Chapter I: Fairies and Demons: The case of Melusine
The first chapter addresses how fairies fit into medieval Christian spirituality by examining the romance Melusine, a late fourteenth-century Middle-English translation of a thirteenth-century French romance. Featuring a character that is half-human, half-fairy, this text serves as an ideal case study for examining the concerns that fairies might share qualities with demons and the extent fairies can hope for salvation. This chapter explores the differences between fairies and demons according to medieval demonology and examples of fairies and demons in Middle English texts. Additionally, this chapter also touches on medieval attitudes towards monstrosity and purity of blood, especially when examining the ways Melusine attempts to “pass” as a human in order to gain salvation for her soul.

Chapter II: Fairies, Gender, and Power
The second chapter, “Fairies, Gender, and Power,” challenges the notion that most fairies in Middle English romance are female and offers an examination of both male and female fairies. Building upon Corinne Saunders’s and Kathryn Gravdal’s scholarship on rape and the supernatural, this chapter discusses how male fairies operate within a “paradigm of violence”. I then argue that this propensity to wield greater control than human characters is intrinsic to all fairies, demonstrating this “paradigm of control” by examining how female fairies also exercise control over their human lovers. While both male and female fairies are able to wield greater power over humans than their human counterparts, the ways they exercise this control continues to follow gendered forms of control. The exception is that by virtue of being a fairy, female fairies are able to usurp the male “role” in a heterosexual relationship, and this allows them to perform both male and female forms of power.

Chapter III: “Performing” Fairy
The third chapter tests some of the conclusions made in the previous chapter, particularly the ways female fairies can exercise both male and female types of power. This chapter, “Performing Fairy”, examines human enchantresses who are mistaken as fairies both within the narratives and by critics of these texts. Adapting Judith Butler’s theory of gender as “performance”, I examine the ways Melior in Partonope of Blois and Loosepaine/Lillias in Eger and Grime “perform” fairy. The ways the authors of these texts use these characters evoke motifs usually associated with fairy mistresses, and yet these characters serve a different function because they are not actually fairies. Unlike their fully-fairy counterparts, human women who “perform fairy” revert back to orthodox gender roles by the end of the texts.

Chapter IV: The Fifth Road to Faerie
A common theme in romances featuring fairies is the journey into the Fairy Otherworld. “The Fifth Road to Faerie,” the fourth chapter of this thesis, returns to the medieval Christian worldview and examines the Otherworld realm of Faerie alongside the Christian Otherworlds of Heaven, Hell, Paradise, and Purgatory. In this chapter, I examine the definitions of mortality and the soul, and the fate of the soul in the afterlife, as they relate to fairies in Middle English romance. This chapter considers to what extent the Otherworld, in this case the land of fairy, represents the Underworld or, in Christian terms, Purgatory or Hell. Fairyland often shares qualities of both Paradise and Hell, a situation that provides an engaging exploration of medieval ideas about Purgatory. By comparing the motifs of each of the different Otherworlds I determine that Faerie serves as an ambivalent secular Otherworld in the medieval imagination.

Chapter V: Fairies in Avalon
Continuing the previous chapter’s discussion of Otherworlds, the fifth and final chapter examines Avalon in Arthurian literature and the extent it can be considered a type of Fairy Otherworld. This chapter traces the development of Avalon in British literature, employing both chronicles and romances written in England, and then examines the resulting image of Avalon with the motifs of Faerie discussed in the previous chapter. In doing so, I challenge the tendency in scholarship to treat Avalon as a type of Fairy Otherworld. This chapter also considers Morgan le Fay in terms of her relationship with Avalon and, applying the conclusions drawn in Chapter Three, her position as a quasi-fairy character. I conclude that despite first appearances, neither Avalon nor Morgan le Fay is truly associated with fairy in the English tradition.