Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700

Maritere López, Daniel T. Lochman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317149798
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection examines the varied and complex ways in which early modern Europeans imagined, discussed and enacted friendship, a fundamentally elective relationship between individuals otherwise bound in prescribed familial, religious and political associations. The volume is carefully designed to reflect the complexity and multi-faceted nature of early modern friendship, and each chapter comprises a case study of specific contexts, narratives and/or lived friendships. Contributors include scholars of British, French, Italian and Spanish culture, offering literary, historical, religious, and political perspectives. Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 lays the groundwork for a taxonomy of the transformations of friendship discourse in Western Europe and its overlap with emergent views of the psyche and the body, as well as of the relationship of the self to others, classes, social institutions and the state.

PART I
Conventional Discourses Reimagined

Chapter 1
Bound by Likeness: Vives and Erasmus on Marriage and Friendship

Constance M. Furey

Friendship and marriage circled each other warily in early modern Europe. Where friendship advocated equality between members of the same sex, usually men, marriage upheld male–female hierarchy; while friendship cultivated self-possession and choice, marriage encouraged female submission and obedience. As Laurie Shannon puts it, “If friendship discourses establish a counterpoint to absolutism (monarchical or tyrannical), marriage, in contrast, operates by analogies to it in the mirroring logics of Renaissance thought” (61). And yet friendship and marriage were clearly opposed in part because they were so closely linked. The standard marriage sermon in Elizabethan England enjoined husbands and wives to live together lawfully in “perpetual friendship” (Certaine sermons 506), and both discourses celebrated unity and idealized the process of two people becoming one. For most scholars, however, this connection between friendship and marriage seems less interesting than the opposition; the connection, when mentioned at all, is usually attributed to friendship’s influence on companionate marriage (Lipton 17, 43; Shepard 82). From the perspective of friendship studies, the reason for this disinterest seems clear enough: marriage lacks the utopian promise and richly intersubjective theory of selfhood that made friendship alluring to early modern writers and fascinating to scholars today (cf. Dolan 43–4).

There are some notable exceptions. In The Friend, Alan Bray argues that up until the seventeenth century friendship and marriage “turned on the same axis”; both were simultaneously social and spiritual, sanctioning exclusive allegiances while affirming a more encompassing notion of unity (214, 259). In Politics of Friendship, Jacques Derrida indicts male friendship’s exclusion of women and love alike—the very things that differentiate friendship from marriage—even as he points out that the distinction is impossible to sustain: although male friendship discourse contemptuously associated women and love with hierarchy and bondage, love and friendship necessarily intertwine and women find ways to make their presence felt (277, 290). However, in seeking to demonstrate that some same-sex relationships were akin to marriage, Bray disregards the notable differences between marriage and friendship; and Derrida queries these differences from within a discourse that insists upon them, by relying exclusively on male-authored philosophical texts about perfect friendship. In what follows, I take a different approach by analyzing sixteenth-century marriage treatises that explicitly connect and differentiate friendship and marriage. Like Derrida’s, my sources are all written by men. As a result, however, of what Lorna Hutson describes as the textualization of friendship, these humanist authors inscribe bonds with one another through their “mental husbandry” (the adroit handling and textual exchange of women); consequently, these male-authored marriage treatises focus as much or more on women as men and, just as importantly, attend to bodies and sex as well as reason and emotion.

The treatise that inspired this essay is Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae christianae (Education of a Christian Woman). Vives’s influential text appeared in Latin in 1524, was translated into English in 1531, and had been published in seven languages and nearly forty editions by 1600. Desiderius Erasmus, Europe’s most famous humanist, published his own long treatise about marriage, Institutio christiani matrimonii, just two years later, in 1526. Vives wrote De institutione while employed as a tutor to Henry VIII’s daughter, Mary, and he and Erasmus both dedicated their works to Catherine of Aragon just a few years before a royal divorce dramatized how consequential beliefs about marital unity could be. Like all other marriage treatises in the sixteenth century, these texts adamantly endorse patriarchy, and yet the discussions of marital friendship in Vives’s and Erasmus’s treatises also intimate an alternative to the dichotomy of hierarchy and equality. The claims about marriage and friendship in these two texts are echoed in many sixteenth-century humanist discussions of marriage, including Erasmus’s earlier Encomium matrimonii (Latin 1518, English trans. 1536) and Vives’s later work, Office and Duetie of an Husband (Latin 1525, English trans. 1555), as well as related treatises by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and contemporary Protestants such as Heinrich Bullinger and Edmund Tilney.

In these texts, friendship and marriage do not clearly stage a contest or perform a merger; rather, they are unsettled and alternating discourses. In De institutione, Vives describes marriage as a superlative form of friendship, and he was neither the first nor the only author to link friendship and marriage in this way. Erasmus, who had read Vives’s work before writing his own, hailed friendship as a “meeting of minds based solely on inclination of will and choice,” only to conclude that husbands and wives were even closer than friends because they shared one body as well as one soul (Institutio 219). These claims highlight an important tension: while affirming that perfect friendship sets the standard because it is a meeting of minds, the texts also suggest that the union between friends based on will and affection is in some important way inferior to the union between husband and wife because the latter is corporeal.

