Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Explorations of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse

Albrecht Classen, Marilyn Sandidge, Albrecht Classen, Marilyn Sandidge

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9783110253979
• eBook ISBN: 9783110253986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Literature

Although it seems that erotic love generally was the prevailing topic in the medieval world and the Early Modern Age, parallel to this the Ciceronian ideal of friendship also dominated the public discourse, as this collection of essays demonstrates. Following an extensive introduction, the individual contributions explore the functions and the character of friendship from Late Antiquity (Augustine) to the 17th century. They show the spectrum of variety in which this topic appeared ? not only in literature, but also in politics and even in painting.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Friendship—The Quest for a Human Ideal and Value: From Antiquity to the Early Modern Time
• Chapter 1 Friendship of Mutual Perfecting in Augustine’s Confessions and the Failure of Classical amicitia
• Chapter 2 The Gift of Friendship: Beneficial and Poisonous: Friendships in the Byzantine Greek Passion of Sergius and Bacchus
• Chapter 3 Where Textual Bodies Meet: Anglo-Saxon Women’s Epistolary Friendships
• Chapter 4 Sapienter amare poterimus: On Rhetoric and Friendship in the Letters of Heloise and Abelard
• Chapter 5 Peter the Venerable and Secular Friendship
• Chapter 6 Mysterious Friends in the Prayers and Letters of Anselm of Canterbury
• Chapter 7 Monastic Friendship in Theory and in Action in the Twelfth Century
• Chapter 8 Ideological Friendship In The Middle Ages: Bonizo of Sutri and His Liber Ad Amicum
• Chapter 9 Friendship in the Heroic Epic: Ruedegêr in the Nibelungenlied
• Chapter 10 Spiritual Friendship in the Works of Alfonso X of Castile: Images of Interaction Between the Sacred and Spiritual Worlds of Thirteenth-Century
• Chapter 11 The Spiritual Friendship of Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel
• Chapter 12 Engendering Obligation: Sworn Brotherhood and Love Rivalry in Medieval English Romance
• Chapter 13 Schotland Talking Bird and Gentle Heart: Female Homosocial Bonding in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale”
• Chapter 14 Sovereign Fathers and Sovereign Friends in Hamlet and Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Friendship”
• Chapter 15 Die zwei Freunde des Leonardo da Vinci: Eine kunsthistorische Fallstudie (with an English abstract)
• Chapter 16 Friendship and Good Counsel: The Discourses of Friendship and Parrhesia in Francis Bacon’s The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall
• Chapter 17 Painted Friends: Political Interests and the Transformation of International Learned Sociability
• Chapter 18 “If I must example bee”: Donne’s Petrarchan Heart as Speculum Amicitiae
• Chapter 19 George Herbert’s Friendship with Christ in The Temple (1633)
• Chapter 20 Friendship and Enmity to God and Nation: The Complexities of Jewish-Gentile Relations in the Whitehall Conference o 1655
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Index: Persons, Subjects, Titles, Concepts