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Griffin, Miranda. Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature., Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 53, Issue 2, April 2017, Pages 266–267, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqx006
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Miranda Griffin’s Transforming Tales is a beautifully written study which, like its subject matter, continually twists, turns and creates echoes between genres, forms and periods of medieval French literature, while simultaneously interweaving theories of metamorphosis, animality, gender and translation. The monograph is divided into five chapters: Chapter One focuses on a single text (the Ovide moralisé) and explores questions of veiling and unveiling, interactions of human and divine bodies, and the mutability of language. Chapter Two discusses ‘echoes of Echo’ (p. 83) in rewritings of narcissistic narratives. Through chains of quotation and imperfect repetitions, Griffin concludes that by becoming voice, Echo ‘incarnates the loss of love and the beauty of poetry’ (p. 100) and demonstrates the power of language both to transform and to be transformed. Chapters Three and Four consider human/animal transformations in relation to gender. Chapter Three reflects upon what it means to be human and explores questions of outward appearance – in particular, of skin and nudity – alongside the fusion of knight and beast within the chivalric body. From the eponymous hero of Bisclavret to the ‘Poisson chevalier’ of the Conte du papegau, the figures under discussion highlight the liminal nature of skin-as-covering and underscore the centrality of layered bodies to medieval thought. Next, Chapter Four considers how non-human bodies may comment upon constructions of gender. Pygmalion’s creation is here set against the slippery forms of Mélusine and Medusa. These tales of ‘the serpentine feminine’ (p. 146) reveal that being a natural woman is in fact to possess a shifting body, while interpretations of the nature/art binary are seen in the attempt to fix the female form in stone. Chapter Five moves to the interdependence of hybridity and metamorphosis in the body of Merlin. Griffin explores how his anamorphotic body can never fully be seen, and how, caught between life and death, it reveals the possibility of a ‘new embodiment in voice’ (p. 195). Overall, this book is a pleasure to read and, by uniting physical and textual changes, metamorphoses and repetitions in one place, it offers new ways to approach not only the medieval body but also the medieval text – itself so often written, as Griffin reminds us, on skin.
