Medieval male friendship, at the intersection of sociopolitics, rhetoric, and philosophy, is both a habitus of affect and a possibility for unification. In Diego de San Pedro's Carcel de amor (1483-1492), the bonding between el auctor and Leriano represents an Iberian late-medieval secretary-lord friendship that both constitutes el auctor's persona and persists throughout the story as the only certainty against passionate love, courtly enmity, and injustice. This article studies this friendship from the perspective of "virtue" and "unification," or "becoming one," the two principle dimensions of amicicia discussed by fifteenth-century moral philosophers-especially Alfonso Fernandez de Madrigal and Ferran Nunez. It argues that Carcel incorporates these philosophical thoughts into its narrative-rhetorical design. By reading the paratexts of Carcel, this article further contends that the pervasiveness of friendship creates a space of boundary-crossing in which the author, el auctor, and Leriano all mirror each other and produce a conflated literary subjectivity.