Intriguingly, when studied with an eye to their spiritual valence and sacramental language in particular, the pairing of these discourses reveals not just repressive norms—though these certainly exist—but also nuanced claims about allegiances, affinity, and accord. If, as Frances Dolan persuasively argues in Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy, our vision of equality today remains distorted by the early modern emphasis on marital unity—“the ultimate message,” she points out, “is that marriage only has room for one” (3)—we might well learn also from the ambiguities and nuances in early modern marital discourse. Specifically, I am interested in how the humanists’ mobilization of the discourse of spiritualized corporality produced claims about unity as both a premise and a process, enabled through divine participation. Reflecting on how unity that is divinely granted (through sacramental grace) must also be achieved between two people who are self-evidently different (because male and female), these texts vector the relational process through God, at once affirming and overcoming difference—and thereby aiding our attempts to rethink intimacy and parity today.

The Premise of Unity: Two in One Flesh

Vives’s flat assertion in De institutione that marriage is the best form of friendship calls attention to the importance of spiritualized corporality. Marriage not only meets but improves upon perfect friendship, for “if friendship between two souls renders them one, how much more truly and effectively must this result from marriage, which far surpasses all other friendships” (II.iii.15). Vives’s conditional logic presumes sacramental assumptions about likeness and bodily unity even as it measures marriage against the standard set by friendship’s vision of unity. Others might emphasize the social utility of friendship and the alliances and aid that friends provided to one another; from this perspective, friendship took over where kinship left off, establishing bonds between people unrelated by blood or family allegiances. Vives, however, invokes the more abstract notion of perfect friendship conveyed by the classical description of a pair of friends as “one soul in two bodies.” As the earliest English translation of Cicero’s De amicitia had it, a friend is “another … the same” (Tiptoft, qtd in Shannon 3). A friend is another self. Friendship can turn two into one. How, then, could marriage be superior? Vives renders this question rhetorical by trumping the classical adage about friendship with the line from Genesis where Adam declares that Eve is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23).

The second creation story in Genesis authorized commentators such as Vives to assume a sacramental chain of association between the pair in Eden and all subsequent married couples. Vives understood this marital unity as both originary and ultimate, as he emphasizes by setting marriage at the center of an ever-narrowing circle of intimacies. Friendship is supplanted by family, which in turn is superseded by the voluntary pairing that spawns the family:

Beginning with that association and friendship by which all men are joined together like brothers descended from God … our special friends are dearer to us, and among these, our kinsfolk are more beloved, and of those joined by blood none is closer than the wife, whom that first progenitor of the human race, upon first seeing her, immediately proclaimed she was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. (“De coniugio” 245; cf. II. 1)

This biblical imagery was standard fare in Christian discussions of marriage, but here Vives uses it specifically to establish that the unity accomplished through marriage exceeds the unity of friendship: marriage creates one body whereas friendship merely overcomes the fact of two (“one soul in two bodies”). Marriage is not just a form of friendship; it is the best friendship. Given these assumptions, it seems straightforward not only to conflate marriage and friendship but also to suppose that marital friendship surpasses all other forms.

A passage in Vives’s Office and Duetie of an Husband that tacks back and forth between marriage and perfect friendship underscores that this claim about the preeminence of spiritualized corporality was more an assertion than an assumption—needing to be made and remade:

Paule doeth saye, he that loveth him selfe loveth his wife, for ther was never a man that hated his owne flesh, but doth nourish and cherish it, as the lord doth cherish his church; Aristotle … doth define a frend that he is the self same thyng with another. And god doth saye, the wife with her husband is al one thing. And Cicero to confirme and kepe amitie geveth this counsel, that the inferior shuld ascend and the superior descend, for so the thinge may be brought to equalitie. But in matrimonye this nedeth not, for it is sufficiente both for the man and the wyfe, to perceyue and understand, that they are parte eche of others bodye. (M3r–4v)

Vives emphasizes that the Christian language about marriage affirms self-sameness just like the discourse of classical friendship, but the two discourses differ nevertheless because sacramental marriage makes the goal inseparable from the premise: husband and wife are joined as one, “al one thing,” because they are “parte eche of others bodye.” Throughout Christian history, claims of marital unity stifled objections to female subjugation and bolstered the husband’s claim to authority (Dolan 26–31), and Vives perpetuates this repression of women by arguing that Cicero’s mandated process of alleviating inequality becomes unnecessary for a husband and wife. Instead of working toward unity, the marital couple is unified at the outset by their mutual affirmation of unity. In this Christian vision of marriage, in other words, the decision itself creates the conditions for the unity it proclaims. Sacramental marriage thus seems to be stripped of the attention to process and the interest in how parity is achieved that makes perfect friendship discourse ethically appealing. Yet even as the circularity of this premise mystifies the process, it also directs attention to the way that any intimate relationship entails an initial claim of attention. This insight is broadly applicable: some form of commitment necessarily precedes the intimacy that makes meaningful commitment possible.

