This book offers detailed and provocative readings of a range of medieval French texts (chansons de geste from the cycle du roi, the verse Ovide moralise and the trickster narrative, Trubert), aiming to illustrate how the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek can be applied to works from this period. By means of this approach, it aims to throw new light on the manner in which different works define, elaborate and undermine their respective visions of literary, communal and historical identity.