| Expressing fondness between individuals, friendship also registers larger cultural trends and affinities. This dissertation argues that in early modern France, friendships between putatively non-equal individuals---masters and servants, rulers and subjects, elders and youths---expressed the culture's new and shifting appreciation of difference. Looking beyond classically-inspired topoi of ressemblant, egalitarian friendship (also prominent in the era), I question the adequacy of the single amical soulmate as a Renaissance cultural ideal. I show that underling friends appear textually valued as purveyors of insight about courtly behavior. Moreover, humanist esteem for encyclopedic knowledge and breadth of identity valorized certain off-the-beaten-path friends. Examining the textual staging of unequal bonds as unions which realize humanist prerogatives, I revise our understanding of the cultural work which service performed in the Renaissance.;Chapter One engages early modern writers (Marot, Montaigne) as well as modern-day network theory to conceptualize non-equal friends' relevance in a Renaissance culture at once more demanding and more gentle. Chapter Two develops this notion through a reading of Rabelais, showing that Rabelais figures friendly ties as irrevocably but also humanely grounded in service. If Panurge is the friend of the kindly, humane, progressive Pantagruel, he is also his servant. The vast implications of this service, which play into the full range of Rabelais' literary modes and moods, bespeak the socially encompassing and literarily trans-generic nature of such friendships' relevance.;Chapters Three through Five evoke this scope by considering the figuration of unequal friendship in several genres. Memoirs by Marillac, Sully, and La Fayette, novellas by Jean-Pierre Camus, a dialogue by Marie de Romieu, and the writings of Marie de Gournay variously idealize (and show ambivalence toward) unequal friends. Thematically, these chapters address three specific relational types: bonds between secretaries and their masters, between non-equal youths raised together or "nourri ensemble," and between young women and aged, Celestina-like mentors. By noting unequal friendships' departure from the praise of sameness and imitatio, as well as from figurations of difference taken to be subversive, such as those addressed by deconstructionist scholarship, I evoke a new, more normative understanding of difference in the Renaissance. |
