Dreams in Early Modern England

Janine Riviere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351744126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Dreams in Early Modern England offers an in-depth exploration of the variety of different ways in which early modern people understood and interpreted dreams, from medical explanations to political, religious or supernatural associations.

Through examining how dreams were discussed and presented in a range of diffrerent texts, including both published works and private notes and diaries, this book highlights the many coexisting strands of thought that surrounded dreams in early modern England. Most significantly, it places early modern perceptions of dreams within the social context of the period through an evaluation of how they were shaped by key events of the time, such as the Reformation and the English Civil Wars. The chapters also explore contemporary experiences and ideas of dreams in relation to dream divination, religious visions, sleep, nightmares and sleep disorders.

This book will be of great value to students and academics with an interest in dreams and the understanding of dreams, sleep and nightmares in early modern English society.

1 “Seasons of sleep”

Natural dreams, health and the physiology of sleep

Introduction

On the 2^nd October 1702 Lady Sarah Cowper, a deeply religious woman and prolific English diarist, recorded the following dream in the first volume of her diary, which was a collection of her spiritual meditations with excerpts of her daily life recorded between 1700 and 1702.

This night I Dreamt that I was married to the old and Battered Ld Oxford. There was nothing Amourous in the imagination it is plain, nor do I remember any other conceit but that it pleased my fancy to think I shoud Dy Countess of Oxford without Considering at all how I shoud live with him. Sure I am that our Dreams do not alwaies suit the Constitution of our Body, nor Correspond with our Thoughts in the Day. ffor nothing wou’d be more averse to my wakeing Thoughts than Committing Matrimony a second time.¹

Apart from demonstrating a deep aversion to remarrying and perhaps her unconscious desire to rise above her station as the Countess of Oxford, Cowper’s reflections reveal to us how early modern men and women might ascribe meaning to their dreams. Similarly, Cowper’s excerpt also illustrates a complex range of ideas circulating about dreams that individuals might consider, accept or reject in the early modern period. Dreams might be natural or supernatural in origin and sometimes even derive from the more ambiguous category of the preternatural. While supernatural or divine dreams were often vehemently contested, due to the spiritual power they often conferred to the dreamer within the community, ideas of natural dreams were longstanding and largely uncontested. Several core understandings of the causes and meanings of natural dreams circulated in printed medical, oneirocritic, religious and philosophical works and also appear in private writings. Early modern writings on dreams and sleep also reveal the inherent sense of vulnerability of both the body and soul to involuntary internal and external forces. Since sleep was understood as a liminal state that left sleepers vulnerable to nocturnal physical and supernatural assaults, early modern writings frequently portrayed sleep as imbued with a deep sense of fear and anxiety.

As Lady Cowper’s dream narrative indicates, dreams were understood largely as part of the natural physiology of sleep and within the framework of health. Drawing on the legacy of classical medicine and philosophy, throughout the period a diversity of authors, including natural philosophers, physicians and writers of dream treatises, argued that certain dreams were “natural” and occurred as a result of normative processes of the body and soul in sleep. Three main ideas underlay the natural theory of dreams and will constitute the focus of this chapter. First, based on the Hippocratic-Galenic system, “natural” dreams were understood as the natural by-products of the complex workings of the humoral system of the body in sleep. Second, the idea that certain dreams were caused by autonomous psychological processes was also common and derived from the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Finally, writers argued that “natural” dreams were alternately caused by a range of external environmental stimuli, such as noises, the planets, the air and the direct environment of the sleeper. These core ideas about the causes of natural dreams changed little from the sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.

Historical studies of sleep by Sasha Handley, A. Roger Ekirch and Roger Schmidt have posited that the eighteenth century marked a significant transitional period in the history of sleep. A. Roger Ekirch suggested in his pioneering study that before the invention of artificial lighting early modern people experienced a pattern of segmented sleep. Ekirch argued that, according to evidence from literature and contemporary writings, most people experienced a fundamentally interrupted sleep cycle with two periods of sleep. Men and women would rise between their “first” and “second sleep” to work, visit neighbours, pray, read, make love or urinate. This common practice began disappearing in the period of industrialization when public lighting became widespread.² In response to Ekirch’s assertions, Roger Schmidt proposed that patterns of disruptive sleep were a “symptom of modernity” that became “increasingly problematic” for men and women in the eighteenth century as a result of the rise of caffeine consumption, the novel and the use of clocks. According to Schmidt, the period of the enlightenment was heralded by a seismic shift and disruption to “the ancient architecture of human sleep.”³ Drawing from and problematizing the earlier work of Ekirch, Schmidt suggests that the advent of public lighting was merely a product of changes to eighteenth-century sleep habits rather than a catalyst for change.

