexity. Gournay developed a new understanding
of douceur through the notions of esprit and vigueur: a poetic style
influenced by the Pléiade and by Montaigne. Gournay attempted to foreground
douceur in complex metaphor rather than in euphony and rationalized
clarity; she privileged forceful, oratorical vehemence rather than purely
conciliatory discourse. Gournay dismissed her contemporaries’ conception
of douceur as mollesse, a pejorative vice commonly associated with women
in her day. Conversely, douceur rendered through esprit and vigueur appears
at first to privilege qualities more readily associated with men. However, in
her search for ‘vraye douceur’ through the medium of Virgilian epic, Gourna y
shows that esprit and vigueur may be associated with ideals of masculinity
and femininity — indeed, classical decorum should lead us to expect no
less. Inspired by Virgil, yet also anticipating the femme forte of the 1640s,
Gournay depicts a Venus who is douce yet vigorous, suggesting the possibilit y
of a gender-neutral style for French verse.
Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 2018
This article looks at how intellectual disabilities were represented in relation to low social cl... more This article looks at how intellectual disabilities were represented in relation to low social class in the early modern period. My main quarry is a chapter from hybrid text, Les Serées (1598), by a late Renaissance merchant-printer, Guillaume Bouchet. Bouchet based his fictional dialogue around snatches of a famous treatise: the Examen des los ingenios by Juan Huarte, which had recently been published in the French vernacular as L'Anacrise. Bouchet's rendering of Huarte is fast-paced, deliberately patchy, in keeping with the spirit of festive conversation that animates the whole of Les Serées. Bouchet's fictitious merchant intelocutors find no easy correlation between what Huarte said about individual temperament, intellectual ability and social rank. They are nevertheless fascinated by anecdotal evidence of the (not-so) "idiotic" potential of various kinds of lowborn individual, from gardeners to professional farce actors.
Sodalitas Litteratorum: le compagnonnage littéraire néo-latin et français à la Renaissance. Etudes à la mémoire de Philip Ford , 2019
Death all too often catches us off-guard, as those who knew and worked alongside Philip Ford will... more Death all too often catches us off-guard, as those who knew and worked alongside Philip Ford will painfully testify. Yet intellectual creativity, community and collegiality-in short, sodalitas-are robust academic virtues which endure. Or do they? This essay will provide a critique of the notion of enduring sodalitas in sixteenth-century French humanism, through a case-study of a learned humanist cenacle that suddenly found itself bereft of its wealthy patron: Jean II Brinon (d.1555).
Renaissance Quarterly, 2017
The Parisian Pierre de L'Estoile was an obsessive compiler of politically motivated, obscene ephe... more The Parisian Pierre de L'Estoile was an obsessive compiler of politically motivated, obscene ephemera in the reign of King Henri III (1574-89). This article explores how and why L'Estoile kept on adding to a vast archive of vile materials that he purportedly despised. Examining L'Estoile's manuscripts at close quarters, the article traces a complex practice of censure and self-censorship alongside similar practices by contemporary writers (Henri Estienne and Pierre de Brantôme). L'Estoile's contribution to the history of sexuality is that of a self-aware critic, legitimating his inability not to disavow the obscenities he has chosen to preserve.
French Studies, 2016
This article proposes a new reading of Pierre Matthieu's La Guisiade (1589), a polemical tragedy ... more This article proposes a new reading of Pierre Matthieu's La Guisiade (1589), a polemical tragedy written at the height of France's Wars of Religion (1562–98). La Guisiade constitutes an incandescent response to the assassination on 23 December 1588 of the Duc de Guise, the charismatic leader of the uncompromising ultra-Catholic faction (the Ligue) on the verge of toppling France's much-maligned monarch, Henri III. Matthieu was a militant ligueur when he composed La Guisiade, seeking to vilify those he deemed responsible for Guise's murder: the king, his various mignons, and his malevolent counsellors. This article will show how the language of villainy that pervades La Guisiade has much in common — and more so than previously assumed — with the inflammatory pamphlets (libelles) circulated by the Ligue in the late 1580s and early 1590s. Matthieu's hybrid tragedy combines the vitriolic rhetoric of a pamphleteer with a humanist's classicizing sensibility. Viewed as such, it becomes necessary to question the scholarly orthodoxy that Matthieu's villains are predominantly ‘Machiavellian’. Instead, Machiavelli is but one symbol of ligueur hatred alongside other deeply reviled figures, including the Huguenot, the Turk, the politique, and the sorcerer, whose villainy is conceptualized as mutually reinforcing.
