This volume is a festschrift in honor of the late professor of French and Neo-Latin literature at the University of Cambridge, Philip J. Ford (1949–2013), which celebrates a life lived among his fellow scholars with great collegiality and solidarity, hence the apt focus on sodalitas among littérateurs in the Renaissance. The introduction spells out Professor Ford's extraordinary contribution to French Renaissance studies and his championing of Neo-Latin literature, a field often hard to situate securely within the structures of academia, but so crucial to understanding early modern literary production, as these essays amply illustrate. The introduction is prefaced with elegies in Greek, Latin, and English by Stephen Fennell, and the book ends with another Latin elegy by David Money, a posthumous paper by Ford himself on sexual ambiguity in Ronsard's poetry, and a complete bibliography of Ford's works. Sandwiched in between are thirteen essays in French and English on the topic of friendship and sodality in Renaissance literary culture, making the volume a substantial contribution to the topic, not just a touching memorial to a scholar sorely missed by his amici et sodales.

The thirteen essays are not formally divided into sections, but the last seven pages of the introduction provide a general overview, opening the discussion of how “friendship, camaraderie, conviviality—but also a confrérie (confraternity, guild) and compagnonnage (the learning of a craft in a corporate environment), of sorts” (19) comprise the Renaissance notion of sodalitas. The general order of chapters suggests certain geographic and thematic clusters, which the first six essays do well to establish: Lyon, Bordeaux, Paris, and Florence in terms of place; in terms of themes, the neo-Catullan dynamics of literary friendship and rivalry, the Latin epigram as the conspicuous medium for expressing support and praise of each other's works, and the collection of epitaphs in memory of a patron, develop in overlapping ways across the opening chapters, setting a paradigm that reflects Ford's lifelong dedication to the imbrication of Neo-Latin and vernacular poetics.

Against the coherent pattern of the first six essays, one might see the latter seven as inviting further challenges and complications. One by Stephen Fennell challenges the homosocial construction of sodalitas by delving into the figure of Alessandra Scala, whose legendary talent dissolves under scrutiny, making the conclusion deflationary and rather confirming than challenging the male dominance of this mode of sociality. Keith Sidwell's chapter is a more targeted and speculative examination of how Poggio Bracciolini's Greek studies and interest in Lucian were shaped in a network of personal relationships.

There is a materialist turn in Stephen Bamforth's chapter on a forged signature of William Shakespeare found in an obscure book; while the sleuthing Bamforth provides is entertaining, it seems clear the sodalitas involved here has to do mostly with a scholarly interest in the skulduggery of collections, which Ford shared. More in line with the general thrust of the collection is Max Engammare's chapter on handwritten dedications in books circulating among the Protestant Reformers John Calvin, Henrich Bullinger, and Theodore Beza, proof of an intense culture of solidarity among Reformers eager to share the intellectual ammunition of their cause. A similar interest motivates Valérie Worth-Stylianou's chapter on French-language dedications in medical works, which reveal a fraternal if hierarchical interest on the part of learned doctors to translate and transmit their learning to the humbler chirurgiens. The inclusion of women who function in a paramedical capacity as well among the dedicatees indicates how professional sodalitas could enlarge the circle of friendship, even if professional and social hierarchies remained in place.

Mathieu Ferrand's chapter addresses the social function of youthful school productions of drama, which create forms of bonding that live on in personal recollection by French authors, a recollection Ferrand contends is a strategy of self-presentation and filiation, and not just anecdotal nostalgia. Lastly, Neil Kenny writes on Guillaume Bouchet's little studied work Les Serées, which recounts thirty-six evenings worth of dinner conversations among the wealthy merchants of Poitiers.