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  • Elf Queens and Holy Friars, Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church by Richard Firth Green
  • Krisztina Ilko
Richard Firth Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars, Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016) 304 pp.

There was a monk, the prior of his monastery, who sat out in the garden and listened to the song of a bird while contemplating the things after death, especially paradise. After a while he returned to the monastery where to his astonishment nobody recognized him. In trying to identify him the monks eventually found a book that recorded his name as the prior three hundred years past. This monastic fable has its roots deep in stories about travel to fairyland, even if the conventual setting prevents any direct reference to elves. How did these two worlds, the domain of the church and the land of the fairies interact with each other? Elf Queens and Holy Friars by Richard Firth Green aims to explore this dynamic relationship through which orthodox church authority and popular belief clashed with each other. The leading characters of the book are the fairies, in a broad sense, defined as magical humanoid creatures which lived on the fringes of the human world, and often interacted with humans. While traditional research usually tackles fairy belief within lay popular culture, Green's point of view examines the demonization of the fairy folk.

The book is mostly focused on the high Middle Ages, with a prologue that touches upon Elizabethan poetry and dramatic literature. Green seeks to set his research in a pan-European context, though, not surprisingly given the abundant source material, he mainly relies on English and French sources. This position sets out the potential of future research to compare or even to rival this material with sources from other parts of Europe. Nonetheless, Green also points out differences between the English and French, such as the use of the changon, a serious accusation of illegitimate birth in French, whose English equivalent, conjoun was more regularly used. It is admirable that beside romances, which are the traditional sources for fairies, Green also fruitfully uses hagiographical texts and sermons. While the Latin and French texts are generally provided with translation, the book can be a challenging read for historians who are not specialised in English medieval drama as most (but sometimes not all) of the Middle English sources are cited only in original.

The five main chapters tackle different themes of fairy belief, such as the influence of vernacular belief, the presence of fairy incubi, or concepts of fairy land. Green convincingly argues that a significant feature of the high and late medieval perception of fairy stories is that their audience had a serious belief in elves. The church, as Green implies, had a heterodox attitude toward fairyfolk: while the clerics disapproved of fairy belief, they had no opposition of accepting the existence of elves as demons. Ecclesiastical texts describe and call fairies demons, however not all demons in these sources are fairies. Green identifies these demons as fairies in the cases in which they possessed elvish qualities, such as being able to bear children with humans, enjoying wisdom and longevity in beauty (but not without limits), mortality, and acting habitually benevolently towards people. This identification works well generally, even if there are certain problematic cases. [End Page 211]

As the church tried to demonize fairies, ecclesiastical writers claimed that coupling with fairies leads to ruin, while at the same time romance writers portrayed fairy lovers as exotic in their wisdom and beauty. Exploring this process, namely how clerics attempted to supress and then re-direct fairy belief makes Green's book especially valuable. Green considers the interaction of fairyland and orthodox belief both ways. A variety of intriguing cases support this argument of mutual influence. For instance, Jesus is called a changeling in some Middle English romances, as a particularly nasty insult by Herod, who was positing that the supernatural qualities of the Saviour can be explained by the fact that he was exchanged with an elf-child. In another fascinating case, Green claims that the penitential haunted procession of the dead lead by the Hellequin...

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