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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:35]
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- [01:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Clap your hands if you believe in fairies. In the early modern period, pretty much everyone would have clapped. But Peter Pan also tells us that every time a child says I don't believe in fairies, a fairy somewhere falls down dead. And no one in early modern Britain would have thought that a bad thing, but they wouldn't have said it all the same because they believed in a reverse danger. Saying the word fairy cost the sayer.
- [02:08]
Interviewer/Host
A year of life.
- [02:09]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, my guest and I are going to endanger our longevity today as we're going to be saying it a lot. And much of what we have to say concerns the ways in which fairies.
- [02:17]
Interviewer/Host
Have been tamed but were historically very dangerous indeed.
- [02:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm joined by the brilliant Diane Purkis, professor of English Literature and a tutorial Fellow at Keble College, Oxford. Her books include the Witch in History, Magical Tales, and the one we'll be drawing on. Especially today, Troublesome A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories. Professor Perkis joined me in February 2024 to explore the multifaceted symbolism of fairies, to examine their role as gatekeepers of identity TR transitions, their connections to sexuality and childbirth, and their place in both the realm of the living and the dead. And along the way, we uncovered fairies surprising connections to discoveries of the new world. The use of fairies in Scottish witch trials, and more positively, the cultural significance of fairies as symbols of hope and transformation. I began by asking Professor Perkis how she understands the notion of fairies and as gatekeepers standing on the threshold of transition.
- [03:26]
Professor Diane Purkis
I think what it means is that the fairy represents a moment in life where you pass from one identity to another, and that might be something obvious and biological. Fairies are very strongly connected with sexuality and with childbirth and with birth itself, looked at from the point of view of the baby. And in all those ways, in rather obvious ways, fairies are gatekeepers. But less obviously, that also translates into fairies as almost psychopomps standing on and crossing the boundary between the realm of the dead and the realm of the living. What does it mean when you have someone who's of your blood, who's died young? In a way, the answer might be that you still feel a connection with them. And one way for people to talk about that, without talking about it directly, is to talk about that person as a fairy, as somebody who's still present in the landscape, still present in their minds and in their lives. Obviously, that's also a way of processing grief, which is a phase of life that's full of transitions. Finally, I would also mention that, very surprising, when I first started researching a connection between fairies and the discoveries of the new world and the discovery that the planet is twice as big as people believed, it was that kind of sense of transition where the whole of society moves actually individually, but eventually holistically, from a world really dominated by a set of ideas associated with medieval theology to a set of ideas associated with empiricism and experimentation. And theories, rather surprisingly, also turn out to be fundamental to that transition, too.
- [05:15]
Interviewer/Host
Now, just in case people are thinking of the sort of small, gauzy, winged creatures from Victorian stories, we probably ought to say what we mean by a fairy. And I suppose what perhaps people would have thought of a fairy as around 1500 would be useful as we go forward.
- [05:35]
Professor Diane Purkis
Indeed, and you are perfectly right to say that at any rate, in 1500, most people would have thought of a fairy tale as life human sized rather than as tiny. There are, however, specific categories of fairy that are small. And the specific category I mentioned that really connects with what you were asking me about before is the household fairy or brownie. They tend to be small, small in the sense of the size of a cat or a small dog, not small in the sense of microscopically tiny, but child size, and in some respects childlike or pet like in their role. But certainly the idea of tiny gauzy benevolent fairies is something we get almost exclusively from the Victorians. When tiny fairies do get, I think I'm going to say, conjured up by Shakespeare and a team of elite poets, they are not necessarily benign. They are usually mildly scary and somewhat malevolent.
- [06:33]
Interviewer/Host
So could we even go further? Could we say that in the early modern period, fairies are becoming dangerous?
