Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Projections, Dreams, Monsters, and Illusions. Edited by Albrecht Classen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. xiii + 807 pages + 9 b/w and 24 color images. $181.99 hardcover or e-book.

Ever since the publication of Jacque Le Goff’s seminal work L’imaginaire médiéval (The Medieval Imagination) from 1985, there has been a steady stream of studies investigating different facets of the premodern imagination, including—but not limited to—memory, emotions, the monstrous and the Other, gender, space and travel, dreams and visions, reception studies, and cultural identity. Albrecht Classen’s publication of essays from the conference proceedings of the Sixteenth International Symposium on Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Arizona in 2019 situates itself firmly within this scholarship. The collection is really two books in one: a book-length introduction and twenty-one essays from an international group of new and experienced scholars. The focus of the collection is as broad as it is diverse, with examinations of the aforementioned topics in the fields of medieval and early modern Arabic, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, and Spanish. As a whole, the book expands our understanding of imagination by revealing the role of ambiguity, ideology, cultural syncretism, and liminality in narrative and authorial strategies of imagination, while demonstrating the universality of imagination to literary cultures.

Classen’s introduction makes the case for the study of imagination. A great strength of the introduction is its overview of theories of imagination from Antiquity to the modern era and brief summaries of a great number of premodern pieces of literature and art. Although Classen’s approach is essayistic and sometimes repetitive, the introduction is useful for readers looking for a starting point for further research or wanting to acquaint themselves with the topic or function of imagination in a particular literary genre or era. The reader can find a veritable treasure trove of topics related to imagination such as monsters, magic, medicine, the miraculous, fairies, travel literature, medieval manuscript illuminations, love and desire, visions, mappae mundi, etc. With these examples, Classen is able to show how imagination reflects premodern hopes, fears, and anxieties across “languages, genres, and periods” (122), finding that imagination is the vehicle for the creative process that influences reality and ideology through narratives that establish or reaffirm an individual’s or a society’s notions of race, religion, gender, knowledge, and cultural identity.

The essays are organized chronologically, whereas another organizational principle such as topic, approach, genre, or field of study might have better focused the reader’s attention on the important findings of the book or connections between contributions. The book is, however, successful on several fronts. It engages the reader in many of the current theoretical approaches to studying imagination while also exploring different modes of imagining such as the collective, scientific, and cognitive imaginations. Some of the essays use and reevaluate past scholarship on the premodern imagination including Le Goff, Jeffery Cohen, and Mary Carruthers. And most importantly, most of the essays demonstrate the value of exploring how cultural imagination is generated and changed in its various forms of transmission and reception. This review will not discuss all of the essays in the volume but will instead highlight some of the thematic groupings of essays.

Two essays study what one might call the scientific imagination. These essays show the role that imagination plays in the development of scientific knowledge, highlighting how fantastical explanations for illnesses or physical abnormalities are dismissed by modern medicine as superstition or myth but prefigure the actual causes for these conditions. Chiara Benati, for example, examines how maladies such as toothaches, headaches, and skin rashes were explained via worms in premodern Germany, prefiguring modern medicine’s discovery of unseen causes of illness such as germs, viruses, bacteria. In a similar fashion, Scott L. Taylor is able to show how the premodern imagination was used to explain congenital abnormalities through bestiality, maternal impressions, or preformationism. Especially valuable is how Taylor dispels Le Goff’s claim that medieval people did not easily differentiate between material and imagined reality, showing that premodern thinkers were indeed nuanced in their medical thinking, and that there was interplay between the two modes of reality well up to the nineteenth century with the advent of the Scientific Revolution.

Another group of essays represents reception studies of the best kind. David Bennet and Filip Radovic explore the position of dreams in medieval Arabic thought, examining the Arabic reception of Aristotelian treatises on dreams, the Parva naturalia. They are able to show with their study of Aristotle’s insights on dreams through Al-Kindī to Al-Fārābi and Avicenna to Averroes that dreams are considered a spiritual perception in the Arabic tradition and therefore are “real” experiences that could connect the dreamer to the divine. Siegfried Christoph’s essay on the monstrous should be required reading for researchers of German courtly literature. Christoph approaches the imagination of monsters through the lens of memory, differentiating the monstrous, grotesque, and marvelous in the late-Arthurian Gauriel von Muntabel by Konrad von Stoffeln. He is able to demonstrate that the reception of monstrous motifs in Konrad’s text relies on the medieval audience’s collective memory of these motifs. In doing so, he makes the strong case that Konrad’s work is more original than past scholarship has given it credit for. Similarly, Filip Hrbrek and Martha Moffitt Peacock show in their two essays how the reception of Chivalric German literature and the Mermaid of Edam myth, respectively, become an essential part of Czech and Dutch collective memory. Hrbrek’s and Peacock’s essays draw upon a wide range of texts and material culture to demonstrate how the reimagining of a literary culture and a fantastical being are ultimately ideological projects, helping to form Czech and Dutch culture and national identity.

