Thinking Fantasies: Visions and Voices in Medieval English Secular Writing

The 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.

Behold! The Voices of Angels: Narrative, Audience and Affect in Eadmer of Canterbury’s Breviloquium Vita Sancti Wilfridi

Two new, lengthy and highly detailed miracle stories appear at the end of Eadmer of Canterbury’s ‘Brief Life of St. Wilfrid’. The first involves an invisible angelic choir, while the second comprises a vision of angels worshipping Wilfrid’s relics in a church suffused with golden, heavenly light. As neither story features in the earlier, full-length Vita, Powell examines what sets these narratives apart, focusing on their cognitive and affective impact upon their audience. In foregrounding Eadmer’s declared desire to inspire veneration, Powell distances herself from traditional historicist interpretations of hagiography. She proposes that hagiography should be seen as a cultural artefact, and demonstrates how the topoi of visions and voice-hearing offered particularly effective vehicles for the provocation of wonder and veneration.