The Elizabethan Mind by Helen Hackett

Author:Helen Hackett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300265248
Publisher: Yale University Press

20. A mother’s imagination could supposedly imprint on an embryo things seen during conception. This hairy maiden’s mother reportedly looked at a picture of John the Baptist in an animal skin, while the black child was born to a white mother who looked at a picture of a Moor during conception.

‘Fragments of idle imaginations’: the interpretation of dreams

As we have seen, the imagination, especially in its aspect of fantasy, was understood as never at rest, even in sleep. This was when it produced dreams, as Sir John Davies related in Nosce teipsum (1599):

This busy power is working day and night;

For when the outward senses rest do take,

A thousand dreams fantastical and light

With fluttering wings do keep her still awake.43

Scot in The Discovery of Witchcraft included dreams among the foolish superstitions of the ignorant and deluded, being merely ‘a looking glass’ in which ‘the fantasy and imagination’ represent such things as the waking mind ‘doth wish and hope to find’.44 Disturbing dreams were also attributable to an impaired mind and inflamed imagination: Nashe declared in The Terrors of the Night that ‘melancholy is the mother of dreams, and of all terrors of the night whatsoever’.45

As we saw in Chapter 6, there were animated Elizabethan debates about supposedly supernatural phenomena including astrological prediction, demonic possession, and witchcraft. Dreams were included in these. Were they merely the natural products of the humours and their provocation of the restless imagination, or could they have external, spiritual sources? Were they meaningless or meaningful? Ancient authorities influenced the debate, especially the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus (second century CE); although not translated into English until 1606, it was available in Latin and other languages and was widely known in Elizabethan England.46 Artemidorus distinguished between the enhypnion – a meaningless dream, produced by random physiological or mental processes – and the oneiros, a predictive dream, often using cryptic symbols, to which he offered a key. Macrobius in around 400 CE developed this meaningless/meaningful distinction and broke it down into further subcategories.47 Through the Middle Ages, more dream manuals appeared, often attributed to biblical figures associated with dream interpretation such as Daniel or Joseph. One of the most popular, Somniale Danielis, appeared in a short English print version in 1556 as The Dreams of Daniel, whose list of dream-symbols and their meanings included: ‘A man that dreameth that he goeth to wed a maid, betokeneth anguish’; ‘To dream to read books, betokeneth good tidings’; and ‘He that dreameth to have a white head, betokeneth winning’.48 Such confident decodings, enabling preparation for good or bad fortune, had obvious appeal for readers.

Thomas Hill wrote manuals relating to various kinds of scientific knowledge and technical skills. These included two dream manuals: A Little Treatise of the Interpretation of Dreams, Fathered on Joseph (1567); and The Most Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams (1571), a vast compendium of dream-symbols largely based on Artemidorus.49 This latter work offered some dream interpretations that are improbably detailed and specific. For instance:

If he which is in love

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