such attitudes were restricted to the late Middle Ages.24 Perhaps then, with Ferlampin-Acher, we should speak “rather of lore than folklore, or at least give to the term people a very wide interpretation.”25
A second important issue raised by the notion of popular culture concerns periodization. Obviously, vernacular culture did not remain static and unchanging across a thousand years of medieval history, and yet the bestknown attempt to supply a chronology for it, that of Jacques Le Goff, remains problematic. In an introductory sketch to the study of the marvelous in his Imaginaire médiéval Le Goff offers us a three-stage process:
1. The Dark Ages and the repression of the marvelous.
2. The explosion of the marvelous: twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
3. The aestheticization of the marvelous: fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.26
A few pages later he fills in this bare schema with a little more detail:
The very rough periodization which I have proposed applies essentially to learned marvels. In the first period, it seems to me that learned culture succeeded for the most part in occluding the marvelous element in popular culture, which certainly existed and which can be detected between the lines and in other texts. By contrast, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries learned culture is much more receptive to the popular marvelous [le merveilleux populaire], with the clear object of either reclaiming or distorting it. Finally, it seems to me that there is a kind of turn to aestheticization, where the dialogue (or the struggle) between the learned and the popular versions of the marvelous is no longer of the first importance. (p. 38)
While acknowledging the significance of Le Goff’s ground-clearing work here and recognizing the essential open-endedness of such terms as le merveilleux savant and le merveilleux populaire, I still have difficulty with this chronology. In fact it seems to me to suffer from precisely the weaknesses that Le Goff himself detects in the kind of study of popular culture that privileges cultural objects over cultural participants;27 when viewed from below, insofar as such a thing is possible, a somewhat different pattern emerges.
In the Dark Ages the church certainly repressed, in the sense of sought to eradicate, such aspects of popular culture as a belief in fairies, but in the British Isles, at least, good evidence for such beliefs, much of it in the vernacular, survives nonetheless.28 It is worth pointing out that this evidence derives almost entirely from the culture savante, since written material of clear lay provenance is virtually non existent.29 A survey of the pastoral literature of the period, however, leaves a strong impression that church discipline seems to have been relatively light-handed: local superstitions were as likely to be mocked for their folly as castigated for their wickedness. Furthermore, in Bernadette Filotas’s words, “Pastoral literature does not support the view that popular culture was a matter of class. References to social standing are rare, but when they appear, they reinforce the idea of a common culture.”30
This observation calls into question Le Goff’s contention that the explosion (irruption) of the marvelous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries reflects the “growth of lay popular culture, rushing into the breach opened during the eleventh and twelfth centuries by a lay aristocratic culture thoroughly imbued with the one available culture-system distinct from the clergy’s, namely the tradition of folklore.”31 Rather, I believe that the twelfth century witnessed the emergence of a bicultural system arising from a laity increasingly comfortable with the medium of letters and a clerisy “increasingly dependent on, and concerned with, the goodwill and co-operation of the whole population.”32 While it is tempting to locate the actual tipping point a little later, in the years immediately following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the founding of the Dominican order (1216)—the period of Caesarius of Heisterbach, William of Auvergne, and Étienne of Bourbon—this can be done only by excluding such important figures as Gervase of Tilbury (whose writing is contemporary with the Fourth Lateran Council), and both Gerald of Wales and Walter Map (who were at work a generation earlier). Certainly writers such as William of Auvergne and Étienne of Bourbon convey the strong impression that fairy beliefs circulated primarily among the poor and ignorant: William, for instance, speaks of the old women who call demons of this kind ‘ladies’ (“huiusmodi demones, quas dominas vocant vetulae”), of the witlessness of old women who, amazingly enough, spread the belief that fairies steal children (“vetularum autem nostrarum desipientia opinionem istam mirabiliter disseminavit”), and of the debased language of the old crones who speak of ‘changelings’ (“quos vulgus cambiones nominant, de quibus vulgarissimi sunt sermones aniles”).33 The same is true of Étienne de Bourbon, who tells of a pauper vetula who tricked people into believing she was a prophetess; of a quidam rusticus, possibly a thief,34 who encountered Arthur’s house hold while prowling about at night; and of the group of homines rusticani who originated the cult of Saint Guinefort.35 On the other hand, both Walter Map and Gervase of Tilbury were writing for aristocratic audiences, and many of their stories concern noblemen and noblewomen; and even Caesarius of Heisterbach’s fairies/demons move primarily in knightly circles. No doubt the third estate offered some churchmen an easier target than the second, and what Filotas observes of the Dark Ages (“the authorities were quicker to detect paganism and superstition in the customs of subordinate groups than in those of their betters”36) remained true of this later period.
Of Le Goff’s three stages in the development of the medieval marvelous, I have most difficulty in accepting the third: his characterization of le merveilleux in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—he is probably thinking here of Mélusine—as having become somehow ‘aestheticized.’37 What he means by this term is made clearer in a later essay, where he employs an essentially high/low version of the bicultural model: “The approach of opposing the two cultures tends to make of ‘popular’ culture, a culture essentially dominated, manipulated, and exploited by the ‘superior’ culture. Learned culture [la culture savante], from this perspective, either destroys, perverts, or occludes popular culture, forcing upon it an acculturation from above drawn from ecclesiastical, aristocratic—later bourgeois—models, or it rehabilitates it aesthetically, when it has lost its power to resist and retains only ‘the beauty of a corpse.’”38 In my view, vernacular culture (that is to say, the culture of the little tradition) was far from having lost its power to resist in the late Middle Ages despite the church’s having stepped up its campaign against it.39 Writers such as Jean Gerson, Johannes Nider, and Heinrich Kramer give no sign of believing that the battle against popular beliefs had been won; indeed by shifting their casus belli from mere superstition to actual heresy they put the conduct of the war on a dangerous new footing.40
If anything, the official attitude seems to have hardened throughout the Middle Ages, and on the eve of the early modern period things were very much darker than they had been earlier. By the end of the fifteenth century Burchard of Worms’s penance of ten days on bread and water for those who believed that corporeal “sylvans” took pleasure with their lovers41 would have seemed remarkably mild. The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, themselves perfectly ready to believe in such sylvans (or rather in their own demonic reimagination of them as succubi), no longer regarded penance alone as sufficient to counter the danger of heterodox beliefs; they were quite prepared to condemn to death those who held such views: “the only possible way for these and similar practices to be remedied is for the judges who are responsible for the sorceresses to get rid of them or at least punish them as an example for all posterity.”42
The state of hostility, or at least deep suspicion, existing between representatives of the great tradition and those espousing such aspects of the little tradition as a belief in fairies is one of the major themes of this book. For me, its presence permeates medieval romance and helps us to disambiguate what James Wade has termed “the ambiguous supernatural” of medieval fairyland.43 While
