Abstract
Chapter 6 places Bridget Manningham's Rivall Friendship within the historical context of discourses on friendship, dominated by male authors since classical antiquity starting with Cicero, and taken up most prominently in the Renaissance by Montaigne. Manningham's romance is then juxtaposed to Spenser's Faerie Queene and Wroth's Urania, as well as the treatment of friendship by her contemporary, Margaret Cavendish, and the Restoration London painter Mary Beale. Manningham's venturing into discourses-on friendship as well as politics-heretofore almost exclusively the purview of male writers was enabled and encouraged by the social and political upheaval of the English Civil Wars. Rivall Friendship constitutes an exemplary instance of the medium of manuscripts deployed by women to address themselves to political subjects.