UC San Diego

Hybrid, demonic women have shown up in various literary forms since ancient Greece; however, in the twelfth century, a particular form of serpentine woman was linked to the House of Plantagenet by medieval authors and the family itself. Over the course of two hundred years, the story of this hybrid woman, Mélusine, would be adapted and linked to another prominent French noble house, that of Lusignan. The conflicts between the Plantagenets, or Angevins, and the Lusignan are well documented. They span geographical, chronological, and literary boundaries, but in the fourteenth century, when the House of Valois was attempting to consolidate its territorial holdings in France, the Mélusine character was taken up again by Jean d’Arras. He was commissioned to craft a pseudo-historical narrative that linked her to the ruling house in France, thus granting them legitimacy in the region, both politically and in the eyes of the local population. The result, the Roman de Mélusine, should be read as an attempt to legitimate the House of Valois in a region that was historically linked to the Angevins and the Lusignan. By tracing the evolution of this character and her contextual relationship to all of the above families, it is possible to not only explain the way she was utilized as a type of genealogical referent that allowed them to use collective memory to pursue competitive aims, but also to examine the fears and anxieties present in medieval thought as it related to women, mothers, and monsters from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries.