Moderata Fonte and Michel de Montaigne in the Renaissance Debate on Friendship and Marriage

This essay aims to individuate research pathways that might be followed to make female friends less absent than they are in the current debate on Renaissance conceptions of friendship. The first section offers a critical discussion of studies that have only partially challenged the idea that friendship in the early modern era was an exclusively male concern. The second shows that women entered the realm of friendship in their capacity as wives, through an analysis of the view of marriage as a form of true friendship that comes to light in Leon Battista Alberti’s Libri della famiglia. This examination allows us to shed new light on the conceptions of friendship developed by Moderata Fonte in Il merito delle donne and by Montaigne in De l’amitité. These works are examined in the third and fourth sections, which show how Fonte excluded men from the realm of friendship, while Montaigne disqualified women from it. What their reflections appear to share is their reference to marriage, but while Fonte tried to reconcile marriage and equality, Montaigne criticised matrimony for its lack of freedom. As made clear in the fifth and final section, scholars who aim to increase the presence of female friends in the contemporary debate and thus strive to achieve a clearer understanding of the Renaissance notions of friendship might benefit from examining works by other learned women, which contain the theoretical roots of feminism, as well as from investigating writings in which marriage was conceived of as a form of true friendship. Although they are not directly connected, studies on friendship, marriage and learned women are deeply intertwined and have the potential to illuminate one another.