The culture of early modern friendship.(Editorial)

The editors are grateful for the assistance of Doug Bruster, Alison Frazier, Wayne Rebhorn, Michael Stapleton, Madeline Sutherland-Meier, and Lisa Moore.

This special issue of TSLL revises our understanding of early modern literary culture by examining its preoccupation with friendship. Foregrounding Petrarch's 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 Ortelius's 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. Francois Rigolot reconstructs the original conception behind another book: Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Tracing his debt to Platonic love, Rigolot reveals why Montaigne had planned to place his dead friend's political treatise, Etienne de la Boetie's Discours de la servitude volontaire, at the center of his own work. Turning ...