Thinking Fantasies: Visions and Voices in Medieval English Secular Writing

Abstract

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.

Visions and voices are most often associated with religious experience, but they also have a prominent part to play in romance, the imaginative fiction of the later medieval period. Romances offer scope for creative engagement with the long-standing literary conventions of dream vision, supernatural encounter and revelation, as well as with medical, theological and philosophical preoccupations of the period. They repeatedly depict supernatural experience of different kinds—dreams and prophecies, visions and voices, marvels and miracles, ghostly and demonic visitations, and encounters with the faery. In part, such narratives respond to an impulse towards escapism and 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 by both dream theory and the psychological models of the period. Visions and voices can be catalysts for change and self-realisation; they can also destabilise and call into question identity. They allow writers to explore fearful and fascinating questions concerning forces beyond the self and their intersections with the processes of individual thinking, feeling and being in the world. Middle English romances weave together the possibilities of dream, marvel, miracle and supernatural encounter in narratives of individual realisation. Chaucer’s romance writing takes these motifs into new realms through its intellectual engagement with the complex forces that shape mental experience.

Frameworks for Thinking

Romance, like religious writing, depends on ideas of mind, body, and affect that are rooted in classical thought but also shaped by a Christian world view.¹ The humoural theory that informed medieval medicine necessitated the idea of a mind-body continuum: both physical and mental health depended on the balance of the four humours. This interdependence was also essential to the Galenic theory of the spirits inherited by the Middle Ages, according to which pneuma, the life breath or vital force, was modified by the three principal organs of the body into three kinds: in the liver the ‘natural spirits’ enabling generation, growth and nutrition; in the heart the ‘vital spirits’ heating and animating the body and controlling breath; in the brain the ‘animal spirits’ governing sensation, movement and thought.² Emotions were understood to occur through the movements of the vital spirits produced in the heart and travelling through the arteries, and to have both physiological and mental consequences. The Galenic model was complemented by late thirteenth-century medical and philosophical thought, including that of Thomas Aquinas, which elaborated the processes of thought and feeling underpinned by the vital and animal spirits.³ Whereas Aristotle had situated thought and feeling in the heart, Galen identified the motor and sensory functions of the brain. Arabic medical theorists, most influentially Avicenna, associated the ventricles or cells of the brain with mental processes. Thoughts were made up of ‘forms’, sense impressions involving perception and response, variously termed imagines, simulacra or phantasmata (Aristotle employs the term eikón, copy).⁴ Avicenna’s influential treatise on the rational soul, De anima, translated into Latin in the twelfth century, describes five cells of the brain, each connected with a particular faculty. The sensus communis, inner senses, where sense perceptions were processed, was placed at the front along with the imaginatio, a temporary memory; the imaginativa, which, similar to modern imagination, put together forms in creative ways, was situated in the middle along with the faculty of estimativa, which made cognitive assessments; and memorialis, the storehouse of imagines or memory-pictures, was located at the back.⁵ Imagines were understood to be multisensory and as having affective weight; they were ‘emotionally charged’.⁶ The quality of imaginativa, with its power to retrieve from memory and combine such thought-images, was both creative and dangerous, with the potential to deceive reason.

Humoural theory intersected with this psychological model: thus, an excess of the melancholy humour might affect the estimativa, resulting in depressive illness, lethargy and withdrawal, while an excess of the choleric humour might cause the imaginative faculty to body forth too many images, causing mania.⁷ In a world that assumed the possibility of visions, spirit visitations and demonic intervention and temptation, supernatural influences on the brain were also eminently possible. Thought-images or phantasmata might be produced by the imprint of the divine or demonic on the susceptible imagination, as well as through sensory processes or the workings of memory. The ability of the devil to influence the psyche was discussed by theologians from Augustine onwards—though the thirteenth-century medical theorists Gilbertus Anglicus and Bartholomeus Anglicus also suggested that belief in demons might result from disturbances of the brain.⁸ The five categories of dream identified by Macrobius (c. 430) in his widely circulated commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis included such possibilities, and similar ideas were contained in commentaries on Cato’s Distichs, a popular schools text.⁹ The model of the inner senses allowed for the concept of an inner eye and ear, and hence offered a physiological framework for visionary or voice-hearing experience, whatever its origin. Medieval understandings, then, figure the imagination and memory as shaped by affective and cognitive responses and potentially influenced by the supernatural, giving rise to visual images, voices and other kinds of unbidden sensory experience: felt presence, even taste and smell. The dominance of sight in hierarchies of the senses from ancient to modern masks the multisensory quality of medieval conceptions of thinking and imagining and of visionary experience. Mary Carruthers notes, that while the idea of an ‘ear of the mind’ was not usual, and that the visual is often emphasised in discussions of thought-images, the Rule of St Benedict urges ‘incline the ear of your heart’ (‘inclina aurem cordis tua’), a phrase adapted from Psalm 44, also used by St Jerome.¹⁰ Such constructions coincide with the concept of the inner senses that dates back to Aristotle, is developed through Arabic medicine, and underpins notions of thought-images as multisensory. The Hearing the Voice project has demonstrated that this multisensory quality may be much more typical of modern-day experiences of voice-hearing than has been assumed.¹¹

Medieval romance writing takes up the notion that physiological processes and exterior influences can interweave to produce powerful psychological experiences. Such experiences are rarely exclusively visual or aural, but rather multisensory, involving some form of material or felt presence or entry into a three-dimensional dream world. While they are most commonly connected with destiny and the divine, they may be more troubling, opening on to the demonic or evoking the eerie realm of the undead. Romance can also model how the imagination and memory may be shaped by affective and cognitive responses to produce both images and voices, often unsolicited, sometimes with the power to unbalance the mind—ideas that can resonate powerfully with contemporary notions of trauma. The blurring of interior and exterior forces to shape such thinking fantasies is especially evident in the writings of Chaucer, which animate romance conventions through their engagement with physiological and psychological processes.

