Chapter 2 explores the circulation of masculinity through the lens of friendship and sensory rhetoric.Coordinating the language of Christian fellowship and classical friendship, the Cappadocians involved correspondents in an aesthetic based on a union of souls.Using imagery of the body to express affinity of soul, the Cappadocians engaged correspondents in an agōn predicated on mutual faith and/or shared manhood.These letters of affection mimicked the language of contest with the Cappadocians choreographing encounters based on reciprocal seeing, speaking/hearing, and touching. In portraying union of souls through corporeal imagination, the Cappadocians reordered the bodily senses as masculine.These friendships were reinforced through the care taken in the penmanship of the letters and careful selection of messengers, elements that reflected the performative nature of correspondence. And through framing correspondence as a form of gift-giving, the Cappadocians further underscored friendship and Christian fellowship as elements of masculinity rooted in the traditions of classical Greece.

Chapter 3 focuses on Seneca’s De beneficiis, one of the most extensive and influential classical texts dealing with the idea of generosity. The chapter explores how this text was received in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, focusing on the manuscripts surviving from medieval England. The first part of the chapter explores what the surviving manuscripts can tell us about the reception of Seneca’s work, looking at the manuscript context, the way in which it was abbreviated and adapted and the marginal comments left behind by medieval readers. The second part of the chapter explores the way in which Seneca’s work was utilised in florilegia, collections of classical sayings. It concludes that the abbreviated manuscripts and the florilegia both indicate that over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Seneca’s work became increasingly widely available.

This chapter investigates the connections between classical ideals of generosity and the portrayal of largesse found in romance literature and other vernacular texts in the central Middle Ages. It investigates the place of generosity in the romances of antiquity, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and those of later romance writers. Based on this survey, the chapter argues that, while aristocratic audiences adapted and transformed many of the ideals they found, their conception of largesse was deeply dependent on the portrayal of generosity found in classical literature and moral philosophy.

This chapter investigates the way in which classical ideas about generosity influenced the actual performance of ritual. It focuses on a register surviving from the court of Henry III of England (r. 1216-72) detailing the gifts received and given away by the king. In order to expound the meanings contemporaries may have attributed to the king’s treatment of gifts, the chapter explores ideas about gifts, authority and kingship in classical and medieval writings.

This chapter explores how classical ideas of the gift were utilised by medieval writers. The chapter focuses on three particularly influential writers from medieval England active across a range of genres: John of Salisbury, William of Malmesbury and Matthew Paris. The chapter shows that these writers were highly familiar with classical ideas of the gift and drew extensively upon them in shaping their own writings.

The Introduction discusses the place of gift giving in the historiography of medieval Europe. It explores how gift giving has been studied by social anthropologists and the influence this has exercised on medieval historiography. Discussing recent interventions in the study of medieval ritualised communication, such as Philippe Buc’s The Dangers of Ritual, the Introduction argues that we need to pay far more attention to the explicitly formulated ‘native theories’ of gift giving available to medieval audiences, some of the most influential of which were those transmitted in classical literature and philosophy.

Chapter 4 investigates how classical ideals of generosity were utilised by writers of saints’ lives in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. It focuses on the case of Thomas Becket’s literary afterlife and the ways in which hagiographers sought to reframe his reputation for largesse in a spiritual direction. The chapter concludes by looking at the influence of this model on the saints’ lives of thirteenth-century England.

The conclusion summarises the findings of this volume regarding the influence of classical ideas on the writing and performance of gift giving in the central Middle Ages. Based on this, it argues that research into medieval gift giving needs to take account of the influence classical models exercised on medieval conceptions of generosity.