- [06:39]
Professor Diane Purkis
Definitely. And in fact, I'd go even further and say that fairies always have an aura of danger in the medieval period as well. You're dealing with them because they have enormous power. They have lots of things they can give you, like knowledge and occult powers and the ability to cure illnesses. That's all great. They also know where buried treasure is. That's really important to their status. But they do want something in return, and they are tricksy. They will try to get more from you than you were initially willing to give. A very standard kind of exchange that we see playing out in a number of Scottish witch trials is women who approach the fairies in quest of occult powers and find themselves either forced into sex with the fairies or forced to give up their children to the fairies. There's a point at which these relations stop being consensual and become something that you can't escape from, that you can't uncommit to. So in that sense, the fairies traditionally always do manifest as mildly and sometimes strongly predatory.
- [07:50]
Interviewer/Host
So let's pick up on those Scottish witch trials, because what was very interesting to me is that the stories that you tell fall outside the sort of major witch craze, if you will, periods of the 1590s and the late 1620s. And in one of the cases with Elspeth Roche, you suggest that sometimes when women were describing a figure that their interrogators took to be the devil, they were actually describing fairies.
- [08:17]
Professor Diane Purkis
Yeah, absolutely. Elspeth uses the word fairy to describe a man in black who comes to her, offers her enormous occult powers, but in exchange demands repeated sex. He's also a dead relation. This is a very common kind of fairy encounter in Scotland, that your relative, who typically died young, the phrase for it in the period is before their time, becomes not a ghost, but a fairy. They ride with the fairies, they are fairies. And in Elspeth's case, this figure who died in battle is described by her as a fairy, even though he's wearing black, he's wearing green as well, but a fairy color. And the interrogators, because they are Calvinist Presbyterians, interpret what she's saying as disclosing sexual relations with the devil. She on the other hand, is telling a story about what might be forced rape and incest that references her sense of the ever presence of the dead in the landscape. And each of them is kind of deaf to what the other is saying. And this happens a lot in Scottish witch trials. The Calvinists are out to prove witchcraft by demonstrating dealings with Satan. And they don't have any gray areas, any ambivalent figures in their heads. So any ambivalent being, like a fairy, has to be immediately translated into, this is a demon, actually. But this doesn't have any purchase on the people who are being accused. The people being accused doggedly go on talking about fairies, because in their minds, fairies are not devils and they are exonerating themselves. So it's a tragic series of misunderstandings.
- [10:02]
Interviewer/Host
It suggests this huge sort of hinterland of supernatural beliefs that are really unaware of or unwilling to admit to, this great intellectual edifice that exists outside of what they're interested in.
- [10:20]
Professor Diane Purkis
Absolutely right. From our point of view, in the 21st century, despite the horror of the witch trials, it's one of the very few opportunities that history affords to hear the voices of ordinary people, people who haven't been to Oxford and Cambridge, who haven't properly signed on to the thinking of the time. And what's very striking, as soon as you do hear those voices, is how very different they are from what. What we tend to assume people are thinking. Historians of the Reformation will blithely say, and these were people's idea of hell. This is what people thought hell was in the 16th century. Well, if you go to the witchcraft trials, you'll see that it's not that simple, that people are still very much thinking with a series of gray areas that might also be destinations for the dead. And it's not the case that everyone has simply accepted what the Church is telling them. And that's particularly the case in the parts of Scotland where there's still a significant number of Gaelic speakers, because obviously there. There's also a linguistic barrier to acceptance of a dominant ideology that fundamentally comes from England. And that ideology of continental witchcraft has huge influence over the educated elite in Scotland, and particularly in the Lowlands, but virtually none in places like Aberdeenshire, which kind of on the boundary of these two regions, where you find lots and lots of people saying that. And there's this wonderful magician who says he's slept with the faerie Queen for 20 years and has many children by her, and that he first got to know her because she was friends with his mother, rather endearingly the only Thing that the Scottish Kirk can do with it is to put it back into the box of, okay, this is the devil. Actually, it's just that this poor ignorant fool doesn't understand that it's the devil. And you can see just this enormous cultural identity confusion going on in every single one of these trials.