It is a critical commonplace that in English romance (by contrast, for example, to the twelfth-century French romances of Chrétien de Troyes, which engage extensively with individual psychology) ideas of character are shaped not through the exploration of the inner psyche but by the gradual accruing of action. Yet while references to mental experience are often brief, romance writing is engaged with processes of emotion and cognition, and the ways that external and internal forces shape being in the world— treating voices and visions of and beyond the mind. Romance treatments of visionary experience are nuanced and complex. Supernatural experience is treated less in terms of its particularities than of the individual responses it evokes, its shaping of morality and action, and its creation of narrative movement. At the same time romances take for granted the presence of forces beyond the self, sometimes personified through visions and voices; sometimes experienced in dreams; sometimes simply felt in extreme and sudden passion.¹² Such responses are part of the mesh and are treated seriously, as moments in which the larger forces of the cosmos come into contact with the individual. Sleep is of special interest because it allows for the internalisation of forces ‘out there’: they enter into the individual mind in dream, stimulating both affective and cognitive responses. The imagination too may perform such a function, acting to shape thought-fantasies of both waking and sleeping kinds. Inner and exterior forces defend and reveal, urge penance and action, warn and inspire—though the supernatural is rarely manifest as just a voice.

Dreaming into Life

The movement from disorder to order, dark to light, winter to spring, as Northrop Frye argued, is essential to the structure of romance, though it may occur in many different ways—and occasionally, is thwarted.¹³ Revelatory experience can play a key role in that movement, advancing the destiny of the protagonist and hence the reassertion of moral and/or political order. Such experience signals the tension at the heart of the genre, between the workings of fortune and the individual virtues of romance protagonists, a tension essential to the pattern of quest and test. One of the earliest romances in English, the late thirteenth-century Havelok the Dane, offers a positive version of this pattern, in which providence is actively manifest. This is not a work renowned for psychological exploration: rather, miracle, visitation and dream combine to authorise the hero, contributing to the strongly folkloric tone. Yet the supernatural endorsement of Havelok through the kinglight that emanates from his body to communicate his royal origins and preserve his life also shapes affect, thought and action. Most striking is the princess Goldboru’s experience of the kinglight, which combines different types of revelation. Married to Havelok against her will, she lies awake ‘sorry and sorrowful’, to see the light emerging from Havelok’s mouth and the gold-red cross on his shoulder, while ‘Of an angel she herde a voiz: “Goldeboru, lat thy sorrwe be”’.¹⁴ Overcome with joy at the heavenly ‘stevene’ (‘voice’, 1275), she kisses Havelok, who in turn wakes to recount his own dream of ruling Denmark. The combination of interior and exterior voices and miraculous signs both offers a powerful endorsement of Havelok, and stimulates individual responses and actions: Havelok is moved to regain his kingdom; Goldboru interprets the dream and plans his return to Denmark. Voice, vision, sign interweave to effect this crucial turning-point in the text.

The merging of interior and exterior, dreaming into life, is especially marked in The Siege of Milan (ca. 1400), which recounts a popular legend of Charlemagne. Multisensory experience crosses the boundaries of voice and vision, dreaming and waking. The grief of the lord of Milan for his besieged city occasions such weariness that he falls asleep, to experience a vision of ‘Ane angelle that unto hym gane saye: / ‘Rysse up, sir kynge’, directing him to Charlemagne.¹⁵ Dream and actuality merge when Charlemagne ‘The same nyghte byfore the daye’ (109) dreams that an angel presents him with the sword of Christ, inciting him to vengeance; on waking, he sees ‘a bryghtenes of a beme / Up unto hevenwarde glyde’ and discovers the sword ‘Appon his bedde syde’ (134–38). The dream is presented as both an angelic vision and a product of the active mind: ‘A swevn than gan he mete; / Hym thoghte ane angele lyghte als leven / Spake to hym with mylde steven’ (111–13). Inner thought, exterior action and supernatural forces seem to align in the ensuing battle between Roland’s army and the Saracens. The angelic visitant is the first in a series of miracles that defend the Christians and mark their victory. But the narrative also ends in deep loss, with Charlemagne’s grief at the death of Bishop Turpin and much of his army. Despite the divine approval betokened by the miracles, the terrible destruction of the Christian forces reflects Charlemagne’s failure to attend fully to his warning dream and to send enough of his men against the Saracen army.

In these works, waking and dreaming blur, as dreams both foretell the future and become manifest, merging with signs and miracles to authorise, endorse and reveal. The workings of such revelatory experience are not questioned; rather, it is the responses of individual protagonists that are the focus, and sometimes too the difficulty of interpretation. Revelation is both certain and obscure.

Sent to Test

Revelation may also serve to test, catalysing individual journeys towards moral perfection and inspiring penance. Such revelation again merges interior and exterior aspects. The late thirteenth-century Amis and Amiloun, one of the most widely circulated romances, with versions in several languages, combines vision and voice-hearing, both dreaming and waking, with the structuring motifs of illness and bodily transformation. Exterior and interior are connected from the start through the reflection of the intimate friendship of Amis and Amiloun in their physical likeness. Friendship is tested to the limits when Amiloun takes on a battle in place of Amis, who has been accused of seducing the Duke’s daughter Belisant. Though the pair’s relationship will be authorised in marriage, they are indeed lovers, meaning that Amis will swear a false oath of innocence if he defends himself in a trial by combat. The mental intimacy of the pair is reiterated through Amiloun’s warning dream of his friend as set upon by wild beasts and at risk of death.¹⁶ The dream follows a description of Amis, who has fled into the forest and is overcome by ‘so stronge slepe’ he cannot resist (994); time is collapsed as Amiloun, now responding to his dream, discovers him sleeping. The sequence implies a deep communication of thought between the friends, further enacted in Amiloun’s decision to take on the battle in place of his friend. The idea of the all-seeing supernatural inherent in the concept of trial by combat and suggested by the dream becomes manifest in the waking world: Amiloun hears ‘a voice fram heven adoun / That no man herd bot he’ (1250–51), warning him that he will become ‘a ffouler man’ than any other if he fights in place of Amis. When the threatened punishment of leprosy occurs, the voice is reinterpreted and given shape: ‘Also that angel hadde him told, / Fouler messel [leper] thar nas non hold / In world than was he’ (1543–45). External forces are profoundly physical, manifesting illness on the body, as well as taking auditory and visible form—but they also enter the mind through dream to prognosticate and shape the future.

