Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Marlowe’s Ghost: The Second Report of Doctor John Faustus / Robert W. Maslen -- Rhetorical Play in Cornelius Agrippa: The Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex / John Flood -- Ein Schwert in Frauenhand: Notizen zu einigen volkssprachigen Texten des Mittelalters / Tette Hofstra -- Female Voices from the Otherworld: The Role of Women in the Early Irish Echtrai / Karin E. Olsen -- Morgan le Fay and the Fairy Mound in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / Richard North -- Cresseid ‘Beyond the Pale’ / David J. Parkinson -- Die Widersacher des allmächtigen Gottes: Teufel und Dämonen in den Concordantiae Caritatis des Ulrich von Lilienfeld / Rudolf Suntrup -- Boundaries of the Fairy Realm in Scotland / Julian Goodare -- ‘Bull-Begger’: An Early Modern Scare-Word / Henk Dragstra -- Shaggie Thighs and Aery Formes: Satyres and Faeries in Ben Jonson’s Oberon / Helen Wilcox -- Paracelsian Spirits in Pope’s Rape of the Lock / Jan R. Veenstra -- Index.

Ever since the Middle Ages the Otherworld of Faerie has been the object of serious intellectual scrutiny. What science in the end dismissed as airy nothings was given a local habitation and a name by art. This book presents some of the main chapters from the history and tradition of otherworldly spirits and fairies in the folklore and literature of the British Isles and Northern Europe. In eleven contributions different experts deal with some of the main problems posed by the scholarly and artistic confrontation with the Otherworld, which not only fuelled the imagination, but also led to the ultimate redundancy of learned perceptions of that Otherworld as it was finally obfuscated by the clarity of an enlightened age. Contributors include: Henk Dragstra, John Flood, Julian Goodare, Tette Hofstra, Robert Maslen, Richard North, Karin E. Olsen, David J. Parkinson, Rudolf Suntrup, Jan R. Veenstra, and Helen Wilcox.