- [12:17]
Interviewer/Host
It is such a fascinating irony, isn't it, that, as you say, witch trials were an awful thing. Awful thing. And this attempt to take complicated ideas and rich culture and press them into black and white and by doing so kill people along the way happen. And yet the sources allow us this insight. In England, you suggest that in the witchcraft trials there some familiars, the demons who take the form of small animals, who do the witch's will, may be understood to be a kind of fairy, or to put it the other way, that what interrogators understood to be familiars were stories about fairies.
- [12:57]
Professor Diane Purkis
Absolutely right, because the familiar is actually just England. No other culture has familiars. Very many other cultures have household fairies. All of northern Europe have household fairies of varying degrees of malevolence. There are Russian household fairies, Latvian household fairies. There are lots of these creatures. But in England, it becomes a peculiarity of the witch trials, because throughout the witch trial period, and maybe this is surprising to some listeners, there's always a fairly high level of anxiety and a fairly high level of discomfort about the fact that there's never any proof for witchcraft. It's really just one person's word against another. Some of the same kind of real discomfort that we might feel about rape cases is felt about witch trials in this period. So they're always looking around for some way to make it empirically evident that somebody has committed an act of witchcraft, which from the Elizabethan witchcraft statute onwards, the late Elizabethan one, is defined as having dealings with the devil rather than what you do with the supernatural powers he gives you earlier. Witchcraft is mostly a question of doing maleficium, doing bad stuff, killing somebody else's pig or killing their child. Later, it becomes a question of dealings with the devil. And therefore that's where the focus comes to lie evidentially. So they confet this complicated idea that the magic is actually not done by the witch herself, but by the devil, because they can't accept the that elderly women with missing teeth actually have magical power. Instead, it's this powerful male entity that has the real power. The women are deluded. So it follows that they simply have to prove that elderly women have had dealings with the devil in order to have a nice clean case of Witchcraft and go to prosecution. And they come up with this idea that since elderly women aren't likely to be having dealings with a sort of full on continental Satan in red trousers, there must be something else in their lives that represents the power of Satan. And they hit on the idea from the witch's own words, the accused witch's own words, that the witches are having or entertaining a supernatural entity that helps them with household things. The witches then, unhelpfully, a bit like the Scottish witches, say, yes, yes, I put out a bowl of cream for the Brownie every 6th of January. And this is then written by the clerk of the court as I put out a bowl of cream for the devil. And the witch will also explain that the name of her familiar is something very obviously the name of a household brownie, something like Hob or Robin, these are sort of fairy names. And the court still doesn't twig and still wants to say, okay, this is her familiar then. And then it follows that any small domestic pet, like your dog or my dog or one of my five cats, becomes proof. And their attachment to me and enthusiasm for being cuddled by me or being stroked by me, and the fact that approach me on an hourly basis demanding that I refill their food bowls, further proof of my dealings with Satan. And so then everybody settles contentedly with this model. The really bizarre aspect of it, though, is the idea that the witch feeds these creatures from her body. So they then instate not a sexual relationship with the devil, but a maternal relation with the devil, where the witch sort of breastfeeds, but doesn't feed with milk, but with blood, this animal familiar, or puts out food for them. But the breastfeeding part's important. And so they look for signs on the witch's body that the witch has such a familiar, and this is called a witch mark.
- [16:45]
Interviewer/Host
Perhaps we could imagine now actually the conflation of the maternal and the sexual, because the witch marks are so often found in the genitals and because the, you know, men sexualize breasts. So the breastfeeding itself is almost sexual.
- [17:00]
Professor Diane Purkis
Well, it's more than that even, because there's one case where very plainly what they're identifying as a witch teat is actually the clitoris. I mean, it's kind of a joke. You know, men can never find it. And then the one time they do find it, this is what they do with it. So the kind of people who are looking for witch marks on the bodies of witches, they either find the clitoris or they find hemorrhoids. And they don't really distinguish very sharply between them. So it's also about a kind of disgust for the lower female body. There's that horrible speech in King Lear when he's mad, when he talks about his daughter Goneril, and he talks about her sexual parts as the mouth of hell. That was also a strand of thinking as part of the witch trials, that the lower body of the witch is so disgusting that only the devil could approach it.
