_____________________________
From: Davide <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2017 6:35 PM
Subject: Fw: TMR 17.04.15 Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars (Hume)
To: <[log in to unmask]>


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
[log in to unmask]


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.