The Seventeenth Century, 2016
Charles Loyseau’s Traité des ordres et simples dignitez (1610) is well known to historians for it... more Charles Loyseau’s Traité des ordres et simples dignitez (1610) is well known to historians for its apparent “anatomy” of France’s social hierarchy in the ancien régime. Whilst Loyseau was mostly preoccupied with the elites and their varying levels of dignity, his treatise nonetheless provides an important window on the multitudinous plebeian orders. Loyseau hesitantly stratifies four tiers of “viles personnes” (cultivators, artisans, casual workmen, and beggars). Each of these groups puts strain on his conceptual framework of dignity and order; only beggars emerge as fully vile. The plebeian multitudes of the Traité des ordres engage in menial, unstable, but in many cases still worthwhile occupations. By comparing Loyseau’s views with those of contemporaries (Louis Turquet de Mayerne and Antoine de Montchrestien) we may better understand his conception of “viles personnes” as the first stages of an emergent discourse on political economy: harnessing the economic potential of France’s poorest.
Early Modern French Studies, 2017
The guest editors explain how this special issue of Early Modern French Studies identifies and ex... more The guest editors explain how this special issue of Early Modern French Studies identifies and explores the significance of the vile in three key regards: i) the heuristic value of repulsive bodies; ii) a search for transcendent beauty in death and decay; iii) revilement along linguistic, social, and political lines. They argue that, within and between these wider phenomena, variations of vileness tellingly illuminate the difficulties of calibrating moral and aesthetic categories with those of a changing socio-political hierarchy.
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2012
This article studies the much neglected moral landscape of a popular early modern agronomical tre... more This article studies the much neglected moral landscape of a popular early modern agronomical treatise, the Theatre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600) by Olivier de Serres. It shows how Serres provided a practical and moral response to the decimation of the French countryside in the Wars of Religion (1562–98). The Theatre d'agriculture was written to offer comprehensive guidance on how to make husbandry of the soil a virtuous form of wealth creation, untainted by the vice of avarice. The article examines Serres's description of just profiteering, excessive getting and deficient giving on an early modern country estate. Serres denounced avaricious overlords, but his greater concern was to advise landowners on managing their allegedly greedy, fraudulent workforce. This resulted in strategies that favour the landlord's enrichment over that of his workers, but not, as is usually argued, in an enthusiastic promotion of sharecropping. I find little evidence that Serres strongly supported any model of land management other than ones involving direct cultivation and fixed rent contracts, where the landowner personally oversaw and monitored the productivity of his servants and tenants. For Serres, a meticulously calculating attitude to finances was warranted by a volatile, avaricious workforce. Historical contextualization suggests that these suspicions, whilst not wholly unsubstantiated, must be viewed critically. Serres's advocacy of pragmatic economic calculus (bon mesnage) as a just philosophy of enrichment was by no means universally shared by his peers. Indeed, for some, bon mesnage of this sort could be, morally speaking, akin to avarice.
Papers by Jonathan Patterson
Early Modern French Studies, 2017
The guest editors explain how this special issue of Early Modern French Studies identifies and ex... more The guest editors explain how this special issue of Early Modern French Studies identifies and explores the significance of the vile in three key regards: i) the heuristic value of repulsive bodies; ii) a search for transcendent beauty in death and decay; iii) revilement along linguistic, social, and political lines. They argue that, within and between these wider phenomena, variations of vileness tellingly illuminate the difficulties of calibrating moral and aesthetic categories with those of a changing socio-political hierarchy.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2017
The Parisian Pierre de L’Estoile was an obsessive compiler of politically motivated, obscene ephe... more The Parisian Pierre de L’Estoile was an obsessive compiler of politically motivated, obscene ephemera during the reign of King Henri III (r. 1574–89). This article explores how and why L’Estoile kept on adding to a vast archive of “vilain” (“vile”) materials that he purportedly despised. Examining L’Estoile’s manuscripts at close quarters, the article traces a complex practice of censure and self-censorship alongside similar practices by contemporary writers (Henri Estienne and Pierre de Brantôme). L’Estoile’s contribution to the history of sexuality is that of a self-aware critic, legitimating his compulsion to disavow the obscenities he chose to preserve.
