Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature

Front matter

E AND

SHNUVAJJALA

LITERATU

Part 2 + Feminine Space, Feminine Voices

CHAPTER 5 “Amonge maydenes moo”: Gender-Based Community, Racial Thinking, and Aristocratic Women’s Work in Emaré LYDIA YAITSKY KERTZ 97

CHAPTER 6 Women’s Communities and the Possibility of Friendship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur USHA VISHNUVAJJALA 114

CHAPTER 7 Female Friendship in Late Medieval English Literature: Cultural Translation in Chaucer, Gower, and Malory MELISSA RIDLEY ELMES 135 vi

CONTENTS

Part 3 + New Modes Of Female Friendship Chapter 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

Afterword

List of Contributors

Index

Cultivating Cummarship: Female Friendship, Alcohol, and Pedagogical Community in the Alewife Poem CARISSA M. HARRIS

“All These Relationships between Women”: Chaucer and the Bechdel Test for Female Friendship KARMA LOCHRIE

The Politics of Virtual Friendship in Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies CHRISTINE CHISM

Prosthetic Friendship and the Theater of Fraternity LAURIE A. FINKE

Conversations among Friends: Ælfflæd, Iurminburg, and the Arts of Storytelling CLARE A. LEES AND GILLIAN R. OVERING

Friendship at a Distance PENELOPE ANDERSON

293 297

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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CO-EDITING A VOLUME of essays is not necessarily a recipe for friendship between and among scholars, but in the case of this volume on medieval women’s friendships, it cant help but draw on our own community of friendships, past and present. Contributors in this volume represent both women scholars with whom one or the other of us has had important bonds of friendship and intellectual kinship in the past and scholars we feel lucky to have had as interlocutors in the work of “befriending past female friendships.” The editors’ collaboration on this volume of essays, too, bespeaks a friendship that began in the formal academic context of mentor/mentee and developed into the kind of friendship that we suspect mirrors those of many female (and male) faculty who go on to work as colleagues with graduate students with whom they have shared interests, passions, and, ultimately, friendships. We have shared the hard work, but also the exhilaration, of seeing this volume from its inception as a series of papers, through its conception, the compiling of contributors, and all the deadlines and revisions that constitute the particular challenge of edited collections, and, finally, to the joy and relief at its completion. Female friendship in the academy is crucially important, as Karma knows from her time at Princeton many years ago before female mentors were widely available in her field. Nevertheless, she, like Usha, has benefited from the support, e vii « viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS generosity, conversations, and shared triumphs of other academic women, and we dedicate this volume to them. They know who they are.

We also thank Holly Crocker, who gave the most generous review we have ever received, and who seemed to model some of the female friendship discussed in this volume, and our editor, Ana Maria Jimenez-Moreno.

Introduction

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KARMA LOCHRIE AND USHA VISHNUVAJJALA

—A woman friend is as rare as true love.

ELENA FERRANTE

FRIENDSHIP HAS BEEN DEFINED, when it is defined at all, by proximity, likeness, political affiliation, public or moral good, and emotional or affective attachment.” With the exception of the final category, it has often been characterized in ways that are primarily or even solely available to men, and often only to those meeting other criteria such as class, religion, or race. Within these constraints, the concept of friendship sometimes comes to resemble a condition, something dictated by circumstance, rather than a bond of affection, love, or even competition, as many of us may think of it today. At the same time, in recent years, studies and news articles on health have begun to tout the benefits of friendship for our physical and mental health, although they rarely define friendship and tend to focus instead on measurable or quantifiable criteria like the number of people one communicates with each day by phone call or text message.’

1. Elena Ferrante, “A Woman Friend Is as Rare as True Love,’ trans. Ann Goldstein, Guardian, April 28, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/28/elena-ferrante-woman-friend-rare-as-true-love.

