Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France ed. by Lewis Seifert and Rebecca Wilkin (review)

There is something of a pun in the title of this book. In fact, it is less about “making friends” in the sense of getting to know someone and becoming friends with them (although some important historical friendships are explored), and more about the rhetorical creation/definition, or “making” of friends and friendships through written texts. In their thorough and thoughtful introduction, the editors place the question of friendship within several interrelated contexts, including the Facebook world where friends multiply yet remain “virtual”; the “transformative exploration of friendship” (4) found in recent queer studies; and the more traditional humanist approach of Ulrich Langer (1994), who looked at the “palimpsestic strategy” employed by Renaissance writers as they sought a usable past in the works of the writers of classical antiquity. Also central are questions of whether women can be “friends” with other women, and how to understand the erotic elements in both same- and mixed-gender friendships.

The stories the collection traces are multifaceted. They begin with the apparent dominance in Renaissance humanist thinking of friendship exclusively between men, as defined by Aristotle and Cicero and refined by Montaigne, and show how this model is challenged through a rethinking of Plato in circles like that of Marguerite de Navarre, so that eroticism is removed or reduced, and ideal male-female friendships are valued. Both Catholic Reformation spiritual friendships (usually between male priests and their female penitents), and the gallantry practiced in heterosexual salon culture, create further spaces for mixed-gender friendships. The individual chapters explore these developments through specific, and quite fascinating, examples of historical and textual friendships.

Because Michel de Montaigne is the exemplary writer about friendship in the sixteenth century, George Hoffmann has had the inspired idea of asking whether he was a good friend in practice. In fact, Hoffmann discovers, he was not. Not only did Montaigne rarely spend time with his friend Étienne de la Boëtie when he had the opportunity, he also seems to have avoided close friendships after La Boëtie’s death, choosing to relate to his inferiors rather than his equals. Michelle Miller’s study of friendship and corporal correction between François I and Clément Marot is equally original though somewhat less convincing. Miller argues that the king’s affection for his poet and valet de chambre, Marot, was enhanced by poetic corporal punishment administered by Marot. Three chapters, by Todd Reeser, Mary Schachter, and Katherine Crawford, taken together, provide a rich analysis of how “platonic” love was reconstrued as both heterosexual and non-erotic in sixteenth-century French texts like Symphorien Champier’s La nef des dames vertueuses. Crawford`s overview is particularly valuable.

In chapters dealing with the seventeenth century, we encounter Richelieu, Descartes, Elisabeth of Bohemia, the Port-Royal nuns, and the Marquise de Sablé. Robert Schneider offers a detailed analysis of the multiple, overlapping “friendship groups” active around the time of Richelieu and within the context of developing absolutism. Schneider is interested in how these groups functioned, and in why many male writers and intellectuals supported the creation of the Académie française, even though it significantly curtailed their creative independence. Rebecca Wilkin examines the correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia from the point of view of the creation of friendship, arguing that Elisabeth used a rhetoric of femininity to negotiate differences of gender and rank which might otherwise have interfered with their epistolary exchange. Wilkin could perhaps have reminded us that the specific rhetoric Elisabeth chose, that of the suffering female body that intrudes on pure rationality, as Elisabeth developed it throughout their correspondence, forced Descartes to think much more carefully about his theory of the relationship between mind and body—hence his composition of the Traité des passions de l’âme for Elisabeth.

Two worlds that might at first glance seem antithetical—Port Royal and the Parisian salons...