A modern performance of Aucassin et Nicolette which takes into consideration reasonable options for performance in thirteenth‐century France reveals certain propensities which are invisible when the text is treated strictly as a literary work. Aucassin et Nicolette is fraught with reversal, yet each reversal, empowered in a border realm through the agency of performance, leads to union. Thus this work which has survived only as a literary text, when embodied in modem performance by a woman jogleor, conveys reversals not evident in the text alone and reflects postmodern ethnographic principles of cultural flexibility in performance.