"The book is dedicated to investigating the meanings of the notion of friendship in the Renaissance from two perspectives, philological and philosophical, by observing how the notion was used in a broad spectrum of case studies of Renaissance culture. Each chapter highlights the way in which the authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (writers, philosophers, philologists, politicians, etc.) on the one hand appropriated Greek and Latin paradigms of friendship, applying them to understand their own social and ...
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"The book is dedicated to investigating the meanings of the notion of friendship in the Renaissance from two perspectives, philological and philosophical, by observing how the notion was used in a broad spectrum of case studies of Renaissance culture. Each chapter highlights the way in which the authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (writers, philosophers, philologists, politicians, etc.) on the one hand appropriated Greek and Latin paradigms of friendship, applying them to understand their own social and political context, while on the other hand they created new paradigms of friendship in both the public and private spheres. Each chapter develops an argument on the notion of friendship starting from the investigation of a particular context and creating a network of connections between the words related to friendship, such as: speaking sincerely (parrh???esia), flattery, justice, love, pleasure good, utility, virtue, good life and truth, in both the private and public domains. The writers addressed in the various chapters are - as regards the ancients - Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Plutarch, Cicero and Seneca; among the moderns we encounter Machiavelli, Montaigne, Thomas More, Erasmus, Juan de Mariana, Feliciano Silvestri, Johannes Caselius, the members of the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft and the authors of Renaissance emblem books"--
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