Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time

Projections, Dreams, Monsters, and Illusions

Albrecht Classen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110693782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

Imagination, Fantasy, Otherness, and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern World

New Approaches to Cultural-Historical and Anthropological Epistemology. Also an Introduction

Albrecht Classen

University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

The following is more than a mere introduction; instead, it represents a comprehensive analysis of what imagination and fantasy might have meant in the Middle Ages and beyond, touching on many different literary texts, art works, religious concepts, and philosophical notions past and present. As the issue at stake is so comprehensive, research has already been very active in coming to terms with it. Below I will provide an extensive literature review and present detailed and extensive discussions of many different relevant sources. To help the reader, I start with a table of content for this contribution only.

“Because you try to penetrate the shadows,”

he said to me, “from much too far away,

you confuse the truth with your imagination.”

(Dante, Inferno, XXXI, vv. 22–24)

“Prove true, imagination!

That I, dear brother, be now tak’en for you!”

(Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 4).

Theseus: “More strange than true. I never may believe

These antique fables nor these fairy toys.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold”

(Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1).

Outline and Structure

In this ‘introductory’ study, in a way a little book by itself, I will create a mental roadmap for the entire volume by examining a wide range of documents, art works, theological reflections, and philosophical ruminations that allow us to examine critically the meaning of imagination, fantasy, otherness, and monstrosity as we can observe those aspects in the Middle Ages and the early modern age. As much as possible, I will also attempt to lay the foundation for theoretical reflections on those phenomena and to identify them as important elements for many scholars working in the pre-modern era. After all, human life is the result both of the material conditions we live in and of the projections of our own selves upon the world stage. Mind and matter are intricately intertwined with each other, which cultural historians have always to keep in mind when they look at the phenomena of their investigation. We create our own lives and are the products of life itself, however we might want to define it (God, nature, life as an independent entity, the political system, the local community, school, etc.). We could hence postulate that imagination and fantasy represent the dimension behind the public stage where we normally operate, consciously and unconsciously, and yet we all know that it takes only a small step behind the scene to recognize the full scope of all existence comprising both the material and the immaterial aspect.

Most editors of other similar volumes containing the studies collected from a pool of papers presented at a conference or a symposium are normally content with outlining briefly the theoretical and cultural-historical framework relevant for the central topic, but then they step aside and give all the room to the contributors. My intention here, by contrast, as in all previous volumes in our series, is to go into detail, to stake out the entire field, to provide insights into the widest range possible of the critical documents and sources, to reflect thoroughly on the current state of research, and to outline how the subsequent contributions can be embedded in this framework. In a way, this is a broadly conceived attempt to establish the foundation for the investigation of this fundamental topic. A complete coverage of everything ever published on imagination and fantasy in the pre-modern world cannot, of course, be expected, but I hope to lead us deeply into this field by engaging with a vast gamut of relevant texts and images from that time period and by reflecting on the relevant international research literature from past and present.

To reflect on the workings of ideology and its mental grounding, it does not really matter what a politician, or even the pope, says in specific terms, but how the words resonate with the audience’s fantasy and imagination. Throughout time, major leaders, kings, emperors, generals, dictators, or other types of rulers have been so successful in gaining control and command over their people not necessarily because of their physical might, intellectual ruse, or operational skills, as important as all those aspects might have been, but because of their charisma and thus their ability to reach out to people’s sense of identity or lack thereof, whether we think of Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, or the fictional King Arthur. All those figures continue to evoke even modern fantasies and are the foundation of much historical imagination.

If a leader knows how to address deeply hidden desires, fears, or hopes, or understands how to stoke those artificially, then the masses have always willingly followed him/her, such as the Crusader knights or the absolutely loyal troops under the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan. Even though there is no room here to pursue this psychological-historical perspective at length, we can easily recognize the profound relevance of human imagination and fantasy which often drive cultural and political developments more extensively than rationality, mechanical processes, and physical objects, such as money.

Fear of immigrants, asylum seekers, new settlers, or outsiders/minorities, especially of Jews, has always been driven by nationalistic, in-group fantasies, both in the Middle Ages and today, as most dramatically illustrated currently by the fanaticism of the conservatives in the United States, especially under President Donald Trump, to ‘defend’ their country from that ominous ‘wave’ of ‘brown people’ that seems to threaten the national identity or the existence of the entire country; and hence the desperate desire to build a wall that would stop all ‘pathogenic’ dangers arising from the south, a rhetoric we are, unfortunately, so familiar with from the time of the Hitler regime in Germany.

The masses, as Gustave le Bon had already observed a long time ago, have always been manipulable because they are dangerously subject to their own and alien emotions and dreams and need a leader who promises to actualize those for them if they only follow him/her. The pre-modern era was not an exception to this phenomenon, although we cannot simply equate the modern masses with the people living in the Middle Ages within a feudal system. After all, every type of society depends on a strong leader who knows how to instrumentalize people’s dreams and desires and to transform them into some kind of reality. Nevertheless, this is, basically, the stuff myths are made of, and they have worked just as well in antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages, not even to talk of the twentieth or twenty-first century. Both mass enthusiasm and mass panic (Crusades, anti-Judaism, Hussite wars, etc.) as well as political movements of many different kinds prove to be based to a large extent on emotions and imagination, which a ruthless and calculating leader knows exceedingly well how to utilize for his/her own purposes.¹

Once again, as in all previous volumes of our series “Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture,” while the focus here rests on the pre-modern age, the issues at stake prove to be of universal significance. By focusing on the specific documents chosen by myself and the contributors, we hope to open up a new chapter within the broad discourse of two of the most critical issues in human life.

