This interdisciplinary collection expands current discourses on friendship, further nuancing understandings of how amity was conceptualized, represented, and lived in premodern Europe. Particularly, the editors highlight what Prodan calls the geometric nature of amity, underlining friendship’s deployment as a guiding ideal or prescriptive force in group relations writ large, not just in relationships between the classical two friends. Each essay here arguably offers an element of novelty, elucidating either the multiple facets of amity or the triangulation of friendship among two friends and a third common element, whether another individual or a shaping context like a social network or joint political end. Premodern friendship, these essays argue, was neither inelastic nor just between paired friends. Rather, it was understood as varied and communal, part of a larger network dependent on shared identities for cohesion.

The collection is organized in three parts, as an inverted pyramid reflecting the complex geometry of friendship. Part 1 focuses on individual friendships, each chapter arguing that friends, equals or unequals, were always motivated by the fulfillment of need — whether practical and based on the exchange of services, or spiritual and grounded on one friend’s ability to guide the other to God. Adriana Benzaquen argues that the friendship between John Locke and Edward Clarke was representative of amity among privileged men in England, both in its combination of affection and obligation and in its foundation on a wider social network. Malina Stefanovska examines the importance of a network of multiple friendships, proposing that various friends each had a different function, important among which was leading one to God’s grace. Finally, Francesco Ciabattoni investigates the friend as guide to God, focusing on Dante’s philosophies of amity as revealed by Beatrice’s salvific friendship in the Commedia.

Part 2 investigates networks of friends, elucidating friendship as a tool to diminish difference and conflict, especially in times of civic unrest. Steve Barker discusses Petrarch’s attempts to reunite two prominent Italian friends, whose renewed friendship could both rekindle a Florentine-Neapolitan alliance and lead to peace in Italy. Examining the friendships between Francesco II Gonzaga and other syphilitics at his court, Sally Hickson highlights friendship’s value in building a collective identity founded both on mutual understanding and support, and political and social benefits reaped by those belonging to this brotherhood. Brian Sandberg stresses the elasticity of the concept of friendship, which often included overlapping and even contradictory definitions. Complicated by competing and shifting alliances, as well as by political and religious turmoil, amity nevertheless furnished a language with which to create and sustain unions, particularly between brothers-at-arms. Finally, Jean Bernier discusses friendship’s potential to curb social divisions rooted in religious conflict, focusing on Pierre Bayle’s development of a friendship model championing fairness and toleration. This model, developed for friends in the republic of letters, could then be prescribed for society at large.

Part 3 takes the geometry of friendship to the political and international stage, focusing on friendship as a possible foundation for larger communities within a nation or among nations. Paolo Broggio contends that the unequal friendship between confessor and penitent became a prescribed model of amity in the Counter-Reformation, representing the vertical bonds required by the state to assert and maintain its authority. Focusing on Matteo Ricci’s friendships with Confucian scholars, Hyun-Ah Kim argues that a common moral philosophy based on decorous behavior and fair dealings could help overcome cultural and religious difference, serving to cohere foreign communities with shared commercial interests. Finally, David Harris Sacks investigates the Renaissance belief that, based on common need and service, commercial exchange as a form of friendship could eventually lead to world peace.

Strong as they are, these essays are perhaps not as novel as the editors propose. The problematic but accepted coexistence of affection and utility, the multiple and often contradictory definitions of friendship, and even the broader appeal of amity as a model for political unity, for example, have been studied broadly. I was also struck by the collection’s noted lack of a discussion regarding female or mixed-gender sociability, a gap that weakens its overarching argument. Notwithstanding these criticisms, this collection is a welcomed addition to the area of friendship studies, especially for its critical exposition of the pervasive sociability and geometry of early modern friendship.