2. For a recent overview, see Alexander Nehamas, On Friendship (New York: Basic Books, 2016).

3. Jamie Ducharme, “Why Spending Time with Friends Is One of the Best Things You Can Do for Your Health,’ Time, June 25, 2019, https://time.com/5609508/social-support-health-benefits/ (accessed June 2, 2021). The study Ducharme references that measures friendship by the number of phone calls and text messages is Suwen Lin et al., “Social Network Structure ele

The anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who famously posited that the number of close friendships a species was capable of maintaining depended on the size of its neocortex, concluded in the 1990s that humans were capable of about 150 close friendships, a number still referred to as “Dunbar’s Number.” When asked recently about research that seemed to undermine his theory, Dunbar reiterated his original claim and, according to Jenny Gross of the New York Times, defined a “meaningful relationship” as “those people you know well enough to greet without feeling awkward if you ran into them in an airport lounge.’ Another recent Times article drew outrage from readers when it suggested that they use the pandemic to jettison friends whose struggles made them a bad influence, defining friendship as “an evolutionary advantage” and noting that “psychologists, sociologists and evolutionary anthropologists say it behooves us to take a more curatorial approach when it comes to our friends because who you hang out with determines who you are?” Each of the essays in this volume defines friendship in a different way—through shared values, protection, advice, physical affection, or safe spaces for difficult feelings, among other things—but each one defines friendship as something more nuanced and complex than these social science approaches construe it to be. And recent popular representations of women’s friendship demonstrate that for many of us in the twenty-first century, friendship is about more than evolutionary advantages, virtuous behavior, or comfort making small talk.

If friendship after the pandemic is a matter of debate, female friendship remains even more mysterious as a category, despite its increasing popularity as a topic of novels, films, and television shows. Female friendships, if recent film criticism is to be believed, have been experiencing something of a cinematic surge since 2019 with Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, the first major dramatic film to expand comedy’s growing focus on female friendship in films like Bridesmaids (2011), Spy (2015), and Ghostbusters (2016), all directed by Paul Feig. The Guardian announced Gerwig’s film and its timing as a veritable invention of sisterhood and female friendship under the title “Sister Act: From

Is Predictive of Health and Wellness,” PLOS One, June 6, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.o217264.

4. Jenny Gross, “Can You Have More Than 150 Friends?,” New York Times, May 11, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/science/dunbars-number-debunked.html (accessed June 14, 2021).

5. Kate Murphy, “How to Rearrange Your Post-Pandemic ‘Friendscape,” New York Times, June 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/well/family/curate-friends.html (accessed June 14, 2021). An earlier version of this article, published June 1, 2021, suggested that readers avoid friendships with those who are obese or who struggle with addiction because those conditions are more common among those whose friends have them.

INTRODUCTION 3

Killing Eve to Little Women, Female Friendships Finally Get Top Billing.”® The pairing of Killing Eve and Little Women in this title is a jarring juxtaposition: the familial nineteenth-century friendships depicted in Alcott’s novel would strike most viewers as light-years distant from the BBC series’ obsessive, erotic, and frightening relationship between British intelligence investigator Eve (Sandra Oh) and psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer). The story of female friendship framed by these two recent ventures in film and television-streaming is itself a strange and compelling riddle.

The film and television series both follow closely on the best-selling literary inquiry into female friendship by Elena Ferrante in her Neapolitan quartet of novels that explores the relationship of Lila and Lenu from childhood through adulthood. April de Angelis, who adapted the first volume of Ferrantes series, My Brilliant Friend, for the National Theatre in London in 2019, averred (in a curious ventriloquism of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, no less!), “Men have always told women’s stories, and they’ve always put themselves right at the centre of the picture. If women had to tell the story of our lives, wed talk about friends, really, talk about our daughters, talk about mothers, talk about grandmothers, and talk about the friendships that are important to us.” Indeed, as Tiziana de Rogatis notes, what is most remarkable about Ferrante’s novels is their captivating representation of what she calls the “liberating messiness” of female friendship—friendship, that is, in all its intimacy, eroticism, fear, cruelty, and indispensability.” Ferrante herself insists on jettisoning “every literary idealization” in order to capture the sheer “disorderliness of female friendship” in her novels.’ For Ferrante, as the epigram to our introduction suggests, female friendship is also both rare and tantamount to “true love” She further explains that “the relationship between friends has the richness, the complexity, the contradictions, the inconsistencies of love? There is also, she adds, linguistic support for her simile of female friendship

6. Gwendolyn Smith, “Sister Act: From Killing Eve to Little Women, Female Friendships Finally Get Top Billing,” Guardian, December 22, 2019.

