Chaucer's oneiric medicine: Dreams, disease, healing, and literary endeavor

This study explores the intersection of dreams, medicine, and literary practice as represented in five of Chaucer's works. Very little has been written about the appearance of medicine in late medieval literary texts, and no prior study addresses medicine specifically in the context of dreams. Although some have argued that a physiological theory of dreaming exerted little, if any, influence on literary subject-matter, Chaucer's poetry provides strong evidence to the contrary. Greco-Arabic scientific and medical works, recently made available to the Latin west beginning in the twelfth century, form the backdrop of Chaucer's literary stage. These works attracted increasing scrutiny as the Black Death decimated populations throughout Europe and defied accepted approaches to the practice of medicine. Chaucer's appropriation of these rediscovered perspectives of medicine and dreams not only impacted literary practice, but provided a potent means through which Chaucer explored literary practice itself.

Beginning with the dream-visions, chapter one argues that the Book of the Duchess recovers the Apollonian connection between poetry and medicine and the Asclepian connection between medicine and dreams, thereby creating a literary space that attempts to facilitate healing through the written dream-vision. Building on these connections between and among dreams, medicine, and literary practice, chapters two and three concern the House of Fame and the Parliament of Fowls, respectively. These poems, I argue, consider the doubleness of dreams and literary endeavor as potentially both pathogenic and curative. Chapter four suggests that the romance-tragedy Troilus and Criseyde explores a theory of contagion through the character of Pandarus while figuring language, literature and letters as pathogenic agents. Although the poem presents diverse perspectives regarding dreams and prophecy, Cassandra's interpretation of Troilus' boar dream clearly functions as a curative force. The fifth and final chapter shows that while the Nun's Priest's Tale parodies dreams, medicine, and the interpretive process, it also champions the life-saving power of speech. Ultimately, this study shows that the confluence of medicine and dreams in these poems constitutes a vital dimension of Chaucer's work-one that reveals a profound connection between literature and the fundamentally human experiences of disease, healing, and dreaming.