French Studies, 2015
The life of Pierre Matthieu (1563-1621) was punctuated by wars and high-profile assassinations. A... more The life of Pierre Matthieu (1563-1621) was punctuated by wars and high-profile assassinations. Amid these crises, Matthieu forged a remarkable career. During France's eighth and final religious war (1587-98), the young Matthieu became an avocat in the présidial de Lyon (1587). At that time his political allegiance lay with the uncompromising Catholic Ligue that sought to destroy all who resisted hard-line Catholicism. When the Ligue's fortunes declined, he swore allegiance to the new, conciliatory monarch, Henri IV. Matthieu found favour in the nascent Bourbon dynasty, and was appointed royal historiographer in 1594-a position he held till his death. Matthieu was not only a historian: in his youth he had received an excellent education in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which fed into a considerable literary output of poems, historical fictions, funeral oratory, and, most notably, five tragedies. This article studies Matthieu's final tragedy, La Guisiade (1589)-a wrathful outpouring in response to the assassination of the onetime charismatic leader of the Ligue, Henri de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, on 23 December 1588. The following year, an incensed Matthieu added his voice to a growing number of Ligueurs blaming King Henri III for Guise's gory demise. Deeply embedded in the politics of its time, La Guisiade enjoyed an ephemeral success, with three editions in 1589. 1 Yet thereafter it has been largely forgotten, barely a footnote in the history of French neoclassical tragedy that would reach its apogee the following century in the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine. Recently, however, scholarly interest in La Guisiade has been revived. The play is now considered an important landmark in the polemical literature that arose out of the French Wars of Religion, not only in France, but also across the Channel in Protestant England. 2 La Guisiade is an intriguingly hybrid work. It combines elements of a classical tragedy (a five-act structure; formal versification, mostly in Alexandrines; intervening choruses; murder committed offstage) with pamphletstyle prose 'arguments', steering reader sympathy at all times towards a seething hatred of the 1 I have consulted Louis Lobbes's critical edition of La Guisiade (Geneva: Droz, 1990), established from the third version published towards the end of 1589 (the first two editions appearing during the summer of that year). On the different early versions, see also Gilles Ernst, 'Des Deux Guisiade de Pierre Matthieu',
French Studies, 2015
This book has been a long time in the making, and I have incurred many debts of gratitude along t... more This book has been a long time in the making, and I have incurred many debts of gratitude along the way. Financial support was provided by Roosevelt University, Duquesne University, the Stanford University Libraries (Gustave Gimon Visiting Scholar Fellowship), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (N.E.H. Summer Stipend). Publication of this volume was generously assisted by a subvention from Duquesne University and its MacAnulty College of Liberal Arts. The list of libraries and archives on whose facilities and staff I have depended is very long; aside from the institutions just mentioned, they include the Bibliothèque Nationale and Archives Nationales of France, the Archives Municipales de Lyon, the Newberry Library,
The British journal of psychiatry : the journal of mental science, 2015
French Studies
2 One can find a number of well-established joint-faculty degree programmes in US universities. 3... more 2 One can find a number of well-established joint-faculty degree programmes in US universities. 3 For example, the 'Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities' series published by Edinburgh University Press, and the 'Law and Literature' series published by Oxford University Press. 4 For a reappraisal of law and literature as a part of law in a humanities context, see the University of Warwick's Law and Humanities research cluster,
This is a draft of a chapter in a future monograph on Renaissance villainy.
Draft chapter of a future publication on villainy in the French Renaissance (work in progress)
H-France, 2022
Four leading scholars discuss my book, Villainy in France. Read their essays and my response essay.
Combining insights from legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, Jonathan Patter... more Combining insights from legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, Jonathan Patterson examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts. Whilst few people obtained justice through the law, many pursued out-of-court settlements of one kind or another. Literary texts commemorated villainies both fictitious and historical; literature sometimes instantiated the process of redress, and enabled the transmission of conflicts from one context to another. Villainy in France follows this overflowing current of pre-modern French culture, examining its impact within France and across the English Channel.
Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Mol... more Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Molière's famous comedy, L'Avare? As wars and economic crises ravaged France on the threshold of modernity, avarice was said to be flourishing as never before. Yet by the late sixteenth century, a number of French writers would argue that in some contexts, avaricious behaviour was not straightforwardly sinful or harmful. Considerations of social rank, gender, object pursued, time, and circumstance led some to question age-old beliefs. Traditionally reviled groups (rapacious usurers, greedy lawyers, miserly fathers, covetous women) might still exhibit unmistakable signs of avarice — but perhaps not invariably, in an age of shifting social, economic and intellectual values. Across a large, diverse corpus of French texts, Jonathan Patterson shows how a range of flexible genres nourished by humanism tended to offset traditional condemnation of avarice and avares with innovative, mitigating perspectives, arising from subjective experience. In such writings, an avaricious disposition could be re-described as something less vicious, excusable, or even expedient. In this word history of avarice, close readings of well-known authors (Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Montaigne), and of their lesser-known contemporaries are connected to broader socio-economic developments of the late French Renaissance (c.1540-1615). The final chapter situates key themes in relation to Molière's L'Avare. As such, Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France newly illuminates debates about avarice within broader cultural preoccupations surrounding gender, enrichment and status in early modern France.
Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 32:2 (2010), 206-20 , Jan 1, 2010
Marie de Gournay’s poetic treatises and epic translations highlight her disgust at seeing the st... more Marie de Gournay’s poetic treatises and epic translations highlight her disgust
at seeing the stylistic concept of douceur overly feminized in the verse
of her Malherbian contemporaries. For Gournay this had rendered French
poetry incapable of cognitive complexity. Gournay developed a new understanding
of douceur through the notions of esprit and vigueur: a poetic style
influenced by the Pléiade and by Montaigne. Gournay attempted to foreground
douceur in complex metaphor rather than in euphony and rationalized
clarity; she privileged forceful, oratorical vehemence rather than purely
conciliatory discourse. Gournay dismissed her contemporaries’ conception
of douceur as mollesse, a pejorative vice commonly associated with women
in her day. Conversely, douceur rendered through esprit and vigueur appears
at first to privilege qualities more readily associated with men. However, in
her search for ‘vraye douceur’ through the medium of Virgilian epic, Gourna y
shows that esprit and vigueur may be associated with ideals of masculinity
and femininity — indeed, classical decorum should lead us to expect no
less. Inspired by Virgil, yet also anticipating the femme forte of the 1640s,
Gournay depicts a Venus who is douce yet vigorous, suggesting the possibilit y
of a gender-neutral style for French verse.
Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 2018
This article looks at how intellectual disabilities were represented in relation to low social cl... more This article looks at how intellectual disabilities were represented in relation to low social class in the early modern period. My main quarry is a chapter from hybrid text, Les Serées (1598), by a late Renaissance merchant-printer, Guillaume Bouchet. Bouchet based his fictional dialogue around snatches of a famous treatise: the Examen des los ingenios by Juan Huarte, which had recently been published in the French vernacular as L'Anacrise. Bouchet's rendering of Huarte is fast-paced, deliberately patchy, in keeping with the spirit of festive conversation that animates the whole of Les Serées. Bouchet's fictitious merchant intelocutors find no easy correlation between what Huarte said about individual temperament, intellectual ability and social rank. They are nevertheless fascinated by anecdotal evidence of the (not-so) "idiotic" potential of various kinds of lowborn individual, from gardeners to professional farce actors.
Sodalitas Litteratorum: le compagnonnage littéraire néo-latin et français à la Renaissance. Etudes à la mémoire de Philip Ford , 2019
Death all too often catches us off-guard, as those who knew and worked alongside Philip Ford will... more Death all too often catches us off-guard, as those who knew and worked alongside Philip Ford will painfully testify. Yet intellectual creativity, community and collegiality-in short, sodalitas-are robust academic virtues which endure. Or do they? This essay will provide a critique of the notion of enduring sodalitas in sixteenth-century French humanism, through a case-study of a learned humanist cenacle that suddenly found itself bereft of its wealthy patron: Jean II Brinon (d.1555).
