Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages by Jessica Barr (review)

REVIEWS 228 the role of the historian within the broader workings of empire” (118). Barletta links history writing with the creation of a Portuguese identity that is centered on conflict with Islam and a conception of martyrdom. History writing also provides a type of immortality through the preservation of deeds for future generations . Barletta further links this type of textual immortality with Alexander, a connection that is augmented by the fact that the Portuguese are operating in the same territory as the historical Alexander. In the final chapter Barletta provides an in-depth examination of how a subject population in sixteenth-century Aragon was also able to access ideas about Alexander to conceptualize Iberian empires and their relationships to subject populations in a different way. Focusing on the Rekontamiento del Rey Alisandre, which was written in Aljamiado and survives in a single extant manuscript, Barletta shows how the mudejar population adopted the story for their own purposes. Rather than using it to conceptualize their own encounters with Eastern Others, or represent their own mortality, the mudejar population focused on aspects of the Alexander story that came through the Eastern tradition . For example, they placed the story within an Islamic literary framework. Unsurprisingly, the mudejar population also focused on the fact that Alexander ’s empire was tied to his mortality and destined to end, just as the Iberian empires in the Islamic world were also destined to end. Barletta concludes by restating the link between stories of Alexander and the imperial projects of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Iberian empires. Discussing the presence of Alexander, he writes, “At once legendary, mythological, and historical, the ghost of Alexander is intricately related to the European, and more specially Iberian, colonial adventures that took place in Muslim Africa and Asia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries” (201). Barletta claims that ideas about Alexander accompany, shape, and even engender Iberian imperial projects. Death in Babylon is an excellent work that provides interesting and useful insight into the ways that Iberian writers conceptualized imperial expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Barletta shows that he is adept in multiple methodologies and he usefully brings a range of approaches to bear on a truly interdisciplinary work. However, at times, this wide approach comes at the cost of depth; Barletta could have included more specific examples of how Iberian writers were influenced by previous representations and stories of Alexander. Moreover, the work is heavily weighted toward the Portuguese experience and would have benefited from more examples from other parts of Iberia, especially from Castile, which is underrepresented in the study. In summation, Death in Babylon is a useful and important work that sheds a great deal of light on the way early modern Iberian writers conceptualized empire and the role that stories about, as well as representations of, Alexander had on these conceptualizations . BRETTON RODRIGUEZ, Romance Literatures, The University of Notre Dame Jessica Barr, Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press 2010) 296 pp. Jessica Barr’s book argues for the essential generic affinity between the medieval dream vision (as articulated in the voice of a male “dreamer”) and the lit- REVIEWS 229 erature of mystical revelation (so often gendered as female in the later Middle Ages) and for “the necessity of reading both presumably ‘fictional’ and ‘nonfictional’ vision texts in relation to one another as parts of a larger dialogue in which they both shared” (6). In positing the complex “porosity of the boundaries between presumably authentic and presumably fictional texts” (4) she addresses a point that is more fundamental to the critical reception of the texts than to the visions themselves. It is not intuitive that the texts’ medieval authors and contemporary readers would have been as troubled by issues of fictionality as successive waves of historicist critics in more recent times are. The book is divided into an introduction, eight body chapters, and an epilogue . Chapter 1 surveys the field of “canonical” visionary texts as a prequel to her arguments in chapters 2 through 8 by providing “three case studies” of important visionary texts that exerted considerable influence in later medieval writing: Boethius’s Consolation...