Description
Book SynopsisMiddle 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.
Trade ReviewLeitch’s book expands our understanding of a neglected area of medieval mentalité, enabling new interpretations of key texts. Arthurian scholars will enjoy rethinking the many sleep-related scenes in the romance corpus through the insights presented in this fascinating book.
Carolyne Larrington,St John’s College, University of Oxford, Arthurian Literature 2023
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Table of ContentsIntroduction: remarkable sleep
1 Emotions, epistemology and the nature of sleep
2 Ethics, appetite and the dangers of sleep
3 Sleeping spaces and the circumscription of desire
4 The hermeneutics of sleep in Chaucer’s dream poems
Coda: ‘all good letters were layde a slepe’: medieval sleep and early modern heirs
Index
