Thinking Fantasies: Visions and Voices in Medieval English Secular Writing

Abstract

AbstractThe creative engagement with visions and voices in medieval secular writing is the subject of this essay. Visionary experience is a prominent trope in late medieval imaginative fiction, rooted in long-standing literary conventions of dream vision, supernatural encounter and revelation, as well as in medical, theological and philosophical preoccupations of the period. Literary texts repeatedly depict supernatural experience of different kinds—dreams and prophecies, voices and visions, marvels and miracles, otherworldly and ghostly visitants. In part, such narratives respond to an impulse towards escapism and interest in the fantastic, and they have typically been seen as non-mimetic. Yet they also engage with serious ideas concerning visionary experience and the ways in which individual lives may open onto the supernatural—taking up the possibilities suggested both by dream theory and by the theological and psychological models of the period. Examples drawn from a range of Middle English romances and from Chaucer’s romance writing demonstrate the powerful creative potential of voices and visions. Such experiences open onto fearful and fascinating questions concerning forces beyond the self and their intersections with the processes of individual thinking, feeling and being in the world, from trauma to revelation to romantic love.