The illness that begins as divine punishment becomes the means of testing moral virtue, of Amiloun and those around him. In the denouement, body and blood are sacrificed to purify body and blood through the killing of Amis’s children, which echoes but surpasses Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. Again this is presaged by visionary experience that both authorises the act and demonstrates the deep psychical connections between Amis and Amiloun. For three nights while Amis ‘in slepe thought as he lay’, an angel ‘stode biforn his bed ful right’, to reveal that the blood of his children will cure his friend (2187, 2189); Amiloun is similarly ‘warned’ by an angel (2210). Waking and dreaming again seem to merge, further authorising the appearance of the angel. Suspense is situated less in the divine visitation, however, than in the inner conflict it occasions in Amis, whose ‘gret rewethe’ (2276) for his children is set against his carefully constructed argument concerning his brother’s sacrifice for him; crucial too is Amiloun’s horrified response. The children’s innocent blood, like Christ’s, restores the sufferer, and the sacrifice—deeply disturbing as it is—functions to prove Amis’ love for his friend above himself, re-enacting Christ’s sacrifice for mankind. The supernatural is then manifest in miracle as the children are restored ‘Without wemme [blemish] and wound’ (2407). Voices, visitations and visions, miracles and signs, govern the transformations of the narrative, allowing for the exploration of thought and feeling in the most extreme circumstances. The romance dramatises the ultimate testing of friendship, yet in troubling ways. Amis must undertake a dishonest battle, enduring an illness that is also a punishment, his sacrifice not only his venturing of his own body but the murder of his children. This is also, then, a romance of impossible choices, occasioned by the voices and visions that reveal and warn, choices that test love to the extreme and that require miracle to resolve their conflicted nature.

Testing is also the subject of early fourteenth-century Sir Isumbras, where an exterior voice is again the catalyst for a narrative of loss, penance and miracle. The protagonist is introduced with little detail, but is characterised as proud, having lived long without thinking of God. His conversion is occasioned by ‘a stevenne’ (voice, 42) sent by Jesus, who ‘wolde no lengur abyde’ (41) his suffering.¹⁷ This voice, however, is given earthly form as a singing bird which offers the choice of suffering in youth or age—the stimulus for Isumbras’ redemptive quest. The bird’s voice provokes in Isumbras ‘carefull herte and sykynge sore’ (55) and ‘drurye’ (68) mode; ‘pleye’ is turned to ‘peyne’ (78). Much of the rest of the romance focuses on enduring suffering with steadfastness and ultimately on the power of pity and generosity. The power of prayer, faith and virtuous action are proven through Isumbras’ battle against the pagans and his lost queen’s charity, which are the catalysts for their reunion. The protective power of God and the benign workings of providence are directly articulated in the visitation ‘abowte hygh mydnyghte’ to Isumbras by ‘an angell bryghte’ who brings him bread and wine (523–24). While the reference to night seems to align the experience with dream, this is presented as a waking vision, as material as the voice of the bird, manifest in physical miracle. The divine opens onto a broader sense of the fantastic and the supernatural, as the angel’s intervention is complemented by that of the noble legendary animals who nurture Isumbras’ lost children. The intersection of celestial and marvellous echoes the merging of the Christ-sent ‘stevenne’ of the start with the voice of the singing bird.

Fearful Hauntings

Visibly manifest voices recur—most prominently angelic visitations, but also ghosts, spirits, and revenants, from the ghost of Guinevere’s mother in the alliterative romance The Awntyrs of Arthure, who rises from hell to warn of the corruption of the court, to the White Knight in Sir Amadace, the ghost of a dead merchant whose body the protagonist has buried.¹⁸ All are manifestations of a spirit world whose workings enact providence and prove the virtue of the individual: they are divine agents or divinely sent. More alarming are manifestations of the demonic or otherworldly that challenge order and virtue. The late fourteenth-century didactic romance of Sir Gowther follows a pattern of sin, conversion and penitence but in terms very different from Sir Isumbras. Here not a ‘stevenne’ sent by Christ but a demon is the catalyst. The tale makes exterior what is often presented as interior, the tempting force of the devil. The narrative begins with a prayer for protection against ‘the fowle fende / That is about mannys sowle to shende / All tymes of the yere’—including through the ability to take the form of the incubus and thus to beget demonic children.¹⁹ The romancier refers both to the authority of ‘clerkus’ (19) and the example of Merlin to contextualise his own story of ‘a warlocke greytt’ (22), a version of the thirteenth-century French tale Robert le Diable.²⁰ The devil is summoned through the rash prayer of a barren wife who prays for a child ‘On what maner scho ne roghth’ (63); in her orchard she is approached by a man ‘As lyke hur lorde as he myght be’ (67), who after making love to her rises up a ‘felturd [shaggy] fende’ (71). The version of the encounter which she gives to her husband uses the positive romance pattern of Isumbras and Amis, ‘An angell com fro hevon bryght’ (82), but the child she bears lives out his demonic origin in a series of violent deeds, culminating in the rape and burning of a convent of nuns. The demonic is terrifyingly embodied in the boy who furthers the devil’s work of betraying mankind. Yet Gowther also retains a human aspect: his mind has the potential to hear the voice of God. The suspicion aroused in him by an old earl’s statement that he is ‘sum fendys son’ (206) leads him to question his mother about his origins, and on hearing her story, to his conversion: ‘This thoght come on hym sodenly: / “Lorde, mercy” con he cry’ (235–36). The moment is given a providential force: the ‘thought’ is not unlike the voice of the singing bird in Sir Isumbras, but its interiorisation suggests a writer keenly aware of the workings of both divine and demonic on the individual mind. As the rash prayer of the start takes embodied force in the demonic child, so transformative thought is fully embodied in Gowther’s penitential journey to Rome and acceptance of penance from the Pope. Evil intent is replaced by true prayer to God ‘in his hart’ (401), which leads directly to miraculous intervention, three times providing him with horse and armour that vanish away when battle is won for the emperor. Their colour progression from black to white signals his redemption, which is affirmed in the miraculous revival of the emperor’s seemingly dead daughter, who, once mute, now speaks the direct message of Gowther’s forgiveness, ‘My lord of heyvon gretys the well’ (655). Her death-like swoon, occasioned by her fall from a tower in distress at Gowther’s danger, is a liminal state in which she hears directly the voice of God. Once ‘tho cursod knyght’, now he is ‘inspyryd with tho Holy Gost’, his holy status written after his death in the cures of those who seek his shrine (731–32). The work is infused with a sense of shaping influences, demonic and divine, on the mind, of the shifting boundary between spiritual and physical worlds, and the ease with which divine and demonic forces can take embodied form.

