"That swevene hath Daniel unloke": Interpreting Dreams with Chaucer and the Harley Scribe (original) (raw)
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Fifteenth-Century Chaucerian Dream Visions
Discusses the Assembly of Ladies, The Flower and the Leaf, The Isle of Ladies, and Belle Dame sans Mercy. An amended version appeared in A Companion to Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Julia Boffey and ASG Edwards.
Predicting the Past: Dream Symbology in the Middle Ages
Like medieval bestiaries, dream-books constitute compelling tools to investigate the collective imagination of the Middle Ages. These manuals, such as the widely circulated Somniale Danielis, were usually structured so that key terms in the text corresponded to the subject of the dream, while the key-words were arranged alphabetically with a concise interpretation of its symbol. The system established both quick and easy access to terms, symbols, and their meanings, and functioned as a convenient guide to the interpretation of dreams. It serves, too, as an important tool for understanding medieval literary as well as other dreams, and for identifying and describing traditional dream topoi. Our session analyses the origin and circulation of dream symbology as transmitted in dream- manuals, in both manuscript and early printed sources. It also concentrates on how dream symbols developed and changed, in their transfer across religious texts and imagery, literature, and the visual arts, into settings and contexts (including genres other than the literary and media other than the book) where they reveal new layers of meaning. In such ways, dream-books and their study may function as portals to the medieval past. Organizer: Valerio Cappozzo (Department of Modern Languages, University of Mississippi) Presider: Claire Fanger (Department of Religion, Rice University) Presenters: Boyda Johnstone (Department of English, Fordham University, New York) “Possessed by Dreams: Dream Interpretation Manuals in Late Medieval England” László Sándor Chardonnens (Department of English Language and Culture, Radboud University Nijmegen) “Seeing is Believing: Dream Symbols and Their Perception in Medieval Alphabetical Dream Books” Valerio Cappozzo (Department of Modern Languages, University of Mississippi, ) “A Dictionary for Dream Interpretation: The Somniale Danielis in Its Manuscript Sources” https://www.academia.edu/10114433/A\_Dictionary\_for\_Dream\_Interpretation\_The\_Somniale\_Danielis\_in\_Its\_Manuscript\_Sources
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.
Journal of Medieval History, 2010
Henry I's four-part dream sequence in John of Worcester's Chronicle is well known to both historians and art historians as a rare but striking historical illustration. This article examines the location of the images within the manuscript itself as well as in the broader context of twelfth-century chronicle illustration. Despite the flourishing of history writing in England, the illumination of such works was rare. In the use of diagrams and narrative scenes, the images found in the Oxford manuscript are amongst the more innovative. Like the near contemporary illuminations in Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum, the choice of subject and the approach taken, reflect the content of the text itself. It is by locating such manuscripts within the tradition of history-writing and historical illustration that both the inventive and more typical elements become clear.
Dreams in Early Modern England: Frameworks of Interpretation
2013
(summary): While dreams as visions have received much attention from historians, less work has been undertaken on understanding more commonly experienced dreams that occurred in sleep. In this dissertation I seek to begin redressing this neglect. Two overarching questions focus the dissertation: How did early modern English people understand their dreams? And did these understandings change in response to significant developments in English culture? To answer these questions I explore early modern English theories, beliefs and experiences of dreams through a close study of key medical, demonological, philosophical, spiritual, oneirocritic and private writings. I suggest that in the period 1550-1750 there were three principal frameworks used to understand dreams: (1) health of the body and mind, (2) prediction and (3) spirituality. These three frameworks coexisted, either reinforcing or contesting one another throughout the period. The framework of health saw dreams as natural produ...
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...