Fragments of the Roman de Mélusine in the Upton House Bearsted Collection

The medieval French Mélusine romances, which recounted the legend of the fairy serpent's foundation of the illustrious Lusignan dynasty, enjoyed wide popularity across western Europe from the late fourteenth century onwards. This essay examines a collection of manuscript fragments of the prose Roman de Mélusine located in the Upton House Bearsted (UHB) Collection in Warwickshire. It argues that the UHB fragments, and implicitly the original manuscript from which they derived, occupy a unique position among the surviving corpus of over thirty prose and poetic Mélusine manuscripts. By contextualizing the fragments against extant manuscripts and editions, this essay posits a close textual and iconographic affiliation between the UHB manuscript fragments and early French and German editions of the Mélusine romances. The multilingual phases of literary transmission that I suggest informed the production of the UHB manuscript in turn contributed to the exceptional illustrative program extant in the fragments. In particular, the fragments depict Mélusine and the aesthetic of the merveilleux in a manner that echoes that of their German predecessors but is original among their French counterparts. By tracing the bibliographic ancestry of the UHB fragments, this essay offers fresh insight into the complex cycles of multilingual transmission, production, and reception that shaped the Mélusine romances in both manuscript and printed culture at the end of the fifteenth century.