Studies in the Age of Chaucer

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Peter Brown, ed. Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Introduction by A. C. Spearing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. x, 194. $60.00. Despite what its title may imply, this book offers neither a chronological survey of dream interpretation from the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, nor a narrowly concentrated study on dreams in literary texts. Instead, it is a worthwhile if somewhat diffuse collection of six essays that often focus on Chaucer or Shakespeare, but that include references to and analyses of texts ranging from the Abbé Baillet’s paraphrase of Descartes’s account of his dreams (1691), to Freud’s case study of ‘‘Dora’’ (1905), to David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet (1986). Given the diversity of the collection, it seems best to comment on the essays individually , paying somewhat greater attention to those that deal with topics specifically medieval. Peter Brown’s ‘‘On the Borders of Middle English Dream Visions’’ takes as its subject the ‘‘significance of the boundary between waking and sleeping’’ (p. 25) in these works, in an effort to understand why the dream vision was such a widespread genre in fourteenth-century England . Brown emphasizes that the dream boundary is, ‘‘for certain poets,’’ a means for ‘‘signifying a state of altered consciousness’’ (p. 40), and suggests that the dream vision, because of its focus on ‘‘betweenness ,’’ enabled writers to reflect on the manifold breakdowns of boundaries in fourteenth-century society (p. 45). Brown then claims we need a ‘‘subtle instrument of analysis’’ to test the ‘‘assumption’’ that the ‘‘extraordinary circumstances found in English society in the second half of the fourteenth century’’ are the source of the ‘‘experience of betweenness ’’ that the dream-vision poets want to explore (pp. 45–46). Victor and Edith Turner’s theory of liminality is offered as just such an instrument , because of its focus on pilgrimage—a cultural practice often represented in dream visions and itself widespread in late medieval society. Although a bit speculative and even occasionally impressionistic, Brown’s engaging essay should prompt conversation about, and further study of, the topic in question. Steven Kruger’s ‘‘Medical and Moral Authority in the Late Medieval Dream’’ opens with concise and insightful comments on Cresseid’s dream in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, delineating the integration of moralizing and physicalizing discourses therein that allows the ‘‘language of natural science [to] take on the colouring of transcendence’’ 524 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:02 PS REVIEWS (p. 55). Kruger then shows how such a conflation of discourses can be contextualized in the dream theory of the later Middle Ages, when the role of the body in dreaming became increasingly emphasized. Supporting this claim, Kruger cites dream theorists ranging from Pascalis Romanus in the twelfth century to William of Aragon and Robert Holkot in the fourteenth. Kruger suggests that recognition of this ‘‘new somatic treatment of dreaming’’ should somewhat curb the critical emphasis on allegory in dream-vision scholarship, and encourage greater scholarly focus on the dreamer’s body (p. 62). Kruger then offers a fine example of the kind of analysis he proposes, turning to Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and arguing that its dream, while not fully or neatly resolving the problems of the body that it raises, ‘‘works to masculinize and heterosexualize the body of its ailing narrator’’ (p. 81). In ‘‘Interpreting Dreams: Reflections on Freud, Milton, and Chaucer ,’’ David Aers sets out to explore the ‘‘forms of power and the roles of gender in the interpretation of dreams’’ (p. 84). Aers begins with Freud’s case history of ‘‘Dora,’’ rehearsing how Freud’s interpretation of Dora’s dreams effectively silences her by denying her, through a patriarchal allegorizing, any interpretive insight into her own dream narratives. In Paradise Lost, Aers finds similar ‘‘silencing strategies’’ (p. 92) employed by Adam in response to Eve’s dream in book 5. He then turns to Chaucer—more specifically, recounted dreams in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and book 5 of Troilus and Criseyde— whose more dialogic approaches to dream interpretation, Aers suggests, ‘‘cast a powerful critical...