An Introduction to Dreams, Memory and Imagination in Byzantium

Abstract

The value placed on dreams, memory and imagination in Byzantine communities of the 4th to 15th centuries may appear strange to the modern mind. Unlike the post-Enlightenment view of dreams as one of many products of the imagination, all of which hold a secondary place in relation to “the real”, in Byzantium dreams and other imaginary sense perceptions carried a social significance that made them more important than mundane reality. Even more strangely, dreams and memories were given equal weight as the imaginary in Byzantine histories, literature, art, and liturgical texts. While we are familiar with dreams and miracles in hagiography, modern readers might not expect to find the same in histories and chronicles. Byzantine readers were not phased by the inclusion in these narratives of events that we might consider products of the imagination; rather they accepted them as lending spiritual weight to a narrative of God’s intervention in human affairs, and Byzantine affairs in particular. The authors of this volume seek to go beyond the modern disjunction between the rational and the irrational, to appreciate the layers of social and individual meanings that the imaginary had in the lives of Byzantine dreamers, writers, chronographers, hymnographers, traders and artists, and to consider how their writings and art were taken up and viewed, read and heard by both ordinary and elite Byzantine citizens. In doing so, they build upon the recent work of scholars who have studied various aspects of dream interpretation and dream narratives in classical Greco-Roman, patristic, medieval and Byzantine literature.1 However, our authors seek to extend previous analyses of such texts beyond dreaming to the linked cognitive fields of imagining and remembering. Our fields of reference also include studies of holy places and holy objects, in recognition of the fact that the material world was permeated by the imaginary in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine era, and had an important function in creating community memories. Dreams and their corollaries, memory and imagination, may seem an amorphous subject of study, and of limited application to the current day. However,