ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book examines humanist meditations on the likeness and disparity between the adage amicus alter ipse and the biblical injunction that husband and wife become 'one flesh'. It examines Marguerite de Navarre's subtle critique of her narrator's perspective in the twelfth novella of the Heptaméron, a reworking of various historical accounts of the assassination of Alessandro de' Medici in 1537. The book engages with key aspects of the early modern discourse of friendship: with the ethics of the moral and material usefulness of friends, and with the centrality of friendship to political philosophy. It involves representations which create the sense of there being a historical transition from one model of friendship to another-from an older 'kin and alliance' model of friendship to a newer individualistic model of intimacy and personal choice.
