Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts, and Expressions ed. by Amyrose McCue Gill and Sarah Rolfe Prodan (review)

It is only recently that scholarship on premodern culture has begun to recognize friendship as a valuable area of literary, analytical and historical inquiry. Within such studies, only during the past decade have inquiries shifted away from investigations of exclusively male-male friendship to explorations of friendship in its myriad forms. Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts and Expressions, a collection of essays that emerged from a conference held at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Reformation and Renaissance studies in 2011, acts as a further contribution to the contemporary endeavor to broaden scholarship on premodern friendship.

The central aim of this volume is “to expand current discourses of amity beyond the purview of individual friendships or the relation of an individual to groups, institutions and/or communities, to include the conceptual deployment of friendship as a guiding ideal, metaphor, or prescriptive force in pre-modern group relations more generally” (17). The main argument of the book is that premodern friendship is frequently triangulated, often consisting of a relationship among friends and a third element—“usually a shaping context such as a shared social network, a joint political end, or the divine” (17). The essays that develop this thesis are interdisciplinary, consisting largely of case studies and of historical essays that include discussions of theory and literature.

After an introduction by Sarah Rolfe Prodan outlining the critical history of premodern friendship and the essays’ contributions to the field, the volume is divided into three sections, progressing thematically. The first section explores individual friendships, beginning with Andriana Benzaquén’s “‘No Greater Pleasure in the Life’: The friendship of John Locke and Edward Clarke.” Focusing on the unequal friendship between Enlightenment philosopher John Locke and landowner and politician Edward Clarke, Benzaquén argues that this friendship both conformed to and departed from contemporary ideals and conventions being “based on affection and intimacy” but “also grounded on an elaborate exchange of favours and services” (44). Overall, this essay draws attention to the ways in which premodern friendship could be both personal and embedded within a larger network that intertwined notions of amity with service. Moving across the English Channel, Malina Stefanovska in “The Theatre of Friendship in Early Modern French Memoirs: the Case of Pontis” explores the multiple types of friendships articulated in the memoirs of Sieur Louis de Pontis, a military man under Louis XIII. Ultimately, Stefanovska argues that in Pontis’s Memoirs, which were dictated to a friend, we see the intersection of friendship and ‘the autobiographical act’ as contributing to the construction of the early modern self. This section concludes with Francesco Ciabattoni’s “Dante’s Rhetoric of Friendship from the Convivio to the Commedia,” which examines Dante’s literary representation of his friendship with Beatrice in contrast to his historical friendship with the philosopher-poet Guido Cavalcanti, with whom he engaged in intellectual and literary debate. Through this comparison, Ciabottoni illuminates a progression in Dante’s oeuvre from a philosophical to a theological conception and rhetoric of amity, mending the Christian rift between eros and agape through the elaboration of a new salvific friendship.

The second section moves from these individual friendships to larger networks and communities. Steven Baker, in “Ad Comunis Epystole Lectionem: Pan-Italian Familiaritas and Petrach’s Community of Friends,” examines Petrach’s attempt to reacquaint two former friends through a letter he addressed to both. In this textual effort, Baker argues, we see Petrach’s effort not just to unite two friends but also to use friendship as a political tool for the greater political good of Italy. Focusing on another collective setting in Italy, Sally Hickson’s “Syphilus, Suffering and Sociability: Friendship and Contagion in Renaissance Mantua” examines male sociability at the Mantuan court of Francesco II Gonzaga. Here, Hickson looks at how the mutual...