Friendship's Shadows by Penelope Anderson

Friendship's Shadows by Penelope Anderson

Penelope Anderson's original study changes our understanding both of the masculine Renaissance friendship tradition and of the private forms of women's friendship of the eighteenth century and after. It uncovers the latent threat of betrayal lurking within politicized classical and humanist friendship, showing its surprising resilience as a model for political obligation undone and remade. Incorporating authors from Cicero to Abraham Cowley and Margaret Cavendish to Mary Astell, the book focuses on two extraordinary women writers, the royalist Katherine Philips and the republican Lucy Hutchinson. And it explores the ways in which they appropriate the friendship tradition in order to address problems of conflicting allegiances in the English Civil Wars and Restoration. As Penelope Anderson suggests, their writings on friendship provide a new account of women's relation to public life, organized through textual exchange rather than bodily reproduction. Key Features: Studies early modern women's friendship in depth for the first time Offers an account of the classical and humanist discourse of friendship by revealing the centrality of betrayal to the Aristotelian, Ciceronian, and Epicurean traditionsIntervenes within recent feminist and queer theory by showing textual friendship to be an alternative account of women's relation to public lifeArticulates the links between women's literary writing and political theories such as contract theory, natural sociability, and patriarchalismContributes to the growing interest in early modern women's writing, drawing on extensive archival materials and texts

Smart, thoughtful, and filled with myriad insights into how complex and contradictory allegiances can be promoted and sabotaged at one and the same moment-- Megan Matchinske University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal *
This deeply researched, important book highlights further neglected subtleties of early modern women’s writing. -- JOHANNA HARRIS, University of Exeter * Renaissance Quarterly, 68.4 *
'Friendship’s Shadows, particularly in its careful attention to the ‘rewritings’ of female tradition in Part Two, begins the necessary and still incomplete task of recovering women’s contributions to our political and cultural heritage.' -- Lara Dodds, Mississippi State University * Review of English Studies *
Friendship’s Shadows opens up new avenues for understanding both the civic and intimate lives of early modern persons, as well as the cultural formations that undergird our own postmodern discourses of the relative inconsequence of female friendship vis à vis marriage. -- Professor Harriette Andreadis * Texas A&M University *

Penelope Anderson is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her publications include writings on women’s friendship in /Literature Compass/ and in /Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700/ (Ashgate, 2011).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781399567183
ISBN 10	1399567187
Title	Friendship's Shadows
Author	Penelope Anderson
Series	Edinburgh Critical Studies In Renaissance Culture
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Edinburgh University Press
Year published	2026-07-31
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.