- [17:41]
Interviewer/Host
To take us off in a related but slightly different direction, in another case that you look at of witchcraft, Janet Weir, we have a woman who's accused of incest and in response comes out with a long story about a fairy woman and a spinning wheel. What should we make of this?
- [17:58]
Professor Diane Purkis
Well, my sense is that fairies are something that women have recourse to when they're asked about something that it's not possible for women to talk about directly. So this is a perfect example that we obviously are in a world where it's completely inappropriate even for women to refute accusations of incest. Even a willingness to talk about it would be a sign of guilt. It therefore follows that in that period, women invited to talk about such things are going to turn it into a different kind of story. A story that's still about a forbidden encounter, a story that's still about a transgression of a boundary, but a story that's now also about a fairy realm. What I'm really interested in, in Janet Wheeler's case is that this is a fairly educated woman. Unusually, the vast majority of Scottish witches are, I wouldn't say peasants, because that's a big, useless term, really, but let's say from the husbandman class or a bit below, they may be quite comfortable in their village community, but they're certainly not part of the elite. Janet Weir is kind of middle class and a little bit urban, and yet she is also willing to address what you could really describe as this traumatic topic via a story about fairies and spindles and whatnot. And I think that tells us something terribly important about why so many of these stories survive, why fairy tales are still so important to women. It's because they're one of the very few established genres of anything that have a female protagonist and a female protagonist who often dares and does very difficult, adventurous and heroic things. And I think that's the answer to the question of why fairies. When you're thinking about something terrible that's happened in your life, like the fact that your baby is behaving intolerably badly, or like the Fact that you're now in a situation where you're repeatedly being subjected to sexual demands that are unwelcome. You address that not directly, but indirectly in this series of ambient myths and dreams. And that gives your story a chance of releasing some emotions without exposing you to the criticism that you would get if you talk directly about what's really happening.
- [20:36]
Interviewer/Host
So one of the things that it was hard to talk about was maternal ambivalence, which you mentioned there one's baby behaving badly, as it were. And you give the testimony of Susan Swapper in your book from Southern England, which introduces us to fears of fairy abduction, although in this case, not necessarily a baby. Can we think about abduction and how this is associated with fairies and why it is?
- [21:02]
Professor Diane Purkis
I suppose we're talking about the changeling myth, really, here. Most stories about changelings concern babies, so you can actually have adult changelings, and I'll come to that in a minute. But the story concerning the changeling baby is that your perfectly lovely, rosy, adorable, well behaved baby turns overnight into a howling monster that can't be appeased and can't be comforted and appears to be rejecting you. I've had two children. I have to say this resonates with me because actually, there are days that feel like that what worked yesterday doesn't work anymore. Nobody knows what they're doing. And we often have this fantasy that in earlier times, people were somehow comfortable with maternity and they understood it perfectly. Nonsense. There's never a point where you're comfortable with it because there's never a point where you know your own baby. And as anyone who's had more than one will know, what worked with the first one doesn't work with the second.
- [22:17]
Interviewer/Host
Somebody said to me once a very useful phrase was that it's almost like babies reset at midnight.
