The Friend

by Alan Bray

In the chapel of Christ's College, Cambridge, some twenty years ago, historian Alan Bray made an astonishing a tomb shared by two men, John Finch and Thomas Baines. The monument featured eloquent imagery dedicated to their portraits of the two friends linked by a knotted cloth. And Bray would soon learn that Finch commonly described his friendship with Baines as a connubium or marriage.

There was a time, as made clear by this monument, when the English church not only revered such relations between men, but also blessed them. Taking this remarkable idea as its cue, The Friend explores the long and storied relationship between friendship and the traditional family of the church in England. This magisterial work extends from the year 1000, when Europe acquired a shape that became its enduring form, and pursues its account up to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Spanning a vast array of fascinating examples, which range from memorial plaques and burial brasses to religious rites and theological imagery to classic works of philosophy and English literature, Bray shows how public uses of private affection were very common in premodern times. He debunks the now-familiar readings of friendship by historians of sexuality who project homoerotic desires onto their subjects when there were none. And perhaps most notably, he evaluates how the ethics of friendship have evolved over the centuries, from traditional emphases on loyalty to the Kantian idea of moral benevolence to the more private and sexualized idea of friendship that emerged during the modern era.

Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, The Friend is a book rich in suggestive propositions as well as eye-opening details. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of England and the importance of friendship in everyday life.

History Today ’s Book of the Year, 2004
 
“Bray’s loving coupledom is something with a proper historical backbone, with substance and form, something you can trace over time, visible and archeologicable. . . . Bray made a great contribution in helping to bring this long history to light.”— James Davidson, London Review of Books   

Genres: History, Friendship, Gender and Sexuality, Queer

392 pages, Hardcover

First published September 16, 2003

Reviews

[Dasha]

The Friend navigates the contested history of friendship between thirteenth- and nineteenth-century England. He argues that the modern binary between friendship (private) and family (public) has obscured the meaning, language, and understanding of friendship in “traditional society.” Indeed, while the spiritual sense of friendship has been lost, the material friendship survived in sources often overlooked or misinterpreted from our cultural understandings of terms and relations. As he concludes, “a strange old world: kinship, locality, embodiment, domesticity, [and] affect” of friendship are being revealed as modernity rediscovers such ideas of friendship. Friendship provided an important foundation to social life that remained relatively steadfast in the face of political and religious upheavals. Friendship, whether motivated by profit, violence, desire, or some combination of all three, were public performances that expanded the kinship through ritual promises. Indeed, while religion provided a uniting base for these promises, such as the Eucharist performance, the friendships also expanded past into economic, familial, and social networks

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something of an update of John Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, this is a nuanced and carefully considered history of a premodern mode of friendship that was ritually sworn and affirmed, not entirely unlike a marriage, looking at how such sworn friendships functioned, how they related to notions of "sodomy", and why such friendship rituals stopped being performed.

[Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most valuable book I've read on understanding male friendship and framing the conversation on how we understand same-gendered relationships in the Pre-Modern World. Dense and meticulous at times, but well-worth the effort.

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scholarly overview of the nature of friendship in England from the 13th-19th centuries. Very interesting stuff related to the public role friendship played and the various ways it was recognized, but dense, scholarly writing which makes the book more work than play.