Friendship and its logics in Amis and Amiloun

Abstract

The poet of Amis and Amlioun took a well-known story of soul-deep friendship and made it one about a naive sworn brotherhood which matures into a bond of reciprocated help. Against the grain of existing criticism, this article argues for a poem sceptical of the friendship’s early incarnation and reformative in its handling of the pair’s crisis and recovery. This puts Amis and Amiloun on a tangent in relation to analogues and other medieval narratives of promises and loyalty but aligns it with mainstream political concerns about confederacy and interference with justice in late medieval England.