Social Change, Narrative Adaptation, and Homophobia: Comparing Two Late-12th-Century Adaptations of Ami and Amile in Old French

My thesis investigates two versions of a popular literary legend of the Middle Ages, Ami and Amile, in the context of the growing clerical intolerance for homoeroticism (“sodomy”) in the twelfth century and afterward. The versions of Ami and Amile examined are both Old French (one belonging to the continent, the other to England and its Norman courts) and date close to the year 1200, a time by which intolerance of homoeroticism is well attested among a variety of clerical authors and, on occasion, secular ones. I argue that the continental version of Ami and Amile, which belongs to the genre of chansons de geste, depicts a masculine world that retains the traditional mores of male homosociality typical before this period; by contrast, the Anglo-Norman version closer matches the anti-homoerotic camp of clerical authorship. It downplays male-male intimacy and constructs, in its place, a heteronormative imperative: the two titular knights must maintain their noble lineages, and the text privileges their heteronormative romances in various ways, both diegetically and by employing the genre of courtly romance. By comparing these two versions of Ami and Amile, I underscore how their temporal and cultural proximity did not inhibit them from portraying starkly different social models for the male nobility. My analysis evokes not only a developing homophobia and heteronormativity on the part of the Anglo-Norman text but also the endurance—¬¬in at least one courtly context—of the continental version’s more traditional chanson masculinity.