My study of the comic animal tales known as the Roman de Renart (Animal Body, Literary Corpus: The Old French 'Roman de Renart' (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996)) examined the richness and sophistication of these texts, viewed as satirical commentaries on issues of law and power, and on the capacity of the emergent Capetian state to control and discipline its subjects. For medieval authors, lesser beasts were important and fertile images of both sin and sinner, and the Renart mines this vein to present the (animal) kingdom at its most deeply and intriguingly dysfunctional.

My second book, Fantasy, Identity and Misrecognition in Medieval French Narrative (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), deals with a range of genres (chansons de geste, Ovide moralisé and the comic narrative, Trubert), and draws particularly on the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek. My approach here centres on the question of méconnaissance or 'misrecognition'. In effect, the subject is defined by what it cannot see, what it will not see and what it must not see. (Identity and communication are more or less successful 'misunderstandings' while the subject is also 'blind' to the enjoyment it derives from what it thinks of as its symptoms.) These ideas then (hopefully) offer an insight into the reflections on blindness and insight that lie at the heart of what might otherwise merely appeared as the usual rip-roaring tales of clan warfare, kingly responsibility, social disintegration, bestiality, masturbation, historical and literary identity, and, last but not least, surreal and improbable costume changes. (Click here to see back cover)