Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

Emotions, ethics, dreams

Megan G. Leitch, Anke Bernau, David Matthews, James Paz, Anke Bernau, David Matthews, James Paz

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526151100
• eBook ISBN: 9781526151094
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

1

Emotions, epistemology and the nature of sleep

Chardri’s thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Life of the Seven Sleepers offers a striking focus on how emotions engender sleep. In Chardri’s description, when the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus fall asleep in the cave in which they are hiding from their persecutors, their emotions play a causal role:

Ke par dolur, ke par penser

Endormirent li set bacheler.

Kar ceo avent, sachez, suvent

Ke gent, quant il sunt trop dolent

Par pesance de lur penser,

Lur cuvent tost sumiller.1

(Whether out of distress or out of worry, the seven young men went to sleep – for it often happens, you know, that when people are very sad on account of the weight of their worries, it is natural that they are prompt to slumber.)

This is an extraordinary sleep: a sleep from which the Seven will not wake for three centuries. Their sleep is a miracle demonstrating God’s power, and a story reproduced in hagiographical collections across the later Middle Ages, including in William Caxton’s 1483 Golden Legend, an English translation of Jacobus de Varagine’s thirteenth-century Legenda aurea.2 Chardri’s aside, however, emphasises that how or why they fall asleep is more ordinary, even expected: it is something that ‘often happens, you know’ (‘avent, sachez, suvent’). This commentary on sleep as a fitting response to a strong, distressing emotion is not paralleled in Chardri’s Latin source, but is also found in Chardri’s other saint’s life, Josaphaz.3 Chardri wrote at a time when knowledge of Galenic medicine had recently spread through Western Europe to England via medical tracts translated from Arabic.4 Chardri’s insular saints’ lives – in Anglo-Norman, directed towards English audiences5 – speak to an understanding of sleep as a natural or appropriate response (‘lur cuvent tost sumiller’) to uncomfortable emotions such as sorrow or anxiety. Sleep is not just a reaction, it is also a renewal: in the prevailing Galenic theory, where an imbalance in the humours signified a strong emotion – black bile indicating melancholy or sorrow, yellow bile indicating choler or anger – sleep, by facilitating the transformation of food into the four humours, could restore the balance between the humours that was necessary for good health. And as Chardri shows, a strong imbalance in the humours was, additionally, believed to be able to generate sleep: this culturally specific construction of the emotions was also explicated in medieval medical paradigms and manuals of health, and with widespread implications for understanding premodern literature.

In medieval English culture, representations of sleep are shaped by its multifaceted relationship to nature and ideas of the natural. Sleep, here, is a form of medicine – a natural, appropriate and beneficial response to a matter of mental health.6 Medicine, as a branch of natural philosophy (or science),7 was sometimes called ‘magyk natureel’, as in Chaucer’s Portrait of the Physician in the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales; medicine was ‘concerned with unlocking the secrets of nature, both in diagnosis and in treatment and remedies.’8 Although sleep, according to the principles of Galenic medicine, was understood as one of the six ‘non-naturals’, bodily processes seen as beneficial for well-being (as opposed to the ‘naturals’, which inhered to the body itself), it was also seen as a natural and necessary process. Describing sleep as a ‘kyndeliche disposicioun’, John Trevisa’s late fourteenth-century translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s proto-encyclopedic De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things) devotes two chapters to sleep, propounding sleep’s importance for physiological and psychological well-being.9 As I show here, both senses of the Middle English word ‘kynde’ – natural and benevolent10 – pertain not only to this particular discussion of sleep, but also to insular representations of sleep and of sleep’s implications for health more broadly.

