Since romances were read alongside other literary, historical, political and religious texts, and since their audience was both noble and gentle, this chapter aims to identify gentry concerns in the different texts available to them. Among the most well-known Middle English texts dealing with the topic of gentility are Chaucer's poem 'Gentilesse' and his 'Wife of Bath's Tale'. The portraits of the Knight and the Franklin in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have also been used by literary critics and historians when discussing fourteenth-century society and its stratification in relation to Chaucer's own reflections on this topic. Instructional texts appear in miscellaneous manuscripts alongside romances, religious tracts and other items, including recipes and medical remedies. In the composite manuscripts many copies survive of the Brut chronicle, Thomas Hoccleve's Regiment, John Lydgate's Secrets, chronicles, genealogical chronicles and advice literature alongside romances.

Sir Edward Hastings expected immediate understanding of the term 'gentilman', and sympathy for his claim that gentle status and imprisonment were radically incompatible. In Latin, 'generositas' seems to have signified nobility by birth in the early thirteenth century, but by 1295 it also signified gentility bestowed by royal title. The breadth of meanings that came to be associated with gentility may itself have encouraged extended usage of the terms, making them peculiarly applicable to women as well as men. Dress and material circumstances were certainly two common makers of reputation and markers of gentility. Virtues such as truthfulness, courage and courtesy were also taken to be concomitants of gentility. Claimants to gentility were involved in a world of fluid social meanings, where their social status was continually being tested and negotiated by peers and neighbours in their community of honour.

The politics of later medieval England have acquired an unsavoury reputation: this was an age of king-killers, after all. Sir John Scott and Sir John Fogge dominated Kentish politics during their time as, respectively, controller and treasurer of Edward IV's household. Each of these local leaders had his own gentry networks. Service in the king's wars, either on campaign or as part of a castle garrison, gave many of the gentry experience of England's Celtic neighbours and, of course, France. Office-holding provided the framework within which the greater gentry led their public lives. The Church held vast estates, and the major religious houses needed servants, estate officials, lawyers and well-wishers, creating their own 'affinities' within which the gentry found employment. In many cases, the greater gentry were perfectly capable of maintaining their autonomy.

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.