The Culture of Early Modern Friendship

Chaplin, Gregory.

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Volume 47, Number 4, Winter 2005, p. 4 (Article) Published by University of Texas Press DOI: 10.1353/tsl.2005.0018

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The editors are grateful for the assistance of Doug Bruster, Alison Frazier, Wayne Rebhorn, Michael Stapleton, Madeline Sutherland-Meier, and Lisa Moore. The Culture of Early Modern Friendship This special issue of TSLL revises our understanding of early modern literary culture by examining its preoccupation with friendship. Foregrounding Petrarchs devotion to friendship in the years following the outbreak of the Black Death, Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski complicates the traditional view of him as the paradigm of Renaissance individualism. Amid the desolation of post-plague Italy, she argues, Petrarch defined the conventions and values of humanist friendship for later generations. Jason Harris draws on Abraham Orteliuss album amicorum, or book of friends, to study humanist literary culture during the Dutch Revolt, uncovering an intellectual community trying to hold firm against the ravages of time and political turmoil. Franois Rigolot reconstructs the original conception behind another book: Michel de Montaignes Essais. Tracing his debt to Platonic love, Rigolot reveals why Montaigne had planned to place his dead friends political treatise, Etienne de la Boties Discours de la servitude volontaire, at the center of his own work. Turning to the stage, Robert Stretter contends that the treatment of idealized male friendship in Tudor and early Stuart drama reflects a move away from humanist-inspired didacticism. In contrast, John Gouws finds that humanist schools still inculcated amicitia: investigating the relationship of Nicholas Oldisworth and Richard Bacon, he observes the ways in which Oldisworths poetry renegotiates the literary conventions of friendship. Rachel Warburton examines how another radical social institution, Quaker Womens Meetings, enabled the formation of female friendships that challenged the preeminence assigned to marriage and male friendship in the period. The writings that Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers produced during their imprisonment in Malta and interrogation by the Inquisition articulate a collaborative identity that resists contemporary models of authorship and sexuality. Finally, Lisa Vollendorf directs our attention to female friendship in seventeenth-century Spain. Attending to a range of women writers, both secular and religious, she discloses attitudes toward female sexuality and homosociality obscured by the heterocentrism of the traditional Spanish canon.

Gregory Chaplin Guest Editor