Visions, a visionary world view, and distinctive habits of mental and corporeal sight defined the boundaries of medieval reality. Extraordinary appearances--visual portents, dream messages from the dead, divine and infernal warnings, intellectual illuminations, visions of the future--complemented ordinary sight. In nine closely related essays, Carolly Erickson traces the visionary imagery that formed the interwoven natural and spiritual landscapes of the middle ages, drawing on chronicles, biographies, and historical and theological writings.
Writing primarily of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the author explores religious belief, the clergy, land and property, heresy, women, lawlessness, kingship and the everpresent supernatural world, relying on contemporary accounts chosen to reveal the shared perception of the educated and illiterate.
Throughout the collection the visionary imagination becomes a touchstone for discovering the gap between modern and medieval perception, a key that informs our understanding of medieval personalities, thought, and society and gives them fresh meaning.
About the Author
Distinguished historian Carolly Erickson is the author of Rival to the Queen, The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots, The First Elizabeth, The Hidden Life of Josephine, The Last Wife of Henry VIII, and many other prize-winning works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Tsarina’s Daughter won the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction. She lives in Hawaii.