7. Quoted in Smith, “Sister Act.” We allude, of course, to the Wife of Bath’s rant against her husband’s reading of the “Book of Wicked Wives” to her in which she exclaims that “by God, if women had written stories / As men have in their oratories / They would have written about men / More than the mark of Adam can redress” [“By God, if wommen hadde writen stories / As clerkes han withinne hire oratories / They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse / Than al the mark of Adam may redresse”; Canterbury Tales, ed. Benson, III: lines 693-96). De Angelis revises the Wife’s insistence that women would call out men in their writings, suggesting that, instead, women would write about their friendships.

8. Tiziana de Rogatis, “For Elena Ferrante, What Distinguishes Conventional Male and Female Friendships? The Liberating Messiness of the Neapolitan Quartet Friendship,’ LitHub, December 17, 2019.

9. Quoted in de Rogatis, “For Elena Ferrante.”

and true love. In Italian amicizia already collapses love into friendship by means of the root verb, amare, “to love.” The rarity of the woman friend to Ferrante’s way of thinking—like that of true love—consists in its exceptionality, its marvelousness, and its scarcity.

THERE IS another kind of rarity where female friendship is concerned, however: the rarity of its consideration in scholarship, including literary scholarship, on premodern women. Virginia Woolf famously invented a female friendship in the history of letters in which the simple phrase “Chloe liked Olivia” seemed to open up worlds of pleasure and recognition that had hitherto not existed for women readers. Karma Lochrie addresses Woolf’s ruminations more fully in her essay in this volume, but for the purposes of this introduction, we can sympathize with Woolf’s exasperation that something is missing from accounts of literary history, even though our purview is the Middle Ages rather than the long durée of literary history.

The rarity of the female friend is not limited to accounts of literary history: it extends to the relative absence of the kind of cultural and philosophical ballast that scaffolds the history of masculine friendship as an idealized construct.

Most writers on friendship either assumed or outright insisted that masculinity was itself a condition of friendship, from the classical period to the Middle Ages and into early modernity. Female friendship was thus marginalized if not rendered inconceivable within the Western philosophy of friendship; friendship was spiritually, politically, and constitutionally unavailable to women. Amicitia was often deemed by definition a masculine virtue that excluded women. Early classical definitions conceived of friendship as primarily a public affiliation that provided the “public and political basis for civic community.” Philia, the Greek word for friendship, was originally “characterized as ethical, public, exclusively masculine, and elite,’ categorically excluding women, as well as nonelite citizens. In addition, Aristotle defines a more private ideal of friendship between male persons in a famous formulation: “a friend is another self’ The likeness between friends about which Aristotle writes is based on equality and a similitude with respect to virtue, a quality presumed to be possessed by men but not by women, as its etymology sug-

10. Ferrante, “A Woman Friend.”

11. Ivy Schweitzer, “Making Equals: Classical Philia and Women’s Friendship,” Feminist Studies 42, no. 2 (2016): 339-40.

12. Schweitzer, “Making Equals,’ 337-38.

13. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 8.8.12; Schweitzer, “Making Equals,” 342.

INTRODUCTION 5 gests.'* Cicero likewise defined friendship in terms of “a second self . . . that become virtually one person instead of two?” Much later, Michel de Montaigne made explicit the exclusion of women from classical definitions of ideal friendship: “The ordinary capacity of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship which is the nurse of this sacred bond; nor does their soul seem firm enough to endure the strain of so tight and durable a knot?”

Although classical models of friendship as a form of affiliation for the public good certainly survived into the early modern period, to consider them the dominant way of understanding friendship in the Middle Ages is to privilege the influence of one strand of classical philosophy—however dominant— over the written evidence that survives from the Middle Ages. The forms of friendship depicted in these texts are at times very similar to and at times dramatically different from the type valued in classical philosophy or Christian theology. The writings of Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth-century Yorkshire abbot who adapted Cicero’s ideas for a Christian audience, are often treated as the final word on medieval friendship. Although several of the essays in this volume draw on Aelred’s writings, we also note emphatically that his definition of spiritual friendship was not the only type of friendship experienced, documented, or imagined by medieval women.

The female friendships this volume considers are those evidenced in written texts. Whether they document friendships between historical women or imagine those between fictional women, this volume’s essays on female friendship demonstrate that the topic of women’s friendships, intimacy, communities, and affinities was, in fact, a central concern to medieval writers across genders, literary genres, and linguistic and national differences. We suggest that these friendships have long been neglected not only because of discourses privileging friendships between men but because definitions of masculine friendships have focused on those friendships grounded in likeness, virtue, and public identity; many of these friendships are between women who may not be alike, whose friendships play out largely in private arenas, or who would not be considered virtuous by either classical or Christian frameworks.”

