Melusine

The Middle English Melusine is a prose romance produced by an anonymous author in the late 15th century. It is a reasonably faithful translation of the French Roman de Mélusine, completed by Jean d’Arras in 1393 at the behest of Jean, Duc de Berri. Jean’s original text, together with a verse version, Roman de Partenay, penned by La Coudrette c. 1401–1405, enjoyed immense popularity in medieval western Europe, with a rich array of manuscripts and incunabula being produced and translations emerging in German, Dutch, and Castilian. There also exists an English translation of the verse romance, The Romans of Parthenay (c. 1500). A pseudohistorical narrative weaving elements of romance and chronicle, Melusine traces the foundation of the House of Lusignan to its mythical ancestor. Cursed to metamorphose into a snake below the waist on Saturday evenings, Melusine’s salvation is contingent upon her marrying a man who swears never to learn of or speak about her secret. After marrying a nobleman of Poitiers, Melusine quickly transforms the wild landscape of Poitou in northwestern France into a rich, cultivated, and prosperous region, constructing an impressive series of fortresses and churches within a matter of days. The first fortress becomes the realm’s main seat of power and is named “Lusignan” in honor of its patroness. Melusine and her husband soon have ten sons, most of whom bear strange facial markings that seem to allude to a supernatural parentage. Despite this, many of the sons venture off on crusade and conquest, spreading their dynasty’s influence across Europe and the Near East. Eventually, Melusine’s snake tail is discovered by her husband; when he reveals her secret to the court, she is forced to leave the human world forever and roam the Earth as a dragon until Judgement Day. As her curse dictates, Melusine must return to Lusignan to hail death and the transferal of power within her genealogical line. Little is known about the precise origins of the Middle English Melusine. As with many insular romances, the translator and patron remain anonymous, though the text’s colossal length would indicate a wealthy clientele. Contrary to literary trends in France and Burgundy, prose narratives written in English appeared relatively late in the 15th century, only truly gaining popularity after the arrival of Caxton’s printing press. The Middle English Melusine is therefore an important example of England’s early prose romances in the vernacular.

Originality, Plagiarism, and Posthumous Publication: Grace Gethin’s Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (1699)

This article explores early modern ideas of originality by reconsidering the critical treatment of one of the first printed female-authored volumes of essays in English: Grace, Lady Gethin’s Misery’s Virtues Whet-stone. Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (1699). Previous scholars of Gethin’s work have used her unacknowledged intertextual borrowings from writers such as Francis Bacon and Joseph Hall to deride her work as unoriginal, plagiaristic, and uninteresting. By comparing Gethin’s essays to her source texts, this article reads Reliquiæ Gethinianæ’s intertextuality as a revealing insight into practices of commonplacing, the literary tastes of early modern women, and the importance of attending to unexceptional readers. It also attempts to reconstruct the intentions behind newly uncovered post-print editing of Reliquiæ Gethinianæ by Gethin’s mother. Manuscript citations made by Frances, Lady Norton in carefully selected copies of Reliquiæ Gethinianæ demonstrate the complex methods used to cultivate and maintain the integrity of Gethin’s posthumous reputation: highlighting her immersion in prestigious scholarly sources, and tactfully downplaying her reliance on Madeleine de Scudéry’s less reputable epic prose romance Clelia (1654–1660).

Sanskrit Literary Theory

Traditional Sanskrit literary theory has always tried to distinguish kāvya,a term often translated as poetry, but actually subsuming all creative literature including prose romance, biography, and drama, from other linguistic expressions like treatises of knowledge systems (śāstra) and narratives (ākhyāna). Though the treatises related to the topic were written in Sanskrit, they addressed Prakrit poetry also, and Sanskrit drama was always multilingual. Literary theorists of India have speculated on a variety of topics related to the nature, aims, genre, and constituent elements of literature, the equipments necessary for a poet, various levels of meaning, and the nature of aesthetic response. In their attempt to distinguish kāvya from other linguistic expressions, they have also formulated various concepts like poetic figures, stylistic features, suggestiveness, aesthetic emotion, propriety, and the like that they deem to be exclusive to poetry. Indian theorists took into account both the creative and receptive aspects of literature and the notion of the ideal reader is inherent in the discussions of poetry. Literary theory also armed itself with the insights it received from philosophical systems in dealing with the problems related to verbal cognition and aesthetic experience. The Kāvyālaṅkāra of Bhāmaha (6th century), the Kāvyādarśa of Daṇḍin (7th century), the Kāvyālaṅkārasārasamgraha of Udbhaṭa (8th century), the Kāvyālaṅkāasūtravṛtti ofVāmana (8th century),the Kāvyālaṅkāra of Rudraṭa (9th century), the Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana (9th century), the Kāvyamīmāmsā of Rājaśekhara (10th century), Vakroktijīvita of Kuntaka (10th century), the Locana commentary on Dhvanyāloka and theAbhinavabhāratī commentary on Nāṭyaśāstra of Abhinavagupta (11th century), the Vyaktiviveka of Mahimabhaṭṭa (11th century), the Kāvyaprakāśa of Mammaṭa (11th century), the Sāhityadarpaṇa of Viśvanātha (14th century), the Sarasvatīkaṇṭābharaṇa and Śṛṅgāraprakāśa of Bhoja (11th century),the Citramīmāmsā of Appayya Dīkṣita (16th–17th century), and the Rasagaṅgādhara Jagannātha Paṇḍita (17th century) are some of the seminal works in Indian literary theory.

