Fairy Encounters in Medieval England: Landscape, Folklore and the Supernatural

What is it like to meet a being from another world? This book collects testimony from eight hundred years of witnesses baffled by the supernatural breaking into their lives. Close reading of miracle collections, chronicles, saints lives and sermons shows how they depended on first-hand vernacular voices, never quite suppressed in the Latin of the clergymen who transcribed them. When people saw spirits, surface identity mattered less than common nature. Whether manifesting as fairies, revena...