Fantastic Histories

A study of the relationship between medieval history and fiction, exploring 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.Beginning with accounts of fairy mothers in the works of Walter Map and Gerald of Wales, the book traces the uses of the fairy as a contested marker of historicity and fictionality in 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, and its relationship to the dominant political and cultural interests that determined whose fantasies were false and whose were the stuff of history.