SECRET COMMONWEALTH OF ELVES FAUNS AND FAIRIES (NYRB)

Late in the seventeenth century, Robert Kirk, an Episcopalian minister in the Scottish Highlands, set out to collect his parishioners’ many striking stories about creatures of ‘a middle nature betwixt man and angel’. Kirk’s essay on the supernatural world, left in manuscript when he died in 1692, is an extraordinary amalgam of science, religion, and folklore, suffused with the same curiosity and wonder as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. This new edition features a wide-ranging and illuminating introduction by Marina Warner.