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  • Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth ed. by Misty Urban, Deva Kemmis, and Melissa Ridley Elmes
  • Bettina Bildhauer
Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth. Edited by Misty Urban, Deva Kemmis, and Melissa Ridley Elmes. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Hardcover. 452 pp. isbn 978-90-04-31508-2. $147.00.

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 [End Page 122] 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...

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