ABSTRACT
As was discussed in the prologue, several authors have suggested that friendship in the early modern period was of an instrumental character. 49 People maintained friendships to achieve certain goals, and affection was not necessarily an important feature of early modern friendship bonds. The idea of affectionate or “true” friendship some say only developed in the eighteenth century. 50 This, however, seems highly unlikely. Clearly friendship sometimes served certain instrumental purposes (as it continues to do in contemporary society), but this does not mean that relationships didn’t also involve mutual appreciation and respect, and even affection. The difference between early modern friendship and friendship in the modern sense of the word may well be the discourse on friendship. Whereas, friendship is nowadays referred to in terms of affection, these affectionate terms were not always part of the seventeenth-century’s references to friends.
