Terrifying shouts, threatening whispers, screams and murmurs; abusive, censorious, manipulative voices; presences in the mind that warn, reproach, urge harm and encourage painâŠthese are some of the distressing experiences reported by voice-hearers today.1 Such experiences are often understood as symptomatic of psychosis, and in particular of schizophrenia, associated in the popular imagination with personality disorder and violent behaviours. In modern Western culture, both clinical and popular, it is assumed that they possess no objective reality; hearing voices that no one else can hear and seeing things that are not there are understood as markers of pathological conditions requiring medical intervention. Within a biomedical framework, voices are classified as auditory verbal hallucinations, significant only in so far as they contribute to the diagnosis of psychopathological disorders. The content and emotional impact of such experiences are rarely explored during the clinical encounter. The voice-hearer, already disturbed and alienated by his or her ordeal, also has to shoulder the stigma of mental illness, with its accompanying anxiety, shame, and distress.
Popular and clinical attitudes to voice-hearing are predicated on the reported experiences of service users, those individuals who have sought clinical support to overcome their voices. Recent studies indicate, however, that voice-hearing may be far more prevalent within society than the figures from psychosis services indicate. Research suggests that between five and fifteen per cent of the âhealthyâ population have heard voices at some stage of their lives.2 While often distressing, the experience may also be benign or positive. Hearing the voice of a loved one after his or her death is not an uncommon, nor an unwelcome experience, and is often seen as a natural response to grief. A more positive picture of voice-hearing is also offered by contemporary accounts of Christians hearing the voice of God. T. M. Luhrmannâs study When God Talks Back (2012) draws on extended interviews with a North American evangelical community, while Christopher C. H. Cook in Hearing Voices, Demonic and Divine (2019) offers a wide-ranging exploration of voice-hearing in biblical, historical and scientific accounts, including numerous present-day instances.3 Divine intervention can be inspiring, comforting and guiding, taking all kinds of different formsâfrom speaking through another human being, to internal or external voices. In certain faith communities, particularly those of an evangelical character, manifestations of God of this kind are far more usual and, indeed, may be sought after. Such experiences can be actively promoted, whether through communal, often charismatic kinds of worship or individual practices of prayer and extreme spiritual exercises. They may merge with other kinds of unusual experience, from visions to speaking in tongues, from signs to miracles. Non-Western religions may be considerably more receptive than secular Western society to manifestations of the spirit world: Islam and a number of African religions, as well as some Asian traditions, include belief in spirits, demons and the possibility of possession.4
The Western biomedical approach not only excludes the experiences of those outside its immediate purview but also, in focusing on diagnosis and treatment, privileges the voice over other sensory experiences. Qualitative research demonstrates that experiences of voice-hearers are frequently multisensory: they may include visual phenomena, such as seeing shadows, figures, bodies or faces; or unusual experiences of smell, taste, presence and touch.5 The limitations of an exclusively medical approach to voice-hearing have been highlighted within the voice-hearing community, particularly through the activism of the international Hearing Voices Movement which promotes the recognition of a diversity of causes and kinds of experience.6
The major collaborative project Hearing the Voice (http://âhearingthevoice.âorg, funded by the Wellcome Trust and based at Durham University), takes up the issue of diversity of cause and kind of experience, across historical periods and cultures. The project brings together researchers in the arts and humanities, social science and science; healthcare professionals; and experts by experience to explore the phenomenon of hearing voices without external stimuli. Hearing the Voice adopts the interdisciplinary approach of the medical humanities to engage with the range and complexity of experience, including by taking a long cultural perspective.7 The arts and humanities play a crucial role in extending understandings of how thought, feeling and imagination intersect to shape inner experience, and of the complex ways in which individuals intersect with the world. The arts present different models of experience and creative spaces that offer new ways of thinking about and seeing the self, opening up a dynamic dialogue with dominant psychological and neurobiological models. Literary texts can recount in richly textured ways individual experiences of voice-hearing, while their imaginative worlds offer crucial insights into the mental and affective processes that underpin such experiences. The thought worlds of the past yield new models and frameworks for thinking, extending current understandings and contextualising and challenging deeply held cultural assumptions. The perspectives on embodied experience offered by the past and by the imaginative worlds of literature and other art forms can provide a corrective to narrowly biomedical perspectives, widen the questions generated in clinical research, and present new therapeutic possibilities. They offer powerful accounts of embodied experience, animating cultural contexts and engaging thought and feeling in ways that go beyond straightforward representation. The intellectual and emotional power of literary and cultural texts can deepen and transform understanding, as well as offering new perspectives on the ideas and assumptions that underpin medicineânotions of health and illness; mind, body and emotion; gender, family and society.8 Whereas historical documents can be limited in their potential to illuminate such topics, literary texts and other kinds of cultural record can provide crucial insights into the attitudes, experiences and imaginings of the past. Putting past and present into conversation uncovers both contrasts and continuities, opening up new ways of seeing and new possibilities for understanding.
