Green, Richard Firth. <i>Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the 
Medieval Church</i>. The Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of 
Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 304. $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4843-2.

   Reviewed by Cathy Hume
        University of Bristol
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In a late thirteenth-century French poem on confession unearthed by Richard 
Firth Green, the priest is instructed to ask, "Do you not believe...in the 
goblin, in the household of Herlequin, in witches, and fairies?" For 
medieval people across Europe, Green argues in this delightfully rich and 
persuasive book, the answer was frequently yes.

Fairies may seem a familiar theme for scholars of medieval English 
literature like Green. James Wade's <i>Fairies in Medieval Romance</i> 
(2011) devotes substantial attention to them, but they are also discussed in 
Corinne Saunders' <i>Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English 
Romance</i> (2010) and Helen Cooper's <i>The English Romance in Time</i> 
(2004). Green's focus, though, is rather different. He is interested 
primarily in what medieval people believed about fairies, and only 
secondarily in how fairies appear in literary texts. Fairies may serve 
useful literary functions in terms of satisfying readers' escapist 
fantasies, creating an atmosphere of wonder, and performing necessary plot 
functions with magical ease. But if we take belief in fairies seriously, as 
Green wants us to, we need to allow for the possibility that many texts 
about fairies were written to explore their nature and existence. He argues 
that a set of common beliefs about fairies were found across Europe, rather 
than being confined to the Celtic fringes of the British Isles; and that 
belief in fairies was shared by all classes of secular people, not just the 
illiterate peasantry.  The struggle between these secular masses and the 
Christian clerics who first pronounced that fairies were demons, then 
promoted them to devils and called belief in them heretical, is central to 
the book's thesis.

Chapter 1 of the book gives a preliminary sketch of medieval fairy beliefs, 
and chapter 2 shows us how this demonisation worked. Green carefully 
demonstrates that "incubus" is, in many cases, nothing more than a 
disapproving clerical synonym for what secular culture called a fairy--or 
maybe an "elf," "goblin" or "faun." He refuses to get drawn into fairy 
taxonomy, but defines as fairies "that class of numinous, social, humanoid 
creatures who were widely believed to live at the fringes of the human 
lifeworld and interact intermittently with human beings" (4). By reading 
"incubus" simply as "fairy," he opens up a wealth of texts describing the 
deeds of <i>incubi</i>, which offer new evidence about medieval fairy belief 
and the struggle to suppress it. Indeed, the breadth of sources the book 
presents were, for me, its greatest pleasure and achievement: there is Latin 
learned and clerical literature of various kinds, from demonologies to 
pastoral manuals to chronicles and encyclopedias; there is travel 
literature; vernacular romance (of course) and hagiography, mystery plays 
and ballads, and much, much more.

From this mass of material Green draws out many common threads of the 
medieval fairy tradition. Chapter 2 discusses how the clerical tradition 
tried to fight back against the inconvenient popular perception that fairies 
were not demonic spirits or illusions, but sexual, fecund, mortal and 
prescient. Chapter 3 discusses liaisons with fairies, sometimes unwelcome 
but often imagined as delightful, as the four spells for conjuring fairies 
in Folger Library MS Xd 234 suggest. Chapter 5 includes some interesting 
material on common traditions about individual fairies and fairy associates: 
Green argues, for example, that the name Sibyl, which we normally read as a 
prophet, suggested a fairy to medieval audiences, and he identifies 
Herla/Herlequin and the mysterious Onewyn as humans who, like Arthur, spent 
time in fairyland.

The main focus of chapter 5, however, is Green's argument that the idea of 
fairyland influenced the medieval conception of purgatory. He describes the 
tradition of fairyland as a peripheral zone around a centre (often a castle) 
entered by crossing a boundary from the human world (often a hollow hill), a 
perilous journey through this uncanny peripheral zone, and a final perilous 
crossing (often over water) into the centre, and shows that this was found 
in many medieval accounts of purgatory. Tellingly, one thirteenth-century 
description of purgatory even included the distinctive fairyland taboo on 
eating food. Green's presentation of a serious struggle between the belief 
that humans could live on in a fairy otherworld and official Christian 
cosmology also helps to makes sense of what the monks of Glastonbury were up 
to in 1191. By announcing that they had found Arthur's grave, they were 
asserting and providing evidence to support the Church line.

The discussion of fairy changelings in chapter 4 may turn out to be the 
book's most influential contribution. Green first discusses medieval beliefs 
about changelings--that they were fairy children substituted for human 
children, sickly, difficult, and voraciously hungry for milk. He goes on to 
show that the term "changeling"—"changon" in French and "cangun"/"changon" 
or "conjeoun" in English--was a common term of abuse, either seriously meant 
or merely insultingly misapplied, rather like the term "bastard" today. The 
Middle English Dictionary does not record "changeling" as the meaning of 
"conjoin," but only the derived senses of "fool," "lunatic" or "brat," but 
Green's presentation of the evidence was, for me, entirely persuasive. As he 
does throughout the book, Green traces the idea across time, language and 
text type--from legal case to chronicle, <i>Ancrene Wisse</i> to <i>Of 
Arthour and of Merlin</i>--from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. 
The chapter culminates in an analysis of Christ's presentation as a 
changeling in the York, Chester and Towneley plays, showing that the 
villains of the cycles use these terms to discredit and mock Christ.

I must confess to being less convinced by Green's extension of this 
argument, to assert that this "elvish Christ" represents "folkloric 
resistance to an increasingly authoritarian church" (142). Similarly, Green 
makes a clear connection in his postscript between Chaucer's amused 
scepticism towards fairies and the tameness of the witch hunt in early 
modern England. I was not persuaded that Chaucer had a direct influence on 
England's early modern elite in this regard. Occasionally, too, Green seemed 
to be pushing too hard for a single, coherent set of fairy doctrine: belief 
in the weather-changing powers of the spring in Brocéliande discussed in 
chapter 1 does not always seem to equate to belief in fairies, and I was not 
sure that the idea of fairies' mortality was quite as securely established 
in popular tradition as Green wanted to claim. But these are very minor 
reservations.

This book has much to say to scholars of English, Latin and other European 
literatures as well as historians of religion and ideas, and is written with 
beautiful clarity. It is engaging and fun, communicating a strong sense of 
enjoyment of the textual treasures Green has assembled. Other readers will 
find their own favourites, but by way of an encouragement to buy this book 
or order it for your library, I must direct you to my own, on page 112. 
There, you will learn what protective magic you might achieve by putting a 
baby into a sieve with its father's underwear.