The medieval dream-vision : a study in genre structure and meaning

The dream-vision in its typical medieval form was first employed widely in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By tracing parallels between the social and philosophical developments of this period and developments in poetic theory and practice, this dissertation seeks to identify what characteristics of the genre were then truly constitutive of meaning. The High Middle Ages found a way to comprehend an increasingly diverse and complicated social and political environment by a deep belief that it was all a reflection of divine intent, a speculum. In philosophical terms, this belief depended on an epistemology designed to explain how man moved from the reflection to a knowledge of the divine reality it reflected, how man knew or "abstracted" immaterial essences from his experience of the material world.