Jane Burns - Mermaids and Material Culture: Looking Eastward from

Jane Burns - Mermaids and Material Culture: Looking Eastward from Medieval France

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Mélusine, a fourteenth-century snake-tailed woman who can fly, derives in part from medieval narrative traditions of fairies and mermaids. It is her excessive wealth, however, that strikes “wonder” and fear into onlookers at the court in Poitou. How might we draw on items of material culture used to characterize Mélusine’s lavish wedding celebration to help understand this ornately clad and bejeweled courtly woman in a more global context?

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