| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Alan Bray. The Friend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. 380. $40.00.
To a modern observer, friends of whatever sex who kiss, share a bed or even a grave, and write loving letters full of embraces are to be explained by reference to the intimacy of sex. It is only in that post-coital moment that most of us seem able to give ourselves fully to another. Alan Bray has created an archeology of a type of friendship, of intense intimacy, that lasted almost a millennium, but that was largely lost in the creation of modernity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was an intimacy between men, full of kisses and physical love, that was nevertheless essentially nonsexual.	1
The evolution of the modern family and of kinship networks and their Frankenstein monster, the possessive and affective individual, lies at the heart of all Western social history metanarratives. In a British context, the works of Lawrence Stone, Alan Macfarlane, and Peter Laslett have, from very different perspectives, depicted the family unit marching in lockstep toward a particular modernity created sometime between 1660 and 1840. It was a modernity refracted through sexual identity and the creation of heterosexuality and homosexuality, through the literary imagination and the creation of the novel, and through a new civil society, underpinning a powerful nation state. But most importantly, it was a modernity found in the personal relationship between a husband and a wife, a mother and her child, a child and his or her parent.	. . .

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