A number of essays explore how identity in the premodern era could also be constructed by the process of Othering. This could occur by creating anti-Jewish fantasies through racist motifs and symbols, as Birgit Wiedl ably demonstrates in her essay. Wiedl shows through a great variety of medieval German media that these “Christian fantasies” (573) function as anti-Jewish propaganda and as narratives that teach how “good Christians” should act. Or this could occur through the ambiguous depiction of monsters and their existence on the borders of civilization in order to highlight the potential of finding a darker, evil Other within ourselves, as Daniel F. Pigg analyzes in his detailed exploration of Grendel in Beowulf. Or the depiction of space could be deployed to establish religious superiority over non-Christian pagans, as Warren Tormey shows in his essay on the hell-tour narrative in Anglo-Saxon and Irish literature. By examining Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Felix’s Life of St. Guthlac, and St. Brendan’s Navigatio, Tormey presents the compelling argument that the imaginative hell-tour narrative was used by patristic writers to demarcate “‘us’ and ‘them’”, while also establishing “a cultural hegemony defined by a continental Christian ethos and practices” (331). Travel literature could be used to imagine the monstrous and wondrous Other afar, as Sally Abed demonstrates in her comparative study of the Travels of John Mandeville and Abu Hamid al-Gharnāti’s Tuhfat al-Albāb. Abed’s approach identifies common imaginative ground while highlighting how the Arabic tradition includes more direct contact with the monstrous and wondrous than the European context through the delayed reception of Pliny in the Arabic world.

Four contributions offer gender-studies approaches to imagination. Jessica Zeitler’s, Albrecht Classen’s, and Isidro Luis Jiménez’s contributions examine three different literary traditions, but come to similar conclusions about gender and imagination. Zeitler’s examination of warrior women, genies, and other imaginary female characters in the understudied Hispano-Arabic Tales of Ziyad Ibn Amir al-Kinani, Classen’s discussion of fantastic female characters such as fairies and Melusine in medieval and early modern German literature, and Jiménez’s analysis of the evolving understanding of the Amazon myth in Spanish culture show how the space of the text was a place where male anxieties, hopes, desires, and fears about women, gender roles, and the future played out. For her part, Christa Agnes Tuczay poses the promising question whether dreams are gendered in Middle High German narrative literature. While she never truly answers this question, Tuczay’s study reveals the different characteristics and functions of dreams in this literary tradition: prophetic and false, warning and healing, allegorical and biblical, and political.

Three essays deserve special attention for their emphasis upon the didactic function of imagination. Robert Landau Ames’s and Edward Currie’s essays situate the discourse of two very different texts within the Mirror for Princes tradition. Ames investigates the depiction of the monstrous King Zahhāk in the Arabic Shāhnāmah (Book of Kings) by Firdawsī, showing how the Persian audience was to learn about good kingship through the vile and monstrous behavior of a bad king. Through a detailed discussion of council in the digressions found in the text, Currie makes the strong case that the medieval audience was to learn from the pitfalls of monstrous council at the court in Beowulf. Jane Beal sheds light on the didactic function of imagining animals and mythical beings in the medieval bestiary, with special focus on the Aberdeen Bestiary. A memory study of the best kind, Beal’s text reveals that the descriptions and depictions of these animals represented a type of memory work for the medieval audience, a means of contemplating the life of Christ.

Much in this volume will be useful to scholars interested in imagination. They will find the most current evaluation of key issues informing the debate around imagination, including the meaning of dreams and travel literature, memory, questions of genre, issues of space, the Other, and reception. The great diversity and the connections among literary traditions and topics found in this collection show the universality of imagination. The book also uncovers varying modes of premodern understanding, interpretation, and reception of medieval and early modern imagination, bringing to light many interpretive issues regarding imagination that warrant further study. For these reasons, this book should figure in any scholar’s or advanced graduate student’s research of the premodern imagination.