Aspects of knowledge

Preserving and reinventing traditions of learning in the Middle Ages

Marilina Cesario, Hugh Magennis

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526107022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This edited collection explores how knowledge was preserved and reinvented in the Middle Ages. Rather than focusing on a historical period or specific cultural and historical events, it eschews traditional categories of periodisation and discipline, establishing connections and cross-sections between different departments of knowledge. The essays cover the period from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, examining the history of science ( computus, prognostication), the history of art, literature, theology (homilies, prayers, hagiography, contemplative texts), music, historiography and geography. Aspects of knowledge is aimed at an academic readership, including advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as specialists in medieval literature, history of science, history of knowledge, geography, theology, music, philosophy, intellectual history, history of language and material culture.

Part I

Anthologies of Knowledge

1

Dream divination in manuscripts and early printed books: patterns of transmission¹

László Sándor Chardonnens

Introduction

Upon consulting three different forms of medieval dream divination, we learn that to dream of a dragon signifies honour, but to do so on the sixteenth day of the moon will make the dream come true only after a long time, and if one finds the letter v on the first line of the left-hand page of a book opened at random after the dream, it means death. The dreamer may eventually achieve honour, therefore, but if out of luck might die before the auspicious outcome of the dream can take effect. Whether medieval people approached dream divination in the same exhaustive way as the example given here is the subject of this chapter. This is not to say that medieval people thought differently about dream divination than we do, because approaches to oneiromancy now are as complex as they were in the past, but modern scholars have many more medieval sources at their disposal than medieval dream diviners did at any one time. Relying on many hundreds of texts, a modern scholar doubling as a dream diviner can select interpretations in which dragons signify honour instead of delusion, in which the sixteenth day of the moon ensures that the dream will take effect instead of not coming true at all, and in which the letter v means death instead of a happy life, just to add a touch of foreboding to the prediction. With around fifty medieval and early modern thematic dream books and around 265 alphabetical dream books in existence, a great variety of interpretations of dream topics is available. Add to these texts a further 280 or so lunaries dealing with if and when dreams will come true and ninety-five mantic alphabets that combine oneiromancy with bibliomancy, and the number of possible interpretations is bewildering. A slight snag for modern scholars in approaching this material is that they must be equipped to read a multitude of scripts from the ninth century onwards, to understand Latin and at least eleven other European languages from various periods and dialect regions, and to have leisure to travel across Europe and the United States to consult these many texts.

The challenges facing modern scholars can be overcome with some effort, but the same cannot be said of those that faced medieval dream diviners. Medieval dream diviners who needed access to written sources of their brand of secular scientia were limited by what was available in a certain language in a certain region at a certain point in time. Since written sources dealing with oneiromancy were transmitted piecemeal, a text-based, comprehensive dream interpretation of the kind featured above may have been rare. Not all forms of dream divination, moreover, were available throughout the Middle Ages. Whereas alphabetical dream books and lunaries had already been around since the ninth century, for instance, thematic dream books and mantic alphabets first emerged in the twelfth century. To collect several sources dealing with dream divination, then, cannot have been easy.

Even so, authorities on dream divination such as Alf Önnerfors noted ‘dass die mittelalterlichen Somnialien und Lunare als typische prognostische Gattungen intim mit einander zusammenhingen’ (‘that the medieval prognostic genres of alphabetical dream books and lunaries were closely connected’).² Lorenzo DiTommaso even goes so far as to argue that ‘in approximately one quarter of the extant manuscripts a lunation immediately precedes, follows, or is in some other way intimately related to a copy of the Somniale Danielis’, and that these two forms of dream divination ‘regularly appear as one text in the same manuscript’.³ This would suggest that medieval scribes saw generic connections between these two forms of dream divination. Sure enough, lunaries and alphabetical dream books are sometimes attested in the same book, sometimes in sequence or even as a single text, but much less frequently than projected. As far as other forms of dream divination are concerned concrete data were lacking altogether. It has not been qualified, by extension, whether the various forms of oneiromancy were considered to belong to the same tradition of learning, even if it would make sense to us that they might have done so. Having examined many hundreds of manuscripts and early printed books that contain dream divination, I argue that a putative close connection between the various forms of dream divination was not widespread before the age of print but existed largely as a result of ad hoc decisions made by individual scribes. This chapter introduces the various oneiromantic practices current in medieval times, traces major developments in the transmission of dream divination in the Middle Ages and early Modernity, and examines the existence of an awareness among scribes and printers of connections between the various forms of dream divination. The findings are based on a corpus of 860 medieval and early modern sources in 489 manuscripts and 89 printed books up to 1550, the most comprehensive survey brought together so far.⁴

Divinatory dreams

Defined as ‘a train of thoughts, images, or fancies passing through the mind during sleep’, dreams take on various forms.⁵ Starting with Sigmund Freud’s Die Traumdeutung, dreams have been seen to be vents of the unconscious: by interpreting the meaning of dreams, a person’s hidden drives and anxieties can be made manifest.⁶ Pre-Freudian ideas about dreams and dreaming, however, offer a different perspective. Steven Kruger opined that in the past ‘dreams were often thought to foretell the future because they allowed the human soul access to a transcendent, spiritual reality’.⁷ This does not mean that all dreams were considered divinatory. By its very nature, dream divination relates only to dreams that can be interpreted meaningfully, and most medieval theories about dreaming include a few kinds of dreams that have mantic qualities.

