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The Friend Paperback – September 16, 2003

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Alan Bray (Author)
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Alan Bray (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars 5 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 392 pages
  • Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (December 31, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0226071812
  • ISBN-13: 978-0226071817
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,103,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 starsSubtle, Elegant
By Allan A. Tulchin on September 30, 2005
Format: Hardcover
Most of the chapters of this book begin with funerary monuments--of two men, or two women, who wanted to be buried together. Bray concludes that in pre-modern times, when life was lived more in public, and it was common for people to sleep in the same bed, the intimacy of friends was much greater than it is today, and was suffused with rituals, especially derived from Holy Communion. Were these relationships sexual? Probably yes, Bray concludes, but that isn't exactly the point, since that's a question we moderns are much more interested in than they were. It's more about how friendship has changed. The argument is subtle, and elegant--my one complaint is that sometimes the prose is too sinuous, when simple declaration would suffice. Some reviewers have even missed the point--they suggest that the friendships were NOT sexual, which isn't what Bray says at all. Incidentally, there's a terrific review of the book in the London Review of Books.
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5.0 out of 5 starsSubtlety in This Heterosexist Age Is Too Often Effacement
By E. Garcia on October 26, 2008
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Reading reviews of Alan Bray's _The Friend_ by some heterosexual critics--as by a few LGB ones also, I fear--is a dumbfoundingly astonishing experience. What book were these critics reading? Have they lost their critical faculties? Bray's book is largely a response to both John Boswell's (in)famous _Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe_ (New York: Villard Books, 1994) and its too predictably feral critics. Boswell contends that the eastern "adelphopoiesis" (Greek, `making brothers') rites are same-sex marriage ceremonies, whereas his critics aver they are merely ceremonies for ritual brotherhood or friendship (strictly platonic, little "p"). Addressing the corresponding western "ordo ad fratres faciendum" (Latin, `rite for making brothers') and the joint tombs placed primarily in churches memorializing such "brothers" or friends, Bray declares BOTH parties wrong (35-41), which is the point missed by some critics. In fact, Bray's enterprise is far more radical than Boswell's, though disguised in carefully constructed rhetoric. Whereas Boswell simply wishes to say there were ancient same-sex marriages, leaving our notions of friendship, marriage, lovers, sex, and the erotic largely intact, Bray would erase our great divide between friendship and sex--both in premodern times and today--reminding Americans, perhaps, of Walt Whitman's radical sexual politics. His rhetorical strategy is to get heterosexist readers on his side against Boswell and then hit them with the "sisterhood" between Anne Lister and Ann Walker in chapter six, by far the longest chapter in the book. Of course, to judge by the critical response, that rhetoric has been less than a stunning success. Let's have a quick look at the most relevant excerpts.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 stars"Loyalty bindeth me...."
By Lohr E. Miller on May 29, 2007
Format: Paperback
Alan Bray's "The Friend" is a fine and nuanced and elegant work from a writer who died too young. Bray's work on homosexuality in Renaissance England gave him a secure place in the gay studies field, but "The Friend" is something more. Bray expands a consideration of intimate relationships-- largely English, largely late-medieval and early modern --to consider not just whether such relationships were sexual (an issue he regards as not truly relevant to his main argument) but how friendships were used and seen in a political world still based on clientage, kinship, and private loyalties. What did it mean to be the proclaimed friend of a 16th-century magnate? What loyalties did two friends owe one another in business or public life? What were the badges of friendship? Of what did intimacy consist, and what things were "private" in our own sense? Bray is a consummate scholar and a fine writer--- and "The Friend" is a book that offers up a fascinating picture of the meaning of public and private loyalties in the late-medieval and early modern world.
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4.0 out of 5 starsthe friend
By Steven T. Karpiak Jr. on January 23, 2013
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
A detailed and involved account. Have patience while reading. It is worth the time and effort. The world is not as simple as it seems.
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4.0 out of 5 starsMet my needs
By Tom McConnell on September 3, 2013
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
I needed this book for something very specific found in it and nowhere else. It met my needs on that point.
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