Most eerie in its depiction of the intervention of the supernatural is the early fourteenth-century romance of Sir Orfeo, a reworking of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, in which the otherworld of faery replaces the kingdom of the dead. Heurodis wakes from her sleep beneath an ‘ympe-tree’ to recount a strange invasion of her psyche by the King of Faery.²¹ She describes this as if occurring within waking reality: two knights summon her to their King, who appears with his hundred knights, placing her on a horse, taking her to his palace, showing her ‘castels and tours, / Rivers, forestes, frith with flours’ (135–36) and bringing her home to her own orchard. Yet the narrative makes clear that the encounter occurs as she sleeps, a fully multisensory vision from which she wakes in a state of madness. The episode is menacing in its depiction of the invasive power of the supernatural, and the violence of the King of Faery’s summons is written by Heurodis on her own body:

Ac as sone as she gan awake,
She crid and lothly bere* gan make;	*noise
She froted* hir honden and hir feet	*rubbed
And crached hir visage—it bled wete.
Hir riche robe hie all to-rett*	*tore
And was reveysed* out of hir wit. (53-58)	*driven

That the attack is on the mind is made explicit by the reference to the flight of the wits, and self-mutilation reflects the disorder of the psyche.

The invisible force of the otherworld is again manifest as, despite the guard of a thousand armed knights, Heurodis is ‘oway y-twight, / With fairy forth y-nome’ (snatched away, taken by fairy forces, 168–69). In his grief at the loss of his wife, Orfeo flees into the forest, becoming a Wild Man figure, a consciously chosen state that responds to Heurodis’ madness and taking. In this transformative, liminal space, vision is manifest in the waking world: Orfeo catches sight of the faery hunt and follows it through a dark cave to a preternaturally bright otherworld that evokes ‘the proude court of paradis’ (352). Mysteriously, the figures in the hunt appear also to be the figures frozen there in seeming death, his wife among them, ‘folk that were thider y-brought / And thought dede and nare nought’ (365–66). The description is graphic: bodies mutilated, mad, strangled, drowned, burned or in childbirth, but also the many who, like Heurodis, have been taken as they slept at noontime, ‘with fairy thider y-come’ (380). The possibility of psychic intervention is deeply troubling, while the boundary between death and life is called into question by this other, parallel space that is neither heaven nor hell, eerily peopled by the undead who can ride again in the faery hunt. Ultimately, Heurodis’ body, seized and unmade through the sinister, unruly forces of supernatural desire, is regained, remade through Orfeo’s virtuous love and the power of his music. But it is her uncanny disappearance, the writing of all-consuming, three-dimensional vision on her body, the sinister depiction of the taken in the world of faery and the ways the story speaks to fears of madness, possession and death that we retain.

Fast Imagining: Chaucerian Voices and Visions

Chaucer’s oeuvre takes up many of these emphases but also reflects a keen interest in physiology and psychology, in particular, the ways that feeling and thought interweave, and the play of love and loss on the imagination.²² The creative possibilities of interweaving the supernatural with psychology are vividly realised in his earliest works, all of which engage with the dream vision. These works take up a conventional French courtly form that finds its origins in the thirteenth-century Le Roman de la Rose, with Guillaume de Lorris’ narrative of the Lover-Dreamer struck by the arrow of the God of Love and his quest for the Rose, and Jean de Meun’s satirical continuation recounting the debate on love and nature between the allegorical figures encountered by the dreamer. The courtly dits of Machaut and Deschamps use a similar framework to open onto dialogues and debates concerning love, overheard by the dreaming narrator. Chaucer both translated parts of the Roman de la Rose and adopted the dream form, characteristically injecting it with a new realism and ambiguity, and capitalising on its polyvocal, unruly quality to depict voices in and beyond the mind. The opening of the Roman de la Rose, translated in the English fragment most securely attributed to Chaucer, addresses the question of the interpretation of dreams, setting the view that they are ‘but fables and lesynges’ against the concept of ‘avysioun’ taken up by Macrobius in his commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis.²³ Dream theory and the impossibility of absolute classification and interpretation of dreams are revisited by Chaucer across his oeuvre. It is precisely in the ambiguity of dreams, their blurring between exterior and interior, supernatural and natural, that their potential to mean is rooted.

