Performing Desire

Performing Desire examines the intellectual and philosophical complexity of a monument of medieval literature: the mid-thirteenth centuryBestiaire d'amours of Richard de Fournival. Although theBestiaire 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 theBestiaire to medieval literature and thought.

Attending to the phenomenology, psychology, and philosophy of Fournival'sBestiaire, 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 theBestiaire 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 theBestiaire.

Through their analysis, Leach and Morton find that the distinctive aspect of theBestiaire'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. InPerforming 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.