Acquire The Friend Presented By Alan Bray Contained In Version

overview of the nature of friendship in England from thethth 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.
The Friend navigates the contested history of friendship between thirteenth and nineteenthcentury 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
In the chapel of Christ's College Cambridge some twenty years ago historian Alan Bray made an astonishing discovery a tomb shared by two men John Finch and Thomas Baines The monument featured elouent imagery dedicated to their friendship 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 yearwhen Europe acuired 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 plaues 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 private and sexualized idea of friendship that emerged during the modern eraFinely 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 Todays Book of the Year “Brays 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 Books  .