The Kepler mission has led to the serendipitous discovery of a significant
number of `super flares' - white light flares with energies between 10^33 erg
and 10^36 erg - on solar-type stars. It has been speculated that these could be
`freak' events that might happen on the Sun, too. We have started a programme
to study the nature of the stars on which these super flares have been
observed. Here we present high-resolution spectroscopy of 11 of these stars and
discuss our results. We find that several of these stars are very young,
fast-rotating stars where high levels of stellar activity can be expected, but
for some other stars we do not find a straightforward explanation for the
occurrence of super flares.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A, 9 pages, 4 figure
