Description: These essays tell the story of the declining intelligibility of classical models of (male) friendship and of the rising prominence of women as potential friends. Contributors reveal how men and women fashioned gendered selves, and also circumvented gender norms through concrete friendship practices. By showing that the benefits and the risks of fri
Review Quotes: '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