14. See, however, Holly A. Crocker’s groundbreaking intervention in masculine definitions of virtue in The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

15. Cicero, De amicitia, quoted in Schweitzer, “Making Equals,’ 342.

16. “Of Friendship,” in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Knopf, 2003), 167.

17. As examples, see Amanda Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Penelope Anderson, Friendships Shadows: Women’ Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and Schweitzer, “Making Equals.”

No scholar has captured the sheer inconceivability of historical constructions of friendship including women more than Alan Bray. In the introduction to his important study of friendship in England from the year 1000 to the eighteenth century, Bray pauses to consider the implicit gendering of his own historical evidence:

Am I writing about friendship or about masculine friendship? Curiously, this question is more difficult to answer, because friendship has been no less asymmetrical than gender itself. There is no more revealing question about the friendship of traditional society than to ask how it encompassed

18 women.

Bray acknowledges that he is indeed writing about masculine friendship, even though he finds evidence for female friendship in the seventeenth century. This volume seeks to build on Bray’s question by asking the following: If medieval understandings of friendship do not encompass women, where might women's friendship reside, and under what cultural rubrics other than masculine virtue, political affinity, and civic polity might it be found? What are the conditions of its emergence and the temper of its expressions? How does it fare under the discourse of medieval misogyny? What different species of female friendship can we discern in medieval texts? Early modern writing on friendship amasses a wealth of terminology for different kinds of friendship affiliated with women and men, including “chaste friendship, “erotic” friendship, political friendship, “sworn brotherhood,” and more.” One of the most important studies of nonsexual love and friendship in the Middle Ages is Stephen Jaeger’s Ennobling Love, in which he argues for that secular passionate friendship that provides a diptych with spiritual friendship in medieval courtly society.” Jaeger’s book has little to say, however, about female friendship because the friendship he examines is the masculine forerunner of courtly love. “Ennobling love” is courtly love, a cultural phenomenon which expanded on the idea of the masculine friendship as a source of self-betterment to a heterosexual ideal that included women. While women were now participants in that “ennobling love” that we call courtly love, the Middle Ages

18. Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 10.

19. For the terms for female friendship, including chaste femme love, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 188-228. For sworn brotherhood, see Bray, The Friend, 16-17, 125-26, and 315-17.

20. C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). See his chapter “Women,” 82-108.

INTRODUCTION 7 seems to be no closer to developing a culturally legible ideal of female friendship than it was before the twelfth century.

The only major study of medieval female friendship across history consists of a volume of essays edited by Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge that includes “that still uncharted territory” of women and friendship in the Middle Ages along with essays devoted to masculine friendship.” One of the reasons for the relative neglect of medieval studies of female friendship, we think, is that the topic was subsumed in the movement of queer studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. For example, Lochrie’s essay in the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’ Writing, “Between Women,’ included a discussion of female friendship within the larger discussion of female homoeroticism in medieval texts. Queer medieval studies co-opted female friendship studies before there was such a thing, and, as a result, we really do not have much groundwork, theoretical or historical, for talking about female friendship as friendship in the Middle Ages. At the same time, it might seem to us as though this topic has been fully vetted because of the scattered address of the topic under queer studies. A quick search of the topic, however, reveals a surprising dearth of studies other than those we have already cited.

Meanwhile, the interest in women’s friendship in other historical periods and in current popular writing continues apace without the Middle Ages. The 2017 nonfiction book Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, documents the largely unknown epistolary friendships these four major British women writers had with other female writers; feminist linguistics scholar Deborah Tannen’s 2017 book Youre the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships considers, among many other things, the detrimental effect that negative social interactions— including those with friends—have on women’s health, despite the fact that they do not have a similar effect on men’s health. Reese Witherspoon, posting an Instagram picture of herself with her co-stars of the 2017 HBO series Big Little Lies (based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty), remarks of the series and her relationship to her fellow actresses: “The power of sisterhood and friendship is limitless!” Guardian writer Ellen E. Jones, who quotes Witherspoon, offers a somewhat different assessment of the series, if

21. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, eds., Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 47. Even in this massive collection dedicated to friendship, only two essays address medieval female friendships explicitly: Lisa M. C. Weston, “Where Textual Bodies Meet: Anglo-Saxon Women’s Epistolary Friendships,’ 231-41; and Sara Deutch Schotland, “Talking Bird and Gentle Heart: Female Homosocial Bonding in Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale;” 525-42.

not the actresses’ bonds with one another, as “T'V’s most compelling commercial opportunity yet: female friendship as a commodity?”

