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Reviewed by:
  • Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France by Jonathan Patterson
  • Rowan Tomlinson
Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France. By Jonathan Patterson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. xii + 319 pp., ill.

This erudite study of attitudes to avarice in French culture between c. 1540 and c. 1615 offers an important pre-history to Molière’s famous miser. It is an admirable model of what can be achieved through combining new socioeconomic intellectual history with the keyword method that has become a stalwart in early modern studies over the past two decades. Jonathan Patterson explores the fortunes of his keyword, avarice, in its manifestations as a passion, a vice, and a sin, as represented in a generically mixed corpus of canonical and lesser-known vernacular writing (prose, drama, and — passingly — poetry). He argues, convincingly, that examination of avarice provides a powerful means of uncovering the complexities of changing positions on three crucial issues — gender, status, and enrichment — during the tumultuous decades his study covers. Key to the book’s thesis is that, if the period’s stances on avarice were strongly influenced by inherited belief systems (Aristotelian, biblical, Augustinian), these legacies were wilfully appropriated and re-described — the figure of paradiastole is central to the approach — so that a distinctly late Renaissance culture of avarice emerges. Patterson shows how conventional condemnations of avaricious behaviour and actors are called in question through Renaissance authors’ exploitation of such flexible hybrid genres as the polyphonic dialogue and the essay; tidy didacticism is replaced with more heterogeneous, equivocal stances and, on occasion, with approval rather than disapprobation of the processes of enrichment that engender avarice. French writers are not the first to challenge [End Page 428] conventional warnings against avarice, but such moral suspicion is ‘loosened another notch’ (p. 274) by the secular authors who make up the corpus. The Introduction makes deft use of scholarship for a whistle-stop tour of Greco-Roman, biblical, late antique, medieval, and early humanist readings of avarice, while the first chapter excavates the terminology of avarice, a generative vice whose branches grew more numerous as the economy became more complex. Chapters then cover gender-specific avarice, social stratification of avares, class variations in attitudes to gold and currency, the disputed status of the newly wealthy, ‘the fourth estate’ (here a fascinating text by Antoine Hotman is compellingly unpicked), and Montaigne’s momentary self-identification as an avare and his reflections on the ethics of avarice. The concluding chapter boldly argues that this pre-history challenges the monumental status of Molière’s L’Avare, which should be reread in light of the avaricious culture that preceded it, and at once defies absorption into grand narrative, whether Weber’s idea of the Protestant ethic or eighteenth-century judgements of money-making as ethics-free. Large claims are made for the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini’s 1428 De avaritia, which offers the ‘first signs’ of the ‘mobile thinking about avarice’ (p. 17) that the study goes on to explore (and celebrate). It was, then, a surprise that the question of Bracciolini’s influence in France was left at a passing reference to indirect ‘echoes’ (for example, p. 193); the idea of the ‘creative matrix’, deployed in the final chapter, might have been adapted to make a useful earlier appearance here. The choice of source for biblical quotation, the New International Version (1973), also seems a lost opportunity, especially as the study is rooted in a commitment to the historically sensitive analysis of linguistic nuance. The author writes engagingly, although sometimes clarification goes too far (was it necessary to tell us that Petrarca is Petrarch, or to provide such repeated flags of what is to come in each chapter section?), and there are a fair few typographical errors. This does not, however, detract from the impressive contribution this book makes to our understanding of early modern culture.

Rowan Tomlinson
University of Bristol
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