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.

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.