We argue that this supposedly new interest in women’s friendship as a topic of art, scholarship, cinema, and even consumerism actually continues a long tradition of writing that has been neglected in scholarship until now. We can see how thoroughly a periodized understanding of women’s friendship has pervaded popular thinking in examples like an NPR review of the book Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship that begins with the sentences “Women in the Middle Ages were excluded from many realms: the law, universities, and surprisingly, from friendship, writes author Kayleen Schaefer. The term ‘friend’ was reserved for the half of humanity that purportedly possessed superior moralsk—men— and only used to describe other men?” While the recent interest in women’s friendship is a positive development in fiction and scholarship and nonfiction, it often relies on a false sense of periodization. With this volume, we aim to put to rest the idea that women’s friendships are a particularly modern development, and with it the oversimplified narrative of historical progress between the Middle Ages and today, especially with respect to gender.

This volume is designed not only to remedy the absence of scholarly work on female friendship in the Middle Ages, therefore, but also to begin to articulate the multiform ways in which women’s friendships appear in medieval literary texts, culture, and even in modern Wiccan derivatives of medieval craft societies. Like the knight in the Wife of Baths Tale, who searches for an answer to the question of what it is that women most desire only to receive multiple and varied answers, we were delighted to discover in the course of assembling this collection that women’s friendships in medieval literature and culture are not homogenous; nor do they necessarily track with the philosophical parameters of masculine friendships. Like Ferrante, we are interested here in the “disorderliness of female friendship,’ as well as its deepest sympathies, ethics, cross-species affiliations, and even its “virtual” and “prosthetic” capacities. Our volume aims to generate a rich and provocative investigation into female friendships in the medieval period, but it also reserves an eye toward the present, including the recent surge in novels, movies, and stream-

22. Ellen E. Jones, “Is Big Little Lies Selling Us a Version of Consumer Feminism That Is Just Too Good to Be True?” Guardian, June 19, 2019.

23. Kayleen Schaefer, Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship (New York: Dutton, 2018); Rhaina Cohen, “Text Me When You Get Home’ Celebrates the Complexities of Female Friendship,’ NPR, February 11, 2018.

24. Laurie Finke borrows this idea of “prosthetic friendship” from David Wills, who defines it as “friendship artificially conceived or produced,’ in “Full Dorsal: Derrida’s Politics of Friendship,” Postmodern Culture 15, no. 3 (May 2005). See Finke’s essay in this volume.

INTRODUCTION 9 ing series on female friendship. In that sense, it pursues a practice of befriending past female friendships by way of considering how they might help speak to our present moment. One of the ways in which our volume straddles past and present lies in its recourse to contemporary theories of friendship, from Jacques Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship to the work of Toni Morrison, Nancy K. Miller, and other important writers and scholars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In addition, we recognize the wealth of feminist scholarship from the past forty years that addresses women's friendships in complex and important ways, even if we do not cite their work in our own. We are deeply aware of and indebted to their work, as we endeavor to push the inquiry into women’s friendship into a past era that has remained somewhat puzzlingly immune to this vector of feminist inquiry.”

Rather than organizing the essays according to better-studied forms of affiliation in the Middle Ages, such as familial bonds or patronage networks, we chose to organize them according to the provocations and interventions the essays in each section are making: spiritual friendship, feminine spaces, and new modes of affinity. While each of these categories is porous and many of the essays in this volume are concerned with spiritual identity, feminine spaces, and new or emerging modes of affinity, this way of organizing the essays highlights the fact that many medieval representations of female friendship do not map easily onto existing categories of relation.

