The Vagrant Knight: Loving the Stranger in Amis and Amiloun

The fourteenth-century Middle English romance Amis and Amiloun takes Cicero’s claim that a true friend is like a “second self” literally. The doubling of the protagonists, however, is at odds with the romance’s account of perfect friendship, as Amis and Amiloun’s love for one another comes to resemble self-love. This essay examines how the romance navigates this problem, focussing on Amiloun’s period of vagrancy and leprosy. The episode renders Amiloun unrecognisable to Amis, and he loses all he once shared with his friend: his appearance, his health, his sense of place and social status, and his knighthood. When Amiloun appears at Amis’s gate as a beggar, he is rendered an abject “foule […] thing," wholly dissimilar from his friend. The text provides Amis with the opportunity to prove that his love for Amiloun transcends those features he shares with him, and instead is extended outward, to a stranger in need, more closely resembling the Christian virtue of caritas, or charity.