- [22:22]
Professor Diane Purkis
Yeah, exactly. That's what the changing myth is. So you have had a lovely previous day with this adorable, darling, rosy creature with cute toes and dimples at the base of their fingers. And the next day, for no noticeable or obvious reason, everything is absolutely fell. And I think that the changeling myth is a way of letting women off the hook about the feelings that they have on those days when everything is fell, when they are run down and sicky and the baby is run down and sicky, and the elder children are demanding and the husband wants his dinner, and the whole thing is just suddenly an absolute waking nightmare, like something in a gothic film. Moments when they vomit in your hair, the moments when you are trying to show them off to some picky elderly relative, and they lose all control of their bodily functions. Those kinds of moments. I think those moments are something that women really flagellate themselves about, because we're never supposed to think, oh, my God, this is horrifying. Can't I just get away from them just for a day? You're never supposed to think that. You are never supposed to say, oh, my God, I loathe them, even though all mothers feel that way sometimes. So we have this body of story where you're allowed to say, I loathe him because it's not my baby anymore. Luckily, my real baby, whom I still love and who's still all dimpled and adorable, is somewhere else. And this horrifying monster that's ruining my life and making a sequence of thought quite impossible is not my baby. This is a not my baby baby. And so, in a way, I'm showing my real love for my baby by rejecting this baby as my not baby. And this then leads to a series of rituals and myths, some of which are pretty horrifying. And my favorite one is the one connected with Saint Guinfour, brilliantly researched by Jean Claude Schmidt. This is the greyhound saint of France. Yep, a greyhound. As a saint, I kind of love popular Catholicism because it's so unruly. Obviously, we know about this because the Dominicans came along and said, you can't have a dog who's a saint. This is just impossible. But the locals were convinced because he'd saved a baby's life, you see, and drowned in the saving of the life. So they established this shrine to him, and the deal was, you took your changeling baby to the shrine, you plonked it down in the woods, and then you went away and prayed while a candle burned down. Well, what a wonderful relief that must have been, because however hard it screamed, you weren't allowed to go to it because that would ruin the ritual. You got four hours off from the awful business of trying to work out what was the matter. You were handing it over to Sin Guinfort to sort it out. And then after four hours, you went and picked it up again. And the idea was that the fairies had returned your own wonderful child to you. So it gave women a respite, it gave women an outlet, it gave women a reason to hope that tomorrow would be less disastrous than today. So socially and psychologically, this is hugely helpful, perhaps less helpful, and there's lots of evidence of this from Tudor England, was the practice of abandoning your baby on a dung hill on the grounds that the fairies would come and replace it with your own child. So you put your baby on the dunghill. The fairies are disgusted that you're abandoning their child on the dunghill, so they come and collect it, save it, and replace it with your darling rosy cheeked sweetheart. But it's a similar idea. It gets worse in that some of these rituals involve things like sitting the baby on a fire. And the later, more horrifying stories concern adult changelings. And the one that people might like to hear about is much later than the period we're mainly discussing, but tells us something important again about the continuity of beliefs. And this is the burning of Bridget Cleary in Ireland. And it's kind of horrifying. Basically believed by her husband to have been replaced by a changeling. And in an effort to get his real wife back, he burns the changeling alive, he sets fire to his own house and his wife dies. And the reason we know about this is that there's a court case where he's tried for murder. So people did go to great lengths because of these myths. And there is a lot of anger, a lot of murderous rage tied up in these stories where, particularly with adult women, it's plain that what happens is that the husband feels he's lost control of the woman in the same way that a mother might feel that she's no longer able to manage her baby. But when you're managing another adult, the vibe is completely different and much more uncomfortable. So this is a really horrifying story, in many respects, of the way in which the changeling also exemplifies the idea of horrifying, problematic change. I'm starting to think about this in terms of the anxieties about transgender that we're seeing in the modern world, the extent to which people whose children turn out to be trans will deny that it's still their child, so that we will actually go through a grieving period because it was my son and now it's my daughter, or it was my daughter and now it's my son. And I'm just sort of thinking that that might bring some of these myths and dreams and stories back into focus as we start to deal as a society society with what's really quite a challenging situation within individual families. I'm not saying anything highly political here, but just addressing the emotional and psychological costs of these kinds of big social changes.
- [28:03]
Interviewer/Host
Now, we've talked about fairies as sort of useful mechanisms, I suppose, for dealing with difficult situations. And one of the ways in which they do that is that you say they're sort of the early modern equivalent of buying a ticket in the National Lottery. They're a magical way of transforming lives. A risky ticket, though, surely?
