Late medieval ideas about sleep—when to sleep, where to sleep, how to sleep, and why we sleep—inform Middle English literature, as this fascinating study shows. Megan G. Leitch’sSleep and its Spaces in Middle English Literature significantly expands the critical discussion of the role of sleep and dreams in this period, while also connecting late medieval attitudes to similar or identical concerns in the Early Modern period—and, to a lesser extent, in our own. The study is wide-ranging in terms of the texts surveyed but remains remarkably focused within each chapter’s purview, making arguments succinctly and illustrating them well. Leitch gestures helpfully to future avenues of possible inquiry without getting bogged down by asides. The book will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the culture of sleep in England and beyond, as it is in conversation with recent literary, scientific, and philosophical scholarship on sleep, while offering exciting new readings of well-known texts and episodes.
As Leitch notes, “Representations of figures who long for or are overcome by sleep abound in a range of Middle English genres, from popular romances to Ricardian dream vision, from fabliaux to saints’ lives and biblical drama” (3). The episodes where sleep occurs, is longed for, or is expected (i.e., in its “spaces”) have historically been seen as plotline pauses or as “platform[s] for other significant experiences” such as intimate encounters or supernatural visions, but this book makes the act of sleeping the central subject, observing that sleep is in itself “a highly charged focus of narrative, conversation, commentary, regulation and interpretation” (3). Sleep is “inherently epistemological: it contributes to what and how characters and readers know, and desire to know” (4). Such a focus on sleep in and of itself, not just as a “gateway” to other parts of the narrative, is overdue for Middle English literary studies, and we must applaud Dr. Leitch for pausing before the gates of horn and ivory to see how sleep and its spaces are working in late medieval literature. Chapter 1 offers an overview of medieval sleep science; Chapter 2 discusses sleep’s perils as depicted in English romances; Chapter 3 explores the ways in which the “spaces of sleep” impact all other aspects of the lives depicted in late medieval literature; and Chapter 4 examines Chaucer’s dream visions in particular.
The introduction offers a helpful reconsideration of the ways late medieval writers used sleep as a way to explore many different matters of interest; a dual focus on Galenic and Aristotelian understanding of dreams and a reading of various literatures in which sleeping functions in some way helps us move away from the old crutch (both in scholarship and in teaching) of reading all Ricardian dream visions “as only, or primarily, intelligible in relation to Macrobius’s classification of dreams” (9). The late medieval culture of sleep saw that activity as central to one’s mental and physical health. Sleep could also mediate powerful emotions such as grief or joy—and thus it shares some traits with swooning; Leitch discusses these related activities in pages 58-67. While sleep provided ways of knowing oneself and others, it could also be perilous. The ideal of a “balanced performance of sleep” was honored in the breach in most genres, thankfully, since we can key into ethical implications of characters’ behavior through their lapses in sleep hygiene (91). Middle English poets often emphasize the ethics of sleeping when reworking continental material (see 104-105). Leitch provides a useful reading of the vocabulary around falling asleep, especially in alliterative poetry—as anyone who has encountered Pearl will remember, the language around the dreamer’s sliding into sleep is striking in that poem. Leitch also offers a provocative new reading of Sir Orfeo and Queen Heurodis’s incontinence in sleeping at a dangerous time of day (110-111). Her approach is innovative and allows us entrée into more nuanced ways of thinking about a host of activities around sleep, even if at times such readings tend to underread supernatural factors in, say, Heurodis’s sleep (a fairy spell) or Joseph’s daytime sleep in the York cycle, Pageant 13 (likely a divinely produced sleep that allowed angelic visitation) (126-127). There is a decent amount of scholarship on sleep in the medieval theater that Leitch only touches upon and which might have served her argument well here—though it is of course hard to include all the disciplines feeding into a study such as this. Nevertheless, as she takes the time at the end of the book to connect Shakespeare’s sleep theory with medieval notions, it might have made sense to explore the “space of sleep” in theatrical performance in a little more depth.
In this book, the expressions “sleeping space” and/or “the space[es] of sleep” refer to places in which one might sleep or expect to sleep, or to perform other sleep-related activities. Islands, orchards, gardens, bedrooms, churches—all these are possible sleeping spaces, with concomitant implications and associations with vices and virtues, such as sloth, lust, etc. “Generic conventions inform the expectations raised when a character falls asleep in a given place,” notes Leitch; “For instance, where drowsing in a pleasant locale in a dream poem raises expectations of a vision, to do the same in a romance raises expectations of some form of assault” (152). When the dreamer in Piers Plowman falls asleep, or Robert, King of Sicily nods off in church in his romance, we can learn what is at stake for that character’s development and redemption (158). In the last half of Chapter 3, Leitch offers a thoughtful reading of the conventions around sexual activity, sleeping spaces, and control of private space, ending with a fascinating discussion of the “stained sheets of medieval romance” (180-189). All of these discussions successfully convince this reviewer that sleeping spaces “invite interpretation” (189).
The final full chapter of this volume is devoted to an expanded conversation about what Chaucer is saying and doing with his extensive sleep-related passages. The book is especially important for readers of Chaucer’s dream poetry, as it explores Aristotelian dream theory and Galenic science as useful informers of Chaucer’s dream poetics. In the case of the Book of the Duchess, “Chaucer characterizes troubled relationships to sleep through medically informed explorations of the physiology of sleep that link the frame narratives with the dream narrative, and that register sleep’s multifaceted contributions to the poem’s concerns with consolation” (200). Chaucer’s ethics of sleep see that activity as key to balance in maintaining health, both physical and mental. This chapter is exciting for Chaucerians, as it is arguably the first to offer a “sustained analysis of Chaucer’s dream visions in relation to” somatic dream theory, the late medieval science of sleep, and Aristotle’s Parva Naturalia, which arguably influenced late medieval authors’ attitudes towards sleep and dreams just as much as Macrobius’ Commentary on the Dream of Scipio did.
This reviewer did stumble over a recurring stylistic quirk. The author has a rhetorical tic of using “here” in an unfocused way to refer to the subject at hand; this indeterminate proximal deixis can be misleading or confusing as in pp. 63, 93 and 126. When Leitch says on 93, “Here, sleep is deployed to evaluate the conduct and aspirations of characters and contemporary readers, this reader is not sure whether the “here” refers to “the works of Chaucer, Langland, Gower, theGawain-poet and Malory,” “a range of anonymous literary texts” (92), “courtesy books, dietaries and homiletic writing” (93), or all three. Thus a cool point, that untimely sleep reflects characters’ “identities and reputations and offers readers exempla of what not to do” (93), is obscured by confusing syntax.
The book ends with a bracing coda that shows how Shakespeare inherited the sophisticated medieval “language of sleep” (242); Macbeth, Bottom, and Richard III, when they interact with sleep and dreams, are also part of the longue durée of sleep theory, and their performances of sleeping, not sleeping, and dreaming are connecting to the “medieval habits of using sleep to explore affective and ethical predicaments” (244). This coda, while quick, is a tour de force and bears implications for Shakespearean scholarship that are quite exciting.
In sum, Sleep and its Spaces contributes to many different, though related, fields of late medieval and early modern studies, and will be a valuable addition to any library.