This is easily the best book I have seen on its rather specialized subject since the chapter "The Longaevi" in C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image. The subject is the attitudes of medieval people towards the fairies or elves, by and large not cute little winged Tinkerbells (though that concept did exist) but much more often human-sized beings distinguished from humans by being very long-lived, if not immortal, and possessing magical powers, and often living in a land of fairie abounding the fruits, flowers, palaces and castles, though also often including terrible dangers.
Most were also extremely attractive and were reputed to make full use of that attraction in having sex with humans. Green endeavors to apply a modern "theoretical" gloss to his subject by appealing to Gramsci and others in making the case that the tales of human interactions with these beings often represented a resistance by the "little tradition" of the common people against the "great tradition" of the learned elite, which generally classes these beings as demons and condemned interaction with them --ultimately contributing to the witch hunts of the early modern era. On the whole, I find this theoretical framework not entirely convincing. There is no doubt that there were learned writers who condemned fairies as demons, but there were also plenty of writers for the secular elite, and even some churchmen, who were prepared to regard them as more harmless. This seems to have been true from Walter Map through Chaucer down to Shakespeare, in short all through the period, as Green's own examples demonstrate. For me, the delight in this book is not in its debatable argument but simply in enjoying the vast range of tales about the fairies collected here, mostly fictional but including a certain number of allegedly true accounts. ( )