Performing Desire

Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival's "Bestiaire d'amours"

Elizabeth Eva Leach, Jonathan Morton

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781501781261
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Performing Desire examines the intellectual and philosophical complexity of a monument of medieval literature: the mid-thirteenth-century Bestiaire d'amours of Richard de Fournival. Although the Bestiaire was recognized in its time as significant, as evinced by numerous surviving manuscript copies and its influence on other literary works, modern scholarship has tended to neglect it. Performing Desire remedies this omission by detailing the contributions of the Bestiaire to medieval literature and thought.

Attending to the phenomenology, psychology, and philosophy of Fournival's Bestiaire, Elizabeth Eva Leach and Jonathan Morton reconsider the work as a literary experiment that explores erotic desire and the construction of a self. Leach and Morton further show that the Bestiaire is as much a meditation on sound and performance as it is a study of desire. Synthesizing methods from musicology, literary studies, and manuscript studies, Leach and Morton consider the complex and hybridized workings of text, image, sound, and cues for performance in the surviving manuscripts of the Bestiaire.

Through their analysis, Leach and Morton find that the distinctive aspect of the Bestiaire's philosophical method is its self-conscious status as a performance between the oral and the literary, the voice and the page. It is this aspect, they contend, that left such a mark on the medieval European tradition of philosophical fiction. In Performing Desire, Richard de Fournival's hybrid text emerges as one of the most philosophically sophisticated and important works of medieval literature not only in French but in any language.

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Richard, the Bestiaire d’amours, and Its First-Person Persona
• 1. Textuality: Voice and Body
• 2. Epistemologies of the Mirror: Identity, Resemblance, Simiotics
• 3. The Place of Bodies: Conceptualizing Intersubjectivity
• 4. Discourse: Pleasure
• 5. Unfinished Business: Responses to the Bestiaire d’amours
• Conclusion: What Is the Bestiaire d’amours?
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index