Like Schmidt and Ekirch, Sasha Handley argues that the long eighteenth century was a transitional period that witnessed significant changes to contemporary sleeping habits, most notably of the social elite. She suggests that the period was one of an increasing practice of “sociable sleeping” whereby persons of the “fashionable” sort deliberately cultivated disrupted sleep patterns and late hours as part of the newly modish “code of civility.” This, Handley suggests, was the result of socio-economic changes and physical shifts in the urban and household landscape.⁴ These recent studies have done much to reveal unique insight into early modern nocturnal lived experiences and the history of sleep; however, I would argue that before historians can make generalizations about significant transitions and changes in the eighteenth century, we must first understand in more depth cultural understandings and experiences of both dreams and sleep in the earlier period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Similarly, as Chapter 4 will demonstrate, according to the evidence of medical casebooks and recipe books, early modern people frequently experienced sleep disruptions and disorders much earlier in the period of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Intertwined in medical theories of natural dreams was the relationship between dreams and the physiology of sleep. Natural dreams were understood as expressions of the good or poor health of the body and mind that manifested only in the state of sleep. Since natural dreams revealed the constitution of the body and its fragile economy of humours, in addition to the disposition of the mind, dreams were considered useful in the prognosis of diseases of both body and mind. That is to say, according to medical authors and natural philosophers, dreams were fundamental prognostic tools that revealed humoral imbalances in the body as well as providing insight into the unconscious mind or self with all its many base desires and anxieties. These ideas were neither new to the early modern period nor particular to English writers and were rather a legacy of the ancient Greeks, particularly Plato, Galen and Aristotle.

The idea that dreams offered physicians insight into the health of the body and the humours of the dreamer had a long history reaching back to Galen. His short tract “On diagnosis in dreams” (De dignotione ex insomniis) advanced a purely physiological understanding of dreams and suggested that dreams might assist in part of the diagnosis of disease.⁵ According to Galen,

The vision-in-sleep [enhypnion], in my opinion, indicates a disposition of the body. Someone dreaming a conflagration is troubled by yellow bile, but if he dreams of smoke, or mist, or deep darkness, by black bile. Rainstorm indicates that cold moisture abounds; snow, ice and hail, cold phlegm.⁶

Drawing inspiration from the writings of Galen, Plato and Aristotle, early modern English concepts of the causes of natural dreams tended to revolve around two main theories in the period – the influence of the humours and the “affections of the mind.” Owen Felltham explained in his work, Resolves: divine, moral, political (1677), “The aptness of the humours to the like effects, might suggest something to the mind … so that I doubt not but either to preserve health or amend the life, dreams, may, to a wise observer, be of special benefit.”⁷ Since the humours affected the body and mind, while both were vulnerable to external environmental forces such as the air and planets, the dreamer was inherently vulnerable to uncontrollable forces within and without. Writings on natural dreams therefore suggest a porous model, not only of the body but also of the mind.

The importance of health in early modern England is clearly indicated by the ongoing popularity of both lay and learned tracts on understanding and procuring health. Popular tracts proliferated and some of the bestsellers include Thomas Elyot’s The castle of health, which was first published in 1539 and went through 14 editions in the sixteenth century alone.⁸ Elyot’s tract was designed to be an easy reference guide and layman’s manual for understanding health and disease. This work offered a comprehensive manual of health in the vernacular so that, as the title page touted, “every manne may knowe the state of his owne body, the preservation of helthe and how to instruct well his phisition in sicknes that he be not deceyved.”⁹ Elyot’s medical manual created an important market for publishers in the late sixteenth century who went on to print numerous health manuals for the laity and non-professionals.

Capitalizing on Elyot’s success, other medical handbooks soon followed advertising comprehensive medical knowledge and practical remedies. Multiple editions of these manuals ensued and examples include Thomas Cogan’s The haven of health (1584) and Nicholas Culpeper’s The English physitian (1652), which, at three pence, went through over 15 editions by 1700.¹⁰ Within these works discussions of sleep and dreams appear as important features of individual health. “Natural dreams” were explained as being products of the character and imbalances in the four humours. These authors also helped popularize the idea that the contents of dreams – their dominant emotions and symbols – could assist in the diagnosis of disease and identify both the humoral imbalance and overall temperament of the dreamer. Since the inner workings and complex balances of the body were hard to discern, dreams were construed as a useful means of finding clues to the physiological and psychological imbalances of the body and mind.

The bulk of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• A note on transcriptions
• Introduction
• 1 “Seasons of sleep:” Natural dreams, health and the physiology of sleep
• 2 Decoding dreams: Dreambooks and dream divination
• 3 “Nocturnal whispers of the Allmighty:” Spiritual dreams and the discernment of spirits
• 4 “The terrors of the night:” Nightmares and sleep disorders
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index