Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours, written by Elizabeth Eva Leach and Jonathan Morton, offers a sustained and ambitious reappraisal of one of the most intriguing and paradoxically understudied works of thirteenth-century vernacular literature: the Bestiaire d’amours of Richard de Fournival (1201-1260). Despite its evident success in the Middle Ages, attested by a substantial manuscript tradition and its presence in a variety of codicological contexts, the Bestiaire has long occupied a marginal position in modern scholarship. It has often been approached either as a curious bestiary or as a clever but ultimately cynical parody of courtly discourse. Leach and Morton’s monograph decisively challenges this view, arguing instead for the Bestiaire’s importance for medieval literary, philosophical, and performative culture. The book’s central intervention lies in its insistence that the Bestiaire d’amours should be read as a highly self-conscious literary experiment rather than as a failed or ironic exercise in persuasion. Leach and Morton also reposition the text at the heart of medieval debates about epistemology, perception, and selfhood, showing how it interrogates the conditions under which desire and knowledge are experienced. In doing so, they align the Bestiaire with a broader medieval interest in testing the limits of authoritative discourse, an interest that resonates with Richard de Fournival’s intellectual milieu, which included projects such as the Biblionomia, where systems of knowledge are explicitly organized and problematized. The Bestiaire appropriates an established genre only to expose its internal tensions when placed in the service of erotic persuasion.
Composed in the mid-thirteenth century, the Bestiaire d’amours presents itself, at least superficially, as part of the medieval bestiary tradition, mobilizing animal lore, analogy and resemblance as interpretive tools. Yet from the outset this encyclopedic framework is inflected—and ultimately destabilized—by another powerful generic affiliation: the discourse of courtly love cultivated in the lyric traditions of the trouvères and troubadours. The text takes the form of a letter written by a man to a woman who has refused his earlier advances. Having failed to persuade her through song, the speaker, which Morton and Leach consistently call the je of the Bestiaire, turns to prose, sending her this letter so that, even in his physical absence, he may continue his attempts to enter into a romantic relationship with her. The Bestiaire thus stages a shift from lyric performance to rhetorical speech while retaining a lyrical mode of address. Animals in the text function as allegories and analogies for the behaviour of lovers in general and for the dynamics between the speaking je and the addressed vous more specifically. Learned knowledge is appropriated for erotic ends, but never transparently so. As Leach and Morton emphasize, the text persistently draws attention to the fragility of analogical reasoning: resemblance does not guarantee truth, and interpretation remains vulnerable to projection and misrecognition. This instability is reinforced by the text’s first-person voice. The speaking je adopts the posture of a learned, rhetorically confident lover, yet his attempt to master desire through knowledge, to render love legible and persuasive, falters. Desire, in the Bestiaire, presupposes a self and an other, but the je proves unable to disentangle his knowledge of the beloved from his own fantasies and projections.
A crucial point of Leach and Morton’s argument concerns the Bestiaire’s material transmission. The text survives in around twenty manuscripts, often copied alongside lyric poetry, musical notation, the Roman de la Rose, lapidaries, works of natural philosophy, and Latin theological texts. This codicological diversity emphasizes the Bestiaire’s generic flexibility and its capacity to circulate within multiple intellectual and performative contexts. Leach and Morton convincingly argue that such manuscript environments invite us to read the Bestiaire not as a fixed literary object but as a text designed to be activated in performance. The Bestiaire d’amours must be understood not as a text to be read, but as a performance to be realized. Drawing on performance studies and manuscript analysis, the authors argue that the manuscripts preserve traces of, and scripts for, embodied and literary performance before an audience. The Bestiaire, they suggest, functions as “a kind of score or script to be interpreted in a courtly setting” (201). Layout, illumination, and visual cues interact with rhetorical pacing, lyric echoes and shifts in register to shape how the speaking voice is heard, seen, and judged. Considering the text in performance, and as performance, becomes important to understanding its rhetorical strategies and philosophical stakes. Nevertheless, one further step might have strengthened this performative approach: a more explicit engagement with scholarship on medieval theatre and dramatic practice, which has already demonstrated how deeply performativity permeated many aspects of medieval cultural and social life. [1]
This focus on performance distinguishes Leach and Morton’s approach from earlier literary-historical studies by scholars such as Jeannette Beer and Christopher Lucken. [2] Where those studies primarily situate the Bestiaire within traditions of the bestiary and courtly literature, Performing Desire foregrounds performativity as central to the work’s meaning. The Bestiaire emerges as a prose lyric with a clearly gendered speaking position (je as male, vous as female), but one whose selfhood is unstable. The voice does not precede the discourse; it comes into being through the act of address, in relation to an audience whose response cannot be controlled.
