These essays tell the story of the declining intelligibility of classical models of (male) friendship and of the rising prominence of women as potential friends. Contributors reveal how men and women fashioned gendered selves, and also circumvented gender norms through concrete friendship practices. By showing that the benefits and the risks of friendship are magnified when gender roles and relations are unsettled, the volume highlights the relevance of early modern friend-making to friendship in the contemporary world.

1: Introduction; 2: Was Montaigne a Good Friend?; 3: The Power to Correct; 4: Redressing Ficino, Redeeming Desire; 5: Translating Friendship in the Circle of Marguerite de Navarre; 6: From Reception to Assassination; 7: Friends of Friends; 8: Making Friends, Practicing Equality; 9: The Gendered Self and Friendship in Action among the Port-Royal Nuns; 10: The Marquise de Sablé and Her Friends; 11: From My Lips to Yours

Lewis C. Seifert is professor of French Studies at Brown University, USA. He is the author of Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France, 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias (1996) and Manning the Margins: Masculinity and Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (2009). Rebecca M. Wilkin is Associate Professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University, USA. She is author of Women, Imagination, and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France (2008). With Domna Stanton, she edited Gabrielle Suchon's work (2010).