Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Projections, Dreams, Monsters, and Illusions ed. by Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (review)

This wide-ranging collection of essays emerges from the University of Arizona's 2019 International Symposium on Medieval and Early Modern Studies. However, the book also boasts a 200-plus-page introduction by Albrecht Classen, which is meant to be an extensive literature review and analysis of the topic and forms "in a way its own little book" (3). Totaling over eight hundred pages, this is a monumental project that required vast amounts of labor and dedication from both Classen and contributors.

Classen uses his introduction to argue for the study of imagination. The literature review is not quite a contextualization of the book in the existing conversation of premodern imagination, however, because Classen argues that today's scholars dismiss imagination in the premodern era. Modern scholarship, he claims, focuses either on Greek philosophers or on the poets of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe as "allegedly the first ones to develop specific aesthetic categories to describe [imaginative] phenomena" (6). Instead, Classen offers a rapid run-through of philosophies of imagination from late antiquity to modernity, as well as subsections dedicated to summaries of medieval artworks and literature in which fantastic events occur. This choice is an offshoot of Classen's overall goal—to use imagination as a framework of universal understanding across time periods, languages, and cultures—and is perhaps implicitly an argument for a more open-ended essay form in which he hopes to generate interest in the topic rather than explain it.

Classen's attention to the universality of imagination—across cultures, across historical moments, across humanity as a whole—is the underpinning justification of the book and the disciplinary breadth of its essays. Imagination's importance, then, must subsume other theoretical and organizational methods. In the first part of his work—and what he works to defend for a majority of the introduction—Classen challenges the material focus of Marxist analyses, contending that imagination is at the core of (or synonymous with) all ideology in its development of fantasies. Rather than "rationality, mechanical processes, and physical objects, such as money" explaining cultural and political conditions (4), fantasy is the origin of sociohistorical realities. He also groups together anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and racism as parallel instances of "in-group fantasies" about outsiders (4), proposing that we can abandon their specificities too. Though not empirical, fantasies are still causal, with national, religious, and racial myths producing changes within and between peoples. But the stakes are still higher: looking at premodern philosophies about imagination serves "to investigate the faculty of the soul to produce images and thoughts" (25–26), which both enables all mental capacity and comprises all literary texts. Imagination, additionally, is at the root of desire and erotics, and so Classen argues that the human mind is better understood through analyses of imagination than anything else. The introduction culminates with the claim that "with respect to imagination, it does not matter whether the literary text or the art work is available in concrete, material terms … the format through which images come forward is irrelevant" (186). This radical proposition—pushing the reader to abandon formal distinctions, along with the linguistic, material, and spatial ones already left behind—perhaps serves as a justification for the diversity in the essays that follow, but also punctuates the overarching argument for the universal significance of imagination.

Classen's introduction is split into its own subsections, all ranging from one to ten pages. These divisions are helpful in breaking up a very long introduction, though they do force Classen to repeat himself. Furthermore, the ordering of the subsections is not particularly intuitive, making the progression of the argument challenging to follow. For example, the section "Music and Imagination" is followed by two different sections on the German poet Hartmann von Aue and then by a section on "Medieval Literature and Visual Psychology," without clear...