Renaissance Quarterly, 2017
The Parisian Pierre de L'Estoile was an obsessive compiler of politically motivated, obscene ephe... more The Parisian Pierre de L'Estoile was an obsessive compiler of politically motivated, obscene ephemera in the reign of King Henri III (1574-89). This article explores how and why L'Estoile kept on adding to a vast archive of vile materials that he purportedly despised. Examining L'Estoile's manuscripts at close quarters, the article traces a complex practice of censure and self-censorship alongside similar practices by contemporary writers (Henri Estienne and Pierre de Brantôme). L'Estoile's contribution to the history of sexuality is that of a self-aware critic, legitimating his inability not to disavow the obscenities he has chosen to preserve.
French Studies, 2016
This article proposes a new reading of Pierre Matthieu's La Guisiade (1589), a polemical tragedy ... more This article proposes a new reading of Pierre Matthieu's La Guisiade (1589), a polemical tragedy written at the height of France's Wars of Religion (1562–98). La Guisiade constitutes an incandescent response to the assassination on 23 December 1588 of the Duc de Guise, the charismatic leader of the uncompromising ultra-Catholic faction (the Ligue) on the verge of toppling France's much-maligned monarch, Henri III. Matthieu was a militant ligueur when he composed La Guisiade, seeking to vilify those he deemed responsible for Guise's murder: the king, his various mignons, and his malevolent counsellors. This article will show how the language of villainy that pervades La Guisiade has much in common — and more so than previously assumed — with the inflammatory pamphlets (libelles) circulated by the Ligue in the late 1580s and early 1590s. Matthieu's hybrid tragedy combines the vitriolic rhetoric of a pamphleteer with a humanist's classicizing sensibility. Viewed as such, it becomes necessary to question the scholarly orthodoxy that Matthieu's villains are predominantly ‘Machiavellian’. Instead, Machiavelli is but one symbol of ligueur hatred alongside other deeply reviled figures, including the Huguenot, the Turk, the politique, and the sorcerer, whose villainy is conceptualized as mutually reinforcing.
The Seventeenth Century, 2016
Charles Loyseau’s Traité des ordres et simples dignitez (1610) is well known to historians for it... more Charles Loyseau’s Traité des ordres et simples dignitez (1610) is well known to historians for its apparent “anatomy” of France’s social hierarchy in the ancien régime. Whilst Loyseau was mostly preoccupied with the elites and their varying levels of dignity, his treatise nonetheless provides an important window on the multitudinous plebeian orders. Loyseau hesitantly stratifies four tiers of “viles personnes” (cultivators, artisans, casual workmen, and beggars). Each of these groups puts strain on his conceptual framework of dignity and order; only beggars emerge as fully vile. The plebeian multitudes of the Traité des ordres engage in menial, unstable, but in many cases still worthwhile occupations. By comparing Loyseau’s views with those of contemporaries (Louis Turquet de Mayerne and Antoine de Montchrestien) we may better understand his conception of “viles personnes” as the first stages of an emergent discourse on political economy: harnessing the economic potential of France’s poorest.
Early Modern French Studies, 2017
The guest editors explain how this special issue of Early Modern French Studies identifies and ex... more The guest editors explain how this special issue of Early Modern French Studies identifies and explores the significance of the vile in three key regards: i) the heuristic value of repulsive bodies; ii) a search for transcendent beauty in death and decay; iii) revilement along linguistic, social, and political lines. They argue that, within and between these wider phenomena, variations of vileness tellingly illuminate the difficulties of calibrating moral and aesthetic categories with those of a changing socio-political hierarchy.
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2012
This article studies the much neglected moral landscape of a popular early modern agronomical tre... more This article studies the much neglected moral landscape of a popular early modern agronomical treatise, the Theatre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600) by Olivier de Serres. It shows how Serres provided a practical and moral response to the decimation of the French countryside in the Wars of Religion (1562–98). The Theatre d'agriculture was written to offer comprehensive guidance on how to make husbandry of the soil a virtuous form of wealth creation, untainted by the vice of avarice. The article examines Serres's description of just profiteering, excessive getting and deficient giving on an early modern country estate. Serres denounced avaricious overlords, but his greater concern was to advise landowners on managing their allegedly greedy, fraudulent workforce. This resulted in strategies that favour the landlord's enrichment over that of his workers, but not, as is usually argued, in an enthusiastic promotion of sharecropping. I find little evidence that Serres strongly supported any model of land management other than ones involving direct cultivation and fixed rent contracts, where the landowner personally oversaw and monitored the productivity of his servants and tenants. For Serres, a meticulously calculating attitude to finances was warranted by a volatile, avaricious workforce. Historical contextualization suggests that these suspicions, whilst not wholly unsubstantiated, must be viewed critically. Serres's advocacy of pragmatic economic calculus (bon mesnage) as a just philosophy of enrichment was by no means universally shared by his peers. Indeed, for some, bon mesnage of this sort could be, morally speaking, akin to avarice.
