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

The essays in this volume originate from a 2011 conference titled ‘Friendship in Premodern Europe (1300–1700)’. Besides a thorough Introduction, the volume is divided into three sections: ‘Individual Friendships’, ‘Networks of Friends’, and ‘Friendship in Political and International Relations’. In her Introduction, Sarah Rolfe Prodan uses the example of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Pescara Vittoria Colonna’s relationship at the turn of the sixteenth century to introduce what she calls the ‘fluid geometry’ (p. 17) of friendship.

The book’s first section focuses specifically on individual case studies: Adriana Benzaquén’s close analysis of John Locke and Edward Clarke’s epistolary friendship; Malina Stefanovska’s examination of the sixteenth-century French nobleman Sieur Louis de Pontis’s memoirs, which reveal that friendships could arise quickly, rather than grow gradually over time; and Francesco Ciabattoni’s chapter on Dante, in which he ‘identifies a progression in Dante’s oeuvre from a philosophical to a theological conception and rhetoric of amity’ (p. 29). The two early modern chapters in particular reveal the fluidity of friendship, both as a category for research and as a contemporary, historical concept. Benzaquén’s work on Locke and Clarke, for example, shows that instrumentality and sentimentality were not mutually exclusive: while there was the exchange of information, gifts, and favours between the two friends, there was also a real, personal affection that was not based on instrumentality; in fact, Locke and Clarke seemed to move between instrumental and sentimental friendship with ease.

The second section focuses on networks of friends, starting with the second of the two medieval chapters. Steven Baker investigates how Petrarch, in an attempt to effect reconciliation, sent a single letter addressed to two Italian noblemen, intending that they would have to read it together. Petrarch, Baker argues, constructed a shared ‘Italian’ identity for both men, even though they were native to different regions. The construction of a shared identity as a basis for friendship and sociability also comes to the fore in Sally Hickson’s chapter on syphilis and Renaissance Mantua; the disease served as a basis for a community forged through patronage. Patronage was central to French noblemen’s lives and Brian Sandberg’s contribution demonstrates how, during the French Wars of Religion (1562–1629), nobles’ reliance on each other for support influenced how they viewed friendship. Friendships were questioned when religious views changed, resulting in some friendships being renounced and new ones cultivated. The cultivation and maintenance of a social sphere where sociability and friendship could flourish was not an easy task, but one that Pierre Bayle tried to create and maintain. Bayle, Jean Bernier demonstrates, wanted scholars taking part in the Republic of Letters to behave towards each other as they would towards friends, engaging in debate with fairness and equality in mind.

The last section begins with Paolo Broggio’s discussion of how the Counter-Reformation changed the concept of friendship. Broggio argues that, particularly after the Council of Trent, Catholic doctrine influenced relationships, in general, and friendships, in particular, by using the unequal confessor–penitent relationship as a model to assert the Church’s authority. Hyun-Ah Kim, in the second chapter, shows how the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci transcended cultural differences while in China. Ricci used both friendship discourse and friendship itself to find common ground, composing a treatise featuring European (Ciceronian) and Chinese (Neo-Confucian) ideas of friendship and forfeiting much Christian dogma to focus on the moral philosophy that both cultures shared. Sharing, according to the sixteenth-century Aristotelian cosmographer, Richard Hakluyt, saw trade as being similar to friendship: both were based on a situation of lack. As David Harris Sacks shows so clearly in his chapter, from the Greek philosophers onwards, exchange – either in the context of a gift or the quid pro quo of...