Vera amicizia: Conjugal friendship in the Italian Renaissance

This dissertation is situated at the crossroads of several humanistic disciplines: literature, social history, the history of ideas and gender studies. In contrast with scholarship focusing on kinship relations and marriage alliance from an institutional, political and economic perspective, I locate marriage and conjugal relations within the context of the history of domestic life, inter-personal relationships and affective bonds. I explore the unstable gap between the current historical model of Renaissance marriage as an economic and political arrangement, and notions of mutual respect and affection between spouses which circulated in both prescriptive and descriptive texts.;My research expands current definitions of Renaissance marriage and early modern friendship by building upon recent studies of the former as a strictly pragmatic social institution and of the latter as most present only in a same-sex relationship. Focusing on depictions of married life in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, I investigate literary texts (novelle and plays) and examine anew traditional historical sources (sermons, treatises and letters) with an eye to the recurring coincidence of friendship and marriage in Renaissance Italy. My methodological approach contributes to the interdisciplinary project of Renaissance Studies and provides a textual basis for further work in art history, where visual sources on marriage are rich but not yet fully explored.