Early Modern French Studies, 2017
The guest editors explain how this special issue of Early Modern French Studies identifies and ex... more The guest editors explain how this special issue of Early Modern French Studies identifies and explores the significance of the vile in three key regards: i) the heuristic value of repulsive bodies; ii) a search for transcendent beauty in death and decay; iii) revilement along linguistic, social, and political lines. They argue that, within and between these wider phenomena, variations of vileness tellingly illuminate the difficulties of calibrating moral and aesthetic categories with those of a changing socio-political hierarchy.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2017
The Parisian Pierre de L’Estoile was an obsessive compiler of politically motivated, obscene ephe... more The Parisian Pierre de L’Estoile was an obsessive compiler of politically motivated, obscene ephemera during the reign of King Henri III (r. 1574–89). This article explores how and why L’Estoile kept on adding to a vast archive of “vilain” (“vile”) materials that he purportedly despised. Examining L’Estoile’s manuscripts at close quarters, the article traces a complex practice of censure and self-censorship alongside similar practices by contemporary writers (Henri Estienne and Pierre de Brantôme). L’Estoile’s contribution to the history of sexuality is that of a self-aware critic, legitimating his compulsion to disavow the obscenities he chose to preserve.
French Studies, 2015
The life of Pierre Matthieu (1563-1621) was punctuated by wars and high-profile assassinations. A... more The life of Pierre Matthieu (1563-1621) was punctuated by wars and high-profile assassinations. Amid these crises, Matthieu forged a remarkable career. During France's eighth and final religious war (1587-98), the young Matthieu became an avocat in the présidial de Lyon (1587). At that time his political allegiance lay with the uncompromising Catholic Ligue that sought to destroy all who resisted hard-line Catholicism. When the Ligue's fortunes declined, he swore allegiance to the new, conciliatory monarch, Henri IV. Matthieu found favour in the nascent Bourbon dynasty, and was appointed royal historiographer in 1594-a position he held till his death. Matthieu was not only a historian: in his youth he had received an excellent education in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which fed into a considerable literary output of poems, historical fictions, funeral oratory, and, most notably, five tragedies. This article studies Matthieu's final tragedy, La Guisiade (1589)-a wrathful outpouring in response to the assassination of the onetime charismatic leader of the Ligue, Henri de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, on 23 December 1588. The following year, an incensed Matthieu added his voice to a growing number of Ligueurs blaming King Henri III for Guise's gory demise. Deeply embedded in the politics of its time, La Guisiade enjoyed an ephemeral success, with three editions in 1589. 1 Yet thereafter it has been largely forgotten, barely a footnote in the history of French neoclassical tragedy that would reach its apogee the following century in the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine. Recently, however, scholarly interest in La Guisiade has been revived. The play is now considered an important landmark in the polemical literature that arose out of the French Wars of Religion, not only in France, but also across the Channel in Protestant England. 2 La Guisiade is an intriguingly hybrid work. It combines elements of a classical tragedy (a five-act structure; formal versification, mostly in Alexandrines; intervening choruses; murder committed offstage) with pamphletstyle prose 'arguments', steering reader sympathy at all times towards a seething hatred of the 1 I have consulted Louis Lobbes's critical edition of La Guisiade (Geneva: Droz, 1990), established from the third version published towards the end of 1589 (the first two editions appearing during the summer of that year). On the different early versions, see also Gilles Ernst, 'Des Deux Guisiade de Pierre Matthieu',
French Studies, 2015
This book has been a long time in the making, and I have incurred many debts of gratitude along t... more This book has been a long time in the making, and I have incurred many debts of gratitude along the way. Financial support was provided by Roosevelt University, Duquesne University, the Stanford University Libraries (Gustave Gimon Visiting Scholar Fellowship), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (N.E.H. Summer Stipend). Publication of this volume was generously assisted by a subvention from Duquesne University and its MacAnulty College of Liberal Arts. The list of libraries and archives on whose facilities and staff I have depended is very long; aside from the institutions just mentioned, they include the Bibliothèque Nationale and Archives Nationales of France, the Archives Municipales de Lyon, the Newberry Library,
The British journal of psychiatry : the journal of mental science, 2015
French Studies
2 One can find a number of well-established joint-faculty degree programmes in US universities. 3... more 2 One can find a number of well-established joint-faculty degree programmes in US universities. 3 For example, the 'Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities' series published by Edinburgh University Press, and the 'Law and Literature' series published by Oxford University Press. 4 For a reappraisal of law and literature as a part of law in a humanities context, see the University of Warwick's Law and Humanities research cluster,
This is a draft of a chapter in a future monograph on Renaissance villainy.
