Alan Bray was an Honorary Research Fellow in Birkbeck College, University of London, when he died in 2002. He wrote Homosexuality in Renaissance England.
"The Friend is a complex, multi-layered book that transports the
reader through five or six centuries of religious rituals, tomb
markers, letters between friends, manuscripts, and historical
events. . . . It is also like a detective story in which the author
and reader explore together thje mysteries hidden beneath and
behind the tombstones and brass plaques. . . . But have no mistake
this is a scholarly work with some important insights about the
meaning of friendship in English culture."--Peter M. Nardi "Journal
of Homosexuality"
"It is precisely his painstaking quest for objectivity -- his
refusal to conflate friendship with what we today call
homosexuality -- that gives this book such contemporary relevance,
and which ultimately makes it (as Bray puts it) 'a book about
ethics'. It should be read not only as an exemplary piece of
historical detective work and source criticism. By seeking to
restore a space for friendship as a spiritual bond of public
significance, this book also provides an indispensable frame of
reference for current debates spiralling from the increasingly
fraught relationship between homosexuality and Christianity." --
Alexandra Shepard, History Today--Alexandra Shepard "History Today"
(3/1/2004 12:00:00 AM)
"Medievalists should read this book for its content, its method,
and its revisionary view of a Middle Ages extending . . . . far
beyond the Lockean 'civil society' that supposedly buried it. . . .
The Friend is beautifully and engagingly written: the reader is
treated as peer and confidant, embarked on a rather eccentric but
wholly absorbing itinerary of church combing and tomb
peering."--David Wallace "Speculum"
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