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.