The Book of the Duchess enacts these questions in its opening. Its grieving narrator’s processes of thought are carefully depicted: ‘sorwful ymagynacioun / Ys alway hooly in [his] mynde’ (14–15). Image-pictures held in his memory are repeatedly revisited, creating ‘fantasies’ (28) in his head and causing a melancholy which has ‘sleyn [his] spirit of quyknesse’ (26). The ‘romaunce’ (48) he reads, which includes the Ovidian tale of Ceyx and Alcyone, opens onto a sequence of supernatural experiences: an invocation that summons the gods, a descent to the underworld, a visitation from the dead. In answer to Alcyone’s prayer for a dream revealing the fate of her husband, Juno instructs her messenger to bid Morpheus ‘take up Seys body the kyng, / That lyeth ful pale and nothyng rody. / Bid hym crepe into the body / And doo hit goon to Alcione’ (142–45). The classical tale depicts a world where gods can be summoned, revelations sought and corpses reanimated, not through nefarious human arts of necromancy but divine transformative powers that will lead to Alcyone’s metamorphosis. In Chaucer’s version, however, Alcyone dies and there is no transformation. Morpheus, summoned from his infernal region, takes up the drowned body, eerily speaking through it to Alcyone. Inner and outer worlds blur, as Chaucer describes Alcyone lying in bed, but also the corpse standing ‘ryght at hyr beddes fet’ (199), calling her by name, ‘My swete wyf’ (201). That this is not the revenant it seems, however, underlines the king’s inability to return. Alcyone’s sorrow on waking, as she ‘saw noght’ (213), leads to her death, and the narrator reminds us too of the opacity of sleep and dream, ‘what she sayede more in that swow / I may not telle yow as now’ (215–16).

The narrator’s consequent, comic prayer to Morpheus leads in turn to his own dream vision, a complex dream-dialogue which probes the psychology of the mysterious Man in Black. Are we to read this as inspired by his own sorrow, his reading, or his prayer to a god? Is the Man in Black an alter ego or a dream guide? Chaucer merges these possible interpretations in an inset narrative of loss and reanimation of the dead, not through divine intervention but the ‘fantasies’ of memory. The Man in Black, like the Dreamer at the start, is lost in his ‘sorwful ymagynacioun’. The poem describes first his spoken complaint and then his silent, inner dialogue:

Verse

Verse […] he spak noght, But argued with his owne thoght, And in hys wyt disputed faste Why and how hys lyf myght laste […]. (503–6)

So absorbed is the Man in Black by the voices in his mind that he is oblivious to external voices, a description that corresponds with recent accounts in cognitive psychology of the workings of inner speech and its connections with voice-hearing.²⁴ As he responds to the Dreamer’s bumbling questions images are gradually retrieved from the storehouse of his memory to create a picture of his lost duchess Blanche. By contrast to the turbulent mental experience of grief with its images and voices that arise unbidden, this is a willed process, producing a multisensory and embodied picture of Blanche’s ‘lokyng’ (870), movement, voice and touch. The poem does not offer consolation, yet it affords resolution of a kind through the Man in Black’s articulation of Blanche’s death. While Alcyone realises Ceyx’s death through god-sent revelation that results in her death, the Man in Black’s revelation is shaped by the power of human thought processes and leads to a re-entry to life. The process of image-making reanimates Blanche within the narrative, allowing the Man in Black to move beyond his traumatised, dissociative state of profound withdrawal. The insomniac narrator too is restored to action, and to the writing of the poem, a further reanimation and memorial of the beloved. The poem, then, might be seen as containing the disruptive images and voices of grief through the processes of the mind, while it also gestures to the opaque external forces that shape the mind: desires, dreams and books provide occasions for imaginative encounters with the supernatural and for visionary experience. Where inspiration ends and interpretation begins, how far those imaginative voices are shaped by the mind or come from beyond it, is left for the reader to ponder.

Chaucer’s other dream vision poems are more light-hearted, but engage in sustained and serious ways with the complexities of external and internal mental influences. The House of Fame takes up the model of the Roman de la Rose to open with a commentary on dream interpretation, but with considerably less certainty than the Rose’s narrator: ‘this trowe I […] / That dremes signifiaunce be / Of good and harm to many wightes / That dremen in her slep a-nyghtes / Ful many thynges covertly / That fallen after al openly’ (Fragment A, 15–20). The House of Fame’s narrator emphasises the difficulty of assessing the ‘signifiaunce’ of dream and of assigning Macrobius’ categories: ‘Why that is an avision / And why this a revelacion, / Why this a drem, why that a sweven, / […] Why this a fantome, why these oracles’ (7–11). Dreams may be caused by ‘spirites’ (41) or inspired by the soul, but they may also be the result of ‘complexions’ (21), the balance of bodily humours; they may be caused by ‘gret feblenesse’ (24) of the brain, abstinence or illness, imprisonment or distress, intense feeling or excessive study, or melancholy produced by the brain itself, ‘That purely her impressions [thought-images or emotions imprinted on the mind] / Causeth hem avisions’ (39–40)—perhaps the situation of the Book of the Duchess’s narrator. Supernatural warnings may occur but too ‘derkly’ (51) to be understood. William MacLehose explores the serious potential for conflict between a dreamer’s perception of a demon assaulting and crushing him, and medieval medical explanations of the condition they term ‘ephialtes’ or ‘incubus’.²⁵ While Chaucer treats the topic comically, his dream visions dramatise both the conflicting possibilities of dream interpretation and the embodied quality of dreams, drawing attention to the complex physiology of sleep and its connections with creativity. In the House of Fame, the narrator’s marvellous dream in which he is swept up to the heavens by a great eagle, a comic dream-guide speaking ‘in mannes vois’ (556) to recall the dazed dreamer to his senses, but to whose offer to explicate the universe he responds that he prefers to read books, resolves none of his uncertainties. The eagle’s elaboration of the theory of sounds multiplying and rising up to the House of Fame finds its complement in the narrator’s experience of the House itself, where the goddess’ decrees are arbitrarily enacted according to the horns of fame and slander blown by Eolus, god of winds, while in the turning House of Rumour sounds of speech and rumours whirl around uncontrolled; the poem breaks off before the ‘man of gret auctoritee’ can be revealed. The narrator invokes the God of Sleep to help him ‘telle aryght’ (79) his dream, presented as surpassing the ‘avisyon[s]’ (513) of a series of biblical and classical figures, but interpretation of its whirling multisensory images is another matter. The poem is vividly visual, yet its vision is most defined by sounds and voices, in a creative disorder that approaches cacophony.

