The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature

This text focuses on literary representations of three categories of ideal friendship - Christian, chivalric and humanistic - and the writers’ strategies of establishing the ethical authority of their contemporary friends and codes on a par with antiquity’s amicitia perfecta . The study identifies the extent to which writers acknowledged women as perfect friends. The selected texts under examination include hagiographies, works of Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx, The Quest of the Holy Grail , Thomas’s Tristan , the Prose Lancelot , Ami and Amile , the Decameron and L.B. Alberti’s Dell'amicizia . Literary comparatists and historians, ethical historians and students of rhetoric should be interested by the comparative study of the rhetorical topos of perfect friendship, the varied ethical criteria inherent there and the writers’ strategies for representing and authorizing an idea.