Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts

This book examines how the experiences of hearing voices and seeing visions were understood within the cultural, literary, and intellectual contexts of the medieval and early modern periods. In the Middle Ages, these experiences were interpreted according to frameworks that could credit visionaries or voice-hearers with spiritual knowledge, and allow them to inhabit social roles that were as much desired as feared. Voice-hearing and visionary experience offered powerful creative possibilities in imaginative literature and were often central to the writing of inner, spiritual lives.  Ideas about such experience were taken up and reshaped in response to the cultural shifts of the early modern period.  These essays, which consider the period 1100 to 1700, offer diverse new insights into a complex, controversial, and contested category of human experience, exploring literary and spiritual works as illuminated by scientific and medical writings, natural philosophy and theology,and the visual arts. In extending and challenging contemporary bio-medical perspectives through the insights and methodologies of the arts and humanities, the volume offers a timely intervention within the wider project of the medical humanities.

Chapters 2 and 5 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

“This invaluable collection brings readings of medieval and early modern textual sources to enrich, even transform, cultural and medical understanding of being human. It opens up the long history of voice-hearing as a range of multisensory experiences, juxtaposing trauma and hallucination with imagination, psychic energy, and religious vision, and challenging boundaries between spiritual and medical, natural and supernatural, inner and outer, waking and dreaming.” (David Lawton, Professor of English, Washington University in St. Louis, USA)

“This ambitious essay-collection challenges current biomedical perspectives whilst benefiting from them. Encompassing pre-modern religious revelations, dream-vision poems, and plays, it engages with contemporary research into auditory verbal hallucinations. Now a phenomenon often seen narrowly as a psychopathological disorder, then voice-hearing could be revered as divine annunciation or powerfully dramatized within fictions of inner experience. Visions and Voice-Hearing offers an impressive interdisciplinary and trans-historical model for understanding the many meanings of ‘hearing things’.” (Alastair Minnis, Professor Emeritus, Yale University, USA; University of York, UK)

“Hilary Powell and Corinne Saunders have created a collection of essays that represents an innovative, highly interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach to textual records of visions and voice hearing in the premodern period.  Considering medieval and early modern texts from a wide variety of genres, the essays in this collection are must-reads for scholars in literary studies, religious studies, history, and medical humanities alike.” (Nancy Warren, Professor of English, Texas A&M University, USA)

Hilary Powell is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK, where she specialises in medieval monastic literary culture and the medical humanities. Her recent publications explore themes of voice-hearing, psychosis and mind-wandering from a medieval perspective.

Corinne Saunders is Professor in the Department of English Studies and Co-Director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK, specialising in medieval literature and the history of ideas, in particular, the connections between mind, body and affect. Her books include Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (2010).