Friendship and Its Logics in Amis and Amiloun

Abstract: The poet of Amis and Amiloun took a well-known story of lasting friendship and inflected it as one about a naive sworn brotherhood which matures into a bond of reciprocated obligations. Against the grain of existing criticism, this article argues for a poem skeptical 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 narratives of promises and loyalty but aligns the poem with mainstream political concerns about confederacy and interference with justice in late medieval England.