Draft chapter of a future publication on villainy in the French Renaissance (work in progress)
This paper will study the aesthetics of vileness in the poetry of Clément Marot, specifically wit... more This paper will study the aesthetics of vileness in the poetry of Clément Marot, specifically within the genre of blasons anatomiques he helped to shape in the 1530s. Praising and blaming parts of the female anatomy was a dangerous game to play in Renaissance France. Marot had been previously vilified for a scurrilous satire on women he did not write (Les Gracieux Adieux aux Dames de Paris), and hence he had to tread with the utmost care: somehow he had to cast himself as a non-misogynist when composing his blason and – especially – the contreblason that followed. In his Blason du laid Tetin, Marot self-consciously toys with images of female vileness in such a fashion as to deflect disapprobation away from his project. In this contreblason, he aims for a register of vileness which cannot be interpreted as ‘villains dictz’ uttered to scandalize ladies of honour. This paper will examine the (mis)fortunes of such an enterprise, leading to a savage backlash from his soon-to-be sworn enemies, Charles de La Hueterie and François Sagon.
In the Middles Ages, vilain had been a recognizable category of person in French customary law. T... more In the Middles Ages, vilain had been a recognizable category of person in French customary law. The vilain (or villanus in Latin) was an inhabitant of a manorial villa, eventually known as a seigneurie in French. The word vilain, moreover, outcompeted rival terms to become the pre-eminent (and often defamatory) label for the peasantry en masse, whilst retaining precise technical meanings in legal documents. 1 The medieval French vilain, like his English counterpart the villein, 2 was originally classed as a man held in bondage, and was initially barely indistinguishable from the serf. Gradually, however, in contradistinction to serfs, vilains began to acquire the legal status of 'franche condition' whilst they worked on lands belonging to their lord and remained under his jurisdiction. For better or worse, vilains and their overlords were yoked together in an intricate set of interdependent relations that characterized the feudal period of the Middle Ages. The vilain was leased a small portion of the lord's lands; he paid dues and services 3 to his lord en vilenage, as well as supplying a vital source of agricultural labour. 4 As early as the thirteenth century, this system of relations was starting to break down; and by the late sixteenth century it had markedly evolved. Vilains were no longer a clearly recognizeable category of person to the late Renaissance juristand yet, curiously, they still attracted considerable attention. This paper explores how that interest was sustained, in a period of significant changes within French legal culture. On an academic level, the sixteenth 1 Robert Boutruche, Seigneurie et féodalité, 2 vols (Paris, 1968), II, pp.48-9: in law the vilain was a tenant en vilenage, and also (in Old French) a masoyer or masuir (from the Latin mansuarius, manionarius), a possessor of a whole or part of a manse (agricultural smallholding and dwelling). 2 One should not necessarily conflate French vilains with English villeins, especially in legal terms. For Boutruche (op. cit., p.49 n.24), vilenage was a better defined system of manorial relations in medieval England than in France during the same period. 'Villeinage' in England was in strict technical terms a narrower and more legalistic form of serfdom that emerged during the course of the twelfth-century as a by-product of the development of the common law. In England, manorial organisation led to the sharp distinction between persons in the power of the lord and out of it; in France, everything depended on the changing equilibrium of local forces and circumstances. Vils or vilains services, vils corvées were menial labours performed at the discretion of the lord, and to which nobles were not subject. 4 The usual practice of fiefdom was that the seigneur would reserve a part of his territory for himself and then cede the rest either in arrière-fief or in censive for a certain number of dues paid in money or kind which symbolized his propriété éminente. The seigneur had civil and criminal jurisdiction over those living on his territory, more visibly in the south and west of France than in the centre and the north. See Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse (eds.), Histoire économique et sociale de la France, 4 vols (Paris, 1970-82), I, p.63.
