Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green

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СКАЧАТЬ Walter Map, who dryly remarks of the story that Triunein, reputedly the son of a Welsh fairy, survived defeat in battle to live with his mother at the bottom of a lake, “a delusion like this might have been invented about a man whose body was never found” [de non inuento fingi potuit error huiusmodi].¹¹²

      The quasi-objective stance of men such as William of Newburgh and Walter Map closely resembles that of a modern ghost-story teller seeking to exploit the frisson that comes with an audience’s readiness to entertain the possibility that it is listening to a true account. The fifteenth-century French courtier Antoine de la Sale professed himself a skeptic on the fairy question, and at the end of his account of the paradise of Queen Sibyl (which he describes as a fairy realm of magical gardens and palaces, populated by elegant knights and beautiful ladies, and ruled over by a gracious sovereign), he wrote, “I pray God to guard every good Christian from such false belief, and from exposing himself to such danger.”¹¹³ But when he describes how he himself had sought to visit this magic realm (entered through a cave high in the Apennines) in 1420, he recounts an unnerving experience that proves that even such a sophisticated outsider was not wholly impervious to the queen’s power. He claims that the local authorities prevented him from passing beyond the cave’s first chamber, and yet even there, “[my companions] and I heard from within a sharp voice, like the sound of a peacock crying out, as if from a long way off. They said that it was an utterance from the Sibyl’s Paradise, but for my part I don’t believe it; I rather think that it was my horses who were at the foot of the mountain, although they were a long way below me” [Iceulx et moy oysmes leans une haulte voix criant ainsi que ce feust le cry du paon, qui sembloit estre moult loings. Si dirent les gens que c’estoit une voix de paradis de la Sibille. Mais, quant a moy, je n’en croy riens; ainsi croy que feussent mes chevaulx qui au pié du mont estoient, combien que’ilz feussent moult bas et loings de moy (p. 15)]. For all his bravado, la Sale’s “although” here betrays an underlying uneasiness; he sounds rather like the hotel guest who, while disclaiming any belief in ghosts, would still rather not sleep in a room reputed to be haunted. But there is a significant difference. Ghost stories in the modern world carry with them only limited ideological baggage; the proselytizing atheist might regard them as dangerous nonsense, but most people would treat them as harmless entertainment. This was not true of fairies in the Middle Ages.

      It is a relatively simple matter to show that some people during the Middle Ages believed in fairies, but we have still not gone very far in understanding the general attitude toward such beliefs. While there may be a strong temptation to explain them in terms of modern phenomena, like a belief in ghosts, such analogies have only limited value. This is true even in the case of a more commonly invoked parallel, the modern belief in alien abductions—a belief that actually bears a strong formal resemblance to some medieval tales of people stolen by the fairies;¹¹⁴ Diane Purkiss has even gone so far as to claim that “aliens are our fairies, and they behave just like the fairies of our ancestors.”¹¹⁵ In one sense this is quite true—both might be argued to fill a similar, even identical, social or psychological niche—but ideologically their roles are very different, and the cultural work performed by each is quite distinct.

      For one thing, modern belief in alien abduction, however widespread (in 2012 about a third of Americans were reported to believe in UFOs), remains a minority cult, indulged in by a fringe population. Its adherents may relish the support of the Harvard psychiatrist John Edward Mack (just as medieval fairy believers were glad to have the learned Gervase of Tilbury on their side), but by and large they have made few inroads into civil society. However, fairy beliefs were very far from being a fringe phenomenon in the Middle Ages (as we shall see). A second way in which medieval fairy beliefs differed from modern theories of alien abduction is yet more significant. Champions of alien abduction, for all their love of conspiracy theories, pose little threat to established society; no one in power apparently feels any great need to censor, silence, or persecute them. As our opening discussion of the church’s representation of fairies as devils and of fairy beliefs as potentially heretical demonstrates, however, medieval stories of fairyland were far from ideologically neutral. It is to the ideological significance of medieval fairy stories that we will now turn.

      CHAPTER 2

      Policing Vernacular Belief

      Adde we to these, the parts and representations of Satyres, Silvanes, Muses, Nymphes, Furies, Hobgoblins, Fairies, Fates, with such other heathen vanities, which Christians should not name, much lesse resemble.

      —William Prynne, Histrio-mastix (1633)

      While most scholars would have little difficulty treating a belief in fairies as an aspect of medieval ‘popular culture,’ many would find it harder to agree on what precisely they mean by this term. The European Middle Ages, as is well known, conceived of society as a static threefold structure—its estates divided among churchmen, knights, and peasants—but modern historiography is more likely to apply a binary, and dynamic, model to medieval culture: either high/low (churchmen and knights vs. peasants) or learned/lay (churchmen vs. knights and peasants).¹ Thus, as Aron Gurevich puts it, “the very concept of ‘popular culture’ as applied to the high Middle Ages remains to a great extent undefined. Was it only the culture of the lower, oppressed classes of society? Or was it the culture of all illiterati, as opposed to that of educated people?”² In what follows, I take vernacular culture to represent the culture of the laity as a whole, knights as well as peasants, while conceding that la culture savante must always be understood to have included some educated members of the laity, and la culture populaire, some of the less literate members of the clergy. More specifically, I adopt here the model proposed by Peter Burke for early modern Europe when he speaks of the “‘great tradition’ of the educated few and the ‘little tradition’ of the rest,”³ always remembering his important proviso that the term ‘little tradition’ must take account of “upper class participation in popular culture” (p. 24). Though Burke is an early modernist, his model can arguably be applied to the late Middle Ages and perhaps even earlier.⁴ Such a model must always be heuristic, of course: the existence of a credulous bishop or a skeptical peasant no more invalidates it than the existence of a reactionary member of a socialist party or a progressive member of a conservative one invalidates the standard ideological model of modern Western democracy.

      For many, the notion that la culture populaire should be understood to include members of the secular elite will be counterintuitive, particularly since there is a common perception that the primary thrust of the French annalistes has been, in John Van Engen’s words, “to dredge up from the bottom, as it were, the residues of peasant religious ‘folklore.’”⁵ Whether or not such an assessment is altogether just,⁶ and whether indeed the very term ‘folklore’ can properly be used in such a reductive sense,⁷ my adoption of Peter Burke’s model in this context obviously requires justification. To be clear, I do not claim merely that medieval aristocrats occasionally drew upon aspects of peasant belief, which appears to be Le Goff’s position: “this whole world of the marvelous came to enrich the cultural armory of the knights.”⁸ Still less do I claim that they were merely playing at being peasants: to read an event such as Charles VI’s bal des sauvages, for instance, as if it were the medieval equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s playing at shepherdesses in the Hameau de la reine would, in my view, be gravely anachronistic; to a near contemporary, after all, it had very much the appearance of “a dance for conjuring a demon” [una corea procurante demone].⁹ Charges of sorcery were rife in the late medieval courts of England and France, and while it is all too easy to dismiss them as merely a cynical political ploy,¹⁰ they could hardly have been leveled at all if the substance of such charges had been widely discredited among the courtiers themselves. Moreover, the claim that while folk beliefs may have circulated among the nobility they must have originated much further down the social scale seems to me a quite unprovable projection СКАЧАТЬ