Renaissance formulations of friendship typically cast the friend as "another self" and idealized a pair of friends as "one soul in two bodies." Laurie Shannon's "Sovereign" Amity puts this stress on the likeness of friends into context and offers a historical account of its place in English culture and politics.
Shannon demonstrates that the likeness of sex and station urged in friendship enabled a civic parity not present in other social forms. Early modern friendship was nothing less than a utopian political discourse. It preceded the advent of liberal thought, and it made its case in...

Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word animal itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in "The Accommodated Animal," the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: I think, therefore I am. Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity.With...

Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word animal itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: I think, therefore I am. Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what she terms cosmopolity.With...