Fantastic Histories explores the political and cultural contexts of the entry of fairies to the historical record in twelfth century England, and the subsequent uses of fairy narratives in both insular and continental history and romance. It traces the uses of the fairy as a contested marker of historicity and fictionality in the histories of Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, the continental
mirabilia of Gervase of Tilbury, and the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French
Mélusine romances and their early English reception
. Working across insular and continental source material,
Fantastic Histories explores the practices of history-writing, fiction-making, and the culturally determined boundaries of wonder that defined the limits of medieval history.
Table of Content
Introduction: fairies in history
1 ‘Historia fabulosa’: writing fairies in England and Wales
2 ‘Relatum ueridica’: wonderful history from Gervase of Tilbury to Philippe Mousket
3 ‘Le Noble hystoire’: romance and history in Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine
4 ‘En rime l’istoire’: vanishing history in Couldrette’s Mélusine and Richard Coer de Lyon
Conclusion: between history and romance
Index
About the author
Victoria Flood is Associate Professor in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham
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