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Arthuriana, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2002, pp. 117-118 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/art.2002.0023

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/art/summary/v012/12.3.wheatley.html

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REVIEWS117

ofoak trees (sexual temptation) at the entrance to Hautdesert'; 'Claims that Nordic
myth underlies G, for Morgan and the Green Knight are analogous to Odin (god of
magic and runic wisdom)'; Argues that the dreamer sees maidens (virgins) in his
vision, all of whom are dead.' After reading Blanch's admirably exhaustive update

of Andrew's bibliography, one yearns for a guide that selects from them what is
actually worth reading: I am sure it would be much shorter.
AD putter

University of Bristol

peter brown, ed., Reading Dreams: The Interpretation ofDreamsfrom Chaucer to

Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp.194, isbn: 0-19-818363-1.
$65.

This book ofessays gave its contributors the opportunity that every scholar ofa certain
age dreams of: a forum for reexamining and revising her or his earlier work. Three ofthe
seven essayists hereA.C. Spearing, Steven Kruger, and Kathryn Lynchpublished
important monographs on dreams and literature between 1976 and 1992, and the other
fourPeter Brown, David Aers, Peter Holland, and Kathleen McLuskiehave dealt

with dreams in essays and elsewhere. The revision of older sdiolarship creates an odd
effect in the collection: the reader has the sense that each critic is dting the work of

others who appear in the volume while those other critics are modifying the very ideas
that the first critic is citing. However, inasmuch as the average user ofthe book is likely

to read only an essay or two, few readers will fed this disorientation.
Editor Peter Brown has commendably ceded his prerogative to write the conventional
introductory encomium praising the essays in his collection; instead, he has contributed
an article that, like all ofthe others, comes under the scrutiny of AC. Spearing in a
valuable introduction that presents a witty, thought-provoking dialectical engagement
with the essays that follow, especially as they relate to his book MedievalDream Poetry. It
is a rare pleasure to see an introduction that challenges the material that it introduces.
Brown's 'On the Border of Middle English Dream Visions' attempts to historicize
the reading ofthese texts by analyzing those that attend to the liminal moment between

consciousness and sleep. Brown believes that this threshold marks a state of readiness
and receptivity before an altered state ofconsciousness...develop[s]' (40), and just as the
waking world will be reflected in the dream, the dream will reflect back on reality and
then modify that reality when the dreamer wakens. He elaborates upon Kruger s term
of'berweenness' and brings to bear upon it Edith and VictorTurner's theory ofliminality,
providing some ofthe essay's most fruitful speculations.
In 'Medical and Moral Authority in the Late Medieval Dream,' the longest chapter
in the book, Steven Kruger discusses early medical models of dream interpretation
suggesting that dreams could reveal symptoms of disease before the waking
consciousness was aware ofthem. In light ofthese theories the central figure's dream
in Henryson's Testament ofCresseid 'merges a religious, moralizing language with a

ll8ARTHURIANA

medical, physicalizing one' whereby 'moral ideology...is naturalized.' This material

leads into a discussion ofthe ways in which the narrator's ambivalent experience in

the Alcyone episode in Chaucer's Book ofthe Duchess affects his dream in 'failfing] fully

to carry through a corrective specification ofthe narrator's position in relation to gender

and sexuality.' Although Spearing faults Kruger for failing to look beyond the medical
perspective to other social and cultural factors that inform dream poetry, the narrow

focus of this essay also makes it the most daring and interesting in the collection.
The central word in David Aers's 'Interpreting Dreams: Reflections on Freud, Milton,

and Chaucer' may well serve as a modesty topos for a diapter that weaves together the
notions that male readers need to dominate and subjugate the experiences ofothers
especially womenand that the alterity of the Middle Ages remains overstated in the
scholarly imaginary, especially that of non-medievalists.
'Baring Bottom: Shakespeare and the Chaucerian Dream Vision,' Kathryn Lynch's
dever contribution to the volume, analyzes A MidsummerNight's Dream as Shakespeare's
'reading of Chaucer [as] a reading of a reading of an already sophisticated tradition of
readings [sic];' the playwright thereby 'parodies and revises the medieval dream-vision
tradition.' Lynch successfully proves that both authors use the dream-vision as 'a form

that embodies the infinite regressiveness of language and its self-undermining

deconstruction,' but this assertion may strike readers as somewhat less than the sum of
its interesting parts.
The final essays, Peter Holland's 'The Interpretation of Dreams in the Renaissance'
and Kathleen McLuskie's "The "Candy-Colored Clown": Reading Early Modern Dreams'
present compendia of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ideas about dream
interpretation. Holland's work is generally more descriptive and historically oriented

(and is valuable not least fot its inclusion of seventeenth-century Jewish dream theory
from Italy), while McLuskie analyzes the ways that dramatists could draw upon 'the
rich and varied tradition ofdream representation' to create a wider variety ofeffects than
were available to their predecessors.
We could say much the same for twenty-first century scholars, for as this volume
shows, they can draw upon an increasingly rich variety of theoretical and historical
material (induding their own) to create helpful new readings ofmedieval and Renaissance
dream literature.

EDWARD WHEATLEY

Hamilton College

glenn burger and Steven F. kruger, eds., Queering the Middle Ages. Medieval

Cultures, vol. 27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, Pp. xxiii, 318.
isbn: 0-8166-3403-3 (cloth) $49.95; 0-8166-3404-1 (paper) $19.95.

In their introduction to this volume of essays, Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger
pose a challenge to the contemporary academy, especially those postmodernists

who ignore the medieval past: 'What might it mean for queer theoretical work, and
more generally our postmodern moment, to have to grapple with the medieval