This chapter explores how this medical understanding of sleep illuminates emotionally charged acts of falling asleep, particularly in Middle English romances, cycle plays and dream visions. It analyses the ways in which a range of writers, from Chardri to Chaucer, from Langland to Malory, negotiated prevailing views of the nature of sleep to communicate the consequences of embodied emotions. When characters get so sad or angry that they fall asleep, unconsciousness serves as a form of making emotion recognisable, of externalising the authenticity of affect, in ways that have partial parallels with, as well as differences from, swooning (a better-studied form of sudden-onset unconsciousness). In addition, in mediating ‘unhealthful’ emotions,11 in helping to relieve sorrow and manage anger, sleep plays an important role in supporting both mental and physical health. Sleep, then, is a way of knowing more about the sleeping subject in premodern English culture, as is insomnia – an affliction affecting romance lovers, melancholic dream vision narrators and uneasy heads that wear the crown. Sleep also offers ways of learning about matters beyond the well-being of the sleeper: desires for sleep are often entwined with desires for truth, in ways that include, but are not limited to, the epistemological implications of dreams and visions. Through this chapter’s identification and analysis of how Middle English literary representations of sleep engage with the thinking of Aristotle, Galen, Avicenna and Aquinas (among others), sleep emerges both with wide-ranging implications for the study of emotions in medieval English culture, and as more integral to the formation and content of dreams and dream visions than has been recognised.

‘profite þat is in slepe’: medicine and mental health

What, then, is sleep? What knowledge did premodern writers and readers have about it, and what attitudes did they have towards it? In the late Middle Ages, when sleep was widely understood as necessary and beneficial, its benefits – both physiological and psychological – originated in sleep’s vital role in digestion. In medical tracts and dietaries, sleep’s profitability is poised alongside discussions of the perils of oversleeping, or of sleeping at the wrong time or place, or in the wrong way. Sleep was not uniform, but it was universal, and (like death, for which it, despite its beneficial role, sometimes rhetorically substitutes) its functions and legibilities affected everyone, from prince to pauper. As Gilbert Hay remarks of Alexander the Great succumbing to sleep at a moment of uncertainty in the fifteenth-century Buik of Alexander, ‘Than slepit he, [as] all man-kynd man do.’12 This section explores how the sleep of humanity features in views of health and of the embodiment of the emotions in medieval English mentalities.

Sleep’s importance for physical and mental health was emphasised in the medical tradition originating with the Greek physicians Hippocrates (c.460–370 BCE) and Galen (129–c.210 CE), medical authorities familiar in later medieval England and name-dropped by Chaucer’s Man in Black in the Book of the Duchess and in the Portrait of the Physician in the Canterbury Tales. In lamenting that not even the great physicians ‘Ypocras ne Galyen’ could cure what ails him, the Man in Black asserts the strength of his grief for his beloved (whom no medicine, after all, could restore to life), but also speaks to contemporary respect for the medical expertise of these familiar authorities.13 Galen was educated in Alexandria, where his medical learning included the works of Hippocrates, Aristotle and physicians writing in the intervening centuries whose works have not survived. Galen’s own influential medical tracts were re-copied and respected for over a millennium and a half, but he is certainly not the only medical authority known during the later Middle Ages, as catalogues of physicians such as the one in Chaucer’s Physician’s Portrait show:

Wel knew he the olde Esculapius,

And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus,

Olde Ypocras, Haly, and Galyen,

Serapion, Razis, and Avycen,

Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn,

Bernard, and Gatesden, and Gilbertyn.14

Classical and Arabic authorities stand alongside more recent thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and English medical writers here, and similar lists circulated in regimenal texts such as the Gouvernayle of Helthe, and in Trevisa’s On the Properties of Things.15 However, Galen’s name has become synonymous with the scientific and medical paradigm that prevailed in western Europe from the twelfth century to the early seventeenth. Because Galenic medicine centres on the body’s fluctuating economy of humoral liquids, which underpin emotional dispositions, sleep, through its contribution to digestion in this medical paradigm, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: remarkable sleep
• 1 Emotions, epistemology and the nature of sleep
• 2 Ethics, appetite and the dangers of sleep
• 3 Sleeping spaces and the circumscription of desire
• 4 The hermeneutics of sleep in Chaucer’s dream poems
• Coda: ‘all good letters were layde a slepe’: medieval sleep and early modern heirs
• Bibliography
• Index