Description
Book SynopsisAlthough we often think of friendship today as an indisputable value of human social life, for thinkers and writers across late medieval Christian society friendship raised a number of social and ethical dilemmas that needed to be carefully negotiated. On Amistà analyses these dilemmas and looks at how Dante’s strategic articulations of friendship evolved across the phases of his literary career as he manoeuvred between different social groups and settings.
Elizabeth Coggeshall reveals that friendship was not an unequivocal moral good for the writers of late medieval Italy. Instead, it was an ambiguous term to be deployed strategically, describing a wide range of social relationships such as allies, collaborators, servants, patrons, rivals, and enemies. Drawing on the use of the language of friendship in the letters, correspondence poems, dedications, narratives, and treatises composed by Dante and his interlocutors, Coggeshall examines the way they skillfully ne
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: The Dilemmas of Friendship in Dante’s Italy Friendship’s Many Faces A Sociological Approach: The Fields and Practices of Friendship 1. Exclusivity: The Piazza Friendship as Civic Medicine Creating Networks The Ship of Friendship Friendship’s Secret Chambers Epilogue 2. Self-Interest: The University Language and Amicabilitas The Ciceronian Turn Amicita as Disinterested Collaboration Amicitia as Self-Interested Sponsorship Abandoning Amicitia 3. Hierarchy: The Court Friendship in the Patronage Economy Negotiating Inequality The Game of Honour Managing Reciprocity The Gratuitous Gift 4. Difference: The Afterlife Inferno: Against the Other Purgatorio: Beside the Other Paradiso: Beyond the Other The Eclipse of Friendship Epilogue: Friendship’s Afterlife in Early Humanism Notes Bibliography Index
