| In English and continental literature of the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, a popular theme was a moral virtue celebrated by the ancients--friendship. In ancient and Renaissance literature, friendship was more frequently treated as a private relationship between two people of the same sex, usually male, devoted to the shared pursuit of virtue and a life in common. However, in their moral philosophy and political theory, classical writers also developed the notion that friendship had public, social and political meanings and applications. Specifically, classical philosophers and moralists believed that friendship applied to the following particular social and political issues: the social ideal of harmony among all members of a state, the economic ideal of communal sharing of property, the relationship between a ruler and his subjects or between any superior and an inferior, the problems of tyranny and flattery, and the establishment of political alliances between states, factions or individuals. This study is devoted to investigating Renaissance literary expressions of friendship topoi applied to these social and political issues.;Humanist thought and writing on the ideal society or state, analyses of court life and the role of the courtier, and treatments of the problem of tyranny are the areas of Renaissance political activity around which this study is organized. The study first focuses on how friendship conventions figure in the utopian idealism of two of the most famous northern Renaissance humanists, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Sir Thomas More. Next, the references to friendship in courtesy literature are discussed, especially in their relation to the issues of flattery, patronage, and the character of a good "governor" or courtier. Works by Castiglione, Sir Thomas Elyot, Francis Bacon, Lord Burghley, and Sir Walter Ralegh, among others, are analyzed. Finally, the resistance to tyranny by perfect friends in works by Etienne de La Boetie, Richard Edwards and Sir Philip Sidney is treated. An intended result of this investigation into the political uses of friendship in Renaissance literature is the documentation and clarification of the history of an important, but now lost, idea of western moral and political philosophy. |
