Melusine of Lusignan
Subtitle: founding fiction in late medieval France
By: edited by Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox.
Contributors: Maddox, Donald.; Sturm-Maddox, Sara.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 301
Subjects: Jean, d'Arras, 14th cent.; Melusine (Legendary character) -- Romances -- History and criticism.; Civilization, Medieval, in literature.
Description: This volume of original essays is the first collection devoted to the monumental Roman de Melusine (1393) by Jean d'Arras. A masterwork of late fourteenth-century French prose fiction, Melusine tells of the powerful medieval dynasty of Lusignan from its founding as a city by the legendary Melusine, an enigmatic fairy-figure subject to periodic monstrous transformations, through its expansion in Europe and the Near East, to its ultimate evanescence.

Melusine offers a singular blend of history and fiction as it upholds the proprietary claims to Lusignan of the work's illustrious patron, Jean, Duc de Berry. The great deeds of Melusine, her forbears, and her progeny unfold in a narrative that blends elements of myth, folklore, and popular traditions with epic, Crusade narrative, romance, and theological doctrine.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 289) and index.