This chapter explores the contrasting treatment of English and Welsh-set fairy narratives produced by authors working in England, or aligned with English political sympathies and authority, in the late twelfth century. It begins with Walter Map’s De nugis curialium, a collection of tales and historical anecdotes which include the earliest recorded insular fairy accounts. In De nugis we see a contrasting treatment of the English and Welsh fairy materials: the English fairy is presented as a historical event, while the Welsh is more straightforwardly fabulous. Map’s rejection of Welsh mirabilia reads in relation to the prophetic elements he identifies in his Welsh-set fairy narratives, elements which appear to be held in a close relationship to an Anglo-Latin historiographical concern with the British lie of Arthur’s return from Avalon, and the (related) representation of Welsh-set fairy mirabilia as improper objects of wonder. This is a feature that we find in Gerald of Wales’s Welsh writings also, including his account of the succubus encounter of the south Welsh prophet Meilerius (Meilyr), whose prophetic visions fuel ill-fated rebellion against the English. Finally, the chapter explores analogous accounts of English fairies by William of Newburgh, which are possessed of a marvellous historicity that could only be situated by English authors within an English geographical and cultural context. While for late twelfth-century authors in England, English fairy narratives might have a place in the historiographical record, their Welsh counterparts could not.

The introduction to Fantastic histories explores the principles of marvellous discernment, derived from Augustine, that informed the distinction between true and false marvels in the writing of medieval fairy narratives – a distinction which was often applied in line with a clear set of political investments, determining whose histories might be believed and whose were the stuff of pure fiction. It approaches the construction, and rejection, of historical mirabilia in relation to ‘communities of wonder’, a new application of the concept of the ‘emotional community’ by which wonder is accepted as a legitimate affective response depending on the identification of the group within which the account is understood to have been generated; and in which context acceptance or rejection reads as a value statement on the group itself, its intellectual sophistication, and its right to historical self expression. This treatment and use of wonder offer a notable point of intersection with Homi Bhabha’s work on ‘signs and wonders’, suggestive of a new approach to medieval postcoloniality, not least in relation to the treatment of fairy marvels between Wales and England.

The introduction delineates the ways in which women’s reproductive bodies have been erased and obfuscated by editorial and translation practices from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment. This chapter establishes and defines the original methodology of the book, termed ‘hysteric philology’, a practice that combines traditional philology with contemporary feminist and medical epistemologies. This method allows for close examination of language, which breaks apart the tidy but inaccurate veneer of polite inattention to the specific elements of women’s medicine. The remedies further offer an avenue to study ordinary, rather than extraordinary, early medieval women.

This chapter disentangles the language around childbirth in Old English remedies. An apparent lack in remedies for childbirth is complicated by the misunderstanding of the language for childbirth and for other reproductive processes. Using hysteric philology, the Old English terms afedan, geberan, geeacnian and cennan are examined in context and differentiated. These terms have been translated irregularly at best; for instance, the same term might be translated as childbirth in one remedy and then conception in the next, with no clear logic for the change. However, the chapter finds specific denotations by examining the terms individually, collectively, and in their manuscript and textual context, ultimately distinguishing remedies that have been treated as indeterminate and locating a range of remedies that actually work to address childbirth.

This chapter uses the terms tudder, clænsian, and afeormian to identify the nature of gynaecological cleansing and purging in the medical tradition. Contemporary US culture frames miscarriage, stillbirth and early abortion as separate categories; however, the medical texts construct these processes as a common category constituted by the notion of delayed menstruation. The chapter concludes that the cultural belief in ensoulment provides space for women to understand the reproductive process in blurrier ways that depend upon women’s own assessment of their reproductive status. In this way, medieval texts may illuminate our contemporary attitudes toward reproductive health and encourage physicians now to trust women.

The independent text is based on the Oxford Classical Text with revisions and is accompanied by a selective apparatus.