Abstract Jean d’Arras’s romance Mélusine (1393) has been referred to as a “Founding Fiction” of medieval France. Around 1500 it was translated into English. Focusing on the Cilician Armenian episode, this paper finds that the colonizing imperative of d’Arras’s text is resisted in the English translation. A comparison of the two versions reveals that the love relation depicted as seamless in d’Arras’s version is fractured in the English translation, destabilizing the hegemonic identities of the chivalric hero and courtly heroine. The failure of the love relation and the sacrifice of the courtly heroine in the English text can be read as resistance to the sanitization of Lusignan ascendancy and the imagined community of a unified Christian/Lusignan world that d’Arras’s text presents. Reading the relationship crisis through the lenses of Monique Scheer’s practice theory of emotions, and Luce Irigaray’s and Homi Bhabha’s theorizations of mimicry, this essay argues that the English text invites a comparison with history. In this way the English text makes a space for local Cilician Armenian histories, which d’Arras’s version appropriates and instrumentally consumes.
Jan Shaw (Fri,) studied this question.