The Making of the Scottish Dream Vision

This book is about how Scotland responded to the dream-vision, Medieval Europe’s most widely known literary form and precursor of the novel. Studies abound in Continental and English dream-vision writing: Dante’s Divine Comedy, France’s Romance of the Rose, and a host of English dream-visions, especially Chaucer. This book shows for the first time that dream-vision was a central aspect of Scotland’s literary and intellectual culture across several centuries and languages. It therefore invites new understandings of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland.Moreover, its innovative approach to the dream-vision itself looks beyond dream-poetry which is the sole focus of other studies of the genre. Instead, it shows how dream-vision intersected with prose and verse writings, with romance, chronicle, epic, theological works and more. In so doing, it yields a new angle of studying the dream-vision which could be applied to other nations, making this book significant to scholars of global medieval literature.