Overview

In Melusine's Footprint: 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, cultural studies, and medievalism, applying rigorous critical lenses ranging from feminism and comparative literature to film and monster theory, this volume brings Melusine scholarship into the twenty-first century with twenty lively and evocative essays that reassess this powerful figure's multiple meanings and illuminate her dynamic resonances across cultures and time. Contributors are Anna Casas Aguilar, Jennifer Alberghini, Frederika Bain, Anna-Lisa Baumeister, Albrecht Classen, Chera A. Cole, Tania M. Colwell, Zoe Enstone, Stacey L. Hahn, Deva F. Kemmis, Ana Pairet, Pit Peporte, Simone Pfleger, Caroline Prud'Homme, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Renata Schellenberg, Misty Urban, Angela Jane Weisl, Lydia Zeldenrust, and Zifeng Zhao.

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This magnificent book combines the research of twenty interdisciplinary scholars who meticulously investigate the eponymous footprint of Melusine from a wide variety of literary as well as artistic approaches. It illustrates how richly this theriomorphic monstrous snake woman has contributed to the culture of so many European countries, and extends as far afield as China, in a study that clearly indicates the continuing fascination of this most enchanting and threatening figure. Melusine is here variously discussed as an instructive exemplar of Christian piety, a powerful mother who desires to humanize herself through marriage into the chivalric, religious order of her age, a transformative figure unifying humanity with nature, an abject object of the gaze, a fairy who functions as a monstrous Other in the mirror of romance, and a metaphor for transgressive feminine prowess. This enthralling work contributes extensively to Melusinia, reading the fairy serpentine hybrid as a symbolic force who never remains contained within any boundaries that may attempt to inscribe her. Gillian M. E. Alban (author of Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt's Possession and in Mythology (2003) and The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women's Fiction: Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive (2017)), November 2017.

This magnificent book combines the research of twenty interdisciplinary scholars who meticulously investigate the eponymous footprint of Melusine from a wide variety of literary as well as artistic approaches. It illustrates how richly this theriomorphic monstrous snake woman has contributed to the culture of so many European countries, and extends as far afield as China, in a study that clearly indicates the continuing fascination of this most enchanting and threatening figure. Melusine is here variously discussed as an instructive exemplar of Christian piety, a powerful mother who desires to humanize herself through marriage into the chivalric, religious order of her age, a transformative figure unifying humanity with nature, an abject object of the gaze, a fairy who functions as a monstrous Other in the mirror of romance, and a metaphor for transgressive feminine prowess. This enthralling work contributes extensively to Melusinia, reading the fairy serpentine hybrid as a symbolic force who never remains contained within any boundaries that may attempt to inscribe her. Gillian M. E. Alban (author of Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt's Possession and in Mythology (2003) and The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women's Fiction: Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive (2017). Essential reading not only for medievalists, but also for scholars focused on fairy tale and folklore studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, gender theory, and postmodernist theory. Melusine's Footprint reinvigorates the study of the Melusine tale and her depiction in various texts from the Medieval period through contemporary representations. The analyses vary theoretically and render new interpretations, keeping Melusine alive for scholars in the humanities and the social sciences . Sylvia Veronica Morin, in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 30 (1), (2019).

Author Information

Misty Urban (Ph.D., Cornell University, 2008) coordinates the Writing Center at Muscatine Community College. She is the author of Monstrous Women in Middle English Romance (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2010). Deva F. Kemmis (Ph.D., Georgetown University, 2012) is an instructor of German language and culture at the Goethe-Institut in Washington, DC. Her publications include an essay on self-forgiveness in the Nibelungenlied and a forthcoming article in the Yearbook of the Society for Medieval German Studies. Melissa Ridley Elmes (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2016) is Assistant Professor of English at Lindenwood University. She has essays published or forthcoming on the Arthurian legend, Chaucer, teaching medieval literature, medievalism, the Robin Hood legend, and violence at the feast in medieval texts.

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