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.

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.

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This book examines how sleep and dreams were approached in early Greek thought, highlighting the theories of the Presocratic and Hippocratic writers on both phenomena as more varied, complex, and substantial than is usually credited. It explores how the Presocratic natural philosophers and early Hippocratic medical writers developed theories which drew from wider investigations into physiology and psychology, the natural world and the self, while also engaging with wider literary depictions and established cultural beliefs. Although the focus is predominantly on Presocratic and Hippocratic ideas, this is not exclusive: attention is devoted from the outset to sleep and dreams in Homer and the mythic tradition, as well as to depictions across lyric, drama, and historiography. Sleep and Dreams in Early Greek Thought provides a fascinating study of this topic which will be of interest to students and scholars of ancient medicine and the history of science, Greek philosophy, and classical culture more broadly. It is accessible to students with or without knowledge of the classical languages, and also to anyone with a general interest in the beliefs of the classical world.

Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans’ relationship to the environment.

Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

In this volume, scholars from three continents trace the role of dreams in the cultural transitions of the early modern Atlantic world, illustrating how both indigenous and European methods of understanding dream phenomena became central to contests over religious and political power.

Dreams and History contains important new scholarship on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and subsequent psychoanalytical approaches from distinguished historians, psychoanalysts, historians of science and anthropologists.