Patterson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983);^[6] a senior fellowship at the Society of Humanities, Cornell University (1983-1984);^[7] the Andrew Mellon Chair of the Humanities at Duke; a Mellon Fellowship, National Humanities Center; and a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship at Yale. She won the Harry Levin Comparative Literature prize (1987) for Pastoral and Ideology^[8] and the John Ben Snow Prize for Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (1994).^[9] She was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000).^[10] In April 2008, Patterson delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California, Berkeley.^[3] In 2014, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Toronto.^[2] She was president and honored scholar of the Milton Society of America in 2002.^[11][12]

• “‘Our Mutual Friend’: Dickens as the Compleat Angler,” in Dickens Studies Annual (1970)

Hermogenes and the Renaissance: Seven Ideas of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970)

• “Against Polarization: Literature and Politics in Marvell's Cromwell Poems,” in English Literary Renaissance 5, no. 2 (1975)
• “L’Allegro, Il Penseroso and Comus: The Logic of Recombination,” in Milton Quarterly 9 (1975)

Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)

• “Wordsworth’s Georgic: Genre and Structure in The Excursion,” in The Wordsworth Circle 9, no. 2 (1978)
• “A Character of Andrew Marvell,” in English Language Notes 17 (1979)
• “Misinterpretable Donne: The Testimony of the Letters,” in John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne 1, nos.1-2 (1982)
• Censorship and Interpretation: the Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)

Roman Image (editor) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)

• “The Country Gentleman: Howard, Marvell, and Dryden in the Theater of Politics,” in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 25, no. 3 (1985)
• “Hard Pastoral: Frost, Wordsworth, and Modernish Poetics,” in Criticism 29, no. 2 (1987)
• Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
• “‘The Very Age and Body of the Time His Form and Pressure’: Rehistoricizing Shakespeare's Theater,” in New Literary History 20, no. 1 (1988)
• Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, UK and Cambridge MA: B. Blackwell, 1989)
• “All Donne,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-century English Poetry, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
• “Couples, Canons, and the Uncouth: Spenser-and-Milton in Educational Theory,” in Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990)
• “Teaching Against the Tradition,” in Approaches to Teaching the Metaphysical Poets, edited by Sidney Gottlieb (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990)
• “Converging Disciplines at Duke,” in South Atlantic Quarterly 90, no. 1 (1991)
• Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)
• John Milton (editor) (London and New York: Longman, 1992)
• “Imagining New Worlds: Milton, Galileo and the Good Old Cause,” in The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England, edited by Katherine Z. Keller and Gerald J. Schiffhors (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993)
• “More Speech on Free Speech,” in Modern Language Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1993)
• Reading Between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993)
• “Quod Oportet versus Quod Convenit: John Donne, Kingsman,” in Critical Essays on John Donne, edited by Arthur F. Marotti (New York: G.K. Hall; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994)
• Andrew Marvell (Plymouth, UK: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1994)
• Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
• “Intention,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study (1995)
• “Local Knowledge: ‘Popular’ Representation in Elizabethan Historiography,” in Place and Displacement in the Renaissance, edited by Alvin Vos (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995)
• The Most Excellent Historie of The Merchant of Venice (editor) (Hemel Hempstead, UK and Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995)
• “Donne in Shadows: Pictures and Politics,” in John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne 16 (1997)
• Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
• “Reading Between the Lines,” (with Lisa Schnell) in Seventeenth Century News 55, no. 3-4 (1997)
• The Trial of Nicholas Throckmorton (editor) (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1998)
• Marvell: the Writer in Public Life (Essex, UK, and New York: Longman, 2000)
• Doctor! Doctor! Doctoral Studies in English in Twenty-first Century Britain (with Judie Newman) (Leicester: English Association, University of Leicester, 2001)
• "Milton, Marriage and Divorce," in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2001, 2003)
• “Catholic Communities and Their Art,” in Visions of Community in the Pre-modern World, edited by Nicholas Howe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002)
• “‘Ideas seldom exist apart from practice’: Turning over Millennial New Leaves,” in The Journal of British Studies 41, no. 3 (2002)
• Nobody's Perfect: a New Whig Interpretation of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)
• “Inventing Postcolonialism: Edmund Burke's Paradise Lost and Regained,” in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, edited by Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University of Press, 2003)
• The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003-)
• The Long Parliament of Charles II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)
• “Oliver Arnold, The Third Citizen: Shakespeare's Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons,” in Modern Philology 107, no. 2 (2009)
• Milton's Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
• “Say First, What Cause?” in The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution 1 (2012)
• John Milton (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2014)
• Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (Oxfordshire, UK and New York: Routledge, 2014)
• The International Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)