The collection of critical articles on early modern friendship assembled by Daniel T. Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson gives us a snapshot of a vibrant and highly interdisciplinary subfield. The collection is rooted in a well-defined set of core issues, notably how the classical ideal of friendship as a perfect union of equals is altered to include differences of rank, status, and gender. At the same time, the essays collected here are remarkably eclectic in terms of subject matter and disciplinary approach, spanning English, Italian, German, and transnational humanist contexts, and deploying historicist, formal, feminist, comparatist, and theological interpretive frameworks.
The book begins with an excellent introduction that reviews recent scholarship in friendship studies (with special emphasis on foundational monographs by Alan Bray, Laurie Shannon, Thomas H. Luxon, Tom MacFaul, and Wendy Olmsted). This introduction will be a valuable starting point for anyone wanting to enter into the conversations around friendship in early modern Europe. The articles themselves are grouped into three thematic blocks.
The first block of essays examine the classical ideal of friendship in new contexts. Constance M. Furey highlights the expansion of the classical ideal to encompass cross-gender marital relationships in the Renaissance, noting that marriage could be celebrated as the best form of friendship because it allows a union of bodies as well as of souls (a formulation that may underplay the extent to which the body was an essential component of male-male friendship as classically conceived). Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski then recovers the pressures and tensions of the triangular friendship between Thomas More, Peter Giles, and Desiderius Erasmus within Utopia. Finally, Daniel T. Lochman argues that Sidney’s New Arcadia collapses the classical distinction between philia and eros by seeing the active cultivation of passions as essential to friendship.
The second block of essays describe friendship between traditionally excluded groups, like women, lower-class men, and persons with different levels of status. Donald Gilbert-Santamaría isolates a more realistic model of friendship in the “tricksters, thieves, and charlatans” of the picaresque Spanish novel Guzmán de Alfarache. Maritere López examines the letter exchanges between two prominent Florentine courtesans and their patrons, arguing that these courtesans open the language of friendship to acknowledge status disparities. Allison Johnson discusses how Isabella Whitney used her friendships with male poets to authorize her own writing. Finally, Penelope Anderson locates a basis for a contractual and consensual model of the state in Katherine Philips’s poetry about (complex, sometimes failed, always consensual) female-female friendship.
The third, and largest, block of essays explore the political implications of early modern friendship discourse. Sheila T. Cavanagh examines female access to friendship in Mary Wroth’s Urania, while Marc D. Shachter discusses one tale in Margueritte de Navarre’s Heptameron, a fictionalized account of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s 1537 assassination of the Duke of Florence after he demanded sexual access to Medici’s sister. This contribution is followed by Wendy Olmsted’s fascinating discussion of King Lear, in which she argues that Lear’s resignation “destroys the deliberative space and freedom where friendships live” (181).
Switching to a highly uncanonical register, Christopher Marlow discusses William Cartwright’s The Lady-Errant. Marlow argues that the play shows women organizing a mock parliament that crosses class lines. Gregory Chaplin argues that Milton tries to liberate the ideal of friendship from Royalist coteries; according to Chaplin, in both the wartime prose tracts and in his major poems, Milton uses the discourse of friendship to “legitimate revolution and fashion an alternative to monarchical government” (210). Finally, Thomas Heilke offers a fascinating (and unexpected) discussion of how Swiss Anabaptists used friendship discourse to think through how a community of believers should be knit together and (equally importantly) how it should relate to the outside world. The collection ends with a sophisticated afterword written by Lorna Hutson in which she reflects back on the conversation that the book as a whole represents.
The strengths of the essays collected here notwithstanding, I was struck by two gaps in the conversation. First, many of the essays treat literary representations as nothing more (nor less) than an archive of early modern ideas about friendship. What is lacking is attention to the aesthetic effects generated when friendship appears and even structures literary texts (as examined in Elizabeth Rivlin’s recent book on friendship and service, The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England [2012]). Second, and perhaps more problematically, I am struck by the absence of sustained attention to sexuality, whether as something that can be coassembled with friendship or as something that threatens it. Sex and sexuality certainly appear in these articles, but they are hardly the focus of sustained attention, which is surprising in view of the historical connection between friendship studies and sexuality studies.
These two limited criticisms notwithstanding, Lochman, López, and Hutson have edited a collection of very strong essays that exemplify current trends and debates in friendship studies.
