Abstract
This book examines how the experiences of hearing voices and seeing visions were understood within the cultural, literary, and intellectual contexts of the medieval and early modern periods. In the Middle Ages, these experiences were interpreted according to frameworks that could credit visionaries or voice-hearers with spiritual knowledge, and allow them to inhabit social roles that were as much desired as feared. Voice-hearing and visionary experience offered powerful creative possibilities in imaginative literature and were often central to the writing of inner, spiritual lives. Ideas about such experience were taken up and reshaped in response to the cultural shifts of the early modern period. These essays, which consider the period 1100 to 1700, offer diverse new insights into a complex, controversial and contested category of human experience, exploring literary and spiritual works as illuminated by scientific and medical writings, natural philosophy and theology, and the visual arts. In extending and challenging contemporary bio-medical perspectives through the insights and methodologies of the arts and humanities, the volume offers a timely intervention within the wider project of the medical humanities.
Highlights
Essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches
Laurie Maguire is Professor of Shakespeare at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at Magdalen College. Her interests include textual studies, Elizabethan and contemporary performance, classical influences on Renaissance writers, history of medicine and the medical humanities. She is the author of fifty articles and ten books, including The Rhetoric of the Page (OUP, 2020), Othello (Bloomsbury, 2014), Thirty Great Myths About Shakespeare, Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Shakespeare’s Names (OUP, 2007), Where There’s a Will There’s a Way (Penguin, 2006) and Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad Quartos’ and Their Contexts (CUP, 1996)
She is currently working on early modern collaboration, on John Florio, and on Judith Shakespeare
Summary
Her interests include textual studies, Elizabethan and contemporary performance, classical influences on Renaissance writers, history of medicine and the medical humanities. She is the author of fifty articles and ten books, including The Rhetoric of the Page (OUP, 2020), Othello (Bloomsbury, 2014), Thirty Great Myths About Shakespeare (with Emma Smith, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Shakespeare’s Names (OUP, 2007), Where There’s a Will There’s a Way (Penguin, 2006) and Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad Quartos’ and Their Contexts (CUP, 1996). She is currently working on early modern collaboration (with Emma Smith), on John Florio, and on Judith Shakespeare
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Accepted Version (
Free)
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call