Friendship and Alternative Kinship in the Early Modern Iberian World
Creators: name: Zamir, Shai
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Friendship
subject: Kinship
subject: Inquisition
subject: Immigration
subject: History of the Family
subject: Iberia
subject: History (General)
subject: Judaic Studies
subject: Latin American and Caribbean Studies
subject: Romance Languages and Literature
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: This dissertation offers a social and cultural history of friendship in the early modern Iberian world. From the Spanish conquest of the Americas to the beginning of the eighteenth-century, Friendship and Alternative Kinship in the Early Modern Iberian World studies amical relationships in the urban centers of the Spanish empire, including Madrid, Seville, and Lima, as well as in rural Andalusia and Galicia. It demonstrates how institutions and actors such as criminal courts, the Spanish Inquisition, and local communities formed, valued, negotiated, documented and debated friendship, within a wide range of sources such as legal testimonies, chronicles, memoirs, wills, letters, and judicial proceedings. The history of friendship in this study revolves around everyday interactions among friends from different echelons of Iberian society. Thereby, it sheds new light on literary depictions of ideal friendship during this period by bringing them into a dialogue with their concrete manifestations on the ground and providing them with original social and legal contexts. To achieve this goal, Friendship and Alternative Kinship explores practices among friends such as sharing food and drink; conversation and play; giving advice; letter-writing; joint travel; the exchange of secrets, gossip and gifts; sharing a bed or a household; hospitality; providing protection; patronage; political alliance; showing affection in gesture and in word; documenting friendship; engaging classical topoi on friendship; swearing an oath of friendship; giving testimony on behalf of a friend; publicizing friendships; offering financial help; religious and moral instruction; spiritual guidance; peacemaking, and taking care of a friend’s last will. The question of trust and the publicity of friendship is examined through friendly promises and contracts made in churches with the mediation of sacred objects. The opening of the Spanish Empire into new geographical horizons led to new urgency around the presence of the absent friend topos, especially in the context of migration to the New World. Furthermore, Catholic reformers, in their effort to promote rituals related to one’s death and salvation, responded to the renewed significance of friendship by offering a new Christian ethic of friendship. In this vein, case-studies from both Spain and Peru shed light on the dichotomy of friendship and animosity as a fundamental way of thinking and acting in Iberian society: who is not a friend must be an enemy. The conflict between two viceroys in Peru demonstrates how these same meanings and practices of friendship had an impact on the politics of the Spanish colonial government. In a humbler context, non-elite people in Spain narrated amical and inimical relationships when summoned to give testimony on violent conflict in their midst, as friendship allowed commoners to articulate effective legal and political arguments to promote their own interests. As records of the Holy Office of the Inquisition reveal, practices of friendship were integral also to socio-religious minorities, such as New Christians of Jewish origin; this marginalized group used public and urban space to pursue their spiritual goals as well as to socialize with other fellow “crypto-Jews.” Finally, as printed books and manuscripts from early modern Amsterdam illuminate, friendship played a key role in forging the fabric of this diasporic group, when mobility and its new social conditions led Sephardi-Portuguese intellectuals to rewrite traditional Iberian concepts of friendship. As in other spaces of the Iberian world, the performance of friendship created new social identities, intimate connections, and communities.