Bacon's friendship

My paper is divided into three parts. The first part offers a general introduction to Bacon’s Essays and aims to highlight the main futures of the work. The second part is intended to provide a close reading of Bacon’s idea of friendship. As I will argue, it emerges in many essays related to Of Friendship and places Bacon between past and future: on one hand, Bacon is the heir to the humanistic concept of friendship as political relationship, a concept rooted in the fifteenth century mirrors for princes; one the other hand, Bacon sheds light on the process that places friendship in the private sphere of life and extols the existential meaning of the relationship. The third and last part -the final remarks- aims to point out that Bacon’s essays play a key role in the history of friendship.