The Conclusion discusses two significant appearances of Mélusine in early modern writings on magic and witchcraft, noting her role as both a designator of credible belief, and a symbol of the incredible fictions synonymous with romance, applied in defence of both belief and scepticism. This is followed by an overview of the relationship between fairies and belief in medieval historiography, and the selective truth values of these materials.

Chapter 3 approaches Jean d’Arras’s late fourteenth-century dynastic romance Mélusine, a French prose work written in the service of Jean, Duke of Berry, who is presented by Jean d’Arras as heir to the house of Lusignan, the line founded by the work’s eponymous fairy. Despite clear components of fictionality, Mélusine is presented as a true history that matters not despite but because of the fairy’s uncertain reality status, and Jean explicitly holds belief in the marvellous to be the quality of a noble heart. Written in the context of the Hundred Years War, Jean’s text has political investments very close to its surface, and the romance functions in a new, reformulated relationship to British marvels of the twelfth century, which endorse the historicity and reality of marvellous phenomena held in opposition to English territorial interests in France. The narrative concludes with a revisionist reimagining of the departure of the English from the fortress of Lusignan, augured by an apparition of Mélusine witnessed by none other than the Welsh rebel, and subject of Welsh political prophecy, Owain Lawgoch. The fairy is a marvel which the English are incapable of fully apprehending, the meaning of which is apparent only to the French and the Welsh.

This chapter examines the difficulty of determining time relative to conception in pregnancy. In both the Middle Ages and the contemporary moment, the ways in which time around pregnancy is counted place women at the mercy of external ‘experts’. However, pregnancy and conceiving bodies produce their own internal logic of time relative to the specifics of each individual conception and pregnancy. The Old English prognostics, like many contemporary superstitions, attempt to make legible a pregnant body that is unreadable in many ways, while remedies for infertility balance the authority of the medical practitioner with the agency of the woman seeking treatment.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the figurine identified by Audrey Meaney as the Broadstairs Woman, now located in the British Museum. It then discusses the ways in which maternal bodies are often absent in genealogies, despite their biological necessity. It turns to a discussion of the universal male body in medical research, and the ways in which Old English medical texts treat the male body as the default body. This default function is visible too in the word mann, which may mean person, but implies the notion of man as ideal person. The lack of discussion of women’s medicine generally, and menopause specifically, reveals the kinds of gaps that are present in the medical tradition of the Middle Ages, but also the lack of research resources for women’s medicine in the current moment.

Chapter 2 begins with the fairy narratives of Gervase of Tilbury, an early thirteenth-century collector of mirabilia and an encyclopaedist working under the patronage of the half-English Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV. While Gervase has often been understood as a significant figure in the incipient development of a medieval scientific method analogous to our own, he is overtly engaged with the historical status of fairy narratives. These are explored by Gervase in relation to the construction of what I term ‘communities of wonder’, tracing the reach and limits of supernatural credibility. Gervase’s texts suggest a particular association of the fairy with a figure associated with wonder, and its abuses, in medieval history-writing: the heretic, a figure inflected in this period by both antisemitic and misogynistic discourses. Given its potent capabilities as a mode of community demarcation, it is perhaps no surprise that the heretical fairy mother first appears as a component of highly partisan revisionist histories during the thirteenth century. Gervase’s fairy content corresponds closely with Gerald of Wales’s near-contemporary De principis Instructione, directed to the French king, Louis VIII, where we find the first recorded application of the fairy mother to an unnamed duchess of Anjou, an ancestor of the Plantagenet kings of England. This was reworked in Philippe Mousket’s Chronique rimée (composed between 1242 and 1273), which imagines the exclusion from the political community of another (perceived) overmighty woman, an ancestor of Eleanor of Aquitaine who functions as a cipher for Eleanor herself.

The focus of the fourth and final chapter is Couldrette’s early fifteenth-century Parisian verse text of Mélusine, written for Guillaume l’Archevêque, the Lord of Parthenay. The balance between history and romance is a point of tension in Couldrette’s text, which capitalises on the imagined worlds of Arthurian romance in its expanded treatment of the knight’s quest, as a component of historical fiction which derives its political function from its moral exemplarity rather than its absolute historicity. This was in large part a response driven by necessity, for unlike Jean d’Arras’s late fourteenth-century prose romance, Couldrette’s text was written for a patron at a remove from the fortress of Lusignan itself, without access to contemporary witnesses (fabricated or otherwise) of the fairy’s near-historical appearances. However, this discursive re-focusing is similarly a feature of the roughly contemporaneous a-text of Richard Coer de Lyon, the earliest Middle English text aligned with the Mélusine tradition, produced a century earlier than the English translations of Jean d’Arras and Couldrette. Here the English king’s mother is identified not as Eleanor of Aquitaine but as a fairy of Antioch, who provokes a wonder response in a historical context that is unashamedly revisionist to the point of being ahistorical. However, a concern with discretion, the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, is nonetheless still apparent. The wider text juxtaposes a knowing English regard for fictionalised romance marvels with the unknowing fictions it understands to constitute non-Christian religious beliefs, encountered in the context of the text’s crusading fantasies.

The diagnostic body is one that is at once general in its representation of the kinds of maladies a woman might experience, and specific in its request for assistance with a particular medical need. The language of menstruation in medical texts and in the penitentials differs. Where the penitentials use punitive language around menstruation, the remedies advocate treatment both for the stopping of excessive menstruation and for the provoking of a menstrual flow for those in whom it is absent. These remedies around menstruation feature a contest for agency over women’s bodies between the voice of the presumably male author or physician, and the self-knowledge required of women in determining and enacting appropriate treatment. By examining the ways in which the penitentials exert authority over women’s bodies, I find a kind of freedom and self-authorising present in the medical remedies that might not otherwise be visible.