Performing Custom

Chapter 4 focuses on the relationship between writing and authority within common law. It argues that Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia reflects on debates about whether to codify England’s unwritten customs that were taking place during this period. He makes use of the tension those debates generate to explore the nature of Renaissance authorship. From the idea of unwritten custom, rooted in practice and performance rather than code and decree, Sidney develops an authorial persona that runs counter to our usual association of the Renaissance artist with loss and melancholy: the aporia or doubt that Sidney’s narrator creates throughout the prose romance and within its pastoral poetry allows him to construct a notion of authorship based on custom and rooted in a connection to an inaccessible past that, ironically, he has no desire to recuperate.

L’énigme incarnée: Méliot de Logres dans le Haut Livre du Gral

The High Book of the Grail, also known as Perlesvaus, after its main character, an analogon of Perceval who evolves in a universe of blood and violence, is a French Arthurian prose romance of the 13th century. The principle of imperfection on which this romance is set encompasses its narrative composition, the consistency of its allegorical meaning, and the poetics of character. Meliot de Logres can be called an énigme incarnée, as its representation does not tend towards unity, but towards destruction. He is an enigma because of its numerous narrative functions (alter Christus, a man in distress, knight ...), and its symbolical power (he is ‘de Logres’, which suggests a moral signification, he embodies spiritual greatness that the romance does not develop). The semiological analysis of this secondary but important character is a way to understand the many problems aroused by the scripture of the High Book of the Grail. Meliot is not only a double: through him, we can see the complexity and intricacy of the romance as a whole.

Living History

This chapter discusses Peter Langtoft’s French-language epic chronicle of British history (c. 1307 and disseminated mainly in north-eastern England), and its most luxurious surviving manuscript: London, BL, Royal MS 20 A II. This early fourteenth-century manuscript contained other historical, lyric, and prophetic material in French and English; in the second half of the same century, abridged segments of the Lancelot en prose and Queste del Saint Graal were appended, along with a letter about recent events in the eastern Mediterranean. We ask: how does a historical text produce itself, how does it authorize itself, and what are the roles of language and of discourse? We show how the Arthurian prose romance extracts in French adapt the manuscript’s earlier contents to England’s changing political and cultural concerns. The use of a single language—French—enhances and directs the potential for meaningful conflict within and beyond the language community.

Francophone Literary Culture on the Move

This chapter connects northern Italy with networked vectors of transmission encompassing the Low Countries, Britain, France, and the eastern Mediterranean: Arthurian prose romance is a vehicle for, and an instrument of, a pan-European chivalric vision of the past, present, and future. This Christianizing interest in figures like Tristan and Guiron le Courtois connects Italy with the Low Countries and the eastern Mediterranean in particular. A key feature of the transmission of this material, and one that grows in importance by the fourteenth century, is compilation. The famous Arthurian compilation (c. 1270) of Rusticiaus de Pise gathers episodes from different romance traditions. Guiron le Courtois circulates in ever-expanding compilations between the Low Countries and Northern Italy.

Out of Bounds

In the fourteenth-century romance of Gamelyn, Sir John of Boundys wills that the greater part of his land should pass to the youngest of his sons, Gamelyn, defying the convention of primogeniture. After his father’s death, Gamelyn is forced to flee to the greenwood and take up life as an outlaw. This chapter examines this narrative as it plays out in Gamelyn and in Gamelyn’s literary successors. Gamelyn was adapted by Thomas Lodge, who used it as the basis of his prose romance Rosalynde; Rosalynde in turn served as the source for Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. I argue that this line of adaptation forms a ‘testamentary fiction’: a narrative about legacies and bequests that uses the idea of inheritance to frame itself as an object of transmission. I also argue that this tradition ultimately serves to celebrate a quasi-sovereign will exercised through the possession of landed property.