The book’s five chapters develop this argument with coherence. Chapter 1, Textuality: Voice and Body, examines how the surviving manuscripts function as traces and scripts for embodied literary performance, emphasizing the material and vocal conditions under which the Bestiaire could be realized before an audience. Chapter 2, Epistemologies of the Mirror: Identity, Resemblance, Simiotics, turns to questions of selfhood and the psychology of desire, showing how the text stages a failure of epistemic mastery over the Other, as knowledge becomes entangled with projection, fantasy, and misrecognition. Chapter 3, The Place of Bodies: Conceptualizing Intersubjectivity, situates the Bestiaire’s representations of love within Aristotelian theories of place and locomotion, offering an account of desire as movement, orientation, and relational positioning. Chapter 4, Discourse: Pleasure, analyses the Bestiaire’s playful engagement with intertextuality and parody, not as a mockery of the bestiary genre, but as a poetic and erotic strategy aimed at persuasion. The example of the ape who imitates the hunter by putting on shoes, only to fall into a trap becomes emblematic of the je’s own entrapment by love (55-56). Finally, Chapter 5, Unfinished Business: Responses to the Bestiaire d’amours, turns to the text’s manuscript reception, demonstrating how the texts copied alongside the Bestiaire frame its interpretation and prolong its unresolved tensions.
Equally significant is the book’s methodological ambition. Drawing on musicology, iconographic and literary analysis, as well as codicology, Leach and Morton read the Bestiaire as a performative object that unfolds between voice and page, sound and image, textual abstraction and embodied reception. This interdisciplinary synthesis is not presented as an external framework imposed upon the text, but as a response to the Bestiaire’s own hybrid form and rhetorical strategies. The chosen methods therefore respond directly to the demands of the Bestiaire d’amours. As the authors convincingly demonstrate, the work’s meaning emerges not solely from what it says, but from how it stages itself as discourse, addressed, performed, and interpreted within a courtly milieu. As a result, the methodological synthesis feels both necessary and productive.
A further strength of Performing Desire lies in its nuanced treatment of parody. Leach and Morton show that the Bestiaire d’amours does not parody the bestiary tradition in order to discredit it, nor does it engage in genre play for purely comic effect. Instead, parody functions as a deliberate rhetorical strategy within the seduction of the vous. By reworking bestiary analogies, the text exposes the mechanics of learned discourse while simultaneously mobilising them to articulate erotic desire. The audience was clearly expected to recognise these manipulations. Parody, in this sense, presupposes competence and shared knowledge, inviting a knowing response rather than derision. As the authors demonstrate through concrete textual and iconographic examples in Chapter 4, the Bestiaire’s parodic gestures intensify its erotic force, because they allow the speaking je to perform vulnerability, irony, and self-awareness.
In conclusion, Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours succeeds in fundamentally reshaping how the Bestiaire can be read, taught, and theorized. Throughout their study, Leach and Morton convincingly demonstrate that the Bestiaire d’amours is, above all, an exploration of selfhood and intersubjectivity. By insisting on the work’s performative status, Leach and Morton move it decisively beyond the categories of parody or rhetorical curiosity to which it has too often been confined. The collaborative nature of Leach and Morton’s project also deserves particular mention here. Co-authored monographs remain relatively rare in the humanities, and even more so when they aspire to such coherence. Here, however, the absence of any division of labour in the book is a strength. The study also offers a powerful plea for integrating performance studies into manuscript research and for reading medieval literary texts as dynamic, relational and experiential artefacts. Richly illustrated and grounded in close textual and iconographic analysis, Performing Desire restores the Bestiaire d’amours to a central place in medieval studies and opens new directions for thinking about how desire is performed through language, image, sound, and interpretation. As a result, this monograph will be of importance not only to specialists in medieval French literature, but also to scholars working on performance, manuscripts, rhetoric, and the history of philosophical fiction.
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Notes:
1. See, for example, Jelle Koopmans, “Un théâtre français du Moyen Âge ?,” Médiévales 59 (2010): 5-16.
2. Jeanette Beer, Beasts of Love: Richard de Fournival’s “Bestiaire d’amour” and a Woman’s Response (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); and Christopher Lucken, “Les portes de la mémoire: Richard de Fournival ou l’‘Arrière-ban’ de l’amour” (PhD diss., University of Geneva, 2010).