Fairies: A History
Friday 9 October
Castle Hill Baptist Church
10.30am
The truth about belief in fairies is far stranger than clichéd images of tiny figures with wings and wands.
Imagine instead a vast range of supernatural human-like creatures, from prehistoric nature spirits, through medieval theology, Renaissance literature and Enlightenment scepticism … to Tolkien’s mythology. Even in our apparently disenchanted contemporary world, fairy belief endures in surprising ways.
Join Francis Young as he restores fairies to their full historical and cultural complexity. This is not mere superstition, he argues, but a serious expression of how people have made sense of a mysterious world. To study fairies is to study ourselves – our evolving morality, our negotiation of the boundaries of the natural and supernatural and how we imagine our place in the cosmos.
A cultural history stranger, and more relevant, than you’d ever imagine.