Amistades imperfectas: Del Humanismo a la Ilustración con Cervantes by Juan Pablo Gil-Osle (review)

From Antiquity through the Renaissance, friendship was an important theme both in philosophy and in literature. Books Eight and Nine of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s De amicitia formed the backbone of theoretical thought about friendship, the relationship that reached its apex when formed and shared by two virtuous men. In this study, Juan Pablo Gil-Osle posits that Cervantes was writing at a time when this traditional concept of friendship was undergoing a change in accord with the way social norms were changing on a wider scale. Gil-Osle captures the nuances in Cervantes’s portrayals of various friendships because he has examined these relationships not as an isolated social phenomenon or theoretical constructs, but rather as bonds that are intertwined with other social interactions, especially patronage, a social relationship both important and problematic to Cervantes. Consequently, Gil-Osle examines how Cervantes, through his fictions, illustrates the ways in which friendship was evolving away from the classical concept, though this Aristotelian paradigm was not completely rejected.

Amistades imperfectas is an excellent study of the literary manifestations of the philosophical, sociological, and anthropological theories of friendship. The book includes an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction lays the groundwork for understanding the theory of friendship as outlined in Classical Antiquity as well as the theoretical underpinnings proposed by later philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. Each of the five chapters studies principally one of Cervantes’s works—La Galatea, La Numancia, Don Quijote, Las novelas ejemplares, and Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda. What Gil-Osle demonstrates through his analysis of these works is that Cervantes, though familiar with the concept of the highest form of amicitia as described by Aristotle and other authors of antiquity, problematizes amicitia in his fiction, and proposes alternative views of the relationship between individuals.

The trajectory of the chapters demonstrates Cervantes’s multifaceted understanding of friendship, but each chapter can be read profitably in isolation from the others. Chapter one outlines how La Galatea, the “Canto de Calíope” in particular, is a reflection of the system of literary patronage as well as an expression of Cervantes’s desire to be admitted to the pantheon of contemporary intellectuals. The relationship between mecenas and client is not just one based on economics, but holds aspects in common with the characteristics of friendship. In chapter two Gil-Osle re-examines the friendship in La Numancia between Marandro and Leonicio and interprets the relationship as a reworking of the portrayal of friendship in Virgil’s Aeneid. Chapter three is a study of Cervantes’s portrayal par excellence of friendship, “El curioso impertinente,” through which, according to Gil-Osle, Cervantes shows the severe flaws in the classical notion of amicitia, perfect friendship. The subject of chapter four is the link among virtue, friendship, and harmony in the Novelas ejemplares, and Gil-Osle uses Renaissance numerology to join the themes in a convincing way. Finally, in chapter five, Gil-Osle demonstrates that there is a “secuencia evolutiva positiva” (145) of friendship in Persiles y Sigismunda, and the evolution of friendship to its end, agape, is reflected in the structure of Cervantes’s Byzantine novel.

In his conclusion Gil-Osle reiterates the idea that Cervantes is writing at a liminal moment in the development of friendship; early modernity questions the true nature of friendship and the possibility of its realization, and friendship based on virtue would eventually be supplanted by the ideas of the social contract, individualism and legalism propagated by Enlightenment philosophers. Overall, this book will be a good addition to the library of any Cervantes scholar, as well as to anyone interested in the evolution of the ideas of friendship in the early modern period. It is well written, gives well-structured arguments with an appropriate amount of context and supporting evidence, and includes a thorough bibliography for those interested in...