Friendship And Rhetoric In The Middle Ages

Friendship and Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Linguistic Performance of Intimacy from Cicero to Aelred covers approximately 1,200 years of literature. This is a book on "medieval literature" that foregrounds language as the agent for cultivating medieval friendship (from the first century BC to c. 1160 AD) in oratorical, ecclesiastical, monastic, and erotic contexts. Taking a different approach than many works in this area, which search for the lived experience of friends behind language, this book stands apart in looking at friendship's enactment through rhetorical language among classical and medieval authors.

Although it seems that erotic love generally was the prevailing topic in the medieval world and the Early Modern Age, parallel to this the Ciceronian ideal of friendship also dominated the public discourse, as this collection of essays demonstrates. Following an extensive introduction, the individual contributions explore the functions and the character of friendship from Late Antiquity (Augustine) to the 17th century. They show the spectrum of variety in which this topic appeared ‐ not only in literature, but also in politics and even in painting.

Follows the threads of ancient rhetorical theory into the Middle Ages and examines the distinctly Medieval rhetorical genres of perceptive grammar, letter-writing, and preaching. These various forms are compared with one another and placed in the context of Medieval society. Covering the period 426 A.D. to 14.

Private and public relationships - frequently labelled as friendships - have always played a crucial role in human societies. Yet, over the centuries ideas and meanings of friendship transformed, adapting to the political and social climates of different periods. Changing concepts and practices of friendship characterized the intellectual, social, political and cultural panorama of medieval Europe, including that of thiteenth-century Iberia. Subject of conquests and 'Reconquest', land of convivencia, but also of political instability, as well as of secular and religious international power-struggles: the articulation of friendship within its borders is a particularly fraught subject to study. Drawing on some of the encyclopaedic vernacular masterpieces produced in the scriptorium of 'The Wise' King, Alfonso X of Castile (1252-84), this study explores the political, religious and social networks, inter-faith and gender relationships, legal definitions, as well as bonds of tutorship and companionship, which were frequently defined through the vocabulary and rhetoric of friendship. This study demonstares how the values and meanings of amicitia, often associated with classical, Roman, Visigothic and Eastern traditions, were transformed to adapt to Alfonso X’s cultural projects and political propaganda. This book contributes to the study of the history of emotions and cultural histories of the Middle Ages, while also emphasizing how Iberia was a peripheral, but still vital, ring in a chiain which linked it to the rest of Europe, while also occupying a central role in the historical and cultural developments of the Western Mediterranean.

In this book Lars Hermanson discusses how religious beliefs and norms steered attitudes to friendship and love, and how these ways of thinking also affected people’s social identity and political action behaviour in medieval Northern Europe, c. 1000-1200.

This comparative study focuses on literary representations in selected texts of three categories of ideal friendship — Christian, chivalric, and humanistic — and the writers' strategies for establishing the ethical authority of their model friends on a par with antiquity's amici perfecti.

Friendship in the Middle Ages carried a meaning far removed from the modern concept of a development of personal sympathies between individuals. It was cultivated formally and implied obligations and bonds of mutual support. In a society where, for example, party politics did not exist, friendship had a clear role in the formation of social networks and political organization.

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West, from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages, represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring that rhetorical history between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle's rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.