Gesture, Emotion, and Humanity
Illuminations of the fairy Melusine captured the imagination of late medieval audiences with their fascinating portrayals of her supernatural monstrosity. As the fifteenth century progressed, however, French representations of the heroine of the Roman de Melusine gradually depicted a fairy whose humanity vied for attention with her otherworldly nature in manuscript and incunabula iconography. Nowhere is this tension more explicitly conveyed than in the unexplored parchment fragments of a late fifteenth-century French manuscript of the prose Roman de Melusine held in the National Trust’s Upton House Bearsted Collection, Warwickshire (U.K.).1 The five extant illustrated fragments in which Melusine is represented depict the grief and sorrow ensuing from the crucial denunciation episode wherein Raymondin publicly condemns the fairy as a demonic agent in serpentine form.2 The Upton House Bearsted (hereafter UHB) fragments focus upon the sentiments of the couple and their court as they grapple with the implications of Raymondin’s denunciation; the illustration of this episode is unique among French manuscripts and differs markedly from the iconography in contemporary incunabula.3 The UHB fragments offer an exceptional visual interpretation of this episode, their detailed gestures and emotions urging audiences toward a reception of the heroine in which her humanity, not her monstrosity, was paramount.