Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700

Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection examines the varied and complex ways in which early modern Europeans imagined, discussed and enacted friendship, a fundamentally elective relationship between individuals otherwise bound in prescribed familial, religious and political associations. The volume is carefully designed to reflect the complexity and multi-faceted nature of early modern friendship, and each chapter comprises a case study of specific contexts, narratives and/or lived friendships. Contributors include scholars of British, French, Italian and Spanish culture, offering literary, historical, religious, and political perspectives. Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 lays the groundwork for a taxonomy of the transformations of friendship discourse in Western Europe and its overlap with emergent views of the psyche and the body, as well as of the relationship of the self to others, classes, social institutions and the state.

Daniel Lochman is a professor of English at Texas State University-San Marcos. His work appears in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Renaissance and Reformation, the Sixteenth Century Journal, and Milton Studies. Maritere López is an associate professor of History at California State University, Fresno. Her work has focused on the lives and letters of sixteenth-century courtesans as they evince the appeal and limits of definitional categories available to early modern women. Lorna Hutson is Berry Professor of Literature at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author or co-editor of numerous books, including The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007).