ABSTRACT
It is widely assumed that during the Middle Ages, social life in Western Europe was ruled by two correlated principles, at least as far as men were concerned: preserve one’s honor and avoid shame. Judging by the sentence “Better to die in honor than to live in shame” which often appears in the French literary texts from that period, the perception of honor as a value and shame as an antivalue does not seem out of place.
However, despite its high frequency, does this apply in all contexts? In other words, does honor always prevail over shame for the characters in the fictional literature of the Middle Ages, even when their own life is at stake?
Throughout a comparative approach between chanson de geste, romance, and fabliau, this essay aims to reassess, based on ideological and literary contexts, the links and interactions between the concepts of honor and shame, rather than thinking of them as a pregiven, systematic opposition.
As a matter of fact, the three French literary genres examined here illustrate distinct scales of values where the hierarchy between honor and shame as well as life and death is far from being established once and for all. Such an ambiguity is rooted in different conceptions and representations of time: each literary genre develops a specific “regime of historicity” (F. Hartog) which largely determines the writing of the honor/shame dynamics. Thus, becoming aware of the porous nature of notions and the polyphony of discourses invites us to consider the complex relationship between honor and shame less through the prism of a linear historical evolution than through a competition between distinct, sometimes contradictory but contemporary ideological positions and aesthetic conceptions.
