Tracing the legacy of a medieval myth, editors Misty Urban, Deva Kemmis, and Melissa Ridley Elmes offer an invigorating international and interdisciplinary examination of the legendary fairy Melusine. Along with fresh insights into the popular French and German traditions, these essays investigate Melusine's English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese counterparts and explore her roots in philosophy, folklore, and classical myth. Combining approaches from art history, history, alchemy, literature, culture, and medievalism, applying rigorous critical lenses ranging from feminism and comparative literature to film and monster studies, this volume brings Melusine scholarship into the twenty-first century with nineteen lively and evocative essays that reassess this powerful figure's multiple meanings and illuminate her dynamic resonances across cultures and time.
Author(s): Misty Urban, Deva F. Kemmis, Melissa Ridley Elmes (eds.)
Series: Explorations in Medieval Culture, 4
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: XIV+438
Acknowledgements ix
List of Illustrations x
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction 1
PART I. Bodies and Texts: Mapping Melusine in Art and Print
1. The Tail of Melusine: Hybridity, Mutability, and the Accessible Other 17
Frederika Bain
2. Polycorporality and Heteromorphia: Untangling Melusine's Mixed Bodies 36
Ana Pairet
3. Mermaid, Mother, Monster, and More: Portraits of the Fairy Woman in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century 'Melusine' Narratives 52
Caroline Prud’Homme
4. The Melusine Figure in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century German Literature and Art: Cultural-Historical Information within the Pictorial Program 74
Albrecht Classen
5. The Alchemical Transformation of Melusine 94
Melissa Ridley Elmes
PART II. Mother, Muse: Melusine and Political Identity
6. Architecture and Empire in 'Historia de la linda Melosina' 109
Anna Casas Aguilar
7. The Lady with the Serpent’s Tail: Hybridity and the Dutch 'Meluzine' 132
Lydia Zeldenrust
8. Matriarchs and Mother Tongues: The Middle English 'Romans of Partenay' 146
Jennifer Alberghini
9. Melusine and Luxembourg: A Double Memory 162
Pit Péporté
PART III. Theoretical Transformations: Readings and Refigurations
10. Youth and Rebellion in Jean d’Arras' 'Roman de Mélusine' 183
Stacey L. Hahn
11. The Promise of (Un)Happiness in Thüring von Ringoltingen's 'Melusine' 208
Simone Pfleger
12. Half Lady, Half Serpent: Melusine's Monstrous Body and the Discourse of Romance 222
Angela Jane Weisl
13. Passing as a "Humayn Woman": Hybridity and Salvation in the Middle English 'Melusine' 240
Chera A. Cole
14. Melusine and Purgatorial Punishment: The Changing Nature of Fays 259
Zoë Enstone
15. Metamorphoses of Snake Women: Melusine and Madam White 282
Zifeng Zhao
PART IV. Melusines Medieval to Modern
16 Goethe and 'Die neue Melusine': A Critical Reinterpretation 303
Renata Schellenberg
17. "Listening Down the Hall": An Epistemological Consideration of the Encounter with Melusine in the Germanic Literary Tradition 324
Deva F. Kemmis
18. Woman, Abject, Animal: Refigurations of Melusine in Frischmuth, Jelinek, and EXPORT 344
Anna-Lisa Baumeister
19. How the Dragon Ate the Woman: The Fate of Melusine in English 368
Misty Urban
20. Melusines Past, Present, and Future: An Afterword 388
Tania M. Colwell
Selected Bibliography 405
Index 429