- [28:23]
Professor Diane Purkis
Yeah, absolutely, that's true. It's perhaps more like gambling on the Internet in that sense. But I think the point of the Lottery is that what you're really buying with the ticket is hope. You're buying the idea that things can change, that you're not condemned to farm this tiny piece of land that you'll be lucky to hang onto for the rest of your life. And I think that hope has a value massively over and above the value that we in our society can easily assign to it, because we have so many ways to change our lives in small and large ways, in comparison with people in Tudor England. People in Tudor England really led lives that are almost unimaginably limited by our standards. Most people didn't really travel more than 20 miles from their village. 20 miles is still quite a lot. And it's not as we used to think, that they were stuck in the one village for their entire lives, but it was still the case that their lives were very contained by the social roles they played. And all this was to some extent altered massively by the grammar school system, by the expansion of English naval power. The fact that people who circumnavigated with Drake didn't know where they were going. They thought they were going to the Mediterranean and, to their amazement, shot up in Brazil, suddenly having no idea why it had taken them so long to get there. That kind of thing actually illustrates why it became imperative to find a source of personal hope for people, of personal transformation for people. That's all that people like Drake and Rolly were. All they really were, were people who sort of had a fairy tale fantasy about the transformations possible in their own existence. It worked for them. There were probably hundreds of others it didn't work for that tried the same thing, but were less successful. And in that way, fairies tie in with this really young man, insanely aggressive, ambitious Elizabethan culture of dreamers, where people can go from being a rowboat pilot to being Sir Francis Drake with an enormous house in a lifetime, just like that. But not everyone does that. Or you can be Shakespeare and be someone whose father couldn't raise the money to let him finish school, but who eventually became Armadurus and a significant property owner in his community. And that's the kind of fantasy that fairies also exemplify. It's completely harmonious with that culture to think, well, if I could just find Fairy gold that would be sorted. How does that differ really from finding Aztec gold or finding someone who's found Aztec gold and taking it from them? The idea is actually very similar structurally. The wealth is there somewhere. I just need to find a way to lay hands on it.
- [31:29]
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- [31:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What?
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- [32:14]
Interviewer/Host
Was this the women's way, as it were? Was it only women or was it mostly women who encountered fairies?
- [32:20]
Professor Diane Purkis
It does seem to have been a feminized thing, and at this point I'm just going to recall that the fairies are a matriarchy. One reason they were fascinating to Elizabethans is that they have a queen regnant, and it's quite hard for Tudors initially to think about having a ruling queen. Elizabeth is helped by the fact that she's previously her elder sisters also had to make a go of it and break lots of rules herself. I think Lucy Wooding's new book really brings out the significance of Mary's reign in that respect. But in thinking about what it means to be ruled by a queen and not a king, the fairies become another useful model to think about that transition with. In terms of ordinary women, I think that the fairies represent a much smaller base of hope, but still a base. And the base is really, I think, beautifully exemplified in the Witch of Edmonton. Even though that fairy is not really a fairy at all, but definitely designated as the devil, he also behaves like a familiar this is a character called Dog in the play and was literally played by a man in a dog suit. And if you've ever seen the play, it's hard not to giggle. But there's also something deeply touching about it. This is a woman that nobody likes, partly because she's a bit horrible and shouty, partly because she's so incredibly poor. And she meets this lovely dog and it's a bit like when you see homeless people with dogs and you can see that the dog is the center of their lives because they are the center of the dog's life. Exactly like that. That's what fairies were for. Very poor women. The person who at least gets it that you're stressed about churning your cream, because if you make a mess of it and you don't get butter out of it, that's it for your hope of having shoes in the winter. That's what a fairy is. So it's still about hope, but a much more minor kind of hope, A much more scaled down, miniaturized kind of hope. Male hopes for fairies are nearly always for abundant sex and big treasure.
