Jonathan Patterson's Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France is a fascinating and erudite study of the concept of avarice in well-known and lesser-known French texts from 1540 to 1615. It draws out how avarice was bound up with wider cultural preoccupations regarding gender relations and changing opportunities for enrichment and status, and it approaches this question with a stunning array of primary and secondary documentation from a variety of angles, including philology, philosophy, theology, and economics. This thoroughness allows Patterson to challenge received ideas about avarice, most notably the notion that it was universally condemned in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Chapter 1, “Avarice and Avares,” traces the conception of avarice as a dangerous passion, a vice, and a sin against God and one's fellow man in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in classical moral and ethical philosophy. It also delves into the relationship between avarice and social class, and resists the stereotype of avarice as the province of the bourgeois by pointing out that the label was just as readily applied to mechanicals or the lavish spending of nobles. Similarly, chapter 2, “Gender Battles,” provides several examples that complicate the common misogynistic trope of female avarice. As seen in Bertrand de La Borderie's Amie de court or nouvelle 55 of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, what might be called avarice on the part of a housewife or a female courtier could actually be a desirable quality in the context of responsibly managing a household or allowing the code of courtly conduct to function properly.

In chapter 3, “Grasping at Gold and Money,” Patterson underscores the ambiguous attitude toward gold and currency as objects that confer wealth, but also as objects of unhealthy or sinful attachment in Pierre de Larivey's Les Esprits and Pierre de Ronsard's “Hynne de l'or.” In particular, Patterson astutely reveals how Ronsard disavows avarice by presenting his quest for patronage and benefices as an even exchange of glory for support, but also suffers mental and physical anguish when deprived of money in a manner reminiscent of Molière's Harpagon. Chapter 4, “The ‘Fourth Estate,’” and chapter 5, “Montaigne's Avarice,” focus on the role played by avarice in reflections on the increasing opportunities for enrichment and social advancement for commoners of means. In particular, Patterson calls attention to the figure of the mesnager, the ideal landowner held up by Olivier de Serres's Theatre d'agriculture as “a rural prototype of unhurried, moderate, and altruistic capitalism” (179). Patterson also sheds light on the little-known Paradoxe de l'avarice of Antoine Hotman, who argues that those who avidly acquire wealth are also more likely to spread their wealth to others in an anticipation of “modern civic philanthropy” and the “capitalistic spirit of future ages” (196, 198). Similarly, Patterson shows how Montaigne attempts to reconcile Stoic moderation and impassivity with Serres's mesnagerie, and provides examples of how avarice can enable prudence and discretion.

In chapter 6, “Before and beyond Molière,” Patterson points out aspects of Molière's L'Avare that seem to hearken back to the previous century, but the chapter doesn't offer much in the way of new observations on the play, and the parallels it proposes often seem like Procrustean stretches. More useful is Patterson's suggestion that his study might be relevant to “society, or the state of the economy,” and especially to “avarice that has been methodically controlled, or dressed up as beneficial to others” (277). I agree wholeheartedly with this possibility, and while I gleaned much from Representing Avarice as a seiziémiste who has worked on Marguerite de Navarre, the querelle des amies, and Montaigne, I think its most unique and provocative contribution is its unearthing of Serres's and Hotman's defense of the avaricious pursuit of wealth as beneficial to the economy, which will no doubt sound eerily familiar in a moment when many are quick to applaud the so-called job creators who amass untold sums by exploiting the labor force and rigging politics in their favor.