Introduction

Et lors fist un moult doulereux plaint et un moult grief souspir, puis sault en l’air et laisee la fenestre et trespasse le vergier, et lors se mue en une serpente grant et grosse et longue de la longeur de.xv. piéz. Et sachiéz que la pierre sur quoy elle passa a la fenestre y est encores, et y est la fourme du pié toute escripte.1 Thenne she bygan to gyue a sore syghe, & therwith flawgh in to thayer out of the wyndowe, transfigured lyke a grete & long in xv foote of length. And wete it well that on the basse stone of the wyndowe apa- reth at this day themprynte of her foote serpentous.2

Melusine’s footprint, which Jean d’Arras swore in his own day was yet visible on a certain windowsill in the castle of Mervent, was only the first of many impressions this woman would go on to make on late medieval literature, symbolism, and visual culture. Her figure draws on the archetype of the super- natural woman, well-attested in art and myth among the ancient and classical worlds of the Mediterranean basin and Near and Middle East, where primor- dial goddesses and other munificent and terrible beings could assume a part-­ serpent, part-bird, or part-piscine form.3 The medieval Melusine shares much with legendary water-women who proliferate through former Celtic-speaking lands and who may have evolved from lamiae, , , , and other figures of Greek and Roman myth.4 Tales of these extraordinary fe- males persist through the early Middle Ages. Medieval Latin collections such as Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium [Courtiers’ Trifles] (ca.1200) and the Otia Imperialia [Recreation for an Emperor], compiled by Gervase of Tilbury in the early thirteenth century, offer tales of fairy women who sought noble marriag- es but, when exposed to the holy rites of the Eucharist, changed shape and disappeared from human purview. Thus it is not entirely remarkable that, at

1 Jean d’Arras, Mélusine ou La Noble Histoire de Lusignan, ed. Jean-Jacques Vincensini (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2003), 704. 2 A. K. Donald, ed., Melusine: Compiled (1382–1394 AD) by Jean D’Arras, Englisht about 1500, Part I, Early English Text Society ES. 68 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1895, rpt. 2002), 320. 3 Gillian M. E. Alban, Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt’s Possession and in Mythology (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003). 4 Diane Purkiss, At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of , , and Other Troublesome Things (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 50–51.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, LEIDEN, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004355958_002 2 Introduction some point in the Poitou region of western , this story pattern is im- posed on a local or goddess figure, la mére Lusine, and allies her with the fortunes of the mighty Lusignan family, a medieval dynasty whose sons controlled ­fortresses including Lusignan and Parthenay, fought in the Cru- sades, and served as kings of and .5 What is remarkable is that in the lengthy historical romance of Jean d’Arras, completed in 1393, Melusine springs to life as a vividly realized half-fairy woman who is also an impressive medieval chatelaine, matriarch, and foundress of the Lusignan line. When discovered in the form of a monstrous half-serpent, after many years of happy marriage and the birth of several sons, she assumes the -like form described above and, in so doing, burns herself indelibly into the medieval ­ European imagination. The fascination with Melusine rests in large part on her parallels with other shape-shifting, water- or earth-associated females who have made persistent appearances in literature and legend worldwide. Women with ophidian, pi- scine, or other features reminiscent of dragon-kind slither through the foun- dational stories of any number of cultures, from the islands of Japan to the creation myths of the first peoples of the Americas.6 The snake- or fish-woman (sometimes both together) has occupied a salient strand of Western literature and myth from the first recorded instances, including the Sumerian Tiamat in her dragon form, the half-viper mentioned in Hesiod, and the Greek

5 Léo Désaivre explores her origins in “Le mythe de la mère Lusine (Meurlusine, Merlusine, Mellusigne, Mellusine, Mélusine, Méleusine): Étude critique et bibliographique,” in Mémoires de la Société de statistique, sciences, lettres et arts du département des Deux-Sèvres, 2nd series, vol. 2, no. 1 (1882): 81–302; so does Josef Kohler, Der Ursprung der Melusinen- sage: Eine ethnologische Untersuchung (Leipzig: E. Pfeiffer, 1895), 1–10, and Robert L. No- lan, “An Introduction to the English Version of Melusine,” (PhD diss., New York University, 1971). 6 Mary Pope Osborne, Tales from Around the World (New York: Scholastic, 1993) col- lects several examples. The mermaid is a popular and personal subject of investigation, as demonstrated by, in a very small sampling of recent works, Theodore Gachot, Mermaids: of the Sea (London: Aurum Press, 1996), Amanda Adams, A Mermaid’s Tale: A Per- sonal Search for Love and Lore (Nanoose Bay: Greystone Books, 2006), and Syke Alexander, Mermaids: The Myths, Legends, and Lore (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2012). The pervasiveness of this image lends itself to psychoanalytical exploration, most memorably by Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959); see, as just one recent example, Gillian Pothier, “The Submerged Feminine: The Sym- bol of the Mermaid in the Human Psyche” (master’s thesis, Pacifica Institute, 2011). The bibliography to this volume offers a list of studies on Melusine and her analogues that have been fundamental to critical scholarship on her texts and her legacy.