Dr Jonathan Patterson

My research explores how literature interacts with broader cultural forces of early modern society: morality, law, bureaucracy, and economics.

My first book, Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France (Oxford University Press, 2015), considers how talk of greed slowly evolved from past traditions to inform wider debates on gender, enrichment and status.

A second book is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2021, entitled Villainy in France, 1463-1610: A Transcultural Study of Law and Literature. Combining the methods of legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, this study examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts from the age of François Villon to the time of Pierre de L’Estoile. Villainy in France follows this overflowing current of pre-modern French culture, examining its impact within France and across the English Channel.

My next project (from 2019) will be a collaborative venture within the emergent field of Literature and Bureaucracy. This project will explore how administrative systems and literary production have curious overlaps when it comes to ‘paperwork’. One strand of the project will consider the rituals of ‘stock-taking’ in Michel de Montaigne’s library with those of the Bureau de la Ville Paris . A second strand will look at the poetics of police reports gathered by Louis XIV’s arch-administrator, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.