This polyvocal effect also characterises the Parliament of Fowls, with its dream vision of a parliament of birds that descends into disarray. Here too Chaucer addresses the question of interpretation of dreams: the poem’s narrator reads Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, which recounts the Roman general Scipio’s dream encounter with his celebrated grandfather, Scipio the Elder (‘the African’), who foretells his destruction of Carthage but also elaborates on the theory of the celestial spheres, whose music Scipio hears. The narrator in turn dreams that Scipio Africanus ‘Was come and stod right at my beddes syde’ (98)—a characteristic experience of dream visitation—but cannot say whether his reading ‘the cause were’ (106), in the same way that the hunter dreams he is in the woods or the lover of his lady. Is this a ‘somnium’, a naturally caused dream, or an ‘oraculum’, a prophetic dream? It seems fittingly portentous, as ‘Affrican’ leads the narrator to gates reminiscent of those entered by Dante, one promising bliss, the other destruction—but within, the dreamer finds not inferno or paradise, but the garden and temple of Venus and beyond it, the goddess Nature presiding over a debate between the suitors of the beautiful ‘formel’ (373) eagle. As in the House of Fame, the debate is unresolved, her choice deferred for a year, and the narrator is awakened with the ‘shoutyng’ (693) of the birds, to read on in his books. This vision too is full of sound: the songs and voices of the birds that debate so animatedly and so inconclusively. Ultimately, like the Book of the Duchess and the House of Fame, the poem is about creativity, the mysterious processes of inspiration that arise vision-like in the psyche, and the skill that is needed to order, recount and interpret that multiplicity of multivalent, multisensory images. Whereas in courtly love visions dream is typically a framework that plays no part in the ensuing narrative, Chaucer’s narratives are continuously dreamlike in their chaotic, kaleidoscopic quality and their resistance to unified interpretation. In this sense, they evoke the experience of hearing voices as it is frequently described by contemporary voice-hearers, but for Chaucer, the experience is one of creative play, offering the potential for radical literary experimentation and the merging of mimetic and fantastic, serious and comic.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with the many voices of its tellers in dialogue—and debate—might be seen as taking up the notion of voice-hearing as a fictional device, extending the play of the dream vision into the imaginative world of the Canterbury pilgrimage, a framework for the multiple worlds and voices of the tales told by its idiosyncratic participants. Within their narratives, Chaucer returns to the motifs of dream, vision and voice-hearing. The Knight’s Tale, the first of the tales and the most extended romance of the collection, includes both dream and waking voices and visions, but complicates them through an emphasis on the workings of mind and feeling. The tale takes up the convention of the God of Love firing his arrow into the heart of the lover to cause a deeply physical passion of love-sickness, but here there is no mention of supernatural force: the lady stands in directly for the deity. Chaucer employs the neo-Platonic conception of love as striking through the eyes to wound the heart, but distinguishes his two lovers through his use of contemporary medical theory: whereas Palamon is ‘chronically smitten’ in conventional terms, Arcite is ‘morbidly lovesick’. ²⁶ Arcite’s malady is an illness of the brain with extreme physiological effects:

[…] lene he wex and drye as is a shaft;

His eyen holwe and grisly to biholde,

His hewe falow and pal as asshen colde […]

So feble eek were his spiritz, and so lowe,

And chaunged so, that no man koude knowe

His speche nor his voys, though men it herde.

And in his geere [conduct] for al the world he ferde

Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye

Of Hereos,²⁷ but rather lyk manye,

Engendred of humour malencolik

Biforen, in his celle fantastik. (I, 1362–76)

This model of melancholy mania was available to Chaucer through, for example, the work of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, translated in the late fourteenth century by John Trevisa.²⁸ Trevisa describes how the passions of the soul engender the melancholy humour, which works on the ‘celle fantastik’, the front ventricle of the brain controlling the imagination. In a state of melancholy, the subject loses the ability to judge and reason; in a state of mania, as here, the imagination cannot perceive new images but sees only the beloved. The thirteenth-century physician Gerard de Berry describes how the estimatio becomes overactive, so ‘struck by the pleasurable sensation’ of perceiving the beloved that it keeps ordering the senses to repeat the process; heat is thus drawn away so that imaginativa is colder and more retentive.²⁹ So in the Knight’s Tale the withdrawing of the vital spirit weakens Arcite’s body and voice, while loss of heat occasioned by the overactive imagination causes his eyes to grow hollow and his countenance pale, fixing the image of the beloved more firmly in the brain. While this is not a voice-hearing or visionary experience, it offers a model for the ways that unsummoned, multisensory thought-images can dominate the mind in an obsessive cycle of mental experience very like that recounted by voice-hearers.

The tale combines interiority with the idea of supernatural influence: external arbitrary forces beyond individual control play on the inner senses and imagination. So Arcite in sleep ‘thoughte how that the wynged god Mercurie / Biforn hym stood and bad hym to be murie’, commanding him to return to Athens (1384–92). The dream vision of the messenger of the gods is conventional, but Chaucer’s use of the verb ‘thoughte’ is suggestive, implying the workings of the mind in dream, and the imprint of the supernatural on the imagination. The gods are also manifest materially and multisensorily, responding to the prayers of each of the lovers—from the shaking and ‘signe’ (2266) of Venus’ statue; to Mars’ ringing hauberk and murmuring of ‘Victorie!’ (2433), accompanied by clattering rings, brighter-burning flames and a sweet fragrance; to the fire and whistling brands dripping blood that presage the appearance and speech of Diana. The debate between the gods is enacted in the temporal world: Arcite wins the battle, reflecting Mars’ military strength, but is thrown from his horse through the Fury sent by Saturn at Venus’ urging. In this tale, the workings of the mind occur in a world where free will seem deeply curtailed, as supernatural forces dominate the fates of the lovers.

Other tales return more briefly to the idea of supernatural visitation and intervention. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale offers a brilliantly comic treatment of dream theory in its account of the cock Chanticleer’s terrifying dream of a hound-like beast and the response of his mate Pertelote, who dismisses the dream as the result of unbalanced humours, ‘Nothyng, God woot, but vanitee in sweven is’; they are caused by ‘replecciouns’, ‘fume’, and ‘complecciouns’, over-eating, vapour from the stomach, and humoural complexions (VII, 2922–24), and Chanticleer’s dream of a red beast is a result of excessive choler, to be cured by ‘som laxatyf’ (2943) that will restore melancholy and choleric humours. Yet Chanticleer’s comically learned response with its series of examples of the truth of dreams is lived out in his confrontation with the fox. Despite the parodic context, the possibility of revelation through dream is taken seriously.