This seminar will explore the social and moral conditions of villainy (vilenie) and of villains (... more This seminar will explore the social and moral conditions of villainy (vilenie) and of villains (vilains) in sixteenth-century French literature. The villain is traditionally stereotyped in fiction as being lowborn with low morals, working against ‘the good characters’. Scholars such as Eugene Waith have nonetheless demonstrated how these traditional villain-noble and villain-hero oppositions are subtly undermined in English Renaissance tragedy. What happens, then, when we turn to French comic fiction? My paper takes as its principal object chapters 45-7 of François Rabelais’s Quart Livre (1552). These three chapters of Rabelais’s Odyssean fourth book humorously dismantle any straightforward correlation of low moral conduct with low social status. Rabelais recounts how two vilains, a humble farm labourer and his wife, cheat a demonic tempter ‘of noble and ancient stock’ in a crop-growing contest. Within this apparently simple, formulaic fable we find humorous, satirical digressions, in which an array of Lucifer’s choicest villains – theologians, lawyers, and usurers – start to repent of their usual sins. Is villainy thus tantamount to base behaviour which may be remedied by religious reform? To what extent are socially lowly vilains capable of moral excellence? Is coarse behaviour still viewed as an indelible mark the lower social orders? Rabelais’s Quart Livre provides no stable answer; but, like John Marston’s later Scourge of Villainy (1599), it animates satire with gleeful references to indecency across an array of social types. This paper will, I hope, stimulate lively discussion on how villainy of the French Renaissance compares with that seen across various other disciplines.
Jonathan Patterson works on early modern French literature, thought and history. From 2008 to 2011 he was Gledhill Scholar at Sidney Sussex College. His PhD research, supervised by Neil Kenny, examines representations of avarice in early modern France (c.1540-1615). His published research considers Marie de Gournay, gender and poetry (2010); and avarice in the agronomical writings of Olivier de Serres (October 2012). His postdoctoral project will be an interdisciplinary study of villainy in the Renaissance.
This paper will be given as part of a new seminar series in 2013 at All Souls College, Oxford, UK... more This paper will be given as part of a new seminar series in 2013 at All Souls College, Oxford, UK.
The paper will address the subject of avarice in relation to the wider themes of the seminar series: literature, learning and the social orders in early modern Europe. My purpose is to show how discussions about avarice in France at turn of the seventeenth century point to broader debates about the expected behaviour of various ranks and professions in early modern French society.
My contention is that one cannot fully understand ideas about avarice and the avaricious in early modern France apart from these vital, underlying discussions on points of moral / socio-economic decorum.
The paper will consider accusations of avarice emanating across the French social orders. Firstly I shall survey moralist worries about 'avares' at both ends of the social scale (ie among the 'peuple' and the 'noblesse'). My particular focus, however, will be on representation of avarice in the middling social ranks. I shall discuss whether usury was thought to be a necessarily avaricious professional activity. Finally I shall explore attitudes to enrichment and avarice among a new elite caste of lawyers - the controversial 'Fourth Estate' - whose growing socio-economic power caused much consternation in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France.
- From passion to sin: a conceptual history of avarice 2) Avarice in the Renaissance: Jean de L'... more 1) From passion to sin: a conceptual history of avarice 2) Avarice in the Renaissance: Jean de L'Espine's Excellens Discours
Br J Psychiatry, 2015
There are several novels that pique our common interest, but Zola's ambition to put a ‘scientific... more There are several novels that pique our common interest, but Zola's ambition to put a ‘scientific aim above all others' in his 19th-century novel Thérèse Raquin provides a particularly interesting topic for collective reflection. After being criticised for vulgarity, in the preface to the second edition of his work Zola justified his portrayal of a gruesome ménage àtrois as being analogous to the ‘analytical work that surgeons conduct on cadavers'. Criticism of Zola's work often focuses on whether he achieves the degree of reductionism and determinism that he allegedly strove for or whether, in fact, his predilections for the gothic and fantastic overshadow the novel's scientific, ‘surgical’ veneer. Similarly, psychiatric case notes often begin with a highly formulaic scientific account, yet on closer inspection digress to read more like a tragic novel.