The clarity of this principle notwithstanding, sacramental marriage was contested terrain within Catholicism. From the fourth century onward, there were divergent claims about whether the sacramental union was ratified by consent alone, or whether physical intercourse was also required (Elliott 137–48). Vives, Erasmus, and most other writers of marital treatises clearly conflated marriage and sex, but in doing so they equivocated about whether the physical union claimed for married couples should be understood as a state of being (an ontological premise because of the complementary creation of male and female) or an activity (achieved because and only because of active copulation). The spiritualized body of the sacramental couple encompassed both possibilities. Again and again in De institutione, Vives appeals to the New Testament to authenticate this claim: “Above all these considerations this is the first and perhaps only law of marriage: ‘they shall be two in one flesh.’ This is the hinge of marriage, the bond of a most sacred fellowship” (Vives II.i.4, citing Matt. 19:5). This “hinge” is the reason why the married pair is united in a way that friends and kin cannot claim to be:

… she is one person with her husband and for that reason should love him no less than herself. I have said this before, but it must be repeated often, for it is the epitome of all the virtues of a married woman. This is the meaning and lesson of matrimony, that a woman should think that her husband is everything to her and that this one name substitutes for all the other names dear to her—father, mother, brothers, sisters. This is what Adam was to Eve. … Therefore it is said that wedlock does not make just one mind or one body of two, but one person [unum hominem] in every respect. (II.iii.15)

At the outset, Vives reminds his reader that his claims are based on the passage from the Gospel of Matthew he cited earlier, where Christ responds to the Pharisees’ question about divorce by saying that husbands and wives cannot be separated because they have become one body. The 1531 English translation of Vives’s treatise underscores this by rendering “unum hominem” as “one body” rather than “one person” (Instruction 93). The all-encompassing claims of oneness that frame this quotation are thereby anchored in the body. The opening emphasis on the wife who is one person (or, in the contemporary English translation, “as one body”) with her husband recurs in the concluding list of unities. One man, one mind, one body, each in itself partial but contributing to the ultimate expression of a couple united as one person. By presenting this description of unity as a gloss on the biblical injunction that husband and wife should be “two in one flesh,” Vives emphasizes bodily unity over the sacramental requirements of volition and mutual consent, though he invokes these latter two implicitly at the end, with his proclamation that true unity involves body and mind alike.

This sacramental vision of marriage encouraged hyperbolic descriptions in many contemporary marriage treatises of how corporal unity overcomes duality and difference. In Commendation of Matrimony (1545), the occult philosopher and theologian Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa elaborates the twining of mind and body that marriage would ideally achieve: “in one agreeable minde two bodies, in two bodies one minde and one consent. Only man and wife, one envieth not an other, they alone loue eche other, out of measure, in as much as either of them hole hangeth of the other … one fleshe, one minde, one concorde” (sig.A8r). As in Vives’s text, the repetitive cadence of the final list—one flesh, one mind, one concord—merges three distinct features of the human person into a single intonation. The unity is, then, both self-contained and excessive: to the degree that they each take hold of the other (“hole hangeth of the other”), their love surpasses degree, “out of measure.” The literal dimension of this physical imagery is affirmed by Agrippa’s final sober concession: “only death can separate them” (sig.A8v). In death, without hands to touch or skin to feel, the couple becomes unimaginable, separate rather than unified. No longer living physical beings, they are also no longer together. The exalted vision of marital unity that Agrippa’s breathless rhetoric invokes is inseparable from a sacramental understanding of physicality.

From this religious vantage point, divine intervention displaces human effort, as Vives underscores in De institutione: “He is her alter ego as she is his. O what force in the divine word, worthy of our total adoration … . He spoke only three words [Quod Deus coniunxit] and gave expression to what mortals cannot explain in the longest speeches but merely labor and try to explain in their infantile stammerings” (II.i.4). Here Christ, the third party to a union between two, catalyzes a transformation that people alone cannot achieve. The lines between literal and metaphoric union blur, and the divine participant effaces the differences between male and female, human and divine:

When he says ‘one flesh’ it means literally one flesh. Moreover, flesh means mankind, both male and female, according to the proper meaning of the Hebrew tongue. Therefore those who were previously two human beings become one, joined together in matrimony. This is the marvelous mystery of marriage, that it so joins and unites the two spouses that the two become one, which was true also of Christ and the Church, as the Apostle Paul teaches. No power could bring this about except it were divine. Of necessity this must be a very holy thing since God is present in it in such a special manner. (II.i.1)

Vives presents total accord, the sense of affinity that makes it possible and compelling to talk about two things becoming one, as something humans alone cannot achieve and can scarcely understand.

This language of holy mystery was used by Protestants and Catholics alike. Agrippa’s Commendation referred to marriage as a “holy mystery,” in contrast with natural family ties: whereas “father, mother, children, brethren,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction The Emergence of Discourses: Early Modern Friendship
• PART I: CONVENTIONAL DISCOURSES REIMAGINED
• PART II: ALTERNATIVE DISCOURSES: FRIENDSHIP IN THE MARGINS
• PART III: FRIENDSHIP IN ETHICS AND POLITICS
• Afterword
• Works Cited
• Index