The Culture of Early Modern Friendship

This special issue of TSLL revises our understanding of early modern literary culture by examining its preoccupation with friendship. Foregrounding Petrarch's devotion to friendship in the years following the outbreak of the Black Death, Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski complicates the traditional view of him as the paradigm of Renaissance individualism. Amid the desolation of post-plague Italy, she argues, Petrarch defined the conventions and values of humanist friendship for later generations. Jason Harris draws on Abraham Ortelius's album amicorum, or book of friends, to study humanist literary culture during the Dutch Revolt, uncovering an intellectual community trying to hold firm against the ravages of time and political turmoil. François Rigolot reconstructs the original conception behind another book: Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Tracing his debt to Platonic love, Rigolot reveals why Montaigne had planned to place his dead friend's political treatise, Etienne de la Boétie's Discours de la servitude volontaire, at the center of his own work. Turning to the stage, Robert Stretter contends that the treatment of idealized male friendship in Tudor and early Stuart drama reflects a move away from humanist-inspired didacticism. In contrast, John Gouws finds that humanist schools still inculcated amicitia: investigating the relationship of Nicholas Oldisworth and Richard Bacon, he observes the ways in which Oldisworth's poetry renegotiates the literary conventions of friendship. Rachel Warburton examines how another radical social institution, Quaker Women's Meetings, enabled the formation of female friendships that challenged the preeminence assigned to marriage and male friendship in the period. The writings that Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers produced during their imprisonment in Malta and interrogation by the Inquisition articulate a collaborative identity that resists contemporary models of authorship and sexuality. Finally, Lisa Vollendorf directs our attention to female friendship in seventeenth-century Spain. Attending to a range of women writers, both secular and religious, she discloses attitudes toward female sexuality and homosociality obscured by the heterocentrism of the traditional Spanish canon.