Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700

Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection examines the varied and complex ways in which early modern Europeans imagined, discussed and enacted friendship, a fundamentally elective relationship between individuals otherwise bound in prescribed familial, religious and political associations. The volume is carefully designed to reflect the complexity and multi-faceted nature of early modern friendship, and each chapter comprises a case study of specific contexts, narratives and/or lived friendships. Contributors include scholars of British, French, Italian and Spanish culture, offering literary, historical, religious, and political perspectives. Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 lays the groundwork for a taxonomy of the transformations of friendship discourse in Western Europe and its overlap with emergent views of the psyche and the body, as well as of the relationship of the self to others, classes, social institutions and the state.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Preface; Introduction: the emergence of discourses: early modern friendship, Daniel T. Lochman and Maritere López; Part I Conventional Discourses Re-Imagined: Bound by likeness: Vives and Erasmus on marriage and friendship, Constance M. Furey; Triangulating humanist friendship: More, Giles, Erasmus and the making of the Utopia, Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski; Friendship's passion: love-fellowship in Sidney's New Arcadia, Daniel T. Lochman. Part II Alternative Discourses: Friendship in the Margins: Guzmán de Alfarache's 'other self': the limits of friendship in Spanish picaresque fiction, Donald Gilbert-Santamaría; The courtesan's gift: reciprocity and friendship in the letters of Camilla Pisana and Tullia D'Aragona, Maritere López; The 'single lyfe' of Isabella Whitney: love, friendship and the single woman writer, Allison Johnson; 'Friendship multiplyed': Royalist and Republican friendship in Katherine Philips's coterie, Penelope Anderson. Part III Friendship in Ethics and Politics: 'My foule, faulce brest': friendship and betrayal in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, Sheila T. Cavanagh; The friendship of the wicked in Novella 12 of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, Marc D. Schachter; 'To plainness is honour bound': deceptive friendship in King Lear, Wendy Olmstead; Politics and friendship in William Cartwright's The Lady-Errant, Christopher Marlow; Milton against servitude: classical friendship, tyranny, and the law of nature, Gregory Chaplin; From civic friendship to communities of believers: Anabaptist challenges to Lutheran and Calvinist discourses, Thomas Heilke; Afterword, Lorna Hutson; Works cited; Index.

About the Author :
Daniel Lochman is a professor of English at Texas State University-San Marcos. His work appears in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Renaissance and Reformation, the Sixteenth Century Journal, and Milton Studies. Maritere López is an associate professor of History at California State University, Fresno. Her work has focused on the lives and letters of sixteenth-century courtesans as they evince the appeal and limits of definitional categories available to early modern women. Lorna Hutson is Berry Professor of Literature at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author or co-editor of numerous books, including The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007).

Review :
'... the authors give a successful overview of the numerous concepts and practices of friendship in early modern times. ... The choice of interdisciplinary essays provides the reader with a wide range of analyses of doctrinal, political and literary texts. True to the volume's title, the essays cover a wide geographical and social range. In doing so, the authors succeed in giving an all-encompassing overview of contemporary scholarship on friendship.' Seventeenth Century