Although these two terms, imagination and fantasy, have been discussed already from many different perspectives, involving philosophical and religious approaches, among many other schools of thought, here I will not distinguish between them strictly and will attempt to bring the various facets together for a collective whole, providing a variety of materials to illustrate the specific use of those concepts in their relevant contexts. For our purposes, it might suffice to observe that these two terms are not exactly the same, yet they function (or simply exist) in very similar fashions and deeply determine human existence collectively. For some thinkers, imagination is connected with divine inspiration (mysticism, Rosicrucianism, Romanticism, religious spirituality), whereas fantasy proves to be the product of the human mind, but I will leave all this deliberately vague because it would not be possible to draw clear-cut distinctions in face of a myriad of cultural manifestations of both forces, including the imaginary (as seen by Wolfgang Iser, among others; cf. below).²

Modern research has tended to give considerable credit to the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle in their discussion of human mentality and then to dismiss the role of both forces (imagination and fantasy) in the pre-modern era, as if those issues had not been relevant in the Middle Ages. Instead, scholars have then regularly highlighted the efforts of thinkers and poets from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries only who were allegedly the first ones to develop specific aesthetic categories to describe these phenomena, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) (reproductive fancy, primary imagination, secondary imagination).³ We must always accept that imagination matters in almost every human dimension, whether in the arts or in the sciences, in philosophy or in medicine, in literature or in music, music or religion.⁴

The Case of the Wunderer

However, we will observe further down that by the late Middle Ages already a stronger rift developed separating imagination as something powerful and real, from fantasy as something fanciful, playful, maybe even dismissible, such as in the case of the various stages of presenting dragons and other monstrous creatures.⁵ One interesting, heretofore hardly studied example would be the rather curious, maybe disjointed and illogical heroic epic, Der Wunderer (ca. 1550), where the monster/outsider, the Wonderer (or Wondrous Being), pursues a maid who had been promised to him as his future wife. Since she refuses now to grant him her hand, he intends to eat her up, a clear case of cannibalism, a rare case for the Middle Ages (see, however, Grendel in Beowulf), but she is ultimately saved by the hero Dietrich of Bern who can overcome and kill the grotesque creature.⁶

Ironically, the maid then turns out to be nothing but an ideal, an allegorical figure representing fundamental courtly values, who commands over three strengths or functions; first, she has the capability to perceive immediately the true character of an individual; second, to grant blessing to anyone and to guarantee his safety; and third, to transport herself to any location wherever she might want to be. It remains entirely unclear why she hence would not rescue herself from the Wonderer by teleporting herself to safety, but there are many other problems with that text anyway which would allow us to identify it as a literary failure of grand proportions.

Nevertheless, in our context, we only need to keep in mind that here we face an intriguing example of truly fanciful imagination, with all the elements of pure fictionality present because even the maid is nothing but an allegory, “fraw Seld” (stanza 5208, v. 1; Lady Happiness).

For the subsequent investigations, however, all we need to know at this point is that these two elements are fundamental in creating human culture and are essential in areas of human life such as spirituality, the arts, but also in the sciences and medicine, whether we can identify theoretical discussions about them or not. As Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann notes:

The worlds of spirituality are fantastical, deriving from revelations that ca...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Imagination, Fantasy, Otherness, and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern World New Approaches to Cultural-Historical and Anthropological Epistemology. Also an Introduction
• When Dreams Got Real: The Ontology of Dreaming in the Arabic Aristotelian Tradition
• Imaginary Creatures Causing Real Diseases: Projective Etiology in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine
• Political Ideals, Monstrous Counsel, and the Literary Imagination in Beowulf
• Who is Grendel in Beowulf? Ambiguity, Allegory, and Meaning
• Otherworldly Pilgrims: The Hell Tour and the Establishment of (Continental) Christian Territoriality on the Anglo-Saxon and Irish Peripheries
• On Monstrosity in the Shāhnāmah: Philosophizing with Żaḥḥāk
• The Negative Imagination: William IX’s Song Exactly About Nothing: “Farai un vers de dreit nien”
• Ladies, Warriors and Genies: Imagining Gender and Power in The Book of the Tales of Ziyad Ibn Amir al-Kinani
• The World of Hybrid Women in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature: Fantasy Images, Fascination, and Terror Fairies, Mermaids, Undines, Flower Girls, and Nixies as Reflections of Popular Subconsciousness
• The Myth of the Amazons in Medieval Spain
• Wonders and Monsters in The Travels of John Mandeville and in Abu Hamid al-Gharnāti’s Tuhfat al-Albāb
• Are Dreams Gender-Related? The Function of Dreams in Middle High German Narrative Literature
• Monstra nobiscum: Medieval and Early Modern Teratology and the Confluence of Imaginatio and Scientia
• Jews and Anti-Jewish Fantasies in Christian Imagination in the Middle Ages
• The Life of Christ in Medieval Bestiaries: Imagining the Griffin, Lion, Unicorn, Pelican, and Phoenix
• Monsters, Grotesques, and Other Marvels in the Later Medieval Imagination
• Fantastic Places, Objects, and Creatures in Fourteenth-Century Czech-Language Literature: Imagination During the Reign of the Luxembourg Dynasty
• The Mermaid of Edam and the Emergence of Dutch National Identity
• Dream and Prophetic Projection in Andreas Gryphius’s Historical Tragedies: Traces of the Symbol
• The Shadow of the Knight: Phantom Fears and their Distortions of Reality in Baroque Spanish Theater
• Fantasy, Imagination, and Vision in Thomas Vaughan’s Lumen de Lumine
• Index