As a species of inner malice outwardly displayed, villainy has an expansive cultural history. Perhaps you think of Machiavelli. Shakespeare’s Iago or Richard III. Any number of post-Romantic, Gothic embodiments of evil. Or, looking towards popular film culture, a Bond villain, maybe, or even a femme fatale…
I’ve spent the last eight years of my research life working on villainy from a somewhat different angle, looking at how it was experienced and represented in pre-modern France. My interest in villainy and villains emerged out of my doctoral work on avarice, in which it became increasingly clear to me that “avare et vilain” was a “thing” (or rather, a collocation) of some significance in sixteenth and seventeenth-century France. In other words, if someone displays a grasping attitude towards money and a paranoia towards material possessions, who can say what ruses and foul play they may try in order to acquire more?
So my project on villainy in France developed from a fascination with the word vilain – a term that carried various connotations of villainy in pre-modern French culture. In the past, vilain felt eminently less banal than in some of its present uses (where, for example, a “petit vilain” is a naughty child). In its older, adjectival uses, vilain pulled towards objects that were palpably dirty and situations that were felt to be disgusting in a material sense: getting stuck in a latrine, for instance, as happens in Marguerite de Navarre’s 11th novella. Vilain stretched to qualify different kinds of characters or dispositions, from those of sordid penny-pinchers to those of much more serious evil-doers – hardened criminals, murderers, serial rapists, traitors, heretics. As a self-standing noun, vilain was always already difficult to place. It could mean someone evil by nature – a villain – but more usually meant something vaguer: a grossly indecent man or woman (vilaine sometimes signified a prostitute). And then comes the problem of social inflections: traditionally, in France, a vilain was like an English villein, in other words a servile peasant tilling the fields. However, by the mid-sixteenth century, outside of literary discourse, occurrences of this word as a status descriptor are vanishingly rare. Tellingly, no-one in a court of law would give their social rank as being that of a vilain. And yet, in literature, the word in all of the abovementioned senses continued to flourish.
If the meanings of this one word – vilain – could move in and out of sync with each other, what kind of broader cultural narrative might emerge? One that is both dynamic and, as I have continually found, difficult to pin down. In writing my book, I have conceptualized this difficulty as ‘going with villainy’s flow’. The image of that which is vilain, that which is vilenie, overflowing its initial frame of reference, is a recurring idea across the range of material I have studied (flowing as it does from the mid-fifteenth to the early seventeenth century). What began as a word-historical study of vilain in the work of Clément Marot, François Rabelais, Henri Estienne, and Pierre de L’Estoile, carried me in directions I did not foresee, moving me out of my comfort zone (sixteenth-century French literature), towards aspects of ancien-régime criminal law, and also towards English writers who recuperate and rework elements of French villainy: John Skelton, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, George Chapman (and yes, for good measure, the odd mention of Shakespeare).
Villainy in France (1463-1610): A Transcultural Study of Law and Literature (OUP, 2021) examines various scenarios in which an action, a behaviour, an expression – even a style of writing – is deemed “villainous” (in French, vilain or méchant). I consider the nature of the offence, what sort of redress is being sought, and in what manner. While 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 facilitated the transmission of conflicts from one context to another. Crossing genres and jurisdictions, looking at archival sources, plays, poetry, pamphlets and a number of prose texts, I go with villainy’s flow.
A study of this kind deliberately plays with its historical parameters. Mine are more symbolic than period-defining – that is to say, my significant markers are the non-death and disappearance of one famous villain in 1463 (the poet-criminal François Villon), and the over-killing of another famous villain in 1610 (the judicial auxiliary François Ravaillac, who had assassinated King Henri IV). Pierre de L’Estoile makes it very clear in his diaries that the brutal execution of Ravaillac ushered in little in the way of societal change for the better. Which begs the question, what has happened to villainy’s flow-rate in France since 1610? Or to put it another way, where is villainy’s flow taking us now? In my book I could not do justice to either of these questions. Nevertheless, I offer some brief reflections on them, in an afterword written at particular historical moment – the time of #JeSuisCharlie and the throes of Brexit (but just predating the COVID pandemic).