Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature by Miranda Griffin (review)

This study of metamorphosis in medieval French literature traces the diverse ways in which acts of transformation underpin, or are otherwise crucial to, an understanding of complex narrative patterns and issues of textual transmission across a range of texts written between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Transformation here refers to the physical changes undergone by human or non-human bodies, as well as by natural or divine objects in medieval texts, but it also encompasses the processes by which such changes are represented for interpretation through language. For Miranda Griffin, it is the ubiquitous presence of transformation in literary works from this period that makes it a valuable object of study. Griffin’s book helpfully builds upon scholarship not only in medieval studies, but also in psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy more broadly, to suggest how such acts of transformation may be considered from a perspective informed by contemporary theory as well as by studies of textual transmission and contextual analysis. Each chapter invites speculation about what constitutes different types of bodies, from serpents and hybrid creatures to the bodies of texts themselves, in order to identify the plurality of forms that transformation can take in works written by, or about, these bodies. An example of this approach can be seen in Chapter 1, which deftly deploys concepts derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis such as the objet a and the Möbius strip (both examples of anamorphosis in which the object becomes distorted when viewed from a particular point of view) in order to explore the limits of subjective vision and the language used to describe this vision in the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé. This text, Griffin argues, seeks to offer the reader a glimpse of the unity implied through the Christian context of the work, whilst also pointing out the incomplete state of human perspective both within and beyond the text. Subsequent chapters engage in similar ways with the transformation of the classical figure Echo into voice and rhyme in the Ovide moralisé, as well as the unsettling allure of hybrid bodies in the legend of Mélusine, and in the portrayal of Medusa in the Roman de la Rose. Throughout, Griffin balances theoretical discussion with meticulous, illuminating close readings of the texts. Of particular note is the discussion in Chapter 3 which nuances the contemporary debate in medieval human/animal studies by combining a philosophical focus on the (often blurred) distinction between the human and the animal, with an analysis of how human and non-human bodies are transformed in Old French lais and romance. In the final chapter of her book, Griffin examines the multiple transformations of the character Merlin, through which she suggests that mutability is, in many of the texts that she studies, a course to truth. Clearly written, and structured in a cohesive, logical way, this book makes many incisive points about transformation in texts written in Old French. This is an engaging and stimulating study that will be of interest to a wide audience of students and scholars of medieval literature.