Drawing on a range of approaches in cultural gender and literary studies this book presents Chrtien de Troyess Erec et Enide as a daring and playful exploration of scandal terror and anxiety in court cultures. Through an interdisciplinary reading it locates Erec et Enide the first surviving Arthurian romance in French in various contexts from broad cultural and historical questionings such as medieval vernacular modernitys engagement with the weight of its classical inheritance to the culturally fecund and politically turbulent histories of the families of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II Plantagenet. Where previous accounts of the tale have not uncommonly presented Chrtiens poem as a decorous resolution of tensions between dynastic marriage and finamors between personal desire and social duty this reading sees these forces as in permanent and irresolvable tension the poems key scenes haunted whether mischievously or traumatically by questions and skeletons from various closets.