ABSTRACT
Early modern English concepts of ‘friend’ and friendship, as elsewhere in Europe, were heavily influenced by the rediscovery of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero's De amicitia, two works that proposed a vision of friendship that exalted virtuous unions between men who shared similar interests and social status. The Anglo-Saxon friund, derived from the Germanic base for ‘free’, denoted a condition akin to mutual trust and intimacy, or freedom from tribute. ‘Friend’ shared a similar formation to its antonym, fiend. 1
