Introduction : friendship : the quest for a human -- Friendship of mutual perfecting in Augustine's confessions and the failure of classical amicitia / C. Stephen Jaeger -- The gift of friendship : beneficial and poisonous : friendships in the Byzantine Greek passion of Sergius and Bacchus / Stavroula Constantinou -- Where textual bodies meet : Anglo-Saxon women's epistolary friendships / Lisa M. C. Weston -- Sapienter amare poterimus : on rhetoric and friendship in the letters of Heloise and Abelard / Jennifer Constantine-Jackson -- Peter the Venerable and secular friendship / Marc Saurette -- Mysterious friends in the prayers and letters of Anselm of Canterbury / R. Jacob McDonie -- Monastic friendship in theory and in action in the twelfth century / Julian P. Haseldine -- Ideological friendship in the Middle Ages : Bonizo of Sutri and his liber ad amicum / John A. Dempsey -- Friendship in the heroic epic : Ruedegêr in the Nibelungenlied / Albrecht Classen -- Spiritual friendship in the works of Alfonso X of Castile : images of interaction between the sacred and spiritual worlds of thirteenth-century / Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo -- The spiritual friendship of Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel / David F. Tinsley -- Engendering obligation : sworn brotherhood and love rivalry in medieval English romance / Robert Stretter -- Talking bird and gentle heart : female homosocial bonding in Chaucer's "squire's tale" / Sara Deutch Schotland -- Sovereign fathers and sovereign friends in Hamlet and Michel de Montaigne's "of friendship" / Theodore Kaouk -- Die zwei Freunde des Leonardo da Vinci : eine kunsthistorische Fallstudie (with an English abstract) / Miriam Sarah Marotzki -- Friendship and good counsel : the discourses of friendship and Parrhesia in Francis Bacon's the essayes or counsels, civill and morall / Stella Achilleos -- Painted friends : political interests and the transformation of international learned sociability / Vera Keller -- "If I must example bee" : Donne's Petrarchan heart as speculum amicitiae / L. Bellee Jones -- George Herbert's friendship with Christ in the Temple (1633) / Jean-Christophe Van Thienen -- Friendship and enmity to God and nation : the complexities of Jewish-gentile relations in the Whitehall conference of 1655 / Andrew Crome.