The Friend (review)

Alan Bray's history of friendship has a depth and density of implications for Renaissance studies that would seem to justify a belated review. Bray's 1982 Homosexuality in Renaissance England was the seminal work in the field. The Friend opens a different, but no less striking, vista on this terrain. It approaches its subject from what might be thought an oblique angle: the handful of English funerary monuments from the twelfth to the nineteenth century that commemorate, often using marital iconography, the friendship of two men (or, less often, two women) whose bodies lie buried together beneath.

These church monuments raise fundamental questions. How to understand such friendships, how understand the AMOR, in the words engraved on a 1619 monument, that IVNXIT these same-sex couples in life and in death? How to read the cultural meaning of something that may have been sayable only in contradictions and silences between the lines? How are the dead stones to be made to speak? The easy answer would be to assume they mean what our own habits of thought tell us they must mean, but this refuses to allow for possibility on which Bray insists: that monuments might be "traces of practices and experiences that have simply no modern equivalents" (40). The Friend, in turn, attempts to work back from these monumental traces to the "traditional culture" that produced them, to let that culture "speak for itself about friendship, in its own diverse voices, however strange, unpalatable, or incoherent they may seem" (11).

The stones do speak, but in "diverse voices," and that is the key (41). The marital iconography does not stand alone, but on tombs, as in the other cultural artifacts Bray examines, intertwines with allusions to sworn brotherhood, betrothal, baptismal compaternitas — all forms of ritual kinship. In the discourses of early modern friendship, these "different kinds of kinship terminology overlap and mix together in an apparently bewildering profusion" (103) that makes sense only if one sees friendship as itself a type of ritual kinship — kinship created by promise rather than blood. But this implies that the love that conjoined friends in death as in life was not a private, potentially transgressive, intimacy. Had it been so, why would their families have erected tombs memorializing their union? And why would those tombs have been, as they invariably are, in churches?

Friendships, a seventeenth-century Anglican divine observes, "are marriages too . . . marriages of the soul," but this rarified sentiment concludes unexpectedly: "and of fortunes and interests and counsels" (143). Whatever else they might be, friends were those "whose interests were tied to your own," those who would use their influence on your behalf and could expect your doing the same on theirs (60–61). What Bray calls the "gift of the friend's body" — the sharing of a meal, of a bed, of embraces, of letters — signified personal affection but also countenance; these were public signs of favor that could be turned to advantage (148–50). The post-Kantian notion of friendship as disinterested benevolence has no place here. That is to say, Bray's thesis rejects the hermeneutic of suspicion that reads interest as polluting the moral core of whatever it enters. For Bray, that friendship was useful, that it counted "in the public context of power and place," does not mean that the "language of love between men" at bottom signified "the very fear and power it denies" (65–67).

Against such reductivism, Bray makes a powerful case that friendship was closely associated with religion on both sides of the Reformation divide. In the eighteenth, as in the twelfth century, the shared burial within the church walls commemorated a friendship that had been solemnized at the altar. In the West, the Eucharist of what Bray calls "traditional Christianity" was designed to make and mend human relationships; its work was the work of friendship and kinship. Before and after the Reformation, the "socially unitive role" of Christianity remained for many its point...