Fairy Encounters in Medieval England
Landscape, Folklore and the Supernatural
By (author) Jeremy Harte
Paperback (Published)
(March 2026)
ISBN: 9781804132401
6.14 x 9.21 inches
Price: $36.00
In stock
Hardback (Published)
(September 2024)
ISBN: 9781804130957
6.14 x 9.21 inches
Price: $126.00
Out of stock
Strange tales from many medieval genres prove that experience, not fiction, underlay fairy beliefs. Supernatural beings took on similar forms whether they were supposed to be ghosts or goblins, saints or demons. First-person oral testimony is backed up by place-names which show how wells, pools and hills were known locally as haunted locations.
What is it like to meet a being from another world? This book collects testimony from eight hundred years of witnesses baffled by the supernatural breaking into their lives. Close reading of miracle collections, chronicles, saints lives and sermons shows how they depended on first-hand vernacular voices, never quite suppressed in the Latin of the clergymen who transcribed them. When people saw spirits, surface identity mattered less than common nature. Whether manifesting as fairies, revenants, local saints or fiends, they came in stock types: goblins, lovers, hunters, pygmies, dogs, indescribable shape-shifting objects. Just as they had preferred forms, so they appeared in particular places. The tradition of English supernatural place-names, never before gathered into a corpus, matches the medieval texts to show what places were haunted and why. The dark pools into which otherworldly things were exorcised, the paths on which they led travellers astray, the hills onto which they descended in search of people to command and seduce, and the meadows where they danced- all these can be found on the cognitive map of the peasantry. This book sheds new light on anomalous experience in medieval life and the relations it forged between vernacular life-stories and the gate-keepers of the written word. Fairies could cure as well as harm, prophecy as well as deceive: that made them a disruptive force in history, theology and morals. They challenge our ideas of a church-dominated society and once they are admitted into the picture, the Middle Ages will never look the same.
Preface
Part I: PEOPLE
1. Strange Meetings
2. Tales of Wonder, Tales of Sorrow
3. Inconstant Shapes
Part II: PLACES
4. Haunted Landscapes
Afterword
Elfin Place-Names: A Corpus
Notes
Sources
Index
- By (author) Jeremy Harte
"A significant and original contribution to the field, further enhanced by the constant liveliness, erudition and humour of Jeremy's writing." Prof. Ronald Hutton, author of Pagan Britain and The Witch
—
...the reader of Fairy Encounters in Medieval England has in their hands a useful guide to medieval English consciousness and memory that speaks of liminal places and moments, where what is not of the primary world is shown to the senses of the soul.
— Jon Mentxakatorre Odriozola
...another masterpiece... Harte’s accessible and engaging prose makes the reader feel as though she was the actual witness to those who faced the supernatural... For scholars of fairies, the historical supernatural and the haunted landscape, this is a must-read.
— Olivia Armstrong
Fairy Encounters in Medieval England is a solidly researched reference guide for anyone curious as to how Medieval English beliefs about interactions between the otherworld and this one left their mark on the landscape. The accounts related within certainly flesh out the variety of these encounters. Jeremy Harte's painstaking scholarship would make an excellent springboard for further historical contextualizations.
— Christina Carlson
Harte is able to put forward a convincing argument that showcases fairy encounters in all their variety and complexity. There is plenty to value here for scholars of varying expertise, including folklore and popular belief, literary convention and the supernatural, medieval ecocriticism, spatial humanities, andphilology.— Stephen De Hailes
...unique and valuable...a treasure trove
— D.L. Ashliman
Fairy Encounters offers much valuable information and is an important contribution to medieval scholarship because of the massive amount of data compiled here.— Albrecht Classen
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