ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows how friends asserted themselves as male or female selves in sixteenth and seventeenth-century France. It also shows that making friends entails creative engagement with a tradition comprising a diversity of ideals pertaining to gender and sexuality. Analyzing Michel de Montaigne's lexical choices, Gary Ferguson asserts that although friendship may claim to fly high above sexual desire it nevertheless stoops down to borrow much of its language. The book brings to experimentation in cross-gender friendships as one of its most important contributions. Brian Patrick McGuire, in a massive study on friendship in medieval monasticism, argues that Renaissance humanists terminated friendships happy coexistence with community. The book includes essays attend to that creative power, showing how the activity of friendship in early modern France both embodies normative interaction and reshapes it.
