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Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'Amours

Name: Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'Amours
Brand: Cornell University Press
SKU: 9781501781247
Price: 60.99 USD
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Contributors:

Elizabeth Eva Leach, Jonathan Morton

Publisher:

Cornell University Press

Binding:

Hardcover

Book Category:

Literary Criticism, Philosophy

Book Subcategory:

Medieval, European, History & Surveys

Book Topic:

French, Medieval

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The product is eligible for a complimentary return within 30 days from the date of purchase. Furthermore, individual items are shipped within 24 hours of receiving the order.

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Release Date:

6/15/2025

ISBN 13:

9781501781247

Weight:

1.36 lbs

Size:

9.25 x 6.38 x 0.77 inches

Pages:

248

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product description

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.

About the Author

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.

Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'Amours

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