Part 1, “Varieties of Spiritual Friendship,’ takes up what might be the most familiar category of female friendship even though, aside from the case of Hildegard of Bingen and Richardis, scholarship has been slow to consider it. The varieties of spiritual friendships discussed in this part range widely across the temporal and the geographic, from Jennifer Brown’s exploration of the famous visionaries Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena; to Stella

25. While any attempt to cite all the—mostly female—authors who have written on this topic over the past forty years is destined inadvertently to omit some individuals, we nevertheless wish to acknowledge as many as we can: Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,’ Signs 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 631-60; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984); Janice Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Mary Hunt, Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (New York: Crossroad, 1992); Maria Lugones and Pat Alake Rosezelle, “Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models,” in Feminism and Community, ed. Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 135-46; Jody Greene, “The Work of Friendship,’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 319-37; and Judith Taylor, “Enduring Friendship: Women’s Intimacies and the Erotics of Survival,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 34, no. 1 (2013): 93-113. Schweitzer provides most of these references, as well as an excellent review of feminist and queer scholarship on women’ friendship; see Schweitzer, “Making Equals.”

Wang's consideration of Marie de France's twelfth-century hagiography La vie seint Audree alongside Eliduc and La Fresne; to Andrea Boffas discussion of Italian holy women like Clare of Rimini (d. 1346), Umiliani de Cerchi (d. 1246), and Margaret of Cortona (d. 1297); to Alexandra Verini’s essay on the “absent presence” of women’s friendships at Syon Abbey, a Bridgettine house established in the fifteenth century in England. Wang argues for an understanding of women’s spiritual friendship not only in terms of private bonds but in terms of an amicitia that was public and discursive.

This volume’s second part, “Feminine Space, Feminine Voices,” takes especial notice of the spaces in which women’s friendships become legible and the crucial role played by female audiences in the expression of female fellowship. Lydia Kertz and Usha Vishnuvajjala frame this section with their essays considering the spaces and audiences of female friendship. Kertz addresses specifically those spaces of female learning in textile production in the Middle English Emaré, which creates transnational connections between Muslim and Christian women in the text even as it valorizes the aristocratic Christian female body over the elite Muslim woman. Vishnuvajjala interrogates the private spaces of the fourteenth-century Stanzaic Morte Arthur to discover how spaces explicitly populated by women enable Gaynor’s expressions of emotion and sympathy, and to suggest that fellowship among women in romance, although it might seem like so much background, is actually vital to Gaynor’s rare expressions of emotion. Female fellowship, in this case, is more evident in its affective effects and gendered spaces than it is in any more conventional depiction of friendship dyads. Melissa Elmes likewise details the possible extratextual pressures and awarenesses of Middle English works by Chaucer, Gower, and Malory, arguing for a heightened late-medieval authorial orientation toward female audiences and patrons that accounts for key diversions from their source material.

The collection’s final part turns to a vibrant array of secular friendships ranging from the personal and private to public and transgressive, to interspecies, to modern and prosthetic. This section, “New Modes of Female Friendship,” straddles the medieval and modern by reaching out from cummarship in medieval alewife poems, in Carissa Harris’s essay, to twentieth-century lesbian bar culture. Karma Lochrie’s essay begins from the twentieth-century Bechdel test for the depiction of female friendship in contemporary cinema, to consider how three different types of female fellowship in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales might offer alternatives to the notion of masculine fellowship framing the tales as a whole. Christine Chism likewise maps out a kind of virtual friendship and “alternative sociality” produced by Christine de Pizan in her fifteenth-century opus, Le livre de la cité des dames (Book of the City of

INTRODUCTION 1L

Ladies). Chism’s argument also affords an exciting theorizing of female readership in terms of virtual friendship that potentially expands the category of women’s friendship for readers of women’s text, medieval, early modern, and modern, aligning women readers across history in a sororal friendship. This section continues with Laurie Finke's provocative study of the modern Wiccan movement as it evolved from the Freemasons in terms of “prosthetic friendship” Finally, Clare Lees and Gillian Overing address the challenge of finding a “narrative in the face of absence” by considering three contemporary texts that reimagine the seventh century. They focus in particular on the possibility of friendship between abbess Ælfflæd and queen Iurminburg by way of imagining a gemeecce, or formal female friendship, as that concept was defined by Nicola Griffith. All the essays of this part challenge contemporary and medieval scholars to think across historical eras as well as to imagine categories of female friendship that might not easily sync with masculine models of friendship and fellowship, and that might chart new directions for theorizing female friendship tout court.