The premodern, pre-Cartesian thought world is of particular interest both because it foregrounds the connections between mind, body and emotion and because it assumes the possibility of supernatural and spiritual experience. Medieval understandings of the emotions as profoundly affective, and cognition as shaped by the emotions, look forward to the theories of contemporary neuroscientists.9 At the same time, they are always coloured by the potential of engagement with the supernatural. Medicine, natural philosophy and theology intersect to produce sophisticated models for understanding inner experience which weave together physiological, psychological and spiritual ideas. Probing the parallels and contrasts between premodern and contemporary experiences of and attitudes to voice-hearing contextualises and illuminates contemporary experience, by offering new frameworks for interpretation and authorisation. The potential for supernatural causation opened up the possibility of veridical experience; premodern approaches operated on the principle that such experiences could be true. For this reason, in the medieval and early modern periods, hearing voices and having visions were understood and represented in terms very different from those that are most common in the twenty-first century. Not only were the medical, natural philosophical and theological frames through which these experiences were viewed radically different but also visionaries and voice-hearers were frequently accredited with preternatural knowledge and came to inhabit a social role that was as much feted as it was feared. The premodern visionary or voice-hearer therefore might enjoy an entirely different cultural identity: a potential prophet as opposed to a certified psychiatric patient. Moreover, for imaginative writers of the period, voices, visions and supernatural experience more generally offered rich creative opportunities, their potential enhanced by the seriousness with which such experiences were taken as well as their deep cultural roots.
Voices and visions have a long and complex history in Western culture that reaches back to the classical period and to the Bible. Classical writing takes for granted the possibility of encounters with the gods. Their voices are heard in in oracles, prophecies and signs; they are manifest both materially, in human and animal form, and in dream. The katabasis or descent to the underworld is a recurrent motif: the world of the shades is sought out by both Odysseus and Aeneas. Hebrew and Christian tradition are similarly shaped by the possibility of divine encounterâand the desire to experience divine presence in the world. From Yahweh speaking to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden onwards, the Old Testament contains repeated manifestations of the Lord in sign and miracle: while his face is veiled, concealed in fire or cloud, his voice is repeatedly heard. In the New Testament, the truth of the Incarnation is shown through the miracles worked by Jesus and by the Fatherâs voice, âThis is my Sonâ, and after his death, through His bodily manifestation and words to the apostles. Such voice-hearing and visionary experience are central to the lives of the saints and the writings of holy men and women from the earliest narratives onwards; they make manifest the connection with the divine and endorse the work of the faithful in the world. Religious writings also demonstrate the alienating potential of such experience, depicting it as a mark of distinction that can be disconcerting and distrustedâan unease that is echoed in much more recent experience.
