Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe: Contexts, Concepts, and Expressions  (Toronto: CRRS, 2014). [co-edited with Amyrose McCue Gill] 

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)

Table of Contents

  • Introduction, Sarah Rolfe Prodan

I. Individual Friendships

  • “‘No Greater Pleasure in this Life’: The Friendship of John Locke and Edward Clarke,” Adriana Benzaquén
  • “The Theatre of Friendship in Early Modern French Memoirs: The Case of Pontis,” Malina Stefanovska
  • “Dante’s Rhetoric of Friendship from the Convivio to the Commedia,” Francesco Ciabattoni

II. Networks of Friends

  • “Ad comunis epystole lectionem: Pan-Italian Familiaritas and Petrarch’s Community of Friends,” Steven Baker
  • “Syphilis, Suffering, and Sodality: Friendship and Contagion in Renaissance Mantua,” Sally Hickson
  • “‘Accompanied by a Great Number of Their Friends’: Warrior Nobles and Amitié during the French Wars of Religion,” Brian Sandberg
  • “Pierre Bayle’s Quest for Pacified Relationships,” Jean Bernier

III. Friendship in Political and International Relations

  • “Peace and Friendship in Early Modern Catholic Europe: Towards a Political History of Human Relations in Counter-Reformation Culture, 1580-1650,” Paolo Broggio
  • “Matteo Ricci and his Confucian Friends: Interfaith Friendship in the Clash of Asian and European Humanisms,” Hyun-Ah Kim
  • “‘To Heal the World’: Commercial Exchange as a Form of Friendship in Renaissance Thought,” David Harris Sacks