The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts by Lydia Zeldenrust

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts by Lydia Zeldenrust Tania M. Colwell lydia zeldenrust, The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts. Studies in Medieval Romance. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. xii, 272. isbn: 978–1–84384–521–8. £60/$99. Lydia Zeldenrust's fine examination of the Mélusine tradition across fifteenth- and sixteenth-century western Europe is a welcome addition to the scholarship of this romance which also broadens our understanding of the contemporary printing industry. Tracing how the French Mélusine romance acquired its status as a European bestseller through the production of vernacular translations and their transregional circulation in print, this study extends recent discussions highlighting the interdependence of medieval cultural networks beyond the national boundaries conventionally imposed upon studies of literary production (p. 10). The author [End Page 94] supplements her command of at least five medieval languages with an interdisciplinary blend of philological, art historical, and book historical approaches to analyze how linguistic, material, and geographic translations of the romance from French sources transformed the Mélusine tale for new audiences. Zeldenrust examines how translators, printers, and artists re-interpreted and reshaped the romance through the lens of the hybridity characterizing Mélusine and her sons (pp. 3–4). Chapter One analyzes the hybrid nature of Mélusine and her progeny and differences in their portrayals between the French prose Mélusine and poetic Roman de Parthenay. Subsequent chapters each focus on a specific translation context (German, Castilian, Middle Dutch, and Middle English), examining the corpus of surviving texts and likely sources, and bringing new editions to light. They then analyse the impact of the translation and its various reproductions on the re-presentation of Mélusine and her sons. This approach allows chapters to draw attention to both the idiosyncrasies within, and the characteristics shared across, individual translations. Idiosyncrasies in form and content feature among several translations. A particularly distinctive example is Gheraert Leeu's Middle Dutch Meluzine, printed in 1491. This edition integrated episodes from the poetic romance into its translation from a French prose incunabulum, thereby creating a 'complete narrative' of the Mélusine romance (p. 180). Tracing the likely source of woodcuts illustrating these poetic episodes to a German prose edition of the Parthenay romance, Zeldenrust characterises the Middle Dutch translation as the potential product of 'multiple cross-cultural exchanges' taking place across the European print industry in this period (p. 149). In contrast, a textual and iconographic paradox was shared among many of the translations which increasingly dominated their sixteenth-century printed lives: the textual effacement of Mélusine's hybrid nature in the latter stages of the romances was accompanied in the editions by woodcuts depicting the fairy in her half-female, half-serpentine form. The standardization of Mélusine illustration is traced to a textual variation within Thüring von Ringoltingen's 1456 German prose translation of the Parthenay romance, whereby the fairy transforms into a hybrid woman-serpent, and not into the fully serpentine figure of the French source. This unique variation was translated visually into German manuscripts and then into the earliest European edition of the Mélusine romance, Bernhard Richel's 1473–74 Basel incunabulum. The author traces how Richel's iconographic program not only informed later German editions, but subsequently influenced the earliest printed editions of the French, Castilian, Dutch, and possibly, Middle English, narratives. Tracking these iconographic relationships allows Zeldenrust to demonstrate how printed editions were central to circulating, and inspiring new translations of, the Mélusine romances across Europe. This argument is extended by the identification of networks between the European printers responsible for producing these translations, several of whom—such as Juan de Parix and Estevan Cleblat, who published the first Castilian edition of the prose Melosina in 1489—enjoyed close relationships with centers of Germanic and/or French print culture at the end of the fifteenth century. These networks corroborate central [End Page 95] claims about both the significance of the German translation and print industry for the circulation of the Mélusine romance, and the importance of situating European literature within transnational as well...