In Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth, editors Misty Urban, Deva Kemmis, and Melissa Ridley Elmes offer an invigorating international and interdisciplinary examination of the legendary fairy Melusine. Along with fresh insights into the popular French and German traditions, these essays investigate Melusine's English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese counterparts and explore her roots in philosophy, folklore, and classical myth. Combining approaches from art history, history, alchemy, literature, cultural studies, and medievalism, applying rigorous critical lenses ranging from feminism and comparative literature to film and monster theory, this volume brings Melusine scholarship into the twenty-first century with twenty lively and evocative essays that reassess this powerful figure's multiple meanings and illuminate her dynamic resonances across cultures and time. Contributors are Anna Casas Aguilar, Jennifer Alberghini, Frederika Bain, Anna-Lisa Baumeister, Albrecht Classen, Chera A. Cole, Tania M. Colwell, Zoe Enstone, Stacey L. Hahn, Deva F. Kemmis, Ana Pairet, Pit Peporte, Simone Pfleger, Caroline Prud'Homme, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Renata Schellenberg, Misty Urban, Angela Jane Weisl, Lydia Zeldenrust, and Zifeng Zhao.

If woman was already considered a baser being in medieval English literary culture, then what explains the monstrous women--part-animal, or magically-empowered--who function as typical romance heroines? If the monstrous women simply dramatize the conventions of medieval misogyny, then why do so many of them found dynasties, establish empires, and fill the royal seats across Europe with their offspring? A closer look at the figures of Constance, Medea, and Melusine in 14th, 15th, and early 16th-century English narratives reveals how metaphorical female monstrosity functions as a critical lens that allows authors, and audiences, to reflect on and re-examine misogynistic conventions, patriarchal authority, and the romance formula itself. Arguing that the Middle English romance constructs new possibilities for fiction, this study uses recent scholarship on monster theory and medieval women to theorize the presence of these monstrous women in medieval romance, discovering how they trace the formulation of a distinct gender ideology and expose the flaws of a literary rhetoric that, in defining the female as Other to the normative male, makes women into monsters.