Edited by Amyrose McCue Gill and Sarah Rolfe Prodan

Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe explores ideas and instances of friendship in premodern Europe through a series of investigations into amity in discrete social and cultural contexts related to some of the most salient moments and expressions of European history and civilization: the courtly love tradition, Renaissance humanism; the spread of syphilis; the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation (and the attendant confessionalization and wars of religion); Jesuit missions; the colonization of America; and, lastly, expanding trade patterns in the Age of Discovery. The essays progress thematically as well as logically with the goal of providing a panoramic view of friendship and sociability in premodern Europe rather than a comprehensive history or unified theory of premodern friendship. Each paper presents an element of novelty – a revised or adapted concept, tradition, or strategy of social and interpersonal relating in the premodern world.

Advance Praise:

“There is much to recommend this volume. It offers a wide range of specific, intriguing examples of friendship as, in the editors’ words, a “guiding ideal, metaphor, or prescriptive force.” Taken together, the articles vividly demonstrate that friendship is in fact both complex and historically significant.”
— Constance Furey (University of Indiana)

Contents:

• Introduction, Sarah Rolfe Prodan

I. Individual Friendships

• “‘No Greater Pleasure in this Life’: The Friendship of John Locke and Edward Clarke,” Adriana Benzaquén
• “The Theatre of Friendship in Early Modern French Memoirs: The Case of Pontis,” Malina Stefanovska
• “Dante’s Rhetoric of Friendship from the Convivio to the Commedia,” Francesco Ciabattoni

II. Networks of Friends

• “Ad comunis epystole lectionem: Pan-Italian Familiaritas and Petrarch’s Community of Friends,” Steven Baker
• “Syphilis, Suffering, and Sodality: Friendship and Contagion in Renaissance Mantua,” Sally Hickson
• “‘Accompanied by a Great Number of Their Friends’: Warrior Nobles and Amitié during the French Wars of Religion,” Brian Sandberg
• “Pierre Bayle’s Quest for Pacified Relationships,” Jean Bernier

III. Friendship in Political and International Relations

• “Peace and Friendship in Early Modern Catholic Europe: Towards a Political History of Human Relations in Counter-Reformation Culture, 1580-1650,” Paolo Broggio
• “Matteo Ricci and his Confucian Friends: Interfaith Friendship in the Clash of Asian and European Humanisms,” Hyun-Ah Kim
• “‘To Heal the World’: Commercial Exchange as a Form of Friendship in Renaissance Thought,” David Harris Sacks

The Editors:

Amyrose McCue Gill (Santa Clara University) has published on the topic of conjugal friendship in the works of Leon Battista Alberti and Laura Cereta. She is currently engaged in a translation project on Frate Cherubino’s spousal and spiritual treatises, an edited project on sex acts in early modern Europe, and a book project on friendship between husband and wife in Quattrocento Italy.

Sarah Rolfe Prodan (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto) is the author of Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2014) which examines, in part, the spiritual friendships of reform-minded Catholic intellectuals known to Michelangelo in sixteenth-century Italy.

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Reviews:

Archive for Reformation History/Archiv für Reformationgeschichte, 44 (2015), pp. 12.

Comptes Rendus, 63:3 (2016), pp. 189-190. Reviewed by Christian Kühner.

La Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 77:2 (Summer 2015). pp. 470-471. Reviewed by Ullrich Langer.

Parergon – Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32.2 (2015). pp, 297-298. Reviewed by Deborah Seiler.

Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 39.2 (Summer 2016), pp. 193-195. Reviewed by Emily O’Brien.

Renaissance Quarterly, 69:2, pp. 744-746. Reviewed by Martiere Lopez.

318pp / Paperback / July 2014 / ISBN 978-0-7727-2170-9 / $39.95 (Price includes applicable taxes, Shipping: $5.99 CAD within North America, $21.99 CAD to Europe, and $24.99 CAD to all other International addresses; prices may vary for bulk orders)