Supernatural intervention also goes beyond dream. The Physician’s Tale takes up the idea of demonic influence on the senses and imagination, as the fiend runs into Appius’ ‘herte’ (VI, 130) to urge him on to rape: ‘And taughte hym sodeynly that he by slyghte / The mayden to his purpos wynne myghte’ (131–32). The line recalls theological discussions of the possibility that the devil may enter the senses and imagination, influencing individual choices and acts. In the Man of Law’s Tale, by contrast, divine intervention preserves the heroine Custance when she is falsely accused of murder. On being required by the king to swear on a Bible, her accuser is violently struck down: ‘An hand hym smoot upon the nekke-boon’ (II, 669); his eyes burst from their sockets and ‘A voys was herd in general audience’ declaring Custance’s innocence (673). That all hear the voice marks its status as ‘miracle’ (684). Chaucer is also careful, however, to emphasise Custance’s agency: ‘So stant Custance and looketh hire aboute’ (651). She finds her nearest parallel in Saint Cecilia in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale, who actively accepts her torment, preaching and teaching as she sits unharmed in a bath of fire. In these works, miraculous intervention accompanies and endorses active faith. As with Middle English popular romances, genre shapes the treatment of voice-hearing and vision: miraculous, direct intervention is more characteristic of religious narratives—hagiography or hagiographic romance—while the courtly convention of love as supernaturally effected and the allegorical play typical of dream vision open up many other possibilities.

Vision, revelation, divine and demonic intervention, all these signal the limits of free will, the constraints placed on individuals by arbitrary external influences, and the complexity of mental processes as they respond to, interpret, refine, and recollect experience. In Chaucer’s great epic romance, Troilus and Criseyde, supernatural influences are signalled throughout, pointing up the conflict between predestination and free will, a tension central to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, with which the poem engages closely and which Chaucer was translating at approximately the same time. Emphasis on the supernatural is especially marked in the proems to each book which evoke the gods, but also in the repeated references to astrology and to the turning wheel of fortune, which will ultimately bring about the fall of Troy itself, the city doomed by the gods. Troilus’ double sorrow, his love for and loss of Criseyde, is a punishment inflicted by the God of Love for laughter at the folly of lovers. The fatedness of love is pointed up by the ominous dreams experienced by both Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer’s depiction of falling in love, however, engages with medieval psychology in alert detail. Alongside his portrayal of love as an extreme, physical malady, Chaucer employs contemporary psychological ideas: Troilus’ thought ‘gan quiken and encresse’; and he makes ‘a mirour of his mynde’ in which he sees ‘al holly [Criseyde’s] figure’ (I, 443, 365–66). Throughout, Troilus’ affective experience is manifest in both mind and body: when Criseyde fails to return from the Greek camp, he is literally unmade by love, so ‘defet’ (enfeebled) that he is unrecognisable (V, 1219). But Chaucer also emphasises cognitive processes: Troilus’ ‘herte thoughte’ is so constantly on Criseyde, ‘so faste ymagenynge’ (V, 453–54) that he cannot be distracted by feasting and revelry. Imagining is, literally, image-making of a multisensory kind: Troilus, re-reading Criseyde’s letters, ‘refigures’ ‘hire shap, hire wommanhede, / Withinne his herte’ (V, 473–74). He has the ‘proces’, the course of events, ‘lik a storie’ in his memory (V, 583, 585). Memory circles back not only to images but also to the voice of his beloved: he hears her melodious singing, ‘so cleere / That in my soule yet me thynketh ich here / The blisful sown’ (V, 578–80). He sees in his mind’s eye himself as emaciated and pale, and hears in his mind’s ear the comments of onlookers, ‘men seyden softe’ (619), on his transformed, melancholy state. Like the man in black, he repeatedly sings to himself of his lady, and his grief too leads him to ‘argue with his owne thought’ and dispute in his wits. While memory is so often conceived of as working through visual images, then, these can as readily be sounds retrieved from the storehouse of the mind, recreated in the imagination, heard by the inner ear, but in a way that is intrusive and all-consuming. The idea of voices bodied forth in the mind as a result of extreme emotion resonates powerfully with recent psychological theories of voices as originating in traumatic experience, and as aspects of dissociative behaviour.³⁰ In Troilus and Criseyde, the voices of trauma inscribe the unruly forces of fortune and desire on the individual mind.

Romance treatments of visions and voice-hearing, then, go far beyond convention. They reflect general familiarity with contemporaneous physiological models, rooted in late classical medical theory and a worldview that endorsed the possibility of supernatural experience. For romance writers, visionary experience, through dream, visitation, marvel or miracle, plays an essential role in authorising the hero and catalysing events, in inspiring penance and showing the workings of grace. It can also, however, be challenging, unjust or dangerous, opening onto encounters with the supernatural that threaten to undo rather than fulfil the individual, and that suggest mysterious, menacing, as well as providential forces at work in the cosmos. Chaucer extends these explorations by engaging in detail with late medieval interest in psychology, the processes of thought and the nature of dream. His dream visions exploit the opacity of dream experience and its potential connections with the workings of imagination, while his Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde probe further, in both comic and tragic ways, the complex intersections of interior and exterior worlds. The notion of being subject to powerful affective forces from within and without allows romance writers to explore in creative and original ways the experiences of spiritual revelation and conversion; the intersections of thought, feeling and exterior influences; the constraints placed on individual will; and the creative yet menacing possibilities offered by visions and voices. The imaginative worlds of romance play freely with those possibilities in constructing their narratives of thinking, feeling and being in the world.

