Dreams in search of knowledge : the middle vision of Chaucer and his contemporaries

In "Dreams in Search of Knowledge: The Middle Vision of Chaucer and His Contemporaries," I examine the medieval experience of dreaming and its relation to dream-frame narrative. I look first at the most influential late-antique and medieval theories of the dream: the foundational discussions of Neoplatonic and patristic writers, important twelfth-century reinterpretations of those early discussions, and late-medieval treatments that modify older theories with "new" Aristotelian lore. I also discuss "real-life" accounts of dreams--for instance, in the autobiographical works of Augustine, Guibert of Nogent, and Hermann of Cologne. In both theoretical and experiential writings, the dream occupies an ambivalent position-- involved simultaneously with truth and falsehood, caused by both angels and demons, divine inspiration and corporeal overindulgence. Medieval poets use the ambivalence of the dream in fashioning an extraordinarily flexible literary form. Dream poems, like dreams themselves, sometimes embody divine truth; but they may also immerse themselves in deceptive physicality. Between such extreme possibilities stands the "middle" dream vision, evoking simultaneously the dream's highest and lowest affiliations. This middle vision navigates a complicatedly ambiguous path between divinity and the mundane, exploring a territory involved with both body and soul. Works as diverse as Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and House of Fame, Langland's Piers Plowman, and the third part of Nicole Oresme's Tractatus de commensurabilitate vel incommensurabilitate motuum cell present themselves as ambiguous dreams; in doing so, they begin to address crucial questions about human betweenness and about human endeavors (poefiy, science, life in the world) that are, of their own nature, ambiguous.