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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.
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.
In the late fourteenth century the complex Middle English word
"trouthe," which had earlier meant something like "integrity" or
"dependability," began to take on its modern sense of "conformity
to fact." At the same time, the meaning of its antonym, "tresoun,"
began to move from "personal betrayal" to "a crime against the
state." In A Crisis of Truth, Richard Firth Green contends that
these alterations in meaning were closely linked to a growing
emphasis on the written over the spoken and to the simultaneous
reshaping of legal thought and practice. According to Green, the
rapid spread of vernacular literacy in the England of Richard II
was driven in large part by the bureaucratic and legal demands of
an increasingly authoritarian central government. The change
brought with it a fundamental shift toward the attitudes we still
hold about the nature of evidence and proof-a move from a truth
that resides almost exclusively in people to one that relies
heavily on documents. Green's magisterial study presents law and
literature as two parallel discourses that have, at times,
converged and influenced each other. Ranging deeply and widely over
a huge body of legal and literary materials, from Anglo-Saxon
England to twentieth-century Africa, it will provide a rich source
of information for literary, legal, and historical scholars.
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