Sexuality, shame, and the genesis of romance

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What is the relationship between courtly love discourse, sexuality and shame in the earliest Old French romances, the romances of antiquity? In the Roman d'Eneas ( c . 1156–60), the anti-sodomitical invective weaves in and out of the lengthy courtly love monologues of Eneas and Lavinia, an invention of the Eneas poet. In the Roman de Troie ( c . 1165), Achilles, once inconsolable over the death of his lover Patroclus, killed by Hector, is later tortured for over 3,000 lines by his love for Hector's sister Polyxena, a major development of Benoit de Sainte-Maure. In the Roman de Thebes ( c . 1150), courtly love discourse is an attempt to attenuate, albeit on a small scale, the venomous hatred of Oedipus' incestuous offspring; and in Alexandre de Paris's Roman d'Alexandre ( c . 1180), the scarcity of such discourse highlights the ambiguity of Alexander's sexual practices and even his legitimacy. Although courtly love discourse is used to reject sodomy and incest in these romances, the terms ‘hontos’ or ‘vergondos’ are not used to qualify these sexual behaviours. Shame does describe inappropriate love behaviour but not along our modern line of division between ‘heteronormative’ and ‘non-normative’ sexualities. In view of the recent debate over the use of categories of ‘homosexuality’, ‘heterosexuality’ and ‘heteronormativity’ to describe sexual acts or identities in medieval literature and culture, this particular angle of ‘shame’ sheds another light on the issue.