Congratulations to Jonathan Patterson who has published Villainy in France (1463-1610): A Transcultural Study of Law and Literature with Oxford University Press.
Scholars and cultural critics of the Anglophone world have long been fascinated by villainy and villains. This book reveals the subject's significant 'Frenchness' and establishes a transcultural approach to it in law and literature. In this study, villainies are framed in terms of offence and redress across a wide range of legal and literary sources. Villainy's particular significance emerges through its representation in authors remembered for their less-than respectable, even criminal, activities: François Villon, Clément Marot, François Rabelais, Pierre de L'Estoile, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman. Villainy in France affords legal-literary comparison of these authors alongside many of their lesser-known contemporaries. Going with ‘villainy’s flow’, or rather overflow (desbordement), Villainy in France reinterprets French conflicts within a wider European context, from the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century.