1st Edition
Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France
316 Pages
by
Routledge
316 Pages
by
Routledge
316 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Today the friendships that grab people’s imaginations are those that reach across inequalities of class and race. The friendships that seem to have exerted an analogous level of fascination in early modern France were those that defied the assumption, inherited from Aristotle and patristic sources, that friendships between men and women were impossible. Together, the essays in Men and Women Making... Read more
1: Introduction; 2: Was Montaigne a Good Friend?; 3: The Power to Correct; 4: Redressing Ficino, Redeeming Desire; 5: Translating Friendship in the Circle of Marguerite de Navarre; 6: From Reception to Assassination; 7: Friends of Friends; 8: Making Friends, Practicing Equality; 9: The Gendered Self and Friendship in Action among the Port-Royal Nuns; 10: The Marquise de Sablé and Her Friends; 11: From My Lips to Yours
Biography
Lewis C. Seifert is professor of French Studies at Brown University, USA. He is the author of Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France, 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias (1996) and Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (2009). Rebecca M. Wilkin is Associate Professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University, USA. She is author of Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (2008). With Domna Stanton, she edited Gabrielle Suchon’s work (2010).
'Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France deepens our understanding of early modern friendship, from the early 16th century well into the 18th century, and signifies a valuable recent critical trend to move away from a conceptual approach to friendship- its representation in literature and its theorization in moral philosophy - to tangible concerns: how did friendships actually work, who were friends to each other, can we trace networks of friends? Questions of gender and sex are also introduced: how could women participate in the culture of friendship, how does this culture accommodate the classical discussion of homosexuality? Deftly combining literary and contextual perspectives on a topic just as engaging today as it was in the days of Descartes and Elizabeth of Bohemia, this collection is a sine qua non for any student of early modern culture.' Ullrich Langer, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
