Elizabeth Eva Leach and Jonathan Morton's "Performing Desire"

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.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Performing Desire: Knowledge, Self, and Other in Richard de Fournival's "Bestiaire d'amours", and reported the following:

On page 99, the discussion moves between two of the animal examples from Richard de Fournival’s darkly playful thirteenth-century fiction, the Bestiaire d’amours—those of the eagle and the woodpecker. The first-person speaker in the work, whom we call the je (the “I”), uses the eagle breaking its beak to eat as a twisted analogy for the lady needing to break her pride (figured as a “fortress”) to speak and accept the advances of the je. He then describes the woodpecker’s behaviour when a hunter stops up its nest hole with a plug or peg. The bird finds a special herb that has the power to unfasten the plug, allowing it to access its offspring. The je uses this story to figure his own desire to access the lady’s heart, lamenting that he doesn’t possess the “herb” needed to open her up. We read the je’s interpretation as a deliberate but transparent attempt to misdirect the audience of the work away from the clear implication of his own desire to penetrate her, both psychically and physically. This imagery contributes to a sequence of suggestive examples on this page, highlighting themes of penetration and lightly veiled obscenity and potential violence.

This page, nestled within the chapter on “The Place of Bodies,” offers a vivid picture of the complex and often unsettling psychic world conjured up in Richard de Fournival’s prose work. On page 99, we discuss how the Bestiaire d’amours uses animal examples to explore themes of penetration, breaking down barriers, and gaining access to the desired other. This single page represents the whole book in a few ways. It captures the Bestiaire d’amours’s distinctive method of being a warped kind of bestiary, of using animal natures for self-serving analogies. It showcases one of the book’s major lines of argument, namely that the Bestiaire d’amours conceptualises desire and subjectivity through images of containment, entry, and rupture. The overtones of obscenity and the je’s manipulative interpretations, crucial aspects of the work’s unsettling effect, are also clearly visible here.

Of course, page 99 doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t delve into the work’s status as a hybrid “prose lyric”, the subtle games it plays with performance and textuality, the subversiveness with which it parodies authoritative philosophical, Scholastic discourse, or its rich reception history, all things treated in the book as whole. Nevertheless, page 99 offers a glimpse of how the Bestiaire d’amours uniquely (and often disturbingly) uses animal imagery to explore the physical and psychological dimensions of desire.

Learn more about Performing Desire at the Cornell University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders by Elizabeth Eva Leach.

--Marshal Zeringue