Gracious Creature
Some men just can’t keep their promises. Of course, when that promise is to his magical wife, the consequences can be dire. This episode brings you the story of Melusine, the mythical faerie of the waters said to have founded some of medieval Europe’s most powerful ruling dynasties.
Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben, with original music by Purple Planet.
Music
Purple Planet - Dawn of Time
Purple Planet - Introspection
Purple Planet - Atmospheric Piano Backing
Frédéric Chopin - Nocturne in C sharp minor 'Lento con gran espressione', B. 49 (Op. posth.), performed by Frank Levy
Purple Planet - Sense of Loss
Purple Planet - Shadowlands
Sources
Primary
D’Arras, Jean. Melusine; or, The Noble History of Lusignan, translated by Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014.
Secondary
Brownlee, Kevin. “Mélusine’s Hybrid Body and the Poetics of Metamorphosis.” Yale French Studies 86 (1994): 18-38.
Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn. “Natural and Unnatural Woman: Melusine Inside and Out.” In Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns, edited by Laine E. Dogged and Daniel E. O’Sullivan, 21-31. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2016.
Burns, E. Jane. “Magical Politics from Poitou to Armenia: Mélusine, Jean de Berry, and the Eastern Mediterranean.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43:2 (Spring 2013): 275-301.
Florschuetz, Angela. Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance: Mothers, Identity, and Contamination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Knapp, James F. and Peggy Ann Knapp. Medieval Romance: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.
Nicholson, Helen J. “Remembering the Crusaders in Cyprus: The Lusignans, the Hospitallers and the 1191 Conquest of Cyprus in Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine.” In Literature of the Crusades, edited by Simon Thomas Parsons and Linda M. Paterson, 158-172. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2018.
Pedersen, Camilla With. “The Cursed and the Committed: A Study in Literary Representations of ‘Involuntary’ Shapeshifting in Early Medieval Irish and Old Norse Narrative Traditions.” In Shapeshifters in Medieval North Atlantic Literature, edited by Santiago Barreiro and Luciana Cordo Russo, 107-126. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019.
Péporté, Pit. Constructing the Middle Ages: Historiography, Collective Memory and Nation-Building in Luxembourg. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Soverino, Tiziana. “Place-lore in the Mélusine Narrative from Irish Tradition.” Estudios Irlandeses 15 (2020): 101-115.
Zeldenrust, Lydia. The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2020.
