Airy Nothings Brill’S Studies in Intellectual History
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Airy Nothings Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History General Editor Han van Ruler, Erasmus University Rotterdam Founded by Arjo Vanderjagt Editorial Board C.S. Celenza, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore M. Colish, Yale University J.I. Israel, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton A. Koba, University of Tokyo M. Mugnai, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa W. Otten, University of Chicago VOLUME 222 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsih Alasdair A. MacDonald Airy Nothings Imagining the Otherworld of Faerie from the Middle Ages to the Age of Reason Essays in Honour of Alasdair A. MacDonald Edited by Karin E. Olsen and Jan R. Veenstra LEIDEN • BOSTON 2014 Cover illustration: Walpurgisnacht, a scene from a nineteenth-century edition of Goethe’s Faust (München, c. 1875), illustrated by August von Kreling (1819–1876). Faust is fascinated by some of the female apparitions; one, Mephistopheles explains, is a Medusa, another is Lilith, Adam’s first wife. (Image from a private collection) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Airy Nothings : Imagining the Otherworld of Faerie from the Middle Ages to the Age of Reason : essays in honour of Alasdair A. MacDonald / edited by Karin E. Olsen and Jan R. Veenstra. pages cm. — (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History ; 222) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-24551-8 (hardback : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25823-5 (e-book) 1. Fairies in literature. 2. Literature—History and criticism. 3. Folklore. I. Olsen, K. E. (Karin E.) editor of compilation. II. Veenstra, Jan R., 1939– editor of compilation. III. MacDonald, A. A. (Alasdair A.) honouree. PN682.F27A38 2014 809’.93375—dc23 2013034667 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0920-8607 ISBN 978-90-04-24551-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25823-5 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Introduction .................................................................................................... vii Alasdair MacDonald: In Praise of Versatility ........................................ xvii Notes on Contributors .................................................................................. xxi List of Illustrations ......................................................................................... xxiii Marlowe’s Ghost: The Second Report of Doctor John Faustus ........... 1 Robert W. Maslen Rhetorical Play in Cornelius Agrippa: The Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex ...................................... 25 John Flood Ein Schwert in Frauenhand: Notizen zu einigen volkssprachigen Texten des Mittelalters ........................................................................... 41 Tette Hofstra Female Voices from the Otherworld: The Role of Women in the Early Irish Echtrai ......................................................................... 57 Karin E. Olsen Morgan le Fay and the Fairy Mound in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ............................................................................................... 75 Richard North Cresseid ‘Beyond the Pale’ .......................................................................... 99 David J. Parkinson Die Widersacher des allmächtigen Gottes: Teufel und Dämonen in den Concordantiae Caritatis des Ulrich von Lilienfeld ............ 113 Rudolf Suntrup Boundaries of the Fairy Realm in Scotland ........................................... 139 Julian Goodare vi contents ‘Bull-Begger’: An Early Modern Scare-Word .......................................... 171 Henk Dragstra Shaggie Thighs and Aery Formes: Satyres and Faeries in Ben Jonson’s Oberon ........................................................................... 195 Helen Wilcox Paracelsian Spirits in Pope’s Rape of the Lock ....................................... 213 Jan R. Veenstra Index .................................................................................................................. 241 INTRODUCTION Jan R. Veenstra and Karin Olsen In the intellectual tradition of the Latin West, the invisible world of supernatural agency was dominated for a long time by angels, demons and disembodied souls. The spirits of woods, fields, mountains, rivers and lakes, the little folk from fairy stories, the familiar spirits of witchcraft lore and the ghostly inhabitants of the four elements were deprived of the intellectual standing that their angelic superiors demanded for them- selves, and they were frequently dismissed as demonic quirks or childish superstitions. Even though their presence in folklore and literature testi- fied to a lasting interest in the minds and imagination of authors and read- ers from the Middle Ages to the present day, it was not until the sixteenth century that their status as objects of intellectual inquiry and speculation began to gain prominence. The first author to give them a non-demonic place in the order of cre- ation was Paracelsus whose Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salaman- dris (posthumously published in 1566) legitimised the elemental spirits, or Geistmenschen as he called them, as forces inherent in nature much in the lines of the secret virtues of plants and herbs and stones, placed there by the creator for the benefit of mankind as restorative powers or objects of marvel. The Swiss doctor approached them with the eyes of the empiri- cist, even though he believed their visible manifestation relied on divine revelation, and treated them as further evidence of nature’s plenitude and as a scientific reminder of the Aristotelian precept that nature abhors a vacuum. Paracelsus was in fact the first to give elemental spirits a local habitation and a name in a scientific world picture. The impact of this work, however, was slight and mainly limited to the field of natural magic where practical metaphysics bonded with cer- emonial heterodoxy. Paracelsus’ intellectual apology of elemental spirits strangely coincided with empirical innovations in science and a renewed interest in the spirits of nature on the part of poets and playwrights. The treatise entered an intellectual scene where science was about to discredit all supernatural agency and where the otherworld of magic and spirits took refuge in the theatre of fairy queens and airy nothings. Far from being a capitulation, this escape into the world of the imagination was in viii introduction fact quite the reverse—at least for some thinkers. Paracelsus himself had made a strong case for the power of the imagination, one of man’s facul- ties that was deemed capable of exerting influence on the physical world. He strongly believed in a process of natural causation whereby morose imaginings can spread the plague faster than infected air, and whereby a mother’s phantasies profoundly affect her foetus. The same level of real- ity can be attributed to the spirits who found a bedding in the heated imagination of poets, and for some early-modern minds the fairy instru- ments of Prospero’s potent art were to be taken very seriously. For more than a century Paracelsus’ spirits could thrive in the world of magic and the world of art where the boundaries between fiction and reality were seriously blurred. Early-modern sceptics and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century en lightened rationalists would eventually banish all spirits to fictional afterlives, removing them once and for all from a thoroughly mechanized universe. For natural spirits like the ones that had only recently been rehabilitated by Paracelsus, this meant a return to an already familiar condition. Geoffrey Chaucer at the beginning of his Wife of Bath’s Tale had relegated the fairy court to ‘th’olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour’ when the land was full of ‘fayerye’.1 He was convinced that nowadays there were no fairies left since they had all been replaced by wandering monks. Duke Theseus in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (from around 1596) was even less generous in his beliefs stating that fairies were wrought by the seething brains of lovers and lunatics and that the poet’s pen could give ‘to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’. His disbelief was checked, however, by his betrothed Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, who realized that more than ‘fancy’s images’ are required to transfigure the minds of the Athenian lovers; and that these fruits of fancy can eas- ily grow to ‘something of great constancy’.2 Of course, in terms of Shake- speare’s self-conscious artistry this could well refer to the imaginary world of the stage made real in terms of a Paracelsian theory of the imagination. For the artist,