Abstract
Illuminations of the fairy Mélusine captured the imagination of late medieval audiences with their fascinating portrayals of her supernatural monstrosity. As the fifteenth century progressed, however, French representations of the heroine of the Roman de Mélusine gradually depicted a fairy whose humanity vied for attention with her otherworldly nature in manuscript and incunabula iconography. Nowhere is this tension more explicitly conveyed than in the unexplored parchment fragments of a late fifteenth-century French manuscript of the prose Roman de Mélusine held in the National Trust’s Upton House Bearsted Collection, Warwickshire (U.K.).1 The five extant illustrated fragments in which Mélusine is represented depict the grief and sorrow ensuing from the crucial denunciation episode wherein Raymondin publicly condemns the fairy as a demonic agent in serpentine form.2 The Upton House Bearsted (hereafter UHB) fragments focus upon the sentiments of the couple and their court as they grapple with the implications of Raymondin’s denunciation; the illustration of this episode is unique among French manuscripts and differs markedly from the iconography in contemporary incunabula.3 The UHB fragments offer an exceptional visual interpretation of this episode, their detailed gestures and emotions urging audiences toward a reception of the heroine in which her humanity, not her monstrosity, was paramount.
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Notes
Upton House, The Bearsted Collection: Pictures (London: National Trust, 1964), 62–63. The fragments date from c.1480–1500 and may be of a central or southeastern French provenance (I am grateful to M. François Avril, Bibliothèque nationale de France, for assistance concerning the fragments’ date and provenance). Although there are twelve extant fragments, each about 145–160 x 100–50 mm (w x h), they have been framed so that both sides of the fragment are visible, hence I consider each side as a fragment. Portions of the text are extant in approximately half of the fragments, including some of the sixteen illustrated fragments. References to foliation of the fragments relate to their position in the Bearsted Collection.
Françoise Clier-Colombani, La Fée Mélusine au Moyen Age: Images, Mythes et Symboles (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1991), 82–83; Harf-Lancner, “La serpente et le sanglier,” 78–84. See also Christine Ferlampin-Acher, “Le monstre dans les romans des XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” in Ecriture et modes de pensée au Moyen Age, ed. Dominique Boutet and Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole normale supérieure, 1993), 69–87.
Sara Sturm-Maddox, “Alterity and Subjectivity in the Roman de Mélusine,” in The Court and Cultural Diversity, ed. E. Mullally and J. Thompson (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 121.
Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les fées au Moyen Age. Morgane et Mélusine. La naissance des fées (Geneva: Editions Sklatine, 1984), part 4.
Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. chapter 16.
On various attitudes toward grief in the Middle Ages, see Jennifer C. Vaught, “Introduction,” in Grief and Gender: 700–1700, ed. Jennifer C. Vaught with Lynne Dickson Bruckner (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 1–14. Vaught notes that excessive grief was condemned by the Church “as offensive to God because it exhibited a lack of faith by denying or overlooking salvation” (4). Moderation in expression of grief was also promoted in late medieval secular conduct manuals such as that written by Anne de France for her daughter at the end of the fifteenth century (see Anne de France, Anne de France: Lessons for My Daughter, trans., ed., and intro. Sharon L. Jansen [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004], 64).
Moshe Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 17–18; Garnier, 1:120 and 223–225.
On the relationship between external movement and one’s internal condition, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 18. The external sign of disorder provided by Raymondin’s apparent loss of his cap could equally hint at Raymondin’s angry denunciation and/or the social disorder, notably the departure of the lady of Lusignan, arising from his anger.
Garnier, 1:113 and 213; Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 62–63.
Jean-Charles Payen, Le Motif du repentir dans la litterature française médiévale (des origines à 1230) (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1967), 534ff; Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 44.
Sandra J. McEntire, The Doctrine of Compunction in Medieval England: Holy Tears (Lewiston: Edwin Meilen Press, 1990), 173.
Stacey L. Hahn, “Constructive and Destructive Violence in Jean d’Arras’ Roman de Mélusine,” in Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature: A Casebook, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 201.
Garnier, 1:116. A common trope for religious enclosure was the entrant’s death to the secular world, for discussion of which see Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 92–98.
Lisa Perfetti, “Introduction,” in The Representations of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Lisa Perfetti (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005), 4–7, and, in the same volume, E. Ann Matter, “Theories of the Passions and the Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women,” 23–29.
Gaenier, 1:209–211, and David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 18.
David Fein, A Reading of Villon’s Testament (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1984), 81.
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Maternity and Monstrosity: Reproductive Biology in the Roman de Mélusine,” in Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 114. On this point, see also Tania M. Colwell, “Mélusine: Ideal Mother or Inimitable Monster?” in Love, Marriage and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Isabel Davis, Miriam Muller and Sarah Rees-Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 195.
Claire S. Schen, Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500–1620 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 21.
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© 2011 Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman
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Colwell, T.M. (2011). Gesture, Emotion, and Humanity. In: Rider, J., Friedman, J. (eds) The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339330_5
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