The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form by Kathryn L. Lynch (review)

REVIEWS read the early troubadours this way, in defiance of philological rigor; but why should one wish to do so? WILLIAM D. PADEN Northwestern University KATHRYN 1. LYNCH. The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philoso­ phy, andLiterary Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Pp. vii, 263. $35.00. In her opening remarks, Kathryn Lynch makes a bold claim for the importance of the dream vision in the High Middle Ages. "Along with romance" she says, the dream vision "was perhaps the genre of the age" (p.l). The pages which follow prove her point, define the subgenre of the "philosophic dream vision," and give a clear sense ofthe paradigmatic shift in philosophy separating the High from the Late Middle Ages-or Dante fromChaucer.Focusing on Boethius, Alain de Lille,Jean de Meun, Dante, andJohn Gower, Lynch makes asignificantcontribution to ourunderstand­ ing of vision literature in general and provides a model of historical and genre criticism. Early in The High Medieval Dream Vision, the author identifies her approach with that of Barbara Nolan's Gothic Visionary Perspective: "By attending to historical change and by tracing significant intersections among the arts, she [Nolan] demostrates the historical cohesiveness of the spiritual quest" (p. 3). Unlike Nolan, however, Lynch also attends to a limited subgenre, the "philosophic dream vision." In her definition of this subgenre, she adapts much of her method from Alastair Fowler's Kinds of Literature and Hans RobertJauss's Aesthetic Experience and Literary Her­ meneutics. But she adds to the approaches of Fowler andJauss her own understanding of the historical method and objects to the bias ofJauss against conventionality, an attributeofthe philosophic dreamvision and of its conservative authors. Lynch blends the approaches of Nolan, Fowler, and Jauss with the historical overview of Gordon Leff, who sees history as a sequence of intellectual change-either "continuous" within a universally accepted paradigm or as "discontinuous" when the paradigm must be abandoned as 263 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER no longer aligned with evidence. In developing her methodology, Lynch allows her medieval sources to provide the critical vocabulary at once precise and rich with possibilities of application to medieval texts beyond the scope of her present study. Chapter 1 looks at twelfth- and thirteenth-century attempts to synthe­ size natural philosophy and received theology. This examination leads to a discussion of the right and wrong use of reason and imagination to move by "abstraction" from the created world to the spiritual. Not only does this chapter give a provocative analysis of the itinerarium mentis ad Deum, it also discusses Reason and Imagination as literary figurae as well as philo­ sophical terms. The implications of Lynch's treatment of ingenium as "poetic imagination" and "mediating term" between the created and di­ vine worlds are far-reaching and immediately illustrative of the medieval capacity to accommodate changing conceptions to existing paradigms. In a sacramental world, poetry moves from image of God to God by abstrac­ tion, ultimately through the mediation of ingenium. Chapter 2 examines the "liminal" qualities of dream visions as especially appropriate for poetic exploration of the individual salvific journey from the physical to the spiritual. Here Lynch sees the De consolatione of Boethius along with Cicero's Somnium Scipionis and Augustine's Soltlo­ quia as literary models for later philosophical dream visions. All three of these models, especially Boethius, reflect a "devalued world" characteristic of Platonic rather than of Aristotelian epistemology (p. 58). The later visions of Alain de Lille and Dante accommodate a more Aristotelian system of abstraction within the Boethian paradigm. The dreamer or "Imagination" is confronted by a figure of Reason, and his mental journey to God is propelled by a dialogue of increasing abstraction. At this point Lynch turns to detailed analysis of Alain de Lille's De planctu naturae, Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose, Dante's Purgatorio, and John Gower's Confessio Amantis. In these four chapters the texts are illuminated by historical context and by close applica­ tion of genre theory to specific works. Considering the philosophic realism of these four authors, genre theory-itself an application of universals to particulars-is an especially felicitous methodology. The discussion of Alain...