Notes

• 1. On medieval models of mind, body, and affect, see also my essays ‘Voices and Visions: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Writing’, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, ed. by, Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 411–27: 412–14, and ‘Mind, Breath, and Voice in Chaucer’s Romance Writing’, in New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies, ed. by Stephanie M. Hilger (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 119–41: 121–26. I am grateful to the editors for permission to draw on this work. On the long history of voice-hearing in religious writing, see Christopher C. H. Cook, Hearing Voices, Demonic and Divine: Scientific and Theological Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2019).

• 2. See further Roy Porter’s discussion of classical and medieval medicine, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 44–134.

• 3. See further Simon Kemp, Medieval Psychology, Contributions in Psychology 14 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).

• 4. See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), in particular, chs 1–2 on models of memory and neuropsychology, 16–79.

• 5. See the summary in Jacqueline Tasioulas, ‘“Dying of Imagination” in the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales’, Medium Ævum 82 (2013), 212–35: 216–17; and further Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Warburg Institute Surveys 6 (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1975), 43–64 and Edwin Clarke and Kenneth Dewhurst, An Illustrated History of Brain Function: Imaging the Brain from Antiquity to the Present, 2nd edn (San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1996), 8–53. For the definitive work on medieval memory, see Carruthers, The Book of Memory; Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Material Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), and Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

• 6. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 59.

• 7. See further my essay ‘“The thoghtful maladie’: Madness and Vision in Medieval Writing’, in Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture, ed. by Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 67–87: 70–71.

• 8. Kemp, Medieval Psychology, 98.

• 9. See Macrobius, Commentarium in Somnium Scipionis, in Opera, ed. by James Willis, vol. 2, Academia Scientiarum Germanica Berolinensis, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1963), 8–9.

• 10. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 27.

• 11. See further Angela Woods, Nev Jones, Ben Alderson-Day, Felicity Callard, and Charles Fernyhough, ‘What Is It Like to Hear Voices? Analysis of a Novel Phenomenological Survey’, The Lancet Psychiatry 2, no. 4 (April 2015): 323–31.

• 12. On the supernatural in romance, see my Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), in particular, chs 5 and 6, on otherworlds, Christian marvel, and demonic intervention.

• 13. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1974–75 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 53–54.

• 14. Havelok the Dane, in Middle English Verse Romances, ed. by Donald B. Sands, Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies (1966; Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1986), 55–129: ll. 1248, 1264–65. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited by line number. The work exists in two fourteenth-century manuscript versions and adapts the late twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Lai d’ Haveloc; the legend is also recounted in Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (1135–40).

• 15. The Sege of Melayne, in Six Middle English Romances, ed. by Maldwyn Mills, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1973), 1–45: ll. 91–92. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited by line number. The romance is found in a single manuscript and appears to be based on a lost French source.

• 16. Amis and Amiloun, in Of Love and Chivalry: An Anthology of Middle English Romance, ed. by Jennifer Fellows, Everyman’s Library (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 73–146: l. 1010–20. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited by line number. The story exists in numerous versions, including an eleventh-century Latin verse epistle and a chanson de geste of ca. 1200. The Middle English expands a version of the Anglo-Norman Amys e Amillyoun (ca. 1200) and exists in four manuscript versions.

• 17. Sir Isumbras, in Six Middle English Romances, ed. by Mills, 125–47, ll. 41–42. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited by line number. The work exists in nine manuscripts, more than any other Middle English romance. It has no known source but is related to the legend of St Eustace.

• 18. These works date from the early fifteenth century and 1350–1400, respectively.

• 19. Sir Gowther, in Six Middle English Romances, ed. by Mills, 148–68: ll. 4–6. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited by line number. The work exists in two manuscripts.

• 20. In Robert le Diable, the child is yielded to the devil’s power at birth and thus drawn towards evil; Sir Gowther adds the detail of Gowther’s demonic conception. On clerical contexts, see further my Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 218–28, and Neil Cartlidge, ‘“Therof seyus clerkus”: Slander, Rape and Sir Gowther’, in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. by Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 135–47.

• 21. Sir Orfeo, in Middle English Verse Romances, ed. by Sands, 185–200: l. 46. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited by line number. The work exists in three manuscripts, including the Auchinleck manuscript.

• 22. On Chaucer, see also my ‘Voices and Visions’, 416–18, and ‘Mind, Breath, and Voice’, 126–32.

• 23. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Romaunt of the Rose, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (1987; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Fragment A, ll. 2, 9. All subsequent references to Chaucer’s works are to this edition, cited by line number.

• 24. See further the work of Charles Fernyhough, including ‘The Dialogic Mind: A Dialogic Approach to the Higher Mental Functions’, New Ideas in Psychology 14 (1996): 47–62, ‘Alien Voices and Inner Dialogue: Towards a Developmental Account of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations’, New Ideas in Psychology 22 (2004): 49–68, Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory (London: Profile, 2012), and, in particular, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves (London: Profile Books-Wellcome Collection, 2017.

• 25. See William F. MacLehose, ‘Fear, Fantasy and Sleep in Medieval Medicine’, in Emotions and Health, 1200–1700, ed. by Elena Carrera, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Traditions 168 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 67–94.

• 26. See Tasioulas, ‘“Dying of Imagination”’, in particular, 213–19.

• 27. Love-sickness is termed amor hereos in a number of medieval medical texts: the term originates in Greek eros, but is influenced by Latin heros, hero, and herus, master; Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy uses the term ‘heroick love’. See further explanatory notes to The Knight’s Tale, lines 1355–76, The Riverside Chaucer, 831.

• 28. See Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De rerum proprietatibus (1601; Frankfurt, 1964) 5.3 and John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, ed. by M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1.73. Trevisa instances ‘grete thoughtes of sorwe, and of to grete studie and of drede’, but not love specifically.

• 29. Gerard de Berry, Glosses on the Viaticum, in Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 198ff, and Tasioulas, ‘“Dying of Imagination”’, 218.

• 30. See further the review paper by Eleanor Longden, Anna Madill and Mitch G. Waterman, ‘Dissociation, Trauma, and the Role of Lived Experience: Toward a New Conceptualization of Voice Hearing’, Psychological Bulletin 138 (2012): 28–76.