Fantastic histories by Victoria Flood

Fantastic histories by Victoria Flood

Fantastic Histories explores 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. It traces the uses of the fairy as a contested marker of historicity and fictionality in the histories of Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, the continental mirabilia of Gervase of Tilbury, and the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French M lusine 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.

‘The dichotomies of truth and fiction, belief and make-believe have proved to be over-simplistic tools for the analysis of the stories of fairies embedded in the complex Latin histories and vernacular dynastic chronicles of the medieval periodVictoria Flood’s brilliant and thoughtful book teases out the different functions of such fairy narratives, revealing a range of subtle, often surprising implications and destabilising many longstanding assumptions about fairies in medieval culture.’
—Carolyne Larrington, Emerita Professor of medieval European literature, University of Oxford

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Victoria Flood is Professor in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at University of Birmingham

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781526195852
ISBN 10	1526195852
Title	Fantastic histories
Author	Victoria Flood
Series	Manchester Medieval Literature And Culture
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Manchester University Press
Year published	2026-01-20
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.