Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Trade Review"Offering what is arguably the first comparative examination of dreams, prophecies, and visions in the early modern Atlantic world, this path-breaking volume is truly without peer. Starting with Anthony F. C. Wallace's excellent prologue, its individual essays explore the complex and often conflicting somatic cultures of both natives and Europeans with particular emphasis on the political and religious uses of dreams on both sides of the Atlantic, their place in the conquest and conversion of the New World, together with the role of dreams, nightmares included, in the construction of the early modern self. All told, this important collection is must reading not only for historians, but also pyschologists and pyschoanalysts, and for that matter anyone-and who isn't?-interested in the complex, often disturbing, but always fascinating and revealing character of dreams." * Richard L. Kagan, Johns Hopkins University *
Table of ContentsForeword. Xanadu: Dreams of the Dark Side of Paradise
—Anthony F. C. Wallace
Introduction: The Literatures of Dreaming
—Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle
I. EUROPEAN THEORIES, POLITICS, AND EXPERIENCES OF DREAMING Dreaming
Chapter 1. The Inner Eye: Early Modern Dreaming and Disembodied Sight
—Mary Baine Campbell
Chapter 2. Demons of Desire or Symptoms of Disease? Medical Theories and Popular Experiences of the "Nightmare" in Premodern England
—Janine Rivière
Chapter 3. Competition and Confirmation in the Iberian Prophetic Community: The 1589 Invasion of Portugal in the Dreams of Lucrecia de León
—María V. Jordán
Chapter 4. The Peasant Who Went to Hell: Dreams and Visions in Early Modern Spain
—Luís R. Corteguer
Chapter 5. Dreams and Prophecies: The Fifth Empire of Father Antonio Vieira and Messianic Visions of the Bragança Dynasty in Seventeenth-Century Portugal and Brazil
—Luís Filipe Silvério Lima (trans. Anna Luisa Geselbracht)
II. INTERCULTURAL ENCOUNTER
Chapter 6. Flying Like an Eagle: Franciscan and Caddo Dreams and Visions
—Carla Gerona
Chapter 7. Dream-Visions and Divine Truth in Early Modern Hispanic America
—Andrew Redden
Chapter 8. French Jesuits and Indian Dreams in Seventeenth-Century New France
—Leslie Tuttle
Chapter 9. "My Spirit Found a Unity with This Holy Man": A Nun's Visions and the Negotiation of Pain and Power in Seventeenth-Century New France
—Emma Anderson
III. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: PROPHECY AND REVIVAL
Chapter 10. The Unbounded Self: Dreaming and Identity in the British Enlightenment
—Phyllis Mack
Chapter 11. Visions of Handsome Lake: Seneca Dreams, Prophecy, and the Second Great Awakening
—Matthew Dennis
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
