The high medieval dream vision : poetry, philosophy, and literary form

The High Medieval Dream Vision is a scholarly work that cannot be easily summarized. It was written for an academic audience and is probably most comprehensible if one has read or is reading the works covered. Kathryn Lynch is both psychologist and literary critic as she explains how philosophical dream vision poetry evolved over the course of a millennium. She discusses the literary precedents from late antiquity including the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, and explains why this genre resonated so deeply among medieval people who were first and foremost religious and yet trying to deal with the real world around them.

The philosophical dream vision appeared in many varieties and subgenres. Many reflected the recorded testimony show more of religious conversion, and many were secular compositions that consciously adopted the dream vision form to describe a pilgrimage towards a psychological, philosophical or even religious enlightenment. Most of the secular visions were in poetic form and were written to entertain and enlighten.

Lynch points out that an understanding of the medieval attitude towards poetry and the arts is helpful in getting to the bottom of why the dream vision was so popular. Christianity was at the foundation of all intellectual discourse, and Christian doctrine created a suspicion of the arts in general because of their close association with the classical past. The works of many great writers and philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, to name only a few, were shunned by the Christian fathers as pagan. Because they were not Christian per se and did not directly reflect Christian values, they were considered unworthy of consideration regardless of the high ethical value of these writings.

Another issue concerned the medieval notion of human psychology, in the broadest sense. The prevailing belief was that human thought processes were of three types: intellect or reason, imagination and memory. The faculty of reason was thought to be superior to the faculty of imagination. Poetry was a function of imagination, and therefore, it was inferior to works that primarily called upon reasoning and intellect.

A further prevailing medieval value was that any writing, whether religious or secular, should have as its goal the improvement of the mind or spirit. In a sense, readers (and church authorities) demanded that written works convey a message of uplift.

Over the course of many years, centuries even, the notion that dreams somehow could be a bridge between the imagination and the intellect took hold. The dream vision was seen as similar to a rite of passage or a pilgrimage, and an otherworldly experience in a dream state had transformative value. In essence, medieval poets were writing about human psychological growth.

After laying all the above groundwork – and more – Lynch devotes a separate chapter each to Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae, Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, Dante’s Purgatorio and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Each has a slightly different take on the poetic philosophical vision, but they all reflect three stages that the dreamer or visionary experiences, which are similar to any rite of passage or heroic pilgrimage that we are familiar with in literature: a separation from familiar surroundings, an unsettling realm or dimension that creates serious physical or psychic challenges, and a transformation where the dreamer awakens and returns to familiar surroundings but with a heightened understanding.

This is a challenging book and can be referred to as a resource when attempting to read and understand the type of vision or dream poetry it describes. Because of the academic nature of this book, I’ll give it three stars, simply because it goes into more detail than the average reader will in all likelihood want to deal with. show less