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Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts, and Expressions

Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe explores ideas and instances of friendship in premodern Europe through a series of investigations into amity in discrete social and cultural contexts related to some of the most salient moments and expressions of European history and civilization: the courtly love tradition, Renaissance humanism; the spread of syphilis; the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation (and the attendant confessionalization and wars of religion); Jesuit missions; the colonization of America; and, lastly, expanding trade patterns in the Age of Discovery. The essays progress thematically as well as logically with the goal of providing a panoramic view of friendship and sociability in premodern Europe rather than a comprehensive history or unified theory of premodern friendship. Each paper presents an element of novelty – a revised or adapted concept, tradition, or strategy of social and interpersonal relating in the premodern world.

“There is much to recommend this volume. It offers a wide range of specific, intriguing examples of friendship as, in the editors’ words, a 'guiding ideal, metaphor, or prescriptive force.' Taken together, the articles vividly demonstrate that friendship is in fact both complex and historically significant.” 

-Constance Furey, University of Indiana

AMYROSE McCUE GILL (Santa Clara University) has published on the topic of conjugal friendship in the works of Leon Battista Alberti and Laura Cereta. She is currently engaged in a translation project on Frate Cherubino’s spousal and spiritual treatises, an edited project on sex acts in early modern Europe, and a book project on friendship between husband and wife in Quattrocento Italy.

SARAH ROLFE PRODAN (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto) is the author of Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2014) which examines, in part, the spiritual friendships of reform-minded Catholic intellectuals known to Michelangelo in sixteenth-century Italy.

REVIEWS
Parergon, 32.2 (2015), pp. 297-298. Reviewed by Deborah Seiler.
Renaissance and Reformation, 39.3 (2016), pp. 193-195. Reviewed by Emily O’Brien.
Renaissance Quarterly, 69.2 (2016), pp. 744-746. Reviewed by Martiere Lopez.

Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe explores ideas and instances of friendship in premodern Europe through a series of investigations into amity in discrete social and cultural contexts related to some of the most salient moments and expressions of European history and civilization: the courtly love tradition, Renaissance humanism; the spread of syphilis; the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation (and the attendant confessionalization and wars of religion); Jesuit missions; the colonization of America; and, lastly, expanding trade patterns in the Age of Discovery. The essays progres...

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book Details

  • Page Count:

    318 pages

  • Publication Year:

    2014

  • Publisher:

    Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University in the University of Toronto
  • Series:

    • Essays and Studies 33

Ebook

USD$ 39.95 ISBN 978-0-7727-2171-6 Order Ebook

Print

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