The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage - Softcover

Tilney, Edmund

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801497051 ISBN 13: 9780801497056

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1992

Synopsis

Edmund Tilney dedicated to Queen Elizabeth in I568―a time when she was under considerable pressure to marry―a spirited dialogue concerning appropriate behavior in marriage. In Tilney's conduct book, which was modeled on Erasmus's Conjugium and Castiglione's Courtier, fictional counterparts to such notables as Vives, Erasmus, Heloise, and the queen herself all make an appearance to offer advice on how to nurture the flower of friendship within marriage. Extraordinarily popular for a generation following its first publication, it is available here for the first time in a critical edition that includes a comprehensive essay by Valerie Wayne.

In her introduction, Wayne examines the dialogue's competing notions of conjugality within their historical and literary contexts and illustrates the impact of humanism on Protestant and Puritan positions. Since marriage was the most common means by which Renaissance women in Protestant countries could sustain themselves outside their parental home, ideologies of marriage became a primary means by which women were constructed as subjects. Wayne explores the range of ideologies presented in The Flower of Friendship, illuminating the contradictory claims of the humanist position in relation to the conflicts within Elizabethan culture over the queen's resistance to marriage.

This edition of a lively debate on marital and sexual conduct in the Renaissance will be welcomed by students and scholars of Renaissance literature, culture, and history, and by others interested in gender issues and the history of marriage.

About this title

Review

"Valerie Wayne's fine critical edition of Edmund Tilney's 1568 discourse concerning duties in marriage, The Flower of Friendship, is a very welcome contribution to this larger enterprise. The text itself takes the form of a dialogue involving several participants in the contemporary debate over the ends of marriage and the relative duties of husbands and wives."

--Brian Patton "Renaissance Quarterly "

"As Wayne demonstrates in her introduction, The Flower of Friendship is a wonderfully witty dialogue treating a key issue in Tudor culture. Clearly, it is an important and revealing index to the ideology of Tudor England, a touchstone in discussions of gender relationships as they are fictionalized in Renaissance literature."

--Elizabeth H. Hageman, University of New Hampshire

"The book is a delight to read, and the combination of critical edition and general introduction to the subject is an especially attractive one. Wayne offers a much-needed introduction to sixteenth-century ideologies of marriage, one that is meticulous, rigorous, and persuasive. She is the first to layout a carefully theorized reading of marriage treatises as a specific genre."

--Janis Butler Holm, Ohio University

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801497051
• ISBN 13: 9780801497056
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277
• Editor: Wayne Valerie