LIT 5038 - Spring 2025 - Fumo

This course explores the body of literature on dreams and dreaming in the Middle Ages, with a focus on the peculiarly medieval genre of the dream-vision. First we will investigate the relevance of medieval “dream theory,” via ancient and medieval discussions of physiology, psychology, and dream taxonomy. We will then engage two central traditions that shape the dream-vision genre—the philosophical and the courtly—as expressed in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, respectively. Building upon these foundations, we will spend most of the semester closely reading the most intriguing dream-visions produced in late medieval England, by the era’s three most accomplished poets (contemporaries in the second half of the fourteenth century): Geoffrey Chaucer, the anonymous Pearl-poet (aka the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), and William Langland.

Our fellow travelers on this journey include erotic daydreamers, narcoleptic sinners, and chosen visionaries, and our itinerary leads us to the question of whether medieval dream-poetry anticipates (or challenges?) modern ideas of subjectivity, personal experience, and psychology. Along the way we will consider the intersection of dreaming with literary representation and the creative alchemy by which dreams become texts and texts become dreams.

Middle English readings will be mostly in the original (with helpful glosses); foreign-language background materials will be read in English translation. No prior knowledge of Middle English is required; however, proficiency in Middle English pronunciation and comprehension is a formal goal of this seminar. This course will be of interest to medievalists and early modernists but also to those engaged in the history of subjectivity, psychology, and/or the generally bizarre. This most self-reflexive and metatextual of medieval genres will especially interest writers