
Performing Desire
Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard De Fournival's "Bestiaire D'amours"
Cornell University Press
Published on 15. June 2025
Book
Hardback
248 pages
978-1-5017-8124-7 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
Performing Desire makes a case for Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amours as a literary object that demands the attention, precision, and tenacity with which scholars examine its contemporaries. * H-France *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Ithaca
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paper over boards
Illustrations
60 color halftones - 60 Halftones, color
Dimensions
Height: 239 mm
Width: 162 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
624 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5017-8124-7 (9781501781247)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Elizabeth Eva Leach | Jonathan Morton
Performing Desire
Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard De Fournival's "Bestiaire D'amours"
E-Book
06/2025
Cornell University Press
€37.49
Available for download
Persons
Elizabeth Eva Leach is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and the author of Guillaume de Machaut, Sung Birds, and Medieval Sex Lives.
Jonathan Morton is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University and the author of The "Roman de la rose" in Its Philosophical Context.
Jonathan Morton is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University and the author of The "Roman de la rose" in Its Philosophical Context.