Immensely popular throughout the medieval period, the theory advanced by the late antique scholar Macrobius in his Commentarii in somnium Scipionis constitutes a fivefold division of dreams:

Omnium quae uidere sibi dormientes uidentur quinque sunt principales et diuersitates et nomina. Aut enim est ὄνειρος secundum Graecos quod Latini somnium uocant, aut est ὅραμα quod uisio recte appellatur, aut est χρηματισμός quod oraculum nuncupatur, aut est ἐνύπνιον quod insomnium dicitur, aut est φάντασμα quod Cicero quotiens opus hoc nomine fuit uisum uocauit.⁸

(All dreams may be classified under five main types: there is the enigmatic dream, in Greek oneiros, in Latin somnium; second, there is the prophetic vision, in Greek horama, in Latin visio; third, there is the oracular dream, in Greek chrematismos, in Latin oraculum; fourth, there is the nightmare, in Greek enypnion, in Latin insomnium; and last, the apparition, in Greek phantasma, which Cicero, when he has occasion to use the word, calls visum.⁹)

The five kinds of dreams described by Macrobius include the insomnium and the uisum, which arise from internal, mental or physiological processes, and that are thought to have no divinatory value. Macrobius asserts, however, that ‘tribus ceteris in ingenium diuinationis instruimur’ (‘by means of the other three we are gifted with the powers of divination’).¹⁰ These divinatory dreams may be prompted by external agents and are hence close to prophetic visions, such as the oraculum. They may also have links to external reality because they predict what will happen in the future (the uisio and the somnium). Whereas the oraculum is generally associated with prophecy and therefore out of bounds to worldly diviners, the uisio and somnium are the kinds of dreams covered by secular dream divination. The main distinction between the latter two is that the uisio comes true in exactly the way that it is dreamt, whereas the somnium deals in symbols whose value can only be decoded by interpretation. The somnium is the type of divinatory dream that dream books concern themselves with, while other kinds of dream divination may also cover the uisio, such as lunaries.

Macrobius’s was the principal dream theory throughout the Middle Ages, though other models already existed, and yet others were subsequently advanced by high and late medieval thinkers. As Kruger discusses, antedating or contemporary with Macrobius’s dream theory were those of Greek and Roman philosophers like Aristotle, who saw little mantic value in dreams, Synesius, who stressed the revelatory power of dreams, and Calcidius, who ascribed revelatory value only to dreams ‘sent by “diuinae potestates”’.¹¹ Church Fathers, too, occupied themselves with dream theory, and they were deeply concerned with the agency behind revelatory dreams. For patristic writers the problem of dream divination seems to have resided not so much in the act of interpretation, which has ample biblical precedent, but in discerning divine from demonic agency, and true from false dreams.¹²

High medieval thinkers refined existing dream theories by uniting pagan and Christian models, and by adding somatic components drawn from classical and Arabic medicine. In the course of the medieval period, humoral theory was brought to bear on dream theory, as outlined in Rhazes’s Liber ad Almansorem, for example. This led to more developed models of the somatic causes of dreaming, as in Pascalis Romanus’s Liber thesauri occulti, which unites somatic dream theory with dream divination.¹³ Late medieval thinkers developed their theories of dreaming even further, constructing intricate models that categorised dreams and dream theory in rigidly logical fashion. Late medieval dream theory, however, was increasingly sceptical of the value of mantic dreams, partly through improved access to Greek philosophical notions about dreaming, notably Aristotle’s, and partly through a growing suspicion of dream divination on religious grounds. Religious scepticism lay in the supposition that external inspiration of dreams might arise from deceptive agents, turning dreams that appear meaningful into falsehoods.¹⁴ Such negative responses to divinatory dreams are evidenced mainly in philosophical and religious writings, but they also affected a number of late medieval oneiromantic texts that were crossed out or denounced by later users of the manuscripts (e.g., Oxford, Balliol College, MS 329 and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 7349).¹⁵ Even so, late medieval dream theory did not rule out the possibility that mantic dreams existed, merely queried under what circumstances dreams came about and what external conditions made a dream be true or false.

To sum up, medieval dream theory relied principally on the work of Macrobius, with alternative models becoming available or being developed over time. Some alternative models hailed from Greek and Roman philosophy and from classical and Arabic medicine. Others were composed by Church Fathers, theologians and medieval thinkers, who fused pagan and Christian approaches to dream theory and speculated on the internal and external causes of dreaming and the agency behind divinatory dreams. The majority of medieval dream theories have in common that they provided for the possibility of divinatory dreams. The Macrobian somnium and uisio are the meaningful dreams of choice, and it is these types that dream divination pertains to.

Dream divination

There are roughly four kinds of dream divination in written form available to medieval dream diviners: alphabetical dream books, thematic dream books, lunaries and mantic alphabets.¹⁶ These forms of dream divination are here discussed in turn.

Alphabetical dream books are the best known form of medieval dream divination.¹⁷ Thought to have derived from an older Byzantine alphabetical oneirocriticon (Gr. ὀνειροκριτικόν, ‘dream interpretation’), alphabetical dream books were the only type of oneiromancy that interpreted the contents of dreams for most of the medieval period in the Latin West.¹⁸ While many alphabetical dream b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Marilina Cesario and Hugh Magennis
• Part I Anthologies of Knowledge
• Part II Transmission of Christian Traditions
• Part III Past and Present
• Part IV Knowledge and Materiality
• Index