In the 16th century, the need to stay in touch with friends and high-status connections existed, though not in the form of the internet (which wouldn’t be invented for at least like dozens of years). Instead, something more tangible known as alba amicorum, Latin for “book of friends,” is what was used to keep records of your friends, their interests, and their “it’s complicated” statuses — pretty much the earliest version of Facebook.
Not quite a Burn Book from Mean Girls yet capable of dropping people you no longer wanted associations with, a simple X drawn across a person’s entry is speculated to have been equivalent of deleting someone. The higher the status, the closer the person would get to having their entry appear at the beginning of these books that were passed around to friends, and sometimes even plebeians who knew a guy and could have royalty sign their book of friendship. Instructors, noblemen, and churchmen were usually asked to sign these books by their students, with many having been kept as a part of various universities’ history.
The book was a blend of an autograph book and diary, occurring mainly amongst young German and Dutch people. As a token of friendship, the trend was especially in with students. As the Guardian puts it, “Renaissance millennials” would get signatures of sometimes famous people of their time; for example, the British Library hosts a friendship book bearing the autograph of King Charles I, “equivalent to a Lady Gaga today.” Sketches found in these have been compared to selfies, as interpretive drawings of friends were often found in these journals.
