Melusine's Footprint

The mythological figure Melusine will be of great interest to readers of Preternature, combining as she does what by modern standards would be natural and supernatural elements in several respects. Claimed as the historical founder and foremother of the house of Lusignan, Melusine is also the daughter of a fairy mother and a human father. Medieval fiction tells of her turning into a serpent from the navel down every Saturday. When the taboo against anyone seeing her in the bath on that day is broken, she transforms into a winged dragon, leaves a footprint on the windowsill, and flies away. The comprehensive collection Melusine's Footprint explores this fascinating preternatural figure in the uncompromisingly cross-cultural and cross-temporal way she deserves. This approach—setting medieval tales in their multilingual and multi-temporal contexts—is state-of-the-art, and the volume's kaleidoscopic findings evidence its heuristic value.The three most influential medieval texts about Melusine were Jean d'Arras French Melusine (ca. 1393), Coudrette's French Roman de Lusignan (ca. 1401), and Thüring von Ringoltingen's German adaptation of the latter (1456). All were widely copied and adapted until the sixteenth century, especially in French- and German-speaking lands, but also beyond. Melusine is still relatively well known in regional German- and French-language cultures but, as the editors point out, not so much in Anglophone academia outside Germanist and Romanist scholarship. This gap is what the collection aims to address, providing an English-language overview of many of the literary, cultural, and political uses of the figure across six centuries. A comprehensive introduction (presumably by the editors) and an afterword by Tania Cowell give an overview of main Melusine versions as well as themes across the chapters and wider scholarship. The editors have assembled a refreshing cast of contributors, including many early career or non-tenure track scholars. In twenty chapters, they provide either surveys and information about various versions or make more analytical arguments. Each chapter can be read on its own terms, giving all the necessary information about Melusine's textual history afresh. Every single chapter is beautifully written, which is unusual for a collection of this kind and demonstrates the great care that the editors must have taken in soliciting, selecting, and reviewing the essays. Original quotations with modern English translations are provided in most cases, making this book accessible to and useful for scholars in all fields. It is a handsome volume with production values that are becoming increasingly rare in academic publishing: with good-quality paper and print, seven color illustrations, an index and a bibliography, and good proofreading, though a number of misspellings have crept in (mostly in names, references, and non-English words, e.g., pp. 4, 5, 77, 91, 282, 294, 346, 433).Five chapters provide surveys of Melusine-like figures in a variety of literary and other sources. Ana Pairet, in her overview of shape-shifting snake-women in mostly French medieval texts, argues that Melusine is best characterized by her ability to metamorphose into various forms, rather than by one of her physical shapes alone: the fully human figure, the combination of human female upper body and fish- or reptile-like tail, or the winged serpent. Despite this caution, the other contributors see Melusine predominantly as a monster and human-animal hybrid. Frederika Bain surveys fish-tailed women, mermaids, and other shape-shifting female figures with reptile or piscine body elements from antiquity to modernity. Zoë Enstone surveys the moral judgments of Melusine as a fairy in the context of Morgan le Fay and other fairies, predominantly in Jean d'Arras and medieval English literature. Caroline Prud'Homme gives an overview of changing emphases to suit audience expectations in the three main medieval versions as well as in three fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish and English translations. Albrecht Classen describes some visual representations in German-speaking lands, especially woodcuts from early printed editions, which are not reproduced here.Two of the most influential medieval texts are given closer analyses in three other chapters. Stacey Hahn reads Jean d'Arras's version as a tale for the education of youths. Angela Jane Weisl interprets the same text as concerned with the construction and dangers of female characters' power in a way that she considers typical of the romance genre, and describes Melusine as a monstrous figure. Simone Pfleger provides a new and convincing reading of Thüring's adaptation in light of Sara Ahmed's work on queer unhappiness, showing how the heteronormative framework gives access to happiness only in return for sacrifices from queer subjects like Melusine. Melusine's narrative—forced to leave her family at the end—thus appears as a failure to attain happiness at the price of queerness.The collection also offers scholarship on adaptations in other languages. Jennifer Alberghini's insightful chapter engages in most detail with the question of translation itself, showing that the relative paucity of Middle English versions of Melusine was probably due to the fact that French was so widely spoken on the British Isles. She then demonstrates how closely one early sixteenth-century translation engaged with the contested issue of vernacularity. Chera Cole discusses a different Middle English version, edited by A. K. Donald (also covered by Prud'Homme), in terms of critical race theory, though she never quite makes clear if her language of “mixed blood” and being “half” human and “half” or “one-quarter” fairy or serpent (as if identity can be calculated and split) is her own or that of the Middle English text. A particularly welcome non-European perspective is afforded by Zifeng Zhao's comparison of Melusine to Madam White, a woman who can metamorphose into a snake in the Chinese “The Legend of the Three Pagodas of West Lake” (1550) and “Madam White is Kept Forever under the Thunder Peak Pagoda” (1624). Lydia Zeldenrust interprets the Middle Dutch translation of Jean d'Arras's version extant in a 1491 print, which, as she argues, emphasizes Melusine's hybridity. Anna Casas Aguilar intelligently analyzes the 1489 Castilian romance version from the perspective of its architecture, interpreting Melusine as a political, empire-building figure comparable to Queen Isabel I of Castile.Even more clearly addressing the political uses of Melusine tales is Pit Péporté's historical account. Péporté shows how Jean d'Arras mixed fact and fiction to provide an entertaining origin myth of the house of Lusignan, also justifying its patron Jean de Berry's claim to descend from this line. Péporté also traces how Melusine came to be claimed as the founder of the city and duchy of Luxembourg, with continuing significance in contemporary culture.Modern adaptations of Melusine are the focus of five further chapters, four of which are primarily concerned with the German tradition. Melissa Ridley Elmes describes the changing use of Melusine and other nymphs in the alchemist Paracelsus's sixteenth-century writings, and the influence of his understanding of Melusine on English and German romantic authors. Renata Schellenberg discusses Goethe's adaptation of Melusine as a literary fairy-tale embedded in his prose work Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (1821/1829). Deva Kemmis reads Ingeborg Bachmann's narrative poem Undine geht (1961) and other German versions of the Melusine-figure and more water nymphs, drawing attention to the importance of hearing rather than seeing, and of continuity rather than endings. Anna-Luise Baumeister cleverly analyzes three feminist German adaptations of Melusine: the 1982 story “Adder” by Barbara Frischmuth, Elfriede Jelinek's 1983 novel The Piano Teacher, and a 1973 short film by artist Valie Export entitled “Man & Woman & Animal.” All three works undermine the devaluation of the grotesque and animalized female body and explore the pornographic potential of Melusine's husband peeking through the bathroom door. The fifth chapter on modern reappropriations by Misty Urban traces how relatively rarely Melusine was adapted in Britain, perhaps, she surmises, due to her associations with French-speaking communities. She cites A. S. Byatt's novel Possession (1991) and Philippa Gregory's historical novels in her Cousin's War series (2009–2015) as indicators that there might be a slow resurgence under way. This book itself might be seen as part of a renewed Anglophone interest in this figure. Both Melusine and this stimulating collection certainly deserve wider attention

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