ABSTRACT
In 1987 I heard Michel Rey, a student ofJ-L. Flandrin in the University of Paris, give a lecture entitled 'The Body of My Friend '. The lecture was only an outline, and his early death left his doctoral thesis uncompleted and his loss keenly felt by many. But in the years that followed that lecture Michel and I often discussed the history of friendship, and I have sought in this paper to complete that paper as he might have done had he lived, as a tribute to his memory. It is a paper about the body of the friend at the onset of the modern world and its loss.