Dreams And Visions In The Early Middle Ages

A comprehensive overview of ideas about dreams and visions in the Christian cultures of the early Middle Ages.

A comprehensive overview of ideas about dreams and visions in the Christian cultures of the early Middle Ages.

Dreams and visions played important roles in the Christian cultures of the early middle ages. But not only did tradition and authoritative texts teach that some dreams were divine: some also pointed out that this was not always the case. Exploring a broad range of narrative sources and manuscripts, Jesse Keskiaho investigates how the teachings of Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory the Great on dreams and visions were read and used in different contexts. Keskiaho argues that the early medieval processes of reception in a sense created patristic opinion about dreams and visions, resulting in a set of authoritative ideas that could be used both to defend and to question reports of individual visionary experiences. This book is a major contribution to discussions about the intellectual place of dreams and visions in the early middle ages, and underlines the creative nature of early medieval engagement with authoritative texts.

In the High Middle Ages, the dream narrative was an enormously popular and influential form. Along with the romance, it was perhaps the genre of the age. It has come down to us in such classics twelfth to fourteenth-century classics as The Divine Comedy, the Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Chaucer's early poetry, and the works of Guillaume de Machaut. This book redefines the dream vision by attending to its role in philosophical debate of the time, a conservative role in defense of the high medieval synthesis of reason and revelation. Lynch shows how the epistemological basis of this synthesis and the theories of visions that emerged from it drew on Arabic commentaries of Aristotle. These theories informed poetic visions modeled on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a work she discusses in detail before turning to Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun, and Dante. A final section, on John Gower's Confessio Amantis shows how fourteenth and fifteenth-century writers extended and finally moved beyond the conventional form of the dream vision.

Stephen Kruger considers previously neglected material and arrives at a new understanding of this literary genre, and of medieval attitudes to dreaming in general.

Research on medieval and early modern travel literature has made great progress, which now allows us to take the next step and to analyze the correlations between the individual and space throughout time, which contributed essentially to identity formation in many different settings. The contributors to this volume engage with a variety of pre-modern texts, images, and other documents related to travel and the individual's self-orientation in foreign lands and make an effort to determine the concept of identity within a spatial framework often determined by the meeting of various cultures. Moreover, objects, images and words can also travel and connect people from different worlds through books. The volume thus brings together new scholarship focused on the interrelationship of travel, space, time, and individuality, which also includes, of course, women's movement through the larger world, whether in concrete terms or through proxy travel via readings. Travel here is also examined with respect to craftsmen's activities at various sites, artists' employment for many different projects all over Europe and elsewhere, and in terms of metaphysical experiences (catabasis).

Hannah Matis examines how a biblical text was read by the most important figures within the ninth-century Carolingian Reform to think about the nature of Christ and the church.

In this study, I examine dream visions and mystical writings of the late Middle Ages to explore how medieval Christians were defining their individualism and creating a selfhood that encompassed their burgeoning desire for individuality even as they conformed to acceptable social and religious influences. Through Church teaching, medieval Christians understood that humankind had originally been created in the image of God, but that the perfection of humanity as godlike was destroyed in the Fall. In order to develop an identity that could live in the world and yet achieve eternal life, medieval Christians would first have to rectify the seeming disconnect between their physical form and their spiritual one. These visionary works provide the authors' understanding of medieval selfhood either through an attempt to correct the flaw or to accept it as part of humanity. Chapter One introduces my theoretical platform and the critical history of scholarly studies of medieval subjectivity. Chapter Two focuses on the nature of people as physical and spiritual beings in a dream poem, Pearl, by exploring how physical senses inhibit and enhance spiritual understanding. In Chapter Three I examine personal growth and higher understanding in Julian of Norwich's A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, which describe the revelation she received in a vision from God, and Mum and the Sothsegger, which offers a dream vision episode within the confines of a debate poem. In Chapter Four, Luke's gospel story of Martha and Mary provides a backdrop for examining The Cloud of Unknowing and Piers Plowman in conjunction. By seeking the best form of living, these works develop medieval views on the two options that Jesus has given: active and contemplative. The final chapter ties two seemingly disparate texts together, The Book of Margery Kempe and Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess. Although Kempe emphasizes a personal relationship with God and Chaucer sees selfhood unified through the melding of spirit and body required to produce art, both recognize the importance of written text for inspiring others to wholeness of being.