Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature: Emotions, ethics, dreams (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture)

Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. These concerns about sleep, and the intersecting medical and moral discourses with which they engage, have been overlooked by studies more interested in what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (sex). In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries and is both subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications for the medieval English cultural imagination. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau. 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. This book shows how sleep and the spaces in which it takes place animate ethical codes and emotive scripts, shaping a range of medieval English genres. In particular, it demonstrates the significance of sleep-related motifs to Middle English romance and offers a more embodied understanding of dream visions by Chaucer, Langland and the Pearl-poet. -- .