- [34:11]
Interviewer/Host
I'm reflecting on the irony of what you've told me, which is that a fairy tale did not usually have a fairy tale ending. How much should we attribute the taming of the fairy to William Shakespeare?
- [34:25]
Professor Diane Purkis
William Shakespeare is a big agent in taming the fairy, but I would also argue it's not his fault. And this happens. If you're a brilliant writer, people then hop onto your coattails and they produce sort of weaker, more ersatz versions of what you did. And that's what happens to Shakespeare's tiny fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream. Not Oberyn and Titania, but peaseblossom, mote, mustard seed. The very names betoken tininess. Also the Queen Mab's speech in Romeo and Juliet, where she's clearly tiny. She comes in shape no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman. So she's really, really tiny, really minute centimeter high. Everyone really loves that idea. And they go on to write a series of fairly banal reach me down standard fantasy world builds about tiny fairies and what they wash up in and what they eat and what kind of hunting they do, and whether they use stag beetles as steeds and so on. And there's a lot of that, and that is very tame, and it's kind of boring. The only interesting side of it is that it's sort of early anthropology. It treats the fairies as if they were some Amazonian tribe that had just been discovered, whose behavior is therefore of acute scientific interest. They elaborately make notes on what these people do for worship. There's a Harak poem called the Temple of Oberon which is all about fairy religion. And it's not even political so much as just curious. It's very reminiscent of the early travelers tales about New World peoples, indigenous peoples of the New World. So that's an interesting aspect of it. I would also argue that the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream aren't as tame as people think. To Tanya, since we're talking changelings, she gives quite a smooth account of how she acquires the changeling. Boy. But I'm very doubtful about how consenting the mother was. It sounds exactly like the sort of Scottish witchcraft trial I was talking about earlier, where you somehow find that you have accidentally given your baby to the queen of the fairies. At the end of a conversation with her, Titania describes her votary's pregnancy and how they were together during the pregnancy. That's just what the fairy queen always does. And then she says that she, being mortal, of that boy did die. And yeah, it's kind of creepy. She's taken the boy over because the mother dies. What did the mother die of? Asking for a friend. Very uncomfortable. Actually, it's very plainly a child changeling abduction. And the child is explicitly called a changeling. Of course, Titania is perfectly heartless about it because that's what the fairies are. They are completely heartless about mortals. And in that sense it's an uncomfortable moment. And moreover, Oberyn, is he really as nice as all that? I'm very doubtful if there's a definite shade of an earlier medieval romance called Sedegere in Ogryn's behavior with the lovers. He's overly interested in them in a slightly creepy way. He's particularly attracted to Helena, who's this sort of forlorn maiden in the woods. When you're a forlorn maiden in the woods in medieval romance and you're met by a fairy, I can absolutely tell you that he does not have your well being in mind. There are very many ballads about this. The one your audience is most likely to know is Tam Lin, admirably performed by Fairport convention in the 70s. And it's a creepy ballad, really. You're forbidden to go to the woods. You go to the woods anyway because you're a bit stubborn. And somehow this guy appears and he says, you can either give me your green mantle or your maidenhead. And that's the kind of engagement that you would expect to have with the king of the fairies in the woods. Now, Oberyn doesn't go quite that far, but he does mess with these women's lives and in quite an eroticized way. And he also messes with his wife's sex life. So I'm kind of inclined to say they are tamed, but only just. The wildness is still there. And if you're an alert viewer, you can still detect it. There was a recent Globe production which I did some of the program notes for, which tried to bring out some of that scary wildness and associations with the dead. And I've noticed that that's the trend of theatrical productions of the plane. More recently in the last 10 years, it's gone from being little gauzy things to being super scary, rather malevolent, vampiric creatures. Much more accurate, in fact, to the medieval and early modern belief pattern.
- [38:58]
Interviewer/Host
Well, that's utterly fascinating. I wish I'd seen that. I've got one last question for you then, to close. Did people in the early modern period believe in fairies?
