Dreams and Divination in Early Medieval Canonical and Narrative Sources: The Question of Clerical Control

Abstract

It is commonly stated, and correctly so, that the most frequently reported dreams of Antiquity and the early Middle Ages were those of saints and kings. 1 However, the unprofessed laity, "ordinary" Christians of the Christian community, were also dreaming religious dreams. 2 Their dreams are both under-represented and less lavishly documented than the more famous visions of the spiritual or political elite, and they are known to us almost exclusively through the writings of clerics and [End Page 621] monks. That lay dreams were recorded in religious writings of the era, however, suggests that they held a noteworthy place in Christian religious culture and that the religious elite believed these dreams to be worthy of religious interpretation. Yet clerics of the early Middle Ages have been viewed as actively ignoring the religious dreams of the laity or as imposing their own interpretive framework on them. This article seeks to assess the degree of control that the clergy can be said to have exercised over the religious aspects of dreaming in the early Middle Ages, and the different kind of sources that reveal clerical intent.

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