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272 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) Each of these essays are endeavours to fill the ‘blank spaces’ where the discourse of ‘female-female desire should be’, which is not the same thing as saying it was definitely there. Two clear conclusions which the sum of these essays conveys are that the texts they examine ‘admit to a space where femalefemale desire is entirely conceivable’, and, not surprisingly given that many of the authors were male, that representations of female homoerotic practices and relationships are all based in traditional phallocentrism. This book shows that there is a great deal to be said about the presence of representations of female homoerotic practice in medieval texts and makes a substantial addition to the growing literature on same-sex love and desire in the Middle Ages. Julie Ann Smith School of History, Philosophy and Politics Massey University Shannon, Laurie, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts, Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 2002; paper; pp. 240; RRP US$19.00; ISBN 0226749673. Divided into sections entitled ‘The Sovereign Subject’ and ‘The Subjected Sovereign’, Sovereign Amity addresses the paradox of its own title, exploring the implications of questions such as ‘can a sovereign have a friend and remain sovereign?’ and ‘can a woman (whose sovereignty belongs to a man) ever be capable of friendship?’. Far from being an overview of Renaissance friendship, Laurie Shannon’s book offers an impressive and suggestive examination of the broader cultural and political implications of the early modern rhetorical practice of sovereign amity, providing a reassessment of friendship as a powerful shaping discourse. What makes this study particularly rewarding reading is its exploration of the interchangeability of the discourses of private amity and sovereign rule. Beginning with an survey of what friendship meant to early modern writers, Sovereign Amity goes on to demonstrate the importance of reading friendship discourses in relation to the ideology of monarchy and to contemporary gender theories. Each of the chapters engages with a wide variety of literature and philosophy but Shannon focuses particularly on interrogating the concept of ‘sovereign amity’ through the detailed reading of a handful of texts, including Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Reviews 273 Parergon 20.1 (2003) Henriad, The Winter’s Tale, and Marlowe’s Edward II. While ‘amity’ was considered a mode of communication for expressing selfhood and resistance to tyranny, this book demonstrates the homosocial nature of this ideal. Parity, in fact, was contrary to female ‘sovereignty’ and, should the king engage in ‘amity’, then sovereignty would come under threat. Examining alternatives to male friendship, this study reveals a complex relationship between sovereignty and subjection. Aligned with resistance and inviolability, for example, female sovereignty was manifest in a woman’s unresisting subjection to a man. Women, as the first section of this study demonstrates, could not enter the discourse of friendship because, as an expression of their sovereignty, chastity affirmed not selfhood, but rather fidelity to another. Female friendship was incapable of providing a counterpoint to tyranny because female sovereignty, as Shannon’s reading of Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam makes clear, often found its expression in surrender to, rather than resistance to, a tyrant figure. Sovereign Amity, however, is challenging because it refuses to deal in absolutes and after interrogating ‘sovereign amity’ as a male concept, Shannon then dedicates a chapter to exploring the possibilities for female friendship, reapplying questions of gender and eroticism familiar from a corpus of literature on male same-sex friendship to the context of female same-sex friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Though rhetorically impossible, Shannon reads Emilia’s preference for the company of her own sex as evidence of female friendship and, significantly, considers this bond as a stronger counteraction to tyranny and absolutism than the male same-sex friendship idealised by Montaigne. Extending the idea of gendered friendship into a broader consideration of sameness, equality, and power, however, Sovereign Amity suggests the impossibility of friendship, not merely for women, but for anyone for whom social equality was culturally unobtainable. In its detailed and insightful examination of ‘sovereign amity’ as a contradiction in terms, one of the book’s major strengths rests in...

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