A posthumous publication by an Early Modern scholar, this book deserves our reading. It also invites our reading through its title and its ethos (see below). The title takes this book beyond the GLBT context of its Library of Congress descriptors: "1. Male friendship--England--History. 2. Homosexuality, Male--England--History." (These descriptors also ignore the extensive analysis of the friendship of Anne Lister and Ann Walker, a nineteenth-century partnership, read in the light of the fifteenth-century east window at Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, where they communed.) Bray's title reclaims a meaning of friendship that differs from the definition assumed today--a definition rooted in John Locke's ideas of governance and now largely taken for granted. Reclaiming an earlier understanding of friendship and also connecting this understanding to the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist are the book's most notable accomplishments.
The book's significance for readers of TMR lies in its definition of friendship as voluntary kinship. Just as ceremonies at the church door were available to recognize betrothal and marriage, ceremonies could also recognize sworn brotherhood. These ceremonies could be further sanctioned within the context of the celebration of the Eucharist, so that these two friends or sworn brothers became a pair at peace and spiritually intimate before God. Whether physical intimacy was involved is another question. Bray persuasively describes the physical intimacy of these times as signifying trust, not lust. Thus, descriptors such as "Homosexuality, Male" simply miss the mark, unless the reader has already carefully attended to the distinctions Bray makes. Sexuality is not conflated with friendship, nor are sex acts a subject of this book. A smaller, but telling point in Bray's argument is the contention that medieval sleeping, even for those joined in matrimony, was most likely to occur in the presence of trusted same-sex associates. Yet another relevant point is that the liturgical "kiss of peace" or passing of the peace was, until the Reformation, actual kissing.
Being a sworn brother did not preclude being a husband or a godfather; it was, however, less constraining for a family. The distinctions are best made in Bray's own words:
The kinship of two godbrothers or two sworn brothers could be as indisputable as that formed by marriage; but kinship of this kind shared a crucial distinction to that of a betrothal or a marriage in its ability to forge links across social divisions where marriage would have been unthinkable. The kinship of two godbrothers (or two sworn brothers) did not extend the family, as a betrothal or a marriage did: it rather befriended it, from within and without. (112)
In order to tease out the nature of sworn brotherhood that persists from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period and, at least among rural Anglo-Catholics, as late as Cardinal Newman, Bray has closely read copious amounts of visual and verbal evidence. Frequently, he draws attention to funerary monuments, personal correspondence, and works of imaginative literature. He attends to details across a wide range of disciplines in order to reconstruct the nature and implications of several same-sex relationships, including these medieval ones: Robert D'Oilly and Roger D'Ivry (arriving with William the Conqueror), John Bloxham and John Whytton (late fourteenth century), Edward II and Piers Gaveston, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe (d. 1391), and Nicholas Molyneaux and John Winter (serving under Henry V in France). To these, he adds examples from medieval romances and ballads.
To return to the title and, finally, to address the question of ethos in GLBT scholarship is to venture into an area where I have no standing. Like his title, Bray's acknowledgements are discrete. His farewell to Michel Rey--lyrically understated and occurring on page four, when I still struggled to decide where the book was going--reverberated throughout. For me, the word "friend" was and remained the right choice. Many readers may recall Bray's earlier book, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982. Rpt. New York: Columbia UP, 1995), originally published in London by the Gay Men's Press, and the subsequent articles that find their final formulation in The Friend. Valerie Traub, who outs herself in the Preface to her The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002), expresses gratitude in her Acknowledgements to "the late, brilliant, and courageous Alan Bray" (xiv). Mark D. Jordan, whose labors as Bray's posthumous editor are themselves an act of astonishing friendship, has written his Editor's Note in the restrained style of Bray's text. However, in paratext to his own scholarly work, Jordan outs himself. Given Jordan's very substantial investment in enacting Alan Bray's final intentions and given Jordan's standing in religious studies, it seems most fitting that a portion of his introduction to The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1997) might serve to speak again in the context of The Friend as well: " . . . it is not a social history of 'medieval homosexuality.' I doubt whether such a history is possible; I judge that it is not desirable. What is powerful in human thoughts is particular" (Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy, 8). The particulars furnished in The Friend are not to be missed.