- [39:10]
Professor Diane Purkis
Ooh, that's so tough. Do you believe in fairies? Don't worry about Tinkerbell dying just for the minute.
- [39:16]
Interviewer/Host
Yes. I'm very struck by the fact that number of times we've mentioned the word is going to cost us a lot of life. Given that my understanding of theories has leapt on in the reading of your work, I think I didn't believe in fairies insofar as I have been enculturated.
- [39:33]
Professor Diane Purkis
In them up until now.
- [39:35]
Interviewer/Host
The sense of fairies as malevolent beings has a great more sense of substantiality about them. I still think I probably don't believe in them. Sorry, Tinkerbell, but I understand a sense of people's connection to them in the period that we work on much more.
- [39:48]
Professor Diane Purkis
I completely agree with that. I have a little nasty trick I do when I lecture, which is to ask the lecture theatre, put up your hand if you believe in fairies, and usually about three people will put up their hands. And then I say, put up your hands if you believe in life on other planets. And typically about three quarters of the lecture theater will put up their hands. And I will then say, that's nice, because there's exactly the same amount of evidence for each of them, I. E. None.
- [40:12]
Interviewer/Host
Exactly. And so what I'm interested in, I suppose, is that space that people have and still have between what they say they believe and what they actually think. At core, the number of people, for example, who actually believe in ghosts, but don't say it unless someone says to them, no, I believe in ghosts.
- [40:37]
Professor Diane Purkis
Absolutely. It's less about belief. Maybe belief's too strong. It's maybe more about a sense of possibility. I think people now in the 21st century have a stronger sense of the possibility of fairies because, as you rightly say, nobody can believe in a Disney fairy with wings and gauzy stuff around them. They're perfectly incredible. But it's much easier, I think, when you're out in the countryside at dusk in winter, to believe that there is a presence, an entity or something that you might encounter. And what people in the past might have called that is a fairy.
- [41:19]
Interviewer/Host
Yes, and it's that space in between which is what shaped people's worldviews. And it's not just make sense of things, because I don't want to make it all sort of functional. But I think we've been talking about the range of ways in which fairies gave a language to explain things or to even conceive of them. This work is so fascinating to me because it feels that in the last, what is it, 40 years or so, the move of the work of history has changed so much. To think about this world of people's imaginations and the world of feminized activity for the better, to talk about the real scope of human activity as opposed to just events and politics. And it involves thinking about women a lot of the time.
- [42:08]
Professor Diane Purkis
100% true. And it's tragic that some old war horses of the old side of history are so resentful of this. And it's very clearly been a change for the better, in the sense that it's impossible to get anyone to engage with history if it's all about people who are completely unlike yourself. And, I mean, I don't really identify much, I'm afraid, with early modern lawmakers. I just don't have much of a sense of personal resonance about their keen zest to improve Tudor bureaucracy. Perhaps that says a lot about me, that I feel I have enough bureaucracy in my daily life. I think that what we can really warm to is the idea that despite huge disparities in experience and disparities of belief as well, the people who speak in the Scottish witch trials, the people who attended Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare himself, are confronting very similar human problems, very similar emotional problems, to the kind of problems we confront ourselves. And I don't think it's just functionalism to say that. I think it's about an awareness that every period's culture has to be flexible and responsive to the ongoing needs of the people within that culture, whether those needs are expressive needs, emotional management needs, or simply the need to be able to displace what you're feeling into a body of story, and in that sense, get shot of it.
- [43:36]
Interviewer/Host
Well, Professor Perkins, this has been a profound pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.
- [43:40]
Professor Diane Purkis
Well, thank you very much for inviting me. It's been a pleasure for me as well.
- [43:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tutors From History Hit. Thank you. Thanks also to my researcher, Max Wintle, and my producer, Rob Weinberg. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do, drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History, Hit.
- [44:16]
Professor Diane Purkis
Foreign.
- [44:21]
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