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Historisk tidskrift 123:4 • 2003

Innehåll (Contents) 2003:4

Uppsatser (Articles)

Vänskap – hot eller skydd i medeltidens samhälle? En existentiell och etisk historia.

Eva Österberg

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

Friendship – Threat or Protection in Medieval Society? An Existential/Ethical Turn in History

In the last decades, personal and informal relations such as friendship, patronclient- relationships and social networks of various kinds, have become increasingly popular topics for research in both history and the social sciences. This article argues that the reason for this is in part the distrust of modernity and of the allegedly rational and formal organizations of modern society that is part of our age. However, the renewed interest in informal relations is also due to a creative scholarly exchange between experts on pre- and early modern society, on the one hand, and modern society, on the other. Medievalists and experts in the seventeenth century, for example, have long been aware of the important mechanisms involved in patronage and friendship. Today scholars of modernity have also become fascinated by informal relations in political, economic and social life.

Yet we still lack an extensive history of friendship. Many questions remain unanswered. Have the expressions and discourses of friendship changed from the Middle Ages to the present, and if so: how? Have people always seen friendship as protection, and as defence against danger? To what extent has friendship also been perceived as a threat to ideologies that have placed society, the group, the community, or the party before the individual and his friend?

Drawing on international research and examples from the Icelandic family sagas and medieval European religious authorities, this article offers some interpretations and hypotheses in answer to these questions. The learned discourse of the medieval churches and monasteries was usually a development of concepts and definitions from the classical era. The problem facing the participants in this discourse was how to reconcile those ideas with the love of God and with the ideal of monastic life. Friendship, in fact, could be perceived as risky – it might undermine the general solidarity of the monastic community or diminish the effort to love God. In the Icelandic saga society, in contrast, people were absolutely dependent on friendship to survive in armed conflict or to avoid armed conflict through negotiated settlement. Kinship was not enough, it had to be supported by friendship. Furthermore not all kin were friendly. In fact friendship was often more important than kinship. However, it was also dangerous. The bonds of loyalty in the Icelandic sagas were very easily drowned in blood. Here friendship is much more than pleasure and fun; friends have to be loyal for the sake of their honour, even at the risk of loosing their lives.