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

In his introduction to Elf Queens and Holy Friars, Richard Firth Green states that his approach is grounded in the principle that the sincerely held medieval beliefs that fairies actually existed should—for courtesy at least—be taken seriously. The first two chapters of the book trace the various ways clerics attempted to define fairy belief as diabolical and heretical, and Green cites numerous documents, literary as well as ecclesiastical, as evidence of the phenomenon of fairy belief manifest in efforts to combat it. He invokes Antonio Gramsci's theories regarding the cultural work of folklore, but he does not present detailed theoretical exegeses, since that is not the focus of his arguments. He also excludes questions of fairy taxonomy and Celtic origins as not part of his project, although mentioning them, of necessity, in some of his discussions.

In chapter 1, "Believing in Fairies," the author quotes from an unfinished manuscript by C. S. Lewis, stating that not to acknowledge fairy belief in earlier periods is not a useful research approach; Green asserts that it is more fruitful to consider the cultural work that such beliefs performed. Medieval churchmen seem to have accepted the seriousness of those who believed in fairies even as they mobilized ways to correct and suppress such unorthodox beliefs. Further, manifestations of fairy belief existed within all social classes; one example that is clearly grounded in the interests of the nobility is the use of the legendary fairy Melusine in establishing the Lusignan family's claims when their holdings changed hands between the English and the French. Throughout Elf Queens and Holy Friars, Green's major task is the uncovering of whatever vestiges of fairy belief can be documented, which he does with an impressive variety of textual data.

In chapter 2, "Policing Vernacular Belief," and throughout the book, Green chooses to use Peter Burke's (actually Robert Redfield's) model of society—the "great tradition" and the "little tradition"—in favor of what he claims is the well-known tripartite division of medieval society into churchmen, knights, and peasants—a view that is more contested than Green implies. He also argues that the greater prominence of fairy belief in twelfth-and thirteenth-century literature resulted from increased literacy and a clergy somewhat less repressive toward fairy beliefs while not totally abandoning a negative stance. This same opposition, however, hardened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, even though vernacular culture retained its power to resist official repression (e.g., the ideological tension surrounding female sovereignty both in "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and in the Scottish romance Sir Thomas of Ercildoune).

Green, noting the specific prohibitions against fairy belief in pastoral and preaching manuals, finds a persistence of fairy belief in the documents surrounding the trial of Joan of Arc. Peasants from her village of Domrény deny—defensively—contemporary belief in fairies, but also always state that such beliefs used to be common. Green ends by asserting the impact on literary criticism of accepting the idea that medieval writers and audiences actually participated in fairy belief: namely, accepting that the presence of fairies is not simply a plot device or an ornament, but the "mainspring" (p. 72) of such romances. Invoking Linda Dégh's statement that stories become legends in the presence of doubt, as well as Gramsci's theories, Green would support considering these medieval texts as sites of ideological contestation.

The next three chapters deal with the forms in which fairy belief appeared in literature. Chapter 3, "Incubi Fairies," asserts that for the medieval period, "incubus" meant "fairy." Whatever belief about incubi existed in the "little tradition," the "great tradition" did not attend very much to incubi until Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (1136). Much of the chapter is an enumeration of evidence, some from secular documents, but it is primarily a chronological account of versions of Merlin's conception...