Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green
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of the Dark Ages (“the authorities were quicker to detect paganism and superstition in the customs of subordinate groups than in those of their betters”36) remained true of this later period.
Of Le Goff’s three stages in the development of the medieval marvelous, I have most difficulty in accepting the third: his characterization of le merveilleux in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—he is probably thinking here of Mélusine—as having become somehow ‘aestheticized.’37 What he means by this term is made clearer in a later essay, where he employs an essentially high/low version of the bicultural model: “The approach of opposing the two cultures tends to make of ‘popular’ culture, a culture essentially dominated, manipulated, and exploited by the ‘superior’ culture. Learned culture [la culture savante], from this perspective, either destroys, perverts, or occludes popular culture, forcing upon it an acculturation from above drawn from ecclesiastical, aristocratic—later bourgeois—models, or it rehabilitates it aesthetically, when it has lost its power to resist and retains only ‘the beauty of a corpse.’”38 In my view, vernacular culture (that is to say, the culture of the little tradition) was far from having lost its power to resist in the late Middle Ages despite the church’s having stepped up its campaign against it.39 Writers such as Jean Gerson, Johannes Nider, and Heinrich Kramer give no sign of believing that the battle against popular beliefs had been won; indeed by shifting their casus belli from mere superstition to actual heresy they put the conduct of the war on a dangerous new footing.40
If anything, the official attitude seems to have hardened throughout the Middle Ages, and on the eve of the early modern period things were very much darker than they had been earlier. By the end of the fifteenth century Burchard of Worms’s penance of ten days on bread and water for those who believed that corporeal “sylvans” took pleasure with their lovers41 would have seemed remarkably mild. The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, themselves perfectly ready to believe in such sylvans (or rather in their own demonic reimagination of them as succubi), no longer regarded penance alone as sufficient to counter the danger of heterodox beliefs; they were quite prepared to condemn to death those who held such views: “the only possible way for these and similar practices to be remedied is for the judges who are responsible for the sorceresses to get rid of them or at least punish them as an example for all posterity.”42
The state of hostility, or at least deep suspicion, existing between representatives of the great tradition and those espousing such aspects of the little tradition as a belief in fairies is one of the major themes of this book. For me, its presence permeates medieval romance and helps us to disambiguate what James Wade has termed “the ambiguous supernatural” of medieval fairyland.43 While Le Goff’s characterization might possibly apply to later works such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene, most fourteenth-and fifteenth-century romances, still energized by this contested ideology, offer us something quite different from “the beauty of a corpse.”
Such a contest can be detected even in a writer as thoroughly imbued with the ideology of the great tradition as Geoffrey Chaucer.44 When Chaucer turns to the discourse of fairyland to explore gender relations in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, for instance, it is not merely because fairies, as the Countess d’Aulnoy or Angela Carter might have said, are good to think with. It is because issues of female sovereignty are deeply rooted in this aspect of the little tradition: as Partonopeu de Blois says of his fairy mistress, “Cele est mes cuers, cele est ma vie; / Cele a de moi la segnorie” (or, as the English translation in Oxford, MS Rawlinson Poet. 14, puts it, “And as she lyste she may gyde me, / She hathe of me þe soueraynete”).45 For all that his clerical contemporaries would doubtless have found Chaucer’s views on fairies unexceptionable, and despite the fact that he prefaces his Loathly Lady’s actual transformation with a sermon steeped in the discourse of learned culture, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale derives much of its real power from this traditional discourse and its long-standing resistance to the crooked-rib propaganda of the great tradition. Beneath its androcentric quest for what women really want, then, lies a much older ideological level where masculine violation of natural harmony is subject to the discipline and correction of a magical universe—a pattern that may be sensed in Walter Map’s tale of Eadric the Wild, in the romance of Thomas of Erceldoune, and in the strange proto-grail romance L’Élucidation, where a rapist’s abuse of fairy hospitality is what brings about the scourge of the Wasteland:
Des puceles une esforcha,
Sor son pois le despucela,
………………‥
Li roiaumes si agasti
K’ains puis n’i ot arbre fuelli;
Li pre et les flor[s] essecierent
Et les aiges apeticierent. (lines 69–70, 95–98)
[He forced one of the maidens and took her virginity against her will…. The realm was so wasted that its trees never again flourished, meadow and flowers withered, and waters dwindled.]46
Whether or not we choose to read Chaucer’s Loathly Lady as the metaphorical equivalent of this Wasteland (and the hideous transformation of the violated fairy queen in Thomas of Erceldoune might offer support for such a reading), the presence of two conflicting levels of signification in the tale seems undeniable.47 As Alice of Bath implies, the expiation that Chaucer’s knight must suffer for his rape is diametrically opposed to the ideological discipline of the lubricious “lymytours and othere hooly freres” who lurk “in every busshe or under every tree”—though by putting his fairy romance in the mouth of a provincial vetula worthy of William of Auvergne, Chaucer the poet might appear to be disclaiming responsibility for the implications of this aspect of his own creation.
In such a context it is important to recognize that Alice’s amusing account of the friars’ banishment of elves from the English countryside at the beginning of The Wife of Bath’s Tale reflects a very real situation:
In th’olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
All was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede.
This was the olde opinion, as I rede;
I speke of manye hundred yeres ago.
But now kan no man se none elves mo,
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of lymytours and othere hooly freres,
That serchen every lond and every streem,
As thikke as motes in the sonne-beem,
Blessynge halles, chambres, kichenes, boures,
Citees, burghes, castels, hye toures,
Thropes, bernes, shipnes, dayeryes,
This maketh that ther been no fayeryes. (lines 863–78)48
Chaucer illustrates the typical mendicant understanding of fairy encounters when he has a summoner “under a forest syde” chance upon “a gay yeman” wearing “a courtepy of grene” in The Friar’s Tale (lines 1380–82); we might expect this shape-shifting yeoman (lines 1462–72) to be a fairy, but as the friar explains, he is really a fiend who dwells in hell (lines 1447–48).49 An anecdote in a mid-thirteenth-century Dominican exemplum collection has sometimes been cited to illustrate the mendicant war on fairy belief:50 two friars, sent to preach in the Scottish Isles, find fairies (“spiritus incubi”) abusing the young women there, but after being instructed in the faith, the women find themselves able to resist these demons (“quo facto, venerunt demones comminantes mulieribus et eis invadere more solito attemptantes, licet non poterant prevalere”), which are last heard of howling through the ether (“auditus est ulultatus et eiulatus magnus in aere”). Medieval people would generally have understood the term ‘incubi demons’ to refer to fairies,