In Elf Queens and Holy Friars Richard Firth Green investigates an
important aspect of medieval culture that has been largely ignored
by modern literary scholarship: the omnipresent belief in
fairyland. Taking as his starting point the assumption that the
major cultural gulf in the Middle Ages was less between the wealthy
and the poor than between the learned and the lay, Green explores
the church's systematic demonization of fairies and infernalization
of fairyland. He argues that when medieval preachers inveighed
against the demons that they portrayed as threatening their flocks,
they were in reality often waging war against fairy beliefs. The
recognition that medieval demonology, and indeed pastoral theology,
were packed with coded references to popular lore opens up a whole
new avenue for the investigation of medieval vernacular culture.
Elf Queens and Holy Friars offers a detailed account of the
church's attempts to suppress or redirect belief in such things as
fairy lovers, changelings, and alternative versions of the
afterlife. That the church took these fairy beliefs so seriously
suggests that they were ideologically loaded, and this fact makes a
huge difference in the way we read medieval romance, the literary
genre that treats them most explicitly. The war on fairy beliefs
increased in intensity toward the end of the Middle Ages, becoming
finally a significant factor in the witch-hunting of the
Renaissance.
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