Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France - Hardcover

Patterson, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198716516 ISBN 13: 9780198716518

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Moliere'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 Moliere'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.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Patterson, British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow, St Hugh's College, University of Oxford

Jonathan Patterson is a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow in French at the University of Oxford.

Review

This excellent study of a word and the connotations spun around it is especially inspiring in terms of its methodology which, in true humanist manner, starts from an intense interest in philology ... The book will appeal to students and scholars of early modern France alike, and will particularly inspire those interested in a fusion between linguistics and historicism. * Forum for Modern Language Studies * This is a subtle and scholarly account of an important topic. * Julia Prest, The Times Literary Supplement * Impressive contribution to our understanding of early modern culture. * Rowan Tomlinson, French Studies *

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0198716516
• ISBN 13: 9780198716518
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 332