Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church by Richard Firth Green (review)

Richard Firth Green has devoted much of his considerable career to a deep immersion in the fairy lore of medieval England. The result of those sustained efforts, this monograph signals a field change in the association of fairies with religion that has profound implications for our understanding of medieval culture and literary texts. Green's essential claim is that fairyland is a 'contested site' between the official and unofficial cultures of the Middle Ages (p. 2). A brief Introduction summarizes the problems of taxonomy, the Celtic hegemony in fairy studies, and the politics of folkloric beliefs that situate this study both with regard to what it does (describe the political significance of fairyland) and with regard to what it does not and cannot do (provide a comprehensive survey of medieval fairy phenomena).

Chapter One catalogues a representative survey of chronicles, romances, lyrics, sermons, student exercises, and allegorical texts that feature fairies, establishing the wide literary presence of the fay, as well as the problems associated with their recording—largely the efforts of 'a clerical elite who officially did not believe in them' (p. 13). Green discovers a spectrum of tolerance regarding fairy beliefs, with official theology condemning all such beliefs as heretical, and local clerics seeking a balance between official doctrine and folkloric tradition in their communities. This chapter establishes that the fairies of romance become coded in medieval demonology over the course of the period, setting up the remaining chapters which trace this transition from fairies' folkloric association to their demonic conflation.

In Chapter Two, Green shows that fairies extend beyond the easy classification of 'high' versus 'low' popular culture, employing instead a Burkian schema of 'great' and 'little' traditions that reflects the presence of dominant and lesser discourses without assigning them to specific social classes. Though in the great tradition fairies are cast as demons and hideously ugly, in the little tradition they are beautiful; thus, negotiating these differences became a fraught endeavor. Green explains the implications of such efforts in modifying our understanding of genre and narrative in medieval romance, as well as 'the degree to which medieval folklore could mount a coherent challenge' (whether spontaneous or considered) to 'the dominant ideology' (pp. 74–75).

Chapter Three tackles human-fairy sexual liaisons. Aligning the concept of the incubus/succubus with fairies, Green takes us on a rollicking voyage through those texts in which humans and fairies copulate. Merlin serves as a case study for the ways in which, in subsequent revisions of the story of his birth, his incubus father is progressively and more explicitly rendered demonic; in this way, human-fairy progeny becomes another contested space between the great and little traditions.

In Chapter Four, differentiating between the changeling and other forms of fairy abduction, Green examines the folkloric and clerical definitions of the concept, then develops an analysis of the ways a presentation of Christ as a changeling in a number of medieval dramas could be viewed by members of both the great and little traditions. For great tradition audiences, such scenes reinforced the foolishness of those who believed in fairies; for little tradition audiences, they might serve as a form of popular resistance against the Church's increased polemic against folk cultures.

Chapter Five most explicitly deals with the Arthurian legend. Green uses the transformation of the fairy motifs of the wild hunt and the wild horde as the basis for his claim that fairyland—as represented by Arthur in Avalon, along with other accounts of humans passing into an Otherworld for extended periods of time—may align with Purgatory; the great tradition is thus not resisting, but rather reclaiming for doctrinal purposes, the little tradition's fairyland. Perhaps, Green argues, folk and clerical beliefs were not as sharply divided as we are used to thinking they were; perhaps that divide was developed by the 'savagely oppressive campaigns' of the early modern...