Miranda Griffin

Transforming Tales argues that the study of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la Rose and its widespread influence, to the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé and the vast prose cycles of the late Middle Ages, metamorphosis is a recurrent theme, resulting in some of the best-known and most powerful literature of the era. Transforming Tales is the first book in English to explore in detail the importance of ideas of metamorphosis in French literature from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This book's purpose is twofold: it traces a series of figures (the werewolf, the snake-woman, the nymph, the magician, amongst others) as they are transformed within individual texts; and it also examines the way in which the stories of transformation themselves become rewritten during the course of the Middle Ages. Griffin's approach combines close readings and comparisons of literary texts with readings informed by modern critical theories which are grounded in many of the ideas raised by medieval metamorphosis: the body, gender, identity and categories of life. Literary depictions and reworkings of transformation raise questions about medieval understandings of the differences between human and animal, man and woman, God and man, life and death—these are the questions explored in Transforming Tales.

Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature

Transforming Tales

Jane Gilbert

Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field.

Essays in Honour of Sarah Kay

The Futures of Medieval French

Transforming Tales examines the idea of bodily transformation in French literature composed between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Focusing on well-known stories (Narcissus and Echo; Pygmalion and his statue) and figures (Merlin, the werewolf), the book approaches a number of canonical texts in ways which will be accessible and helpful to students and scholars of medieval literature Not only does it explore the ways in which stories oftransformation enable an insight into medieval ideas about humanity, it also considers the way in which these stories have themselves be reworked and adapted, arguing that metamorphosis can be read as a metaphor forrewriting in the Middle Ages.

Miranda Griffin

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