Dreams, Medecine and Literary Practice: Exploring the Western Literary Tradition through Chaucer by Tanya S. Lenz (review)Lenz (original) (raw)
AI-generated Abstract
This review assesses Tanya S. Lenz's book "Dreams, Medicine and Literary Practice: Exploring the Western Literary Tradition through Chaucer," highlighting its unique exploration of the intersection between dreams and medicine within Chaucer's works. The analysis emphasizes how Lenz connects Chaucer's references to medicine, particularly in the context of the Black Death and various poetic narratives, to broader themes of literary practice and truth. While acknowledging some critiques of Lenz's translation approach, the review ultimately commends her insightful contributions to Chaucerian scholarship.
Related papers
Shakespeare and Therapeutizing the "Naturall Sicknes" of Dreams in Reformed England
The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, 2022
Situating the dreams of Cleopatra, Bottom and Caliban in the context of Elizabethan oneirology, medicine, politics, and the English Reformation, this paper argues that Shakespearean oneirotopias (dream topoi) reveal how deeply the Bard felt about contemporary emotional wellbeing, whether concerning an Alexandrine empress, a subaltern weaver or an inebriated "monster." Elizabethans saw dreaming largely within martyrological, heretical, theological or utilitarianist discourses. Proto-medical texts of Galenic oneirology, drawn from Greek influences, gave a secondary position to dreams as dispensable and falsifiable residues of waking realities. Shakespeare's dreamscape challenged the notion of dreams as a "naturall sicknes," finding dramaturgical, aesthetic and psychotherapeutic roles for them. Seen in the light of the method of dream work devised by the psychotherapist Montague Ullman, the Shakespearean dreamscape elicits the anxieties of Elizabethan oneirology to trace and articulate the etiology of dreams, which it failed to wholly appropriate into either a divine (metaphysical) or anthropogenic (secular or materialistic) discourse. The Shakespearean stage operates as a meeting ground between private traumas and collectivized spectacle, legitimizing dream phenomena as perfectly natural and organic constituents of the processual sickness and health of the Renaissance mind, beyond Elizabethan cynicism and the Freudian model of dream censorship.
"That swevene hath Daniel unloke": Interpreting Dreams with Chaucer and the Harley Scribe
2015
This article contrasts Chaucer’s attitude toward dream visions and the Somniale Danielis tradition with English and Latin Somniale works in two of the Harley scribe’s manuscripts: London, British Library MSS Harley 2253 and Royal 12.C.xii. It includes an edition of the Royal Somniale Danielis, here edited and translated for the first time. I demonstrate that—in contrast to Chaucer’s skepticism—the Harley scribe viewed the Somniale tradition as a valuable source of knowledge worthy of transmission into English. The vast gap between these two figures’ approaches to dream interpretation reveals that fourteenth-century attitudes toward texts that bridge the practical/devotional divide were not homogeneous, and that Chaucer’s characteristic ambivalence toward and manipulation of dream genres should not be taken as representative.
The Path to Wholeness: The Therapeutic Potential of Bodily Writing in Late Medieval Dream Visions
2016
This dissertation argues that late medieval dream poets viewed writing as a serious means of therapy, capable of healing both pscyhological and physiological ailments. Blending together the poetic revelatory tradition (influenced by Apocalpytic writings) with new understandings of health and medicine, fourteenth-century dream visions sought to treat the illnesses of their poetic personae by applying medical principles to literary bodies. It is the dream frame in particular, as both a reflection of the poet’s physical and mental condition and a catalyst for introspection and transformation, that enabled these poets to write through and for their bodies, ultimately facilitating healing. I take as case studies four late medieval dream visions: Le Roman de la Rose, Piers Plowman, The House of Fame, and L’Advision-Christine.
Shakespeare in Dreams and Shakespearean Dreams
International Journal of Dream Research, 2021
This paper argues that Shakespeare’s dreamscape—manifest dreams, dreamlike attributes, discourses and semantic associations—follows a probability of archetypal psychic moods, pervaded by oneiric intertextuality of Jung-ian shadows. In Tudor England, dream reportage was deeply contested due to religious feuds revolving around the English Reformation; dreaming was subsumed in martyrological, heretical and religious discourses. The profuse dream reportage in Shakespeare—across Tudor England, Caesarian Rome, Ptolemaic Egypt and uninhabited Mediterranean Islands—supports an affective resonance across the canon. Dream reportage became a new skill permeating space and time on the Elizabethan stage, if not necessarily outside. Based on dream data from Shakespeare, we examine the probability distribution of redeemable, non-redeemable and ambivalent archetypal dream moods. Redeemable moods occupy nearly 40 per cent of the dreamscape’s probability. Since Shakespeare deployed dreams much more numerously than his contemporaries, his dreamscape operates as a prerational organ, dynamically morphing the body of the canon (and minds of actors), in the context of improvised theatrical productions in Elizabethan times, and theatrical affect in general.
Shakespeare in Dream and Shakespearean Dreams
2021
This paper argues that Shakespeare's dreamscape—manifest dreams, dreamlike attributes, discourses and semantic associations—follows a probability of archetypal psychic moods, pervaded by oneiric intertextuality of Jungian shadows. In Tudor England, dream reportage was deeply contested due to religious feuds revolving around the English Reformation; dreaming was subsumed in martyrological, heretical and religious discourses. The profuse dream reportage in Shakespeare—across Tudor England, Caesarian Rome, Ptolemaic Egypt and uninhabited Mediterranean Islands—supports an affective resonance across the canon. Dream reportage became a new skill permeating space and time on the Elizabethan stage, if not necessarily outside. Based on dream data from Shakespeare, we examine the probability distribution of redeemable, non-redeemable and ambivalent archetypal dream moods. Redeemable moods occupy nearly 40 per cent of the dreamscape's probability. Since Shakespeare deployed dreams much...
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
Related papers
“Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream through Middle English Romance,” Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), pp. 140-160., 2009