If voice-hearing and vision are crucial to hagiography and visionary writing, they are also taken up in other cultural and literary genres. Philosophical and other kinds of didactic work repeatedly use the convention of visionary experience, often but by no means always presented as dream: Alain de Lilleâs De planctu naturae (The Plaint of Nature, c. 1160) established a model of Nature as divine guide, taken up, for example, in the thirteenth century in Guillaume de Lorrisâ and Jean de Meunâs Le Roman de la Rose. Along with the Roman de la Rose, the late classical visionary narrative of Boethiusâ Consolatio Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) and Danteâs Divina Commedia, written in the early fourteenth century, were the building blocks of later medieval writing. Their distinctive interweavings of fiction and instruction established long-lived conventions of visionary experience and encounters with supernatural guides. In the late fourteenth century, William Langlandâs Piers Plowman takes up and complicates the idea of the instructive dream that extends back through these works to Ciceroâs Somnium Scipionis (The Dream of Scipio). Langlandâs series of dream-visions presents a multiplicity of conflicting instructive voices personifying interior and exterior forces. Romance, the imaginative fiction of the premodern period, adopted and developed many of the creative possibilities of visionary experience, particularly the idea of the courtly dream-vision established by the Roman de la Rose. The dream provided an essential framework for allegorical writing that explored and debated questions of love and grief. Romance narratives more generally looked back to classical writers such as Ovid in their use of the supernatural. Voices and visions, dreams, visitations and miracles, and other kinds of otherworldly encounter animate the landscape of romance, both offering exotic entertainment and presenting new possibilities for writers interested in probing individual psychology and its intersections with the world. Dramatists too took inspiration from these long-standing traditions of writing the supernatural. The earliest drama stages the great narrative cycle of the Bible, figuring in material terms the spiritual revelations that shape Christian history, while the morality plays written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exploit the possibilities of personification, allowing the vices and virtues to speak and staging the theatre of the psyche, giving voice to the forces that battle over the human soul. For early modern dramatists, the performance of the supernatural presented both technical challenges and rich possibilities of suspense and psychological insight. Voice-hearing and visions became powerful topoi across the dominant literary genres of the medieval and early modern periods, both religious and secular.
This book speaks to the need to recover past perspectives on the experience of hearing voices, to reimagine the voice-hearer as a visionary, whose information (and the way he or she came by it) was not only conceivable within contemporary modes of rationality but heeded and even solicited by society. It also addresses the remarkable creative appeal of voices and visions. Contributors explore how the experience of hearing voices or seeing visions was framed within the cultural, literary and intellectual contexts of the medieval and early modern periods, from 1100 to 1700, to offer new insights into a complex, controversial and contested category of human experience. While literature is a particular focus, the book also engages with the visual arts and scientific and medical writings, and probes how such experiences were integrated and contested within the dominant medical, philosophical and theological hermeneutics of the premodern period. Because voices and visions were culturally credible phenomena, far greater attention was bestowed on the qualia of the experience, on the testimony of the visionary and on the interpretation and significance he or she attached to it. Far from being stigmatised in the manner of many contemporary voice-hearers, some of the best-known thinkers of the period were medieval voice-hearers, while visionary experiences inspired some of the greatest religious writing of the time. Occupying what was essentially an ambiguous position, plausible yet problematic, visions were also ripe for literary and creative play. Rather than on explicit comparisons with modern Western attitudes, the focus of this volume falls on the literary, cultural, textual and material fabric of the medieval and early modern periods. By exploring the various ways in which visions and voice-hearing were represented, interpreted and mobilised in spiritual, creative, political and critical contexts between 1100 and 1700, these essays shine a new light onto a currently feared and misunderstood human phenomenon, while offering contemporary voice-hearers possible alternative perspectives on their own experience.
Medieval religious and theological texts both exploit the power of visionary experience and probe its nature. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century saintsâ lives demonstrate the multisensory quality of visionary experience, as well as the powerful affect and political importance of such experiences. Medieval scholastic thinkers were keenly engaged with the status, nature and physiology of visions, in particular, the connections between inner and outer senses. Hilary Powell opens this volume with a richly detailed essay exploring two miracle stories appended to the brief life of St Wilfrid by Eadmer of Canterbury (d. ca. 1128) found in Eadmerâs Breviloquium. Both include experiences of angelic music but are highly multisensory. Powell shows how crucial voice-hearing and seeing visions were to the genre of hagiography, as tropes capable of being mobilised for political or spiritual purposes. She also places them within a long history of such narratives, stretching